My son is at Penn State, and a few weeks ago, we were planning to visit him for parents’ weekend.
If you’ve ever tried booking a hotel near Penn State during a football weekend, you know it’s not cheap. We had a room reserved for a couple thousand dollars.
Then, just before we were supposed to leave, my son called and said he’d decided to come home instead. Great news for him. Not so great for our non-refundable hotel reservation.
So I had my Grok bot call the hotel and negotiate a refund. Within minutes, it worked things out with both the hotel and Expedia, and we got every penny back.
Pretty amazing, right?
And that wasn’t the only time AI surprised me that week.
That Monday morning, my wife asked me to go grocery shopping. Now, I’m a terrible grocery shopper. My Kolbe is 2-2-10-3, which means I can spend four hours zigzagging around a grocery store because I do absolutely nothing in order.
So I took a few pictures of our refrigerator and cabinets, told Grok what we needed, and let it handle the shopping. It placed the order, managed substitutions, and had everything delivered.
Two things that would have taken me hours, handled by AI.
And I started wondering what else AI might take off our plates.
For generations, we’ve built businesses around specialization and repetitive work. A lot of what we do is transactional, and AI is getting remarkably good at handling those transactions for us.
So what happens when more and more of that work goes away?
I keep coming back to two things: creativity and relationships.
Think about a leadership team sitting around a table during a Level 10 Meeting.
Software can already handle a lot of the reporting. Scorecard numbers, Rock updates, To-Dos. And AI may eventually take even more of that work off our plates.
But what about the part where the team gets into IDS? Where someone brings up an Issue, another person sees it differently, and together they figure out what’s really going on?
To me, that’s the most valuable part. People bringing different experiences and perspectives to the table and figuring something out together.
I believe there’s something inherently human about that desire to come together and build something.
No matter how much AI changes the way we work, I don’t see that going away. In fact, as AI takes the transactional work off our plates, we may find ourselves doing even more of it.
And that takes a little vulnerability. Without the busy work to hide behind, we’re putting our own ideas out there and relying on each other.
Think about what that could mean. What if we spent less time on all those transactions and more time creating, connecting, and building something together?
Maybe that’s what I find most interesting about AI. Not what it can do, but what we’ll discover about ourselves when we no longer have to do it.
