Is your AI investment compounding or depreciating?

Welcome to another edition of Leading Momentum, where we cover on-the-ground insights leaders need to know about getting AI operations to work in their organization.

Today I’m going to share how to make sure your AI investments are compounding, by applying one of the protocols we’ve published: Own the Playbook; Rent the Tech.

I've told this story dozens of times the past few weeks.

We recently moved a bunch of our internal AI operations off of ChatGPT and into Claude + a platform called OpenClaw. The reasons were mostly to push for more autonomy, the AI doing stuff in the background automatically without our intervention.

But that's not what I want to tell you about today.

The important part is how it went.

Each playbook took maybe five minutes to set up in the new tool. We opened up the playbook doc, uploaded it to the new tools, tested it, made a few small tweaks, and it's running. It took us one evening and we were done.

Now, these playbooks originally took a couple hours each to write. That's where the real work was. Thinking through the steps, the decision points, what "good" looks like. But because we'd already done that work, and because it all lived in plain-language Google Docs and not inside the AI tool itself... there was nothing to rebuild. We just moved the document.

And that's it.

This is what we mean when we say own the playbook, rent the tech. But watching it happen for our own work was a good reminder of something I think about a lot when I'm inside companies.

Your team's AI work is either compounding or depreciating right now. And most leaders don't know which one it is.

If the process logic, the thinking, the quality standards, all of that lives inside an AI tool, it depreciates every time the landscape shifts.
... A better model comes out.
... The tool changes its pricing or its features.
... Your best AI person takes a new job.
And suddenly the investment your team made over months is worth less than it was yesterday.

But if that same thinking lives in playbooks your organization owns, every improvement to AI tools makes your playbooks more valuable.
... Better models mean your existing playbooks produce better outputs.
... New capabilities mean your playbooks can do things they couldn't before.
The investment compounds.

I cannot tell you how many companies I walk into where the team has done real work with AI, months of it, and none of it is portable. It's all inside one person's account, or built into a tool configuration that nobody else fully understands.

The leader looks at that and thinks "we're ahead."

But what they actually have is an asset that's losing value every week and they can't see it.

We would have been looking at weeks of rebuilding if we'd built all of that inside CustomGPTs the way most teams do.

Instead it was an evening.

That difference is the difference between an AI operation that compounds and one that quietly depreciates until something forces you to start over.

So if your team is using AI for anything right now, the question I'd sit with is: could you switch tools tomorrow? Not would you, but could you?

If the answer is "not without a lot of pain," that's worth paying attention to. It usually means your team has been building equity in a place you don't own.

Read more on how to think about own the playbook, rent the tech here: https://runonamp.com/protocols/own-the-playbook-rent-the-tech

Thanks for reading. It's a privilege that you spend time with these each week.

Whenever you're ready, here's how we can help:

Cheers,
Rachel