Managing Human and AI Employees

All those SOPs you made, have not removed the stress of dealing with employees or contractors. I know because every month my entrepreneur friends and I are trauma dumping on text about managing our teams. It is truly a nightmare sometimes, especially when you are running payroll and feeling like that payroll is not giving you the return on investment you expected.

Here’s what I’ve learned after managing a team of 13 and spending way too much money on Gusto.

Before you start firing people, I stop and ask myself how it happened. Was it a technical issue, a training issue, or a tool issue? A lot of times, people are doing the best they can within the systems they have been given.

I had a project manager who wasn’t prioritizing things in the right order. I updated the SOP, rewrote the Google Doc checklist, updated the project management handbook, sent countless messages in chat, and she was still doing whatever the hell she wanted. So instead of staying frustrated, I rebuilt the system outside of her.

Because I built my own custom software, I updated our client management dashboard and re-ordered our portal flow. When she logged in each morning, she no longer had multiple options, and nothing in the process was left to her discretion.

When I kept getting frustrated that tasks were not getting assigned fast enough, I built an AI-powered triage system that automatically reviews and assigns incoming tasks so that a human doesn’t touch it at all.

AI agents do not think for you, they execute. An AI agent is only as good as the instructions it receives, and those instructions are your SOPs. Every process you write down clearly enough for a new employee to follow is a process you can hand to an AI to run with or without a human in the loop. The founders winning with AI right now are not the ones buying the newest tools. They are the ones who already had their operations documented and are converting those SOPs into automated workflows one step at a time.

You don’t need to pay that lady thousands of dollars to “install an AI employee” in your business. You can feed Claude your SOP docs and say “I want to automate this workflow. Consider a Claude project as the AI employee who understands the job they have to do (the what) and create skills and markdown files on the “how” for each process that they execute. Guide me step by step since I’m not technical.”

When you remove the repeatable, rule-based work from your team’s plate, your people stop being executors of a process and start being the creative thinkers, relationship holders, and problem solvers you actually hired them to be.

Customer service, onboarding, triage, and marketing ops are all running on agents at this point. Those were the easy wins because they are rule-based, repeatable, and do not require taste or judgment. I documented the process, handed it to an agent, and have not looked back.

There are some things that you or your team is an expert in, and no amount of skills can replicate that. I have seen that when it comes to design. Because I have excellent designers, the mediocre AI designs just don’t cut it right now. I want to hand it off to AI so bad, but the VILLA team edits eats the AI versions up every time. The human edit is where the magic actually happens. Take a look at the difference below. (You wouldn’t believe the amount of credits I wasted arguing back and forth with Claude and Figma Make to get this first draft.)

AI is not replacing your creative team. What it is doing is removing the blank page problem and giving your people a head start so they spend their time on the decisions that require actual design eyes. I got my Claude skill to a decent place to edit Canva template graphics, but true original designs aren’t there yet. Don’t force it.

If you do not have your SOPs documented yet, start there before anything else. AI agents and humans cannot read your mind, and if you’ve never documented what “good” looks like in your business, you have nothing to feed them. Record a Loom of yourself doing the task once and drop the transcript into Ai to create a Google Doc. That one video is worth more than any AI subscription you are paying for right now. If you complete something using AI to your liking, immediately prompt it to create a skill so the process is repeatable.

Hiring a human employee means writing a job description, training them, managing their performance, and paying them every two weeks whether the work is there or not. Deploying an AI agent means giving it your documented process and letting it run, with a human checking the output, not doing the work. What if the reason AI isn’t working in your business isn’t the technology at all? What if it’s that you’ve never forced yourself to write down how your business actually operates?

I have seen what happens to payroll costs when founders keep replacing people instead of fixing the process. Now I’ve also seen what happens when you are spinning your wheels trying to remove humans out of everything. The one-person business is not as attainable as Instagram makes it seem. You will cycle through humans and burn credits forever only for the problem to follow you. Stop firing your way out of a systems problem and wondering why the new hire makes the same mistakes.

Build it brick by brick, skill by skill.

Hope that helps!