We’re all caught up in the debate about when artificial general intelligence (AGI) will arrive, whether it’s 2027 or 2035. But meanwhile, there are people right now manually copying customer emails into spreadsheets. Yes, you read that right.
We’re so focused on the flashy questions like ‘will AI replace doctors?’ that we’re blind to the fact that a huge chunk of office work is just moving information from one place to another. And AI can do that today, not in some hypothetical future. For a mere $20 a month.
Right now, this very second, someone is:
* Copy-pasting between two systems that could talk to each other
* Manually creating reports that could generate themselves
* Typing the same email template for the 400th time
* Updating the same data in 5 different places
* Spending 3 hours finding specific clauses in contracts that an AI could find in 3 seconds
Sharon from accounting is still manually entering invoice numbers, one by one, while AI that can process 10,000 invoices in seconds just exists, unused.
We have the tech to automate 60% of white-collar work right now. But we’re too busy having philosophical debates about consciousness to notice. The singularity isn’t coming; it’s been here since 2023.
Someone’s probably automating their entire department over a weekend right now. They just won’t tell anyone.
It’s time to shift our focus from the futuristic possibilities of AI to the mundane tasks that AI can already automate. Let’s stop debating the future and start embracing the present.