AI Won’t Replace You — But Someone Using It Will

The Long Run Mindset - For Entrepreneurs #8

I remember trying to explain the job to a friend.

This was around 2016. We were six years into Key Digital and I’d just taken on someone whose role, as far as I could describe it, was to look after our online presence — the website, the data, the email marketing, building the kind of digital footprint that I sensed was going to matter even though I couldn’t have told you exactly why in precise terms.

My friend was a business owner. Sharp, experienced, running a decent operation in a different market. He looked at me the way you look at someone who’s just said something that doesn’t quite parse.

“So what does she actually do?” he said.

I tried again. Something about search, something about data, something about where customers were going to be looking for us in five years’ time.

He nodded slowly in the way that means he’d moved on.

I don’t tell that story to make myself look clever. I got plenty wrong in those years. But I’d sensed something was shifting, and I’d acted on the instinct before I could fully articulate it. The job title that confused him in 2016 is now on every business’s hiring list. The question is just whether you hired early or late.

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We set Key Digital up in 2010. From day one we ran on an IP phone system with digital numbers, and a CRM that tracked every customer interaction we had. I know how unremarkable that sounds now. In 2010, most of our competitors were running on fixed legacy systems — phones tied to a building, customer data living in someone’s head or a spreadsheet nobody could find.

We could work from anywhere. We could route calls without employing a receptionist. We were building and owning our data at a point when plenty of people in our market were still sending postal mailshots.

We weren’t geniuses. We just paid attention to where things were heading and didn’t wait until the direction was obvious to everyone.