Hey friends,
This coming Monday I'm running a live workshop here in Geelong, and I wanted to spill the beans a little early.
I'll be spending ninety minutes in a room with local business owners on a single idea: humans and AI agents working side by side. Not humans replaced by machines. Side by side. Most of you reading this won't be in that room, and the ideas matter more than the seat, so I want to hand you the key insights now, before I stand up on Monday.
Here's the short version of what I'll be walking through.
A Chatbot Answers, An Agent Does The Work
This is the distinction almost everyone misses, and it's the one that changes how you think about the whole thing.
For the last couple of years, AI has been something you talk to. You open a chat window, ask a question, get an answer, close the window. Handy, but it's a tool sitting on the desk waiting for you to pick it up. You still do all the work of using it.
An agent is different. An agent is software you can hand an actual job to. Not "write me an email," but "watch the inbox, draft replies to the routine ones, flag the tricky ones for me." It goes and does the task, then comes back to you. You stopped typing the question. It's now doing the running around.
Once that clicks, you stop asking "what can I ask the AI today" and start asking "what job could I hand over this week." That's the whole shift.
Side By Side, Not Instead Of
The fear in the room is always the same. If the software does the work, where does that leave the people?
Here's how I actually see it. The agent takes the busywork that was quietly eating your week. You keep the parts that need a human: the judgement, the relationship, the call that only you can make. The business owner is still the one in charge. The agent just stops you spending your Tuesday on things that never needed you in the first place.
That's not a robot future. It's a quieter Monday, with the same person running the show.
Where It Earns Its Keep First
When people ask me where to start, I point at the least glamorous corners of the business every time. Quoting. Admin. Customer questions you've answered a hundred times. The follow-ups that slip because nobody got to them.
These are the jobs that don't need your judgement but still steal your hours. They are boring, repetitive, and predictable, which is exactly what makes them the right first candidates. Hand one of them over and you get real hours back. That is the entire game. Not transformation. One task, off your plate, this week.
The First Move
If you take one thing from this and never come to a workshop, take this: don't try to "adopt AI." That's too big and it goes nowhere.
Instead, pick the single most repetitive task in your week. The one you could describe to a new staff member in five minutes. That's your first candidate to hand to an agent. Start there, get it working, then pick the next one. Small, boring, and real beats a grand plan every time.
Come And Do It With Us
That's the preview. On Monday we go deeper, with real local examples and time to map it to your own business.
The AI-Powered Business: Where Humans and Agents Work Side by Side Monday 3 August, 9:00 to 10:30am Geelong Small Business Hub, Wurriki Nyal, 137 to 149 Mercer St, Geelong
It's part of the Geelong Small Business Festival, it's hands-on, and there are 74 seats. Tickets are on Eventbrite, and the code QUTUB25 takes 50% off for you and anyone you bring, colleagues included.
If someone you know runs a business and is curious about this but sick of the noise, forward this on. That's exactly who Monday is for.
A Calm Takeaway
I just got back from the UN AI summit in Geneva, and the thing that stayed with me was how much of what gets said at that level is noise. The genuinely useful part of all this is smaller, quieter, and far more doable than the headlines suggest.
You don't need a strategy, a big budget, or a summit ticket to begin. You need one repetitive task, one agent to hand it to, and the honesty to admit where your week actually goes.
Everything else is just deciding to start.
See you next week,
— Aamir
📲 Resources & Links
🎧 Listen to the Podcast Episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
📘 Book: The CEO Who Mocked AI (Until It Made Him Millions) by Aamir Qutub