On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT launched and the conversation about Artificial Intelligence moved from research labs and tech conferences into every boardroom, break room, and LinkedIn feed on the planet.

And yet — the fundamentals of business didn’t change.

You still need to find and keep customers. Deliver on your promises. Make good decisions with incomplete information. Manage costs. Build teams that function well. None of that is different today than it was 40 months ago.

What changed is the cost and effort of managing some of the hard things that surround those fundamentals.

The hard things were never the ‘what’ of business — they were always the ‘how’. Sifting through contracts and documents to find what matters. Drafting proposals, emails, and follow-ups that actually get read. Capturing the knowledge that lives in one person’s head and making it available to the whole team. Responding to customers and prospects quickly enough that they don’t move on.

These tasks didn’t disappear. But the effort required to handle them well has dropped considerably.

We’re seeing it firsthand. Businesses we work with — sales organizations, operations teams, and growing mid-market companies — are beginning to explore where AI fits, not as a transformation initiative, but as a practical question: where are we spending time and attention on things a well-designed Generative AI system could handle?

That’s the right question. Not “how do we become an AI company” — but “where is the friction, and do better tools now exist to reduce it?”

For most businesses, better tools do exist. The work is in knowing where to look.