Your Next AI Breakthrough Might Already Be on Your Payroll

AI can solve business problems, but many businesses haven't empowered people to solve them.

I recently watched an interview with Jean-Denis Greze, founder and CEO of Town, where he talked about the need for more tinkerers.

People who see a problem, get curious, experiment with technology, and figure out how to solve it.

I couldn’t agree more.

I call these people subject matter experts (SMEs). They understand the work, know what’s broken, and often have great ideas for fixing it.

But most businesses aren’t set up to let them.

The people closest to the work know what needs to be fixed

Think about how many problems employees work around every day.

Sales teams manually updating multiple systems. Operations managers spending hours compiling reports. Teams waiting on approvals that shouldn’t require three departments.

The people doing this work know where the friction is.

But their fixes turn into IT tickets, budget requests, or projects that never get prioritized. So the workarounds pile up, and the ideas never get built into working solutions.

AI is changing who can solve business problems

Until recently, building custom solutions generally required someone who knew how to code or was technically inclined.

That’s changing quickly.

This spring, after a long search for a platform that could do what I envisioned, I discovered Replit.

I’ve spent most of my career helping companies solve problems with technology, and I immediately recognized what this could mean for businesses of all sizes.

I was impressed by the technology and the culture behind it. Replit embraces the kind of curiosity, experimentation, and problem-solving that I believe businesses need more of.

And they’ve built what I consider the strongest end-to-end AI platform for turning ideas into working solutions.

That’s why I chose to become a Replit Ambassador.

I wanted to help more people discover what they could accomplish with it.

A business owner can build an internal tool to improve an inefficient process. A sales leader can create a better way to manage their team's pipeline. An operations expert can finally test an idea that’s been sitting on the back burner for years.

Now the people closest to the problems can help build the solutions.

That’s a significant shift.

But building a solution isn’t the same as changing a business

In my recent article, AI Changed the Work. Who Changes the Organization?, I wrote about what happens when companies introduce AI without changing the decisions, responsibilities, and expectations around the work.

The technology improves productivity, but the business doesn’t necessarily capture the value.

The same thing can happen when employees start building AI solutions.

Someone creates an internal tool that eliminates hours of manual work.

But what happens next?

Does the team change its process? Can other departments benefit? Who owns the solution? What happens to the time that’s been freed up?

Without addressing those questions, organizations risk creating another collection of disconnected tools.

That’s not AI transformation.

The real opportunity is to redesign the work around what AI makes possible.

Sometimes that means building an application or AI agent. Sometimes it means eliminating a process altogether. And sometimes the biggest improvement comes from a leadership decision that should have been made years ago.

We need more problem solvers, not just more AI users

I think we’re approaching AI fluency too narrowly.

Knowing how to write a prompt isn’t the same as knowing how to identify a business problem, design a better way of working, and turn an idea into something valuable.

We need people who understand their businesses and are willing to challenge how things have always been done.

And leaders who give them the tools, time, permission, and appropriate guardrails to do something about it.

You don’t need everyone to become a technical expert.

You need more people who believe they can solve problems, and an organization that supports them.

Start with one problem

Here’s what I’d encourage every business leader to do.

Find one problem your team has been working around for too long.

Bring together the people who understand it best.

Ask what they’d do differently if they could redesign the work today, knowing what AI makes possible.

Then give them the opportunity to build and test a solution.

Measure what improved. Change the process around it. Decide where the new capacity should go.

Then tackle the next problem.

I believe some of the most valuable business innovations in the coming years will come from people who never considered themselves technical.

Founders, salespeople, operations leaders, educators, creatives, and others who understand a problem well enough to know what a better solution should look like.

AI is giving them a new way to solve problems they didn’t have before.

The question is whether we’ll give them the opportunity to solve them.

The businesses that get this right will have a massive competitive edge. They won’t simply have more people using AI. They’ll have more people solving problems, improving how work gets done, and creating value.