I've had enough of the AI Bros on LinkedIn — and in this episode, I'm calling them out.

Hi, I'm Mike Fox, host of this podcast, "Lone Wolf Unleashed." In this episode I'm taking direct aim at the wave of self-proclaimed 'gurus' claiming to have fired their entire operations teams overnight and replaced them with AI bots. It's hype. It's harmful. And if you follow that advice, it could wreck your business.

Instead, I walk you through the measured, methodical approach that actually works: document your processes first, iterate one small change at a time, test discreetly, and never forget that people do business with people — not bots.

AI is a powerful tool. But it is not a replacement for human judgment, creativity, or the relationships that keep clients coming back. This episode gives you a grounded framework and the confidence to adopt AI the right way.

What you'll learn:

1. Why the 'fire your team, hire AI' advice is dangerous and ethically wrong
2. How documentation is the non-negotiable first step before any AI implementation
3. Why I recommend changing one small thing at a time — never entire workflows at once
4. The irreplaceable role of human connection in sales and client retention
5. How to spot the real difference between AI hype and genuine productivity improvement

If you've been tempted by the 'automate everything' crowd, this episode will set you straight.

Connect with me: lonewolfunleashed.com

Mentioned in this episode:

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Today I'm going to call out some behaviors and I'm going to tell you what you should be doing instead so that you can take a more measured approach to adopting AI.

G'.

Day.

My name is Mike from Lone Wolf Unleashed, and it is yet another week where we're having to deal with these AI gurus pumping up their marketing engine on LinkedIn to basically tell lies and to suck people in to absolutely abhorrent business practices.

This week I saw a post on LinkedIn.

Can't remember the guy's name.

He.

He tried to connect with me, which I declined immediately because I'm not interested in engaging with charlatans.

But basically what his post said was that he fired his entire operations team and he'd instead decided to use claudebot, which is an AI engine that basically has access to all your stuff.

He said that he didn't have staff anymore and he didn't have a VA anymore and he was just doing all of this stuff for himself.

And to comment AI, if you wanted to see how he did it, every response, regardless of what the comment was on, his post said, please send me a connection request so I can send.

Not wanting to engage with anything, I commented something like, I'm absolutely sick of this hyped up nonsense.

The response was, please send me a connection request so I can send.

Oh my God.

I didn't even say the word that he'd asked in the post.

And I really am getting sick of this because, you know, I'm afraid that there are going to be people out there who want to adopt AI and they're going to do it in unhealthy ways that frankly will destroy their business if they do it the wrong way.

And I don't want that.

I want to help people to build good businesses and I want to work with good people.

So I'm going to continue to call out this, quite frankly, this bs.

And I suppose that there has always been bros in each trend.

A number of years ago there was the Blockchain Bros, there's the Crypto bros, there's the Finance bros. Now, yes, unfortunately we have the AI Bros.

If you really do want to, quote, unquote, replace your operations team, I'm going to walk you through a few concepts here that you need to be thinking about.

And spoiler alert, it's not going to involve firing every single one of your team.

And if you're listening to this and you're the solo operator and you're the solo founder who's wanting to work through some of this stuff, yeah, hiring still is going to be a viable option in the future.

AI is not going to replace every single piece of human capability like these AI bros think it's going to.

And so I'm going to walk you through now how that's going to go and what to do instead.

So strap yourself in.

So number one, documentation here is key.

How do we replace systems, how do we replace people, how do we delegate, how do we, etc.

Etc.

Etc.

It doesn't really matter what the purpose is or what the improvement is.

Documentation is critical starting point for getting things right.

We can't teach other people, we can't teach machines, we can't automate, we can't AI, we can't do anything unless we know very, very specifically how things work from the very beginning.

So the first thing you need to do is very specifically know the task that you were wanting to delegate, automate, eliminate, and having a fundamental understanding about all the ins and outs of what that means.

So I've done heaps of content on this now.

Guys, go back and have a look at the process, mapping, the procedure, documentation.

All of that stuff goes into the document phase.

We want to document, document, document.

How does this work?

What is it?

What systems am I using?

What fields am I having to complete?

What information do I put where?

What decisions do I have to make?

All of these things need to be put into these documents.

Automating and handing over to AI is not something you can do in 20 minutes.

You can't replace entire end to end, you can't automate end to end in a matter of weeks.

It does not work that way.

The reason why it doesn't work that way is because documentation by far and away takes the longest thing to do.

Take it from someone who's been doing consulting and business analysis for a long time now.

Requirements gathering, elicitation of those requirements, documenting out those requirements is a very difficult thing to do.

It is very time consuming.

Whether you have AI helping you or not, it is time consuming.

And I want to set the expectation here that documenting out this stuff for the first time is going to be slow, it's going to be painful, and that is okay.

So once you have some documentation about how things work now you can sit down and figure out you can even use an AI tool of choice to try to figure this out.

Feed it in there, go.

What are the areas of improvement here?

How can I streamline how I do this?

Get your templates together.

This is part of documentation, right?

Get your templates together.

How do I do this.

Is there a system that can help me do this faster?

Is the AI able to produce the document with the content in it for each case, etc.

Etc.

That's how you do it.

You do the little bits of the workflow at a time.

If you replace an entire workflow in one go, you are not going to be able to know where it breaks very easily.

Testing should be done discreetly.

And by that I mean if you know and you make just one tweak at a time and you improve one little thing at a time and you test it as you go, you'll know what's breaking along the way so you can make those adjustments.

If you do wholesale change to a process and things go wrong, you will not know where to look.

You won't.

So it is really important here that you manage those different types of improvements and things discreetly, one little iteration at a time.

Trust me, it is going to save you so many headaches if you get this right, okay?

If you follow this process properly and you don't buy into the hype that's out there on these platforms, you can still achieve some of these outcomes just in a more healthy way.

The other thing that really pisses me off is that we're talking about replacing entire human teams here.

I think that is just so fundamentally ethically wrong.

To think that just people's working capital is just expendable like that is disgusting.

I am a fan of automation.

I'm a fan of automation and I've talked about this on a previous episode.

The difference between machine work and human work.

And I think what these bros are trying to do is they are trying to pass everything off as machine work as if suddenly everything is just, oh, no, that's machine work.

AI can replace that.

Oh, AI is excellent.

It can do this, it can do that.

It can't do everything.

It doesn't have intuition.

All it has is inputs and outputs.

That's all it has.

Humans have creativity that AI does not have.

They have the ability to connect with the things that matter.

Fundamentally what matters in business.

What matters in business is connection.

It's human relationship.

Think about the sales process.

The sales process is so fundamentally relationship driven, I am surprised that anyone is buying into the fact that they're trying to do these end to end voice agents to do selling.

It's absolutely nonsense.

There's many other words out there.

I'm trying to keep it clean.

It's absolute nonsense.

And as you try to manage customers and you're trying to manage clients, you can't automate that, you can automate some of the different communications or maybe you need to send an email or you need to update them or something like that.

But at the end of the day, people do business with people.

They do business with people and they do business with brands.

And if a brand is gonna go after this and they're gonna try to automate end to end.

Oh, you know, we don't really let our customers talk to people anymore because, well, we want the profits.

What's gonna happen is people are gonna get wind of that in their interactions and you know, actually I don't feel rewarded anymore for dealing with this.

I'm just gonna go and take my business somewhere else.

And that's another thing that these AR Bros are missing is they're missing the big picture, the long term vision.

If you're in business, you're playing a long game here.

Business is a long game.

If you play the game right, the game never ends for you.

A lot of people fail in business.

But if you play it right, there are companies out there that are hundreds of years old, they will outlast you.

It has the potential to create intergenerational wealth.

If you get onto and you try to sell these ridiculous short term hyped up solutions and you're simply just getting on the bandwagon because it, it generates engagement, then shame on you.

Honestly, shame on you.

I just think that there's so many better ways to do business.

I do business with good people.

I'm not really looking to replace those people.

The main value that I get out of business is the connection that I get to have with other people and being able to transform the way that they work and transform the way that their work can reward their lives.

That is so rewarding for me.

And to have these guys out there go, oh well, I just help scale agencies with AI so they don't have to hire anyone and they can fire their entire teams is absolute ridiculous nonsense.

What's the takeaway?

The takeaway is don't buy into this ridiculous hype about what AI can and can't do.

It's not going to replace every human being.

The market's already evolving.

Yes, there's a lot of unemployment out there at the moment.

It's not because of AI.

There is other economic factors that are going into this.

There's also studies out there that CEOs are starting to see that AI is not actually solving a lot of their productivity problems problems.

So maybe this is not a technology problem, maybe this is a people problem.

And the only way that we can solve people problems is with people.

So have a think about that this week.

If you are on LinkedIn, please connect with me and you see these posts.

I want you to tag me.

I'm collecting an evidence box and I'm trying to not get it worked up about all this stuff, but it does work me up because there are a lot of people out there that are desperate for change and I am afraid that they're going to start looking in the wrong places for change and they're going to destroy their business and their reputation because they trusted an AI to do something that really it shouldn't have been trusted to do in the first place.

So thanks for joining me with this week.

I've been a little bit more worked up this week.

Thank you for sticking around.

I really appreciate your time.

You could have been doing many million things this today, but you decided to hang out with me for 10 minutes and have me rant about the AI bros, make sure that you go away, document well, think through how you're making decisions so you can make good decisions in what you're automating.

And until next week.

I'll see you then.