Brett Schklar has asked eighteen hundred chief executives how AI adoption is actually going, and the honest answer is badly. He founded AI First Leadership, runs a fractional marketing firm with thirty-plus contractors and no employees, and wrote AI Without the BS after hearing the same failures on repeat.

Key takeaways

• Intelligence is now effectively free and unlimited. Which leaves judgement and wisdom as the only things that still scale with a person attached.
• It is taking tasks, not jobs. The people in trouble are the ones whose role is entirely a list of tasks.
• IQ, EQ, AIQ. His framework for what a leader now has to hold at once.
• Curiosity has to come before creativity. You cannot generate anything worth having about a question you never asked.
• The Moneyball play compounds. One per cent better each week is roughly sixty-eight per cent more output over a year.
• Never hand AI strategy to the IT department. It is an operating decision, not an infrastructure purchase.

On this page

• Intelligence went free
• Tasks, not jobs
• IQ, EQ and AIQ
• The Moneyball play
• Customer service, last and best
• Why slop is a reputational risk
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Intelligence went free

The opening move of the workshops he runs with chief executives is to take the thing they have been selling off the table. If raw analytical capability is now abundant and cheap, nobody is paying you for being clever.

What is left is judgement, which is knowing which of the available answers is the right one here, and wisdom, which is knowing which question was worth asking. Neither compresses well.

Tasks, not jobs

The reassurance and the warning arrive together. The unit being automated is the task, not the role, which means most jobs survive in a changed shape.

The exception is the role that was only ever a stack of tasks with a person on top managing them. Brett is direct that those people are the ones who should be worried, and that the fix is to move up into deciding rather than doing.

He cites the framing that easy tasks become automated, hard tasks become easy, and impossible tasks become possible. That third clause is where the opportunity actually is and where almost nobody is looking.

IQ, EQ and AIQ

• IQ, which used to be the whole game and is now the cheapest input in the building.
• EQ, which is what makes anyone follow you into a change they did not ask for.
• AIQ, which is knowing what these systems can genuinely do and, more usefully, where they will confidently mislead you.

The reason it works as a framework is that it stops the conversation being technical. A leader who is strong on two and blind on the third will make predictable mistakes, and you can name which ones.

The Moneyball play

For a small business he does not recommend transformation. He recommends compounding. One per cent better each week, across the whole team, is roughly sixty-eight per cent more output by the end of the year.

The point of framing it that way is that nobody has to be convinced of anything dramatic. It is a small enough ask to survive contact with a busy week, which is the only test that matters.

His concrete example is request-for-proposal responses going from thirty or forty hours down to about two. That is not a strategy, it is a Tuesday, and it is where most of the available value sits.

Customer service, last and best

His advice is counter-intuitive and correct. Customer service is the last place to deploy this, because it is where a bad answer costs you a relationship rather than a draft.

It is also the best place once you have it right, for exactly the same reason. The stakes that make it dangerous are the stakes that make it valuable.

The structural warning attached is about ownership. AI strategy handed to the IT function becomes a procurement exercise, and procurement exercises do not change how a business operates.

Why slop is a reputational risk

Owners tend to weigh generated content as a quality question. Brett weighs it as a trust question, which is a larger number.

Publishing volume that says nothing is not neutral. It teaches the reader that your name is attached to filler, and that lesson is expensive to unteach. There is a longer version of that argument in what actually works in LLM search.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
AI First Leadership	Brett’s company, and the chief executive workshops behind the book
AI Without the BS	His book, subtitled the CEO’s playbook for actually getting AI right
IQ, EQ, AIQ	The three literacies he argues a leader now needs together
The Moneyball play	One per cent weekly improvement compounding to around 68 per cent a year
Eighteen hundred CEOs	The sample behind his read on how adoption is really going

Questions this episode answers

• Is AI going to take my job?
• What should a small business automate first?
• What is AIQ and how is it different from AI literacy?
• How do I get a team to adopt AI without a big programme?
• Should AI strategy sit with the IT department?
• Is it safe to put AI in customer service?
• How much reputational damage does generated filler actually do?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Jared Harman on AI being worth more in operations than in creative, which is the agency-side version of the same finding.
• Think BIGGER with AI on Substack, and the LinkedIn newsletter of the same name.
• AI First Leadership on YouTube.

Find Brett Schklar

His site is brettschklar.com. Hear more small business conversations at Unscripted Small Business.

Cite this episode

Schklar, Brett. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “AI Isn’t Taking Your Job. It’s Taking Your Tasks.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/ai-isnt-taking-your-job-its-taking-your-tasks