A while back I caught myself spending a Saturday morning copying figures into a spreadsheet by hand. Forty minutes in, it landed on me — Copilot could have done this while I made a coffee. I wasn’t being thorough. I was being slow. And when the person at the top moves slowly, everything behind them backs up too.
That morning is why I keep coming back to a simple way of sorting the work in front of me: what to pass over, what to speed up, what to build alongside the machine, and what I should never let go of. Four buckets. GAIN.
Pass over the work that doesn’t need you
Most of us hold on to tasks out of pure habit. The first draft. The long document that needs boiling down. The background reading before a client call. None of that needs your judgement — it just needs doing. So let it be done. I’ll ask Copilot in Word to condense a forty-page proposal, or have it pull the recurring themes out of a month of client emails in Outlook. I’m not after ideas. I’m after a finished job. Once you start looking, the size of this pile is genuinely surprising.
Speed up the things that already work
Every business runs on small, repeatable steps. An enquiry arrives, someone qualifies it, someone books the meeting, someone sends the follow-up. You’re not reinventing that — you’re stripping out the waiting in between. With Power Automate sitting under Copilot, a new lead can be sorted, routed, and have a meeting request out the door before anyone’s even read it. Two hours back a week, every week, for as long as the doors are open. That compounds in a way that’s easy to dismiss when you’re staring at the setup.
Build something you couldn’t make alone
This is the part people skip past. The real value isn’t AI standing in for you — it’s the two of you producing something neither would on its own. I’ll have Copilot take ideas I’ve already worked through, connect them in ways I hadn’t spotted, and hand them back in a different shape. Sometimes I’ll drop a Loop page of rough notes and let it pull the thread together while I’m out of the office. I come back and I’m editing, not starting from a blank page. Minutes of shaping instead of hours of grinding. You shift from making the thing to sharpening it — and that’s a far better use of your attention.
Keep what only you can do
Not everything belongs on these piles, and pretending otherwise is how people lose the plot. Taste can’t be handed over — it’s learned, never taught, and certainly never prompted. Vision stays yours, because the machine has no idea what your clients will want next year. And care — actually feeling something for the work and the people on the other end of it — that’s the whole point of doing any of this. Copilot can draft the message; it can’t mean it. Guard those three closely.
The aim was never to turn yourself into the software. It’s to clear away everything else so there’s more room for the part of the job that’s unmistakably yours. I’m curious how far that line shifts over the next year — but those last few things, I don’t think they move at all.
CIAOPS 