Quick answer: to increase the return on investment of your human team, audit the work your people do every day, hand the monotonous, low return administration to AI, and give your humans back more of the human work: training, creativity, support and done for you services. That is how I’ve grown the value my team brings without firing a single person.

Someone told me I’m next

I recently shared a post about how I got AI to go into my website and fix all the things that humans hadn’t done for me. My AEO, my SEO, my page descriptions. It increased my visibility and my traffic by 115%.

In that post I said I will never be hiring a web person ever again, because I now have AI doing the work I’d been paying human beings to do for years. And quite frankly, my AI found that a lot of it simply wasn’t being done, despite me paying for it.

A commenter replied, “You’re next, lady.” Apparently I’m next for the AI chopping block.

I get comments like this a lot when I talk about AI. I’m a big AI advocate, as many of you know. So first of all, this is not a takedown. Let’s not be mean. We’re all about constructive conversations here. This is a whole new world for all of us, and quite frankly, we’re all terrified. If you’re not, you should be, because none of us really know what kind of world we’re about to go into.

Actually, I was first

Here’s the thing. I wasn’t next. I was first.

As a white collar professional, a postgraduate qualified curriculum developer, teacher, trainer and e-learning specialist, I was one of the first to lose my work to AI when ChatGPT was released to the public in late 2022 and early 2023.

The work I used to charge people thousands of dollars for, developing their e-learning, setting up their e-learning tech and building their curriculum content, disappeared overnight. People could just go to ChatGPT and say, “Create a course for me.” Done. I was obsolete in a day.

So trust me, I’ve already been next. I’m one of the survivors. And now what I do is teach other people who are in the same boat I was in three years ago how to survive this change, in the only way any of us know how right now: by constantly evolving, learning and having constructive conversations about this new world of AI.

I haven’t fired anyone because of AI

One thing I really want to share is this. With all the AI I’m implementing in my business, I haven’t fired anyone by bringing in AI agents.

In fact, having AI agents in my business has amplified the amount of human work our human team can do.

We did lose people who didn’t want to embrace AI. They chose to leave. But we have not fired anyone. And what AI has actually done is make our team busier than ever.

Why your team’s return on investment matters

When you run a business, you need a very clear picture of your numbers, especially your expenses.

I don’t mean to describe human beings this way, but if we talk in literal accounting language, staff wages and salaries are an expense line. If your staff wages and salaries have a low return on investment, meaning your team isn’t actually doing income generating work, then in the accounting world what you have is an expense line, also known as a liability.

And if your expenses outweigh your profit margin, that’s when businesses go bust and go into administration. That’s certainly what we’re seeing happen right now. Not necessarily just because of AI, but because the world is fundamentally changing.

So one of your goals as a business owner must be to increase the return on investment of your people. When your people bring more value into the business, the business can grow, and the impact it makes on people can keep increasing.

How to audit the work your team is doing

Ask yourself: is my team doing return on investment work, meaning income generating work? And how can I increase the value they bring to the organisation, and to the people it serves, in exchange for their wages and salaries?

Whether you’re a solopreneur hiring virtual staff or a large corporate organisation, if you really sat down and audited your team’s time, you’d find a huge amount of it goes on very monotonous, laborious, plain administration. It has very little return on investment, but it’s still critical for the business to run.

The good news is that AI can help you do that audit. Here’s a prompt you can give your AI:

Using everything you already know about me, my business and my team, help me audit the work my team does each week. List the recurring tasks you know about or can infer, and sort them into two groups: low return administration that AI could take over, and high value human work such as selling, training, supporting and creating for our customers. For each admin task, tell me how AI could handle it. Then suggest how my team could use the time they get back to do more income generating, human to human work. Ask me anything you need to fill the gaps.

Hand the admin to AI and give your humans the human work

The second you replace that boring, non income impacting admin by getting AI to do it, you free your human team to do the proper income generating, profit making, impact making work of working with humans.

Here’s what that has looked like in my business. Because AI has taken over the low impact admin that used to fill their days, my team now:

• Delivers three free training calls a day, run by humans for our human customers
• Does more education and training
• Gets to be more creative
• Delivers in person support at a much higher scale
• Does more hand holding
• Delivers done for you and done with you services so our customers get more results

What happens when customers get more human support

When people get more human support, they get bigger and better results. And when that happens, you get:

• Higher retention rates
• Higher lifetime customer value
• More repeat custom
• Better ambassadors and affiliates
• More word of mouth referrals

All because you freed your humans from monotonous administration and adjusted their roles to give them more of the human work back.

Everyone’s values are different, and that’s okay

We can all choose what we want to do. Everyone has different values, and I’m not telling anyone to change their values or their ethics. I absolutely respect them all.

Where I’m at is this. As a business owner, how do I make sure that what I do every day is helping people and making a positive impact in their lives? And how do I do that in a way that is economically viable for my company, by increasing the profit margin and the return on what I put into people’s salaries and wages?

And how do I improve the experience people have with us, so that they experience more wealth, more abundance, more productivity and more positive impact in their own lives and businesses too?

None of us fell out of the womb knowing what’s going to happen at the end of 2026 and beyond. It’s a whole new world. But if you’re using AI in the right way, it can be positive.

Frequently asked questions

Will AI replace my staff?

It doesn’t have to. In my business, AI has taken over the monotonous admin and my human team is busier than ever doing higher value, human to human work. We haven’t fired anyone because of AI.

How do I increase the return on investment of my employees?

Audit the work they do, identify the low return administration, hand that to AI, and redirect their time into income generating work such as training, support, creative work and done for you services.

Can AI help me audit my team’s workload?

Yes. Ask your AI to use everything it already knows about you, your business and your team to sort recurring tasks into admin AI can handle and high value human work.

What work should stay with humans?

Human to human work: delivering training, being creative, giving support, hand holding and delivering done for you and done with you services. That’s the work that drives retention, lifetime value and referrals.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Everyone is entitled to a point of view and I won’t be offended at all. I’m here for constructive, positive and polite debate, because this is a world that’s new to all of us. Share yours in the comments below.

Thanks for the comment that sparked this one. I’m a survivor, and I’m here to help you be one as well.

Sarah Cordiner is a business and AI educator. She has more than 20 years in business, has taught more than 280,000 students in 181 countries, and has been sharing business education online since around 2011.