Business owners are wasting massive amounts of time building AI agents when they should be figuring out what their business actually needs.

Scott isn't anti-agent—he has them in his business. But there's an untold tax: onboarding, maintenance, troubleshooting. In small businesses, guess who does it? You.

The Easter Weekend story: Anthropic changed their terms. 3pm Saturday, Scott's OpenClaw stopped working. He spent Easter weekend switching to ChatGPT. His wife was not happy.

The hidden burden: Every new OpenClaw release broke what he'd already fixed. Nights and weekends troubleshooting. Time spent with AI agents is time not spent with the team.

Digital dust: The AI is producing outputs Scott doesn't have time to review. It's not being used. It's digital dust.

The new default: When work needs to come off Scott's plate, the desire is to give it to AI. But his default now is to give it to a human. A VA can be onboarded in 48 hours. An AI agent might take 100+ hours of teaching, testing, and overseeing.

Humans first: Humans allow you to pressure test processes. They know if something's working. They can find a better way. If a process doesn't work with humans, it won't work with AI agents. You're just automating chaos—and chaos amplifies.

The broken speaker: Turn up the volume on a broken speaker and the distortion gets louder. Apply AI to broken processes and the chaos happens faster.

The close: If you've been putting off the AI agent thing because something feels off—trust that instinct.

Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask