I have talked a lot about the American entrepreneur Alex Hormozi in my previous writings. He recently said something quite interesting in one of his videos. He mentioned that AI allows us to do more things much faster but it actually does not impact revenue.
I honestly could not agree with him right away. AI has changed so much of our world and made everything remarkably fast. Just looking at the time spent, we can see a huge difference in output compared to the days before AI. Why would he say all of this has no impact on revenue? Today I want to break down his thinking here in my own way.
The True Meaning of Leverage
First we need to understand the concept of leverage. Leverage simply means the power to create bigger results with less effort. Even when spending the exact same amount of time, one person might only influence a single individual while another person delivers a message to hundreds of thousands of people through a single video. The latter clearly has much greater leverage.
From this perspective artificial intelligence is a truly powerful tool. It can write articles, organize data, build programs, and handle repetitive tasks with incredible speed. One person can now process the work that previously required an entire team. The production capacity of an entrepreneur has increased dramatically. This leads many people to mistakenly believe that if they just use AI well they will not need anything else.
But reality does not work that way. The power of capital did not vanish just because AI appeared. The influence of media has not disappeared either. The results created by a solid team, a strong brand, and the trust you have already built with customers remain just as important. An entrepreneur with abundant capital can run more advertisements, hire better talent, and survive longer in the market. Someone with influential media can reach countless potential customers with just one piece of content. When you add a great team and a solid system to the mix, each of these leverages multiplies together to create vastly larger results.
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| The irreplaceable leverage of a solid team working together in the AI era |
The interesting part is that even the companies developing the most cutting edge artificial intelligence still hire thousands of employees. If AI could truly replace all people and systems, they would have been the very first to do so. I notice the same thing running my own one person operation. AI lets me write, code, and design faster, but it has never once replaced the actual judgment calls about what to build next. In the real world greater results happen when people and teams who know how to use AI move together.
Ultimately the key is not putting all your expectations into a single tool. It is far more important to judge how to combine and utilize the capital, human resources, media, brand, and systems your business possesses.
Faster Is Not Always Better
So if AI allows you to do more things, will your business automatically grow? It is true that you can process far more work than before. On the surface the productivity of your business really does look like it went way up. But the problem Alex Hormozi highlights is this.
When human processing capacity increases, people start doing things they would never have done in the first place. In the past we naturally had to prioritize because time and manpower were scarce. We had to think hard about what tasks were truly necessary and give up on things that did not directly impact revenue.
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| Wasting powerful AI on trivial tasks just because we can |
But the situation changed when AI came along. Since things do not take long anymore, we create one more report, add unnecessary features, and keep producing content with unclear results. We just increase our workload simply because we can.
The problem is that no matter how fast you process unimportant tasks, your business results will not change. If you lack customers but just create more internal documents, your revenue will not grow. If your product is not appealing but you keep adding program features, your sales will stay flat. Instead your team loses focus and the time available to solve truly important problems shrinks.
AI boosts productivity but it does not judge what is actually important for you. What happens if you give a faster car to someone driving in the wrong direction? They do not reach their actual destination faster. They just arrive at the wrong place much quicker. Business works the same way. Ultimately the important thing is not how much work you did. You must verify if that work actually increases customers, boosts conversion rates, and grows the value of your product.
I fell into this exact trap myself a few months back, spending an entire weekend having AI help me build an internal dashboard to track my own reading habits for this blog. It was a fun weekend project, but not a single subscriber has ever cared about it, and I could have spent those two days writing a column instead.
If you find yourself constantly exploring new tools instead of focusing on what actually drives revenue you are falling into a dangerous trap. I wrote extensively about this pitfall in my guide on Why Your AI Obsession Is Actually Killing Your Business.
Creating Leverage Without New Technology
Then what is the method to increase the efficiency and profit of a business without complex technology? You do not necessarily need AI to boost business efficiency. You can actually create much greater leverage just by slightly changing your service method or sales structure.
Let us think about a business that provides one hour of consulting to a single customer. If you work eight hours a day, you can only meet a maximum of eight customers. No matter how hard you work you hit a wall limited by time.
But what if you change this to a group format where ten people listen to the same content together? You can handle ten people instead of one during that single hour. You can provide your service to ten times the number of customers in the same amount of time. You did not develop a new technology and you did not use AI either. You simply changed the one on one structure and your leverage increased massively.
You also do not have to run consultations at a strictly scheduled time. Just changing to an asynchronous method where customers leave questions and the representative answers when available reduces scheduling constraints. Then one employee can manage more customers and clients can use the service according to their own schedule.
The sales process works the same way. Many companies call multiple times and repeat the same pitch to persuade a single customer. But if you provide the pricing, service details, frequently asked questions, and success stories well in advance, the customer understands most of the necessary information before the consultation even begins. As a result the sales representative can have short and deep conversations exclusively with customers who have a high intent to purchase. A structure is built where two people can achieve the same results that previously took ten employees to handle. This is why Alex Hormozi emphasizes that leverage is not only created from new tools. It changes entirely based on how you provide and sell your existing work.
The Power of Choosing What Not to Do
Among all these countless options, what should you change to create the biggest result? The most crucial thing is figuring out how to make the best possible decisions. He does not say that automating all tasks is the best way to increase a team's productivity. He emphasizes that deciding not to do unimportant things at all creates a much bigger effect.
Imagine a project that ten team members need to prepare for a week. You might be able to finish that work in three days using AI. On the outside it looks like you created massive efficiency. But what if that project does not have a major impact on revenue, customer satisfaction, or business growth? The fact that you finished it in three days does not matter. You simply rushed through work that did not need to be done in the first place.
Conversely if the entrepreneur decides from the very beginning that a specific task is not important right now, they can focus the entire team's time and energy on more critical problems. He says this specific kind of judgment creates higher leverage than AI. One good decision can change the work direction of dozens of people and prevent hundreds of hours of waste.
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| AI rapidly executing a terrible human decision |
On the flip side, if you make a wrong decision, AI simply magnifies that mistake much faster. I have done exactly this to myself. I once decided a feature was worth building without checking if anyone actually wanted it, then used AI to ship it in a single afternoon instead of a week. All that speed did was let me waste a day instead of a week. Ultimately the judgment of the person deciding where to use the tool is far more important than the performance of the tool itself.
AI helps you do things quickly but it does not perfectly tell you exactly what you should be doing. So the skill an entrepreneur needs is not starting more tasks. It is the ability to eliminate work you do not need to do right now and select the single most important task.
Making these tough decisions requires a specific mindset that goes far beyond technical knowledge. You can discover how to develop this critical ability in my piece on The One Skill That Matters More Than AI in the AI Era.
Finding Your True Bottleneck
How can you figure out what the most important problem is among so many issues? To grow a business you must first find the real bottleneck that is blocking your growth.
Making money in a business basically breaks down into three stages. First you must create demand by letting more people know about your product. Next you must convert those interested customers into actual buyers. Finally you must provide results that exceed expectations to those who purchased. If even one of these three stages is blocked, your business growth will definitely stop.
For example if not enough people know your product, you must first fix your marketing and customer acquisition. Will building an internal reporting system or a task management program with AI in this situation increase your revenue? No matter how fast you process your work, the outcome will not change if new customers are not coming in.
On the other hand if you get plenty of inquiries but very few people actually buy, the problem likely lies in your sales process or product structure. The customers either cannot accept the price or do not understand why your product is worth it compared to competitors. What you need here is not automation. You need to figure out why customers are not buying and improve your offer.
And if sales are strong but refunds and complaints keep happening, then your service quality is the bottleneck. Running more advertisements in this situation might increase short term revenue but the problems will just grow bigger right alongside it.
This is why he suggests asking yourself one specific question. Did introducing AI actually make me more money? If you cannot find the answer, there is a high chance you are using AI in places that are not your most critical problem.
Time, manpower, and capital are limited for every business. The true skill of an entrepreneur is not revealed by how widely they spread these tiny resources. It is revealed by how intensely they focus on the single problem that will create the biggest result. AI can be a brilliant tool to solve that problem. But if you fail to find your bottleneck, AI can never be the right answer.
The tool changes every year. The question of what actually deserves your attention does not. I am still working on getting that answer right for my own business, and figuring it out first is what I keep coming back to before I open any AI tool at all.
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