Fixing AI Budgets: Tying Spend to Customer Benefit

I would like to take a little victory lap here 😏 DesignerPunk was conceived with token budgeting as a first-class requirement. I didn’t have the infinite budgets of Meta, Intuit, Microsoft, and others. I couldn’t spend my way to a solution. I would even go so far as to say DP is a cost saving solution. DP is design system infrastructure that works on a $100-200 subscription to enable anyone with the vision to build a product to the scale of Big Tech without becoming Big Tech. This is what it means to design and engineer within the realities of the independent builders who have enterprise ambition without enterprise resources. DesignerPunk was built for The Internet. 🦾🧑🎤

Excited to see that 209 people have already registered for my FREE lightning lesson this week on @Maven about how to lead a team of people and AI agents. My goal is to give you practical tools you can use with your team immediately. Every leader is being told to adopt AI. Almost no one is being taught how to lead a team that now includes it. The result: work gets duplicated, agents underperform, and your best people resent the mandate. That's a leadership problem that we need to fix, to deliver maximum impact through AI. The leaders who succeed going forward will be the ones who have the skills to redesign the team so humans and agents work in synchrony. RSVP (it's free): https://lnkd.in/gE63r92q Comment below if I'll see you there! #Maven #Leadership #AI

AI is making teams faster, faster, faster. But speed can hide a dangerous problem: Stress is getting faster too. When pressure hits, smart people don’t suddenly become stupid. - They become defensive. - They stop asking questions. - They assume intent. - They stop listening. Leaders create "urgency". Teams "react" to it. And suddenly, everyone is "moving faster while thinking worse." That’s the real challenge of the AI era. We’re giving teams incredible tools to move at machine speed. But humans still need space to think, disagree, pause, and say: “I’m not sure.” Because .. The best teams won’t be the ones that move fastest. They’ll be the ones that stay human under pressure.

Everyone says AI will replace jobs. I think that's the wrong conversation. The real risk isn't AI replacing people. It's businesses using AI outperforming businesses that don't. The winners won't have fewer employees. They'll have employees supported by AI to work faster, make better decisions and deliver better customer experiences. The question isn't, "Will AI replace my team?" It's, "How do I help my team work with AI before my competitors do?" That's the conversation every business leader should be having. #AI #FutureOfWork #BusinessTransformation #Leadership

AI isn't replacing great teams. It's amplifying them. Over the past several months, we've focused on finding practical ways to reduce repetitive work and create more time for meaningful customer interactions. One of the biggest lessons? Small process improvements often deliver the biggest results. When team members spend less time formatting updates, documenting work, or handling routine tasks, they can spend more time solving problems and delivering value. The future isn't about doing more work. It's about removing friction so great people can do their best work. What operational process would you automate first if time and budget weren't a concern? #Leadership #Operations #AI #BusinessEfficiency #Productivity

AI didn't replace my team. It removed the parts of the job they hated. There's a lot of fear that AI takes jobs. In my experience, the reality has been the opposite — and much more human. AI took over the work no one enjoyed: → Copying data between systems → Formatting reports at midnight → Chasing receipts and reconciling expenses → The repetitive, soul-draining tasks What's left is the work people actually love: strategy, creativity, relationships, judgment. The team is more energised, not less. That's the version of AI I believe in — not replacing people, but giving them back their time and their best work. The goal was never fewer people. It was better work. What task would you happily hand to AI tomorrow? #AI #FutureOfWork #Leadership #Teams #Productivity

In "The AI Productivity Paradox", Marty Cagan sets out why teams are shipping faster than ever and getting worse outcomes. His answer is not tooling. It is that most of those ideas were never worth building. Which raises the harder question: how would your team have known? Most teams cannot answer that, because they have never had to show their reasoning. The decision got made, the thing got built, and nobody kept a record of why.

Roles aren't blurring. They're expanding. AI isn't replacing the work. It's changing who owns the outcome. The below P&G study said it plainly: AI breaks down functional silos. R&D thinks commercial. Commercial thinks technical. Boundaries go porous. But doesn’t porous boundaries create accountability gaps if no one manages them? The real shift isn't tasks. It's judgment. Division of labor has to move from who does what to who decides what. The organizations that succeed in the future won't reorganize around titles. They'll redesign teams around workflows. #FutureOfWork #AI #Leadership #solvingrealproblems #solvrays #noexcuses

Most people trying to keep up with AI have felt this by now: the same tools that energize you on Monday can leave you feeling completely scattered by Thursday. The pace is exciting, but it also creates a very real leadership challenge, because every new capability looks like an opportunity until it starts pulling your team away from the work that actually matters. I’m convinced the companies that win with AI won’t be the ones that chase every new tool or pivot every time something shiny appears. They’ll be the ones that build enough discipline to ask better questions: Does this improve the customer experience? Does it create leverage for the team? Does it support the strategy we already believe in? AI can absolutely expand what’s possible, but without focus, it can also become a liability. The goal isn’t to keep up with everything. It’s to stay curious without losing the plot. How are you deciding which AI opportunities deserve your attention and which ones are just noise? #AI #Leadership #DigitalMarketing #GrowthStrategy #FutureOfWork

What happens when AI stops being a chatbot and starts operating like an executive team? I’m testing a system with six AI seats across two computers: Claude. Grok. OpenAI. Each seat rotates roles every 20 minutes, CEO, CMO, finance, auditor, operations, or whatever the business needs. But they don’t simply complete tasks. They review the work of the model before them. They challenge assumptions. They cross-check decisions. Then they proactively identify the next ten things the company should do. All six models share one communication channel, allowing them to coordinate, audit, and improve each other’s work. The goal is not more AI-generated content. The goal is an AI leadership system that operates 24/7/365, continuously looking at the company from the right angle and finding the next valuable action. There is always more work to do. The real constraint is whether your system knows where to look. What role would you assign to the first AI seat in your company?