How to Automate Any Business With AI in 3 Steps (Beginner's Guide)

So over the past two and a half years, my agency, Morningside AI, has been on the front lines of implementing AI for some of the world's biggest brands. And I can tell you that the difference between the 5% of companies who are seeing a massive ROI on AI and the 95% who are failing right now is simple, and that's that they start with a process and not the technology. Most businesses get this backwards. They get all hyped about a new tool and they dive straight into the development and ultimately fail. And from this, companies are learning that the initial shine of AI is gone now. And this stuff takes real human skill to get right. And even OpenAI has kind of just admitted this openly by launching their own consulting team. So whether you're a business owner who wants to join this 5% of winners or an entrepreneur who wants to serve the 95% of companies who are failing and need help, then this video is for you because I'm about to open source the entire start to finish framework that we use at Morningside AI for automating any business with AI. And at the end, I'll give you a full guide so that you can go and apply this stuff yourself. So if you are new to the channel, my name is Liam Mley and for the past 2 and a half years, I've been helping businesses and individuals to use AI to get ahead. And I do this because our vision at Morningside is to ensure that the games of the AI revolution aren't just for the big guys. And that's why I share our learnings here on this channel to give businesses the tools to survive and win in this AI revolution.

So, here's the deal. This is a reality check for almost every single business out there right now. But what they ultimately want is growth, which requires order. Most companies are a complete mess. Their data is scattered. Their processes are a mix of how we've always done it and a dozen different apps or tools that don't talk to each other. And now according to studies, most of their employees are secretly using a bunch of AI tools to get parts of their work done without them telling the company. And that's creating huge risks of data leaks etc. So it's organized chaos at best. And most business owners are just trying to keep the wheels from falling off. And so now when you take this chaotic system and you try to just plug in the most powerful technology on the planet right now, what do you think happens? Right? It's going to fail and pretty miserably. And you don't actually have to take my word for it on that. The numbers are pretty brutal. MIT has published a study recently showing that 95% of AI initiatives and businesses fail to deliver a return on investment. Let me say that again. The vast majority of businesses that try to implement AI are getting zero value from it. This is in enterprise to be fair, so it's sort of bigger businesses, but it's still an interesting point. But that's not because this technology is useless. That's because these companies are trying to copy what everyone else is doing and they're failing miserably because of it. Instead of taking the time to do the real exploratory work to figure out where AI can fit their business best, they are just looking for the headlines and looking for YouTube videos and stealing from other people, rather than doing the ground work to find where AI best fits their organization. And often when they try to do it themselves, they are actually clueless to what it really takes to see AI adoption within teams of emotional and fearful humans. There are human barriers to adoption and actually seeing an ROI that many companies are just not aware of right now. So what the 5% who are actually seeing an ROI are doing is they're starting from square one and taking a comprehensive and holistic approach to AI opportunity identification and then development within the company in order to find what we call like layups or quick wins with AI that can really drive immediate ROI from them. And so the reason the majority of these companies are not seeing an ROI is because they are trying to go for what the neighbor said that they were doing and not seeing these golden nuggets laying right in front of them, which are the quick wins, the quick ROI projects that can implement AI quickly and allow them to see a return on their investment. And I can say with complete confidence from the client work we do at Morningside, there are always these quick wins lying around that companies are just not aware of and how AI can plug into those and really solve a bottleneck for them that's been troubling them for a while. Now, if you're a business owner watching this, these stats should be a massive wakeup call. It means that almost all of your competitors are trying to use AI and they're failing and they're wasting money, they're wasting time, they're getting nowhere. So, this gives you a huge advantage because if you can be one of the small percentage who gets this right by properly auditing your business and following the exact process that I'm about to lay out for you, you'll dominate your industry for years to come using these advantages. And if you're an aspiring entrepreneur, that same stat should sound to you like the biggest dinner bell you have ever heard because it means that there are millions of businesses out there who are hungry for the most powerful technology on the planet right now. And they have no idea how to use it or get an ROI from it. So this is an enormous and untapped market and your job is to figure out how to bring that power to them. And in this video, I'm going to show you the exact process to do that. Okay, so now you understand the opportunity. Now I'm going to give you the exact Morningside method playbook in order to capture it. So, this is a three-phase process that we use at Morningside to take any business from that initial state of chaos to order and then ultimately to growth. So, I'm literally open sourcing our entire method here for you guys to take and use in whatever capacity you want to. As a quick disclaimer though, we typically run this playbook for mid-market companies, businesses anywhere from 50 to 500 employees. So, if that sounds a bit above your pay grade, don't worry because the principles that I'm going to teach you are exactly the same when you're applying this whether it's a 10p person team or a massive enterprise. So, you can scale it up or down exactly as you need. It's all in there and the process is solid.

The first thing we do when we're thinking about automating a business with AI is that before even building a single tool, we get the leadership team on the same page. So, you cannot transform business if the people at the top don't understand the game that we're playing and understand the key terms and terminology that we're going to be going through, what the opportunity is. So our goal here in this phase is to align the entire leadership team to establish a clear strategic vision for AI within the company and also to communicate both the opportunity and the urgency to all the key decision makers to make sure that they know what's at stake here. And so to do this, we'll usually run a 2-hour AI leadership workshop alongside a second workshop for employees, which usually happens a bit later, but we'll charge for this on top of our fee for a base AI audit. And here's a crucial detail from our playbook is that we always do this before we present our final recommendations on where the best AI opportunities are. This is because it frankly allows us to indoctrinate them with our frameworks, we get them to see the world the way we see it and we establish what a best-in-class AI transformation looks like. And this way when we present our final road map later, they're already bought in to the logic. They understand the key terms and it's not a surprise. It's kind of a natural conclusion of the strategy that we've already agreed on in this early phase. One key message that helps our clients to see what the end goal for this transformation is what we call an AI first or chart where we will put up a traditional org chart and then we'll swap that out for what an AI first organization would look like. So they start to build this new vision of what the company could look like on top of what they currently understand. So I'll put that up on screen for you to see.

Once leadership team is educated and aligned and genuinely excited for the change that's coming for the company, we can then move on to the next stage which is identification. The goal here is to understand their business better than they do. So we are trying to become the world's leading expert on how their company actually works including like the warts and all the ugly parts. So this is a multi-stage process. It's quite a lot of work. But first we start off with interviews. We'll conduct deep dive interviews with everyone from department heads down to even the frontline staff who are in the trenches every day creating value for the company. We actually write personalized interview guides for basically each person adapting our questions as we learn more and more about the organization. So it kind of changes as we go. And the next step is what we call process mapping. So this is where we take all of that information that came out of the interviews. All of these data points that we got and then we use that to map out the core workflows of the company visually in a tool like Figma. And let me tell you that this step alone is incredibly valuable because most companies have SOPs, sure, but they're usually gathering dust in a Google Drive somewhere and they're completely updated. So for many clients, this is actually the first time they've seen a clear and objective map of how their business actually operates on the day-to-day. And then comes the part that requires the real expertise, which is the use case identification. So our consultants take that process map and then using both their knowledge and our internal AI solutions database which is over 300 proven AI systems they start to pinpoint the bottlenecks in those process maps and they find the areas clogged up with things like manual data entry report writing and repetitive tasks. And this is really where the amateurs are separated from the experts. It's like how much experience have you got? How well do you understand AI and what it can do for businesses? And how well can you layer that on top of the process map you see in front of you. So, it's all about knowing what AI solution fits perfectly into solve each problem and kind of making sure you're leaning into the strengths of the technology. A lot of the time we see these lack of ROI projects coming out because they are trying to use AI to do things that it's not really super good at right now. And it's always best to be looking at where is AI in production in companies right now actually moving the needle and can we lean into those rather than looking for the more experimental ones which is in most cases what people are trying to do. And then finally, we have the most important step which is the opportunity grading and the validation. So my consultants will have identified dozens of different opportunities, but business is all about prioritization of resources, right? Like there's always a million opportunities of things you can do, but some opportunities are inherently more valuable than others. And some are also more difficult to build in order to realize that value. So we can plot these opportunities on what we call the opportunity matrix. And then through careful process of elimination, we can start to trim down to the right mix of what we call quick wins to get a return on their investment as soon as possible once we get into development. also looking at, hey, what are the big swings for us here that will ultimately become a major advantage for us in the market versus their competitors, but often require some prerequisite steps or just generally much more investment and development in order to see through. So, you've got the quick wins and the big swings. And so, it's a case of trimming down until you get a nice mix of both. But another key part of the process here is that we're not just doing this in a lab on our own in isolation, then present the final result. We go back into the business and we run multiple validation interviews with both employees and the leadership. And this is so so important because when you go back to the employees, they validate that yes, we this is really a painful problem. Can you please solve this? But the leadership validates that solving this problem aligns with the company's strategic goals. And you absolutely have to have both. Um you have to have that employee buyin or the tools won't get used. And without the leadership buyin, you're not going to get the budget. And so the deliverable from all of this work is a comprehensive 50 to 100page final report. Yes, it's a beast, but it is the master plan. It is their AI strategy roadmap. And it lays out a strategic road map for their entire AI implementation, blending those quick wins that we had before with some of the big gamechanging swings for them to hit. In the free guide that I'm going to be sharing with you guys at the end, you'll be able to get some examples of these key slides that we put in our presentations that are needed to communicate these kind of key initiatives and the overall AR road map that they're working towards.

All right. So once you've delivered that 50 to 100 page report, you've turned the chaos of the company into order. The client is blown away by how well you understand the business and they've approved the road map. Now it's time to turn that order into what they really want, which is growth, which of course starts with actual development. So following that final report, we will check in with the clients. Sometimes they'll need a month or two to get their budget sorted out. Other times are like sweet, let's go. But here is the most important rule for this phase is that we always start with the quick wins. We are not going to go for the six-month multi-million dollar moonshot project first. That is a shorefire way to lose trust and momentum. So we always pick the project from the road map that is the perfect blend of that high impact and low difficulty cuz we want to get them that tangible ROI on our entire engagement including both the education, the consulting and now the development as soon as possible. And that's how you get into by working with someone who knows what they're doing. You get to that ROI where we're just as invested in making sure that this all makes sense for you getting you to be in that 5% who are really starting to see an ROI on just the first AI initiative that you actually deliver. And we see this time and time again when you actually run the numbers that a targeted and seemingly quite basic relative to all the stuff you hear about in the news. These relatively basic systems can provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in ROI and savings from staff time wasted on inefficient processes. And this is one of the key things that I really want you to all take away is that for most businesses, the biggest quick wins that can get you an ROI are in the most boring places. We're talking about like soul crushing manual data entry, endless document creation, or the constant let me just look that up for you kind of tasks. In these cases, we can build a relatively simple voice agent, a smart transcription feature, or an agent to query their internal documents and instantly save the team hundreds of hours a month. And it's these simple systems that deliver a massive impact and prove the value of what we're doing. And these kinds of quick wins can cost anywhere from 20 to $50,000 or more. But at this point, businesses are within arms length of getting their first ROI providing AI systems built and developed. But development is the hardest part and it's the most difficult to replicate this consulting side of things. You could kind of do it yourself, but at the end of the day, to get things built out and actually working in production, you need talented developers. Because having a team with enough skills and experience to be able to tackle new and custom AI problems every single time is quite rough. So, if you're an AI agency owner just starting out, your goal here is simple, to be able to find just one versatile AI developer with ideally some full stack experience as well. And the best place to find them is in communities like mine where people are already skilled up and passionate about the stuff and kind of get the kind of things that you'd likely need them to build. But when we are scoping out these projects for our clients, we give cost estimates and ranges that give enough breathing room to handle the unknowns that always pop up. And once the project's kicked off, the developers handle most of the client communication themselves. They're really good at that. And it's a lean and efficient process designed to deliver results without a ton of bureaucratic overhead, which is the worst. So, by this point, you know the business better than the owner. And a fruitful and long-lasting relationship can actually be formed. It's really awesome when you get it right. Instead of having to go through that phase over and over, you and the client just get to work with each other on getting down to business. Like you understand their business fully, you're helping them deliver, get a tangible ROI on their projects. And from there on, it's like as long as you're delivering and you're not hiking your prices up too much, then you have a long lasting relationship and partnership you can form. And at Morningside, we've literally been working with some of our clients for over a year now, coming up for two with one of them. And this is how we see the best results for businesses by following through on a road map that we laid out and staying in close contact with a team who has the air to the ground on the new things that are developing in the space and what could maybe be applied and cutting through the noise of all of this new stuff. What is actually relevant to me? What is realistically able to be plugged into my business and actually provide an ROI. So every time a new and more powerful model like GPT5 drops, it's a business opportunity for both us and our clients because we can go back to our clients and we can offer them upgrades to make their existing systems more powerful and often cheaper as well. So this is how you can massively increase the lifetime value of every client just by providing a ridiculous amount of value over an extended period of time because you know their business so well. So this is how you build a truly scalable agency. You just focus on landing one or two of these major transformation projects a quarter. You start to stack and layer them. You of course service and deliver well and you able to build a predictable and high margin business that's deeply embedded in your client success. So while we are here to automate businesses with AI, it's also about building an irreplaceable and long-term partnership that's mutually beneficial.

Okay, so that's the playbook. Now, how do you actually use it? This is going to be your action plan, and I'm going to break this down into two different parts. One, what it means for AI agency owners, and then secondly, what it means for uh your more traditional business owners. So, if you're an aspiring entrepreneur, an AI agency owner likely, then listen up because what I just showed you, becoming a full AI transformation partner or AITP like we are at Morningside, is the endgame. It's, let me be 100% clear, it took us years to get here, and you need to really build your way up to it. And here's the path. Step one is you're going to start as an AI automation agency. You're going to use no code and low code tools to deliver your first projects. You're going to get your hands dirty. You're going to learn how to deliver real value for businesses with the current tools and get comfortable working with businesses and working with your clients. Step two, you need to evolve into an AI agency and you're going to take those profits from your first few projects and you're going to be able to hire a full stack AI developer. Now, with these kinds of skills on the team, you can start to offer more custom and complex solutions. It's not just your basic automation. You can now build full platforms out of them and much more comprehensive systems. And then step three, after you've been in the trenches for a while, like we were for two years, then you can move into the AI transformation partner model and start to sell this full and strategic playbook of AI transformation for a business from start to finish. So to help you get there, the resource that I've got in the description is going to give you everything you need to run your first AI audit, which is going to break down our questionnaires, the key slides that we use on our uh slideshows, how to calculate ROI, etc. And finally, if you are a business owner, then you have two clear options, which is option one, doing it yourself. I've made this video for you to be able to do this. Take the entire playbook that I've broken down here. Take the resource that I've got in description as well. It's going to break down how to do this on a much more granular and tactical level. So, you're going to take this entire playbook. You're going to bring it to your team. You're going to start the conversation and you're going to run an audit on one department at a time and just find one pilot project that you can use to build momentum. You can find developers and communities like mine and make a post and say, "Hey, I'm XYZ business. I'm looking for this kind of thing. We've identified this opportunity. Can someone help us a develop it? " And that's the best chance of finding really good talent to help you do these projects with. So long story short is that you can lead this transformation internally, but it's not going to be easy. I'm not going to sugar coat it. It's not going to be super easy. You're going to have to bump into a lot of things, make a lot of mistakes, but you can ultimately get there. Then option number two, of course, is to work with a team who can help you do this. So, for example, if you wanted to work with my team at Warningsai, we can run this playbook for you, but you have to apply to work with us. And at this point, we're quite selective with who we partner with because we're really looking for those long-term relationships of people that we really want to work with for a long time and where we can drive incredible case studies in an industry as well. But if you have a cool business and you're doing good things and you're a good person, then I'd love to have a chat and see if we can help you make your AI transition. So the opportunity at this point is pretty clear. We've got this awesome technology. People are really struggling to get value with it. But that's like I said because they're taking this back to front run the wrong way and they're not doing the ground work. They're not going through the phases of education, of identification, then ultimately development. So this video is about trying to give you the keys to do this yourself. So, I've added our complete AI audit resource uh down below based on our internal templates and what we do at Morningside AI. In there, you've got questionnaire templates, you've got examples of key slides, you've got how we calculate ROI and things like that. So, you can find that in the first link in the description. Up here, I have a video talking about how chat GBT can fundamentally change the AI automation landscape. It's very interesting stuff myself. Aside from that, it's all for the video. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next