In April, Christian and I attended IDEA Week — hosted by the great folks at Startup South Bend & Elkhart — and one session on Wednesday stopped me in my tracks.
Angie Carel — Gen AI Consultant, Speaker, and one of the Top 50 Women to Watch in AI — took the room from "I use ChatGPT sometimes" to "wait, I can automate my entire client intake workflow with three human touchpoints?!" in about 45 minutes. (It was supposed to be a structured talk. It turned into a workshop because people kept interrupting with questions. That's how you know you've hit a nerve.)
The thing Angie said that stuck with me most:
Most people are using AI linearly. Prompt → iterate → result.
And they think that's it. It's not it. Not even close.
But here's my take from the operator's seat, having spent over 20 years in business — about 13 of them inside SaaS companies: the AI conversation in most orgs isn't really a technology conversation. It's a leadership conversation.
And the leaders who figure that out first are the ones who are going to win.
Let's address the elephant in the room
Yes, AI is eliminating jobs. I'm not going to sugarcoat it.
In just the first two months of 2026, there were 32,000 job losses in tech firms. In the first half of 2025, nearly 78,000 tech jobs were directly tied to AI-driven layoffs. (Source: Challenger, Gray & Christmas) And companies are getting increasingly candid about it — Block's CEO Jack Dorsey stated plainly that his company's massive layoffs were "not driven by financial difficulty, but by the growing capability of AI tools to perform a wider range of tasks."
That's a big deal. Executives spent years carefully avoiding the word "automation" in layoff announcements. Now they're just... saying it.
After ChatGPT launched, job postings for roles involving structured, repetitive tasks dropped 13%. At the same time, demand for analytical, technical, and creative roles grew 20%. (Source: Harvard Business School, 2026)
So is AI coming for everyone? No. But it is absolutely coming for how everyone works. And the teams that don't adapt are going to feel it.
The reframe that changes everything
Here's where Angie's session hit differently for me. She talked about a mental shift she calls moving from Do-er to Director.
Before AI: You grind through the tasks yourself. Email, admin, coordination, repetition. After AI: You decide, delegate, and direct. Agents handle the execution.
She shared her own AI org chart — not mapping roles, but mapping tasks — with agents handling intake qualification, meeting prep, proposal drafts, content scheduling, inbox triage, bookkeeping, and more. A 21-step client workflow automated down to three human touchpoints.
Her point wasn't "look how cool this is." It was: the value isn't just the work getting done. It's the mental load you're no longer carrying.
That landed for me. Because I've watched founders (and now myself!) carry that mental load alone for years. Every email, every follow-up, every renewal conversation — all of it — in their heads. That's not sustainable at scale, AI or not.
What this actually means for your SaaS team
Here's the thing nobody's saying loudly enough: AI doesn't eliminate the need for strategy. It amplifies it.
You can automate your support queue. You cannot automate the judgment call about whether to build that enterprise custom feature that could wreck your roadmap. You can have AI draft your proposals. You cannot automate the relationship with the customer who was about to churn until someone picked up the phone and actually listened.
BCG's research makes this clear: AI will reshape more jobs than it replaces. Most roles will remain — but will change substantially. (Source: BCG, 2026)
The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report projects that 92 million jobs will be displaced by 2030 — but 170 million new ones will be created, a net gain of 78 million.
That doesn't mean you get to sit back and wait for the net gain to show up. It means you need to get ahead of the reshape.
Concretely, here's what I'd encourage every SaaS leader to think about now:
1. Map your tasks before you map your headcount. Angie's framework starts here: write a clear problem statement, identify the issues and drivers, and define your desired outcome. Then — obsessively, she says — map out your processes. Where is your team spending time on repeatable, low-judgment work? That's your automation roadmap. Stop guessing, start mapping.
2. Get your leaders onboard before you get your tools onboard. This is the piece most companies skip. They buy a platform, hand it to the team, and wonder why adoption is patchy.
I saw this firsthand recently. We have a client who rolled out an AI tool to their team — good tool, real potential. I ran an anonymous poll to see how it was actually landing. The responses? All over the place. Not enough time to learn how to use it effectively. Don't feel comfortable with AI. Didn't even know we had it. What is it?
Sound familiar? This is what happens when adoption is treated as an IT rollout instead of a leadership initiative. The tool is only as effective as the culture it lands in. If your leaders aren't using it, talking about it, and modeling curiosity around it — your team won't either.
3. Know what you're actually automating. There's a meaningful difference between automating a task and automating a relationship. Automating your meeting scheduling? Great, please do that immediately. Automating your QBR with a strategic account? That's a different conversation. Know which category you're in before you hand things off to a bot.
4. Invest in the humans who do what AI can't. The roles growing fastest right now are the ones that require judgment, creativity, relationship-building, and strategic thinking. AI and information processing are expected to affect 86% of businesses by 2030, with AI development, cybersecurity, and sustainability identified as the fastest-growing role categories. (Source: WEF Future of Jobs Report, 2025) The people who can operate alongside AI — who understand both the tool and the context — are going to be in serious demand.
Here's the part nobody's talking about (but we are)
Every time a tech company does an AI-driven reduction in force, a very predictable thing happens six months later: they quietly realize there are some things the AI cannot do. The strategic relationships. The cross-functional judgment calls. The messy, human, context-dependent work that makes the difference between retaining a customer and losing them.
And then they're stuck. They let the experienced people go. Rebuilding takes time they don't have.
At STARTUP SMART, I'll be honest — this trend is already sending really good talent our way. People with deep SaaS expertise across operations, GTM, finance, and product who are being displaced by companies over-rotating into automation. Seasoned operators who've done this before, who know the difference between what a tool can handle and what needs a human.
And here's what I'm especially proud of: our operators use AI in their day-to-day work. That's the combination that matters — human expertise paired with AI efficiency. Not one or the other.
That's exactly who you want when you're navigating a scaling moment, a post-merger integration, a new product launch, or just trying to figure out what your team should actually look like in an AI-first world.
The fractional model was already the smart play for early-stage SaaS. In an AI-reshaping-everything moment, it's even smarter. You get the expertise without the long-term commitment — and you get people who understand both the operational depth and the AI landscape you're operating in now.
The bottom line
AI is not going to make great operators obsolete. It's going to make average operators obsolete — the ones who keep doing things the way they've always done them, who treat AI as a gimmick or a threat instead of a tool, and who don't invest in helping their teams adapt.
The best thing you can do right now is what Angie recommended to close her session:
Make time to play with AI. Map your processes. Write a clear problem statement. Explore agent platforms. Run experiments. And give yourself some grace — this is genuinely new territory for everyone.
Then call in the humans who can help you make sense of it.
Not sure what you need — a hire, a fractional pro, or just a second opinion? That's exactly the call we help founders and business leaders make.
Special shoutout to Angie Carel (angiecarel.com) for an outstanding session at IDEA Week — go follow her if you're not already. She's one of the clearest thinkers on practical AI adoption I've come across.
