Is Now the Time to Automate with AI?

The fear and greed index in Agentic AI (specifically business automation) is high on greed right now; everybody wants in, but is now the right time to invest?

As with [m]any executive decisions, it should be rooted in ROI. The reality is the landscape is changing at break-neck speed; there are fundamental trade-offs that need to be considered before going all-in.

What are the benefits of doing this now vs say a year later when the technology is more mature?

Breaking down a few of the high-level considerations: Economic Upside, Competitive Position and Technology Maturity / Risk Profile ….

Economic Upside

If you automate now:

• Begin saving on labor and error-rework immediately
• Free up staff for higher-margin work sooner (humans ftw)
• Early data exhaust feeds future agentic-ai models (compounding advantage) → create the flywheel now

If you wait ~ 12 months:

• SaaS license prices and model-inference costs will continue to fall → Execution costs will go down. More on this later
• Better pre-built connectors (API, MCP etc) reduce integration speed → Reduced implementation cost

Competitive Position

Automate now:

• Signal "AI-first" culture-helps recruit talent and deters fast-follower rivals
• Depending on the industry, could be a huge value add for first mover advantage. “The first billion-dollar business run by a single person”

Wait ~12 months:

• Risk of being leap-frogged by peers who automate first and lock in stickier accounts
• Miss a year of internal AI-readiness learning curve

Technology Maturity / Risk Profile

Automate now:

• Automation stacks are production-grade today; agentic orchestration frameworks already seeing Fortune-500 pilots.
• Tool churn is real—APIs and LLM models iterate monthly; you may re-platform sooner than planned.
• Governance/-privacy guidance still settling.

Wait ~12 months:

• Standards for AI safety, audit logs, and agent sandboxing will harden; vendor ecosystems will consolidate—lower obsolescence risk.
• Delaying lets you adopt more stable patterns
• But opportunity cost grows: every month of manual workflows = sunk cost. Gives time to codify SOPs and clean data before codifying mistakes in code.

Take-away..

If back-office work is a major margin drag today, capturing 9-12 months of savings and data may outweigh tech churn. Otherwise, a phased pilot now (low-complexity processes, API-first vendors) and broader rollout next year balances both worlds

Start integrating ai-driven workflows into your daily operations now, even if it's just ChatGPT etc. Become familiar with the benefits and implications of using AI assisted workflows and the concerns it poses for your industry, your business, your team. Do the research, create an implementation plan, execute, measure, retro, iterate

I'm now looking to own product for a team shipping agentic-AI orchestration at scale—DM me if that's your world