I just spent more time planning a slide deck than I have in years. Then I watched the whole thing build itself in about a minute.
Both of those things are true, and the gap between them made something clear to me about where our value lies as business owners. The strategy, deciding what to say and why, got slower with AI and came out better. The tactical work of building it almost disappeared. And the strategy was always the part that mattered.
It started simply. I'd been asked to present Lucitech at a networking group, and I did what I've always done. I sat down and wrote an outline: what we do, and the story I wanted the room to walk away with.
Then I did something I wouldn't have done a few years ago. I took that outline to Claude and we worked it over. It questioned my order. It asked what I wanted a business owner to do after the last slide, and I realized I didn't have a good answer yet. We went back and forth until I did.
That took longer than my usual process. Noticeably longer.
Next we worked through the slides themselves: which should come first and what each one should look like. Again we started from my outline, and again it took real time. By the end I had a clear plan for each slide before I'd opened a template.
Which left the part I usually put off. Setting up the template, nudging text boxes half a pixel at a time, debating whether a photo looks better on the left or the right. It's hours of work that takes patience but almost no thought.
So, mostly on a whim, I asked Claude if it could just build it.
It checked that it could reach my Google account, found my logo and photos in my Drive and on our website, and built the deck in Google Slides. About a minute, start to finish.
The meeting ended up rained out, so the room hasn't seen it yet. But I've presented well over a hundred decks in my career, and I'm proud of this one. You can judge for yourself: View the deck
Two kinds of work
That deck split my work cleanly in two, and I think every business's work splits the same way.
There's strategy: deciding what to say and what matters. That's where a business's value comes from, and it's the part nobody can do for you. When I brought AI into it, it took longer. It also came out better, because I had a sharp partner asking hard questions.
Then there's tactical work: taking a plan that's already decided and carrying it out. Once my plan was solid, that part collapsed from hours to a minute.
It's easy to expect AI to make everything faster. In my experience, it should make your strategy slower and your tactical work faster. If the strategy side of your work is getting shorter because of AI, that's worth a second look, because strategy is what sets you apart from competitors.
Where to start
You don't need to study everything AI can do. Start with work you already know how to do well. Bring AI in as a second set of eyes on the strategy, and once the plan is settled, ask whether it can handle the execution. More often than you'd expect, it can.
That execution depends on connectors, the links that let an AI work inside tools you already use, like your email or your shared drive. The technical name is MCP, which is handy to know if you go looking. Or just ask your assistant what it can connect to. You may find more is already there than you thought.
That's a trade I'm happy to make: more of my hours on the strategy that makes the business mine, and fewer of them pushing buttons.