I have spent more than twenty years in restaurant technology. The first stretch on the operator side. The person responsible for making the technology work for the business, not the person who built it. The last six years on the vendor side, working for a SaaS company that sells into that same industry.
Same world. Different seat at the table.
As Director of Customer Success, I watched my team spend hours every week pulling information from multiple systems, formatting it, dropping it into PowerPoints, and preparing for customer meetings. The same work, the same way, every single week. So we stopped doing it that way. We built workflows. We handed the repetitive parts to AI and spent our time on the work that actually required a human.
That work expanded. My current title is AI Enablement and Transformation. Now I do it across the whole operations side of the company — sales, customer success, finance, legal, HR, implementation, support. Not the developers. Not engineering. They have their own world. I work with the people who were handed a mandate to use AI and are now sitting at their desks wondering where to start.
If that is you, this blog is for you.
Simple AI Insights focuses on two tools: Claude and Microsoft Copilot. Both built for people who are not developers. Neither requires you to know how to code. What I will show you is how to identify the manual work that is eating your time, build workflows that hand it to AI, and become the auditor of what comes back instead of the person doing it all by hand.
This blog comes from the gap between what companies say about AI and what actually happens when regular people try to use it. From the press releases that say AI is “built in, not bolted on” and “natively embedded” and “purpose-built for the AI era.” And the employee who is still copying and pasting between spreadsheet copies, trying to get VLOOKUP to work, wondering what any of that means for their Tuesday.
While this blog focuses on Claude and Microsoft Copilot, the way we think about workflows, auditing output, and handing off manual work applies to any AI tool you are using. The skills travel.
If you want the longer version of everything this blog covers, mandate, setup, build, audit, and proof, that is what my book, You Are AI-First Now, is for. It is on Kindle now.
I asked Claude to write a letter once. We went back and forth on it. Right before I sent it, I asked if the words were right, if the content landed. It came back with “Honest opinion — it’s not great.”
It wrote the letter. Then it told me its own work was not great.
That is where the Hallucination Station came from. AI is funny if you let it be. There is a t-shirt store.
Tell me what resonates and where you are stuck. That is exactly what I am here for.
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