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.

There are a million ways to apply AI inside your company and team. Here’s one that feels like a smart move but actually has major downside 👇

So I've been watching companies make the same mistake for about a year now.

A founder I work with runs a company that builds custom training programs for large corporations. They went through our program, codified their whole methodology into playbooks, and got AI running those playbooks reliably. Work that used to take a team of 20 is now handled by AI running their playbooks with a small team reviewing the output.

Their first instinct was "oh shit, what do I do with my team now."

But their second instinct, the more dangerous one, was "we should turn this into a tool our clients can use themselves."

I've seen this instinct in probably a dozen companies at this point. You figure out how to get AI to do something your team used to do. It works. And then someone, usually someone smart, says hey, what if we just let the customer do this part themselves? We'll build a portal, give them access, and it'll be a whole new product line.

We will have a SaaS!

It sounds like innovation. It's usually a trap.

I watched a marketing agency go down this exact path. They had internal AI that was making their team significantly faster. Great margins, same quality, clients were happy. Then they built a customer-facing version of it. Packaged it up, gave clients a login, positioned it as a value-add.

Clients needed training on how to use the tool. That's labor. Clients expected to pay less because they were "doing it themselves." That's margin compression. And the agency's positioning shifted from "we're the experts who deliver results" to "we sell an AI tool." That's a completely different business.

I checked back in with them a few months later. They'd killed the customer-facing tool entirely. Moved everything back to internal-only. Went back to delivering the service, just with way better margins than before.

The math is simple. The same AI, deployed internally, expands your margins. Deployed to the customer, it compresses them.

Internal means your team does more with less. You deliver the same quality, maybe better, at the same price. Your cost to deliver drops. That's almost always the right first move.

Customer-facing means you've turned your expertise into a vending machine. And vending machines compete on price.

Here's the thing I keep coming back to. If your company is positioned on expertise, on quality, on "we're the ones who actually know how to do this well," then the AI should be invisible to your customer. They should see the outcome, not the tool. That's the whole point.

The companies I work with that are getting the most value from AI right now? Their clients can't even tell.

So if you're sitting on an AI capability that's making your team faster, and someone on your team is pitching the idea of turning it into a product your customers use directly, the question I'd sit with is this. Where are you positioned right now? Better, faster, or cheaper? And does exposing the AI to the customer keep you there, or does it quietly move you somewhere you don't want to be?

Most of the time, the answer is keep it internal. Let your team be the ones who are way more capable. Charge what you've always charged. Let the margin be the win.

Don't turn your expertise into a vending machine.

Hit reply and tell me: has someone on your team pitched the "let's just give clients a portal" idea yet? I want to hear what happened.

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Cheers,
Rachel