I was on a call with Maya, a marketing manager at a SaaS company. She was worried about her team thinking automation meant replacement.
"I don't want them to feel like I'm trying to automate their jobs away," she said.
Then she happened to mention Jonah. Every monthly check-in, he had the same complaint. He really, really hated the monthly performance report.
"Dead refusing" were her exact words.
Jonah's monthly nightmare looked like this:
Pull numbers from three different team reports
Fix date formats that were different across each spreadsheet
Run the same 12-step cleanup process across the 3 reports
Combine everything into one deck
And then he’s pretty sure no one’s actually reading the report.
Ten hours every month and Jonah brought it up every single meeting.
Maya's take: "That's Gen Z for you."
My take: "No that’s an automation opportunity for you.”
So Jonah and I worked together to build a system. Airtable pulled the reports. Zapier standardized the dates. AI wrote summary bullets for the slide deck.
We reduced a 10 hour process down to 30 minutes. No joke.
Jonah now can spend his time analyzing trends and building campaign ideas. The stuff he actually got hired to do.
The takeaway:
Anger is information. When someone hates a task that much, they are pointing you straight to your best automation win.
Still on the lookout for complaints,
Jamie
P.S. This is the kind of shift we build together inside the AI Operator Bootcamp.