What About Bob?

I’ve worked with a lot of industry experts over the years.

People who were incredibly impressive in their knowledge, experience, expertise and, most importantly, the value they brought to customers.

There’s one person who sticks out to me. Bob.

Bob has talked about retiring for years. Recently, he told me he’s getting close.

And it got me thinking about one of my favorite questions to ask business leaders:

“What keeps you awake at night?”

I’ve gotten all kinds of answers over the years. Cash flow. Employees. Growth. Customers. Competition. The next big decision.

For me, one answer has always come back to the thought of losing the expertise of people like Bob:

What happens when we lose the people who know how everything really works?

That level of knowledge is a real, and I believe, tangible asset to a business.

Bob is an incredibly detailed process thinker. He knows the business, the products, the customers and all the little things that don’t necessarily show up in a job description or an SOP.

And his number one priority has always been constant:  Take care of the customer.

That’s a lot of institutional knowledge walking out the door when Bob eventually retires.

But this is where I think AI gets interesting.  Not because AI replaces Bob.

It doesn’t and really can’t in terms of his relationships with customers and the team.

But what if we could use AI to learn from Bob?

What if we could capture the way he thinks through a problem, how he makes decisions, how he handles exceptions, how he takes care of customers and how he navigates all the details and situations that only 30 years of experience can teach you?

That could give us two pretty significant advantages.

First, we have an opportunity to preserve some of Bob’s best practices.

Not just documents. Not just procedures. Not SOP’s that have to be read, trained, processed, and put into effective practice.

The thinking behind them.

Second, we may be able to dramatically accelerate the learning curve for the next generation. In real time!

Imagine a new employee being able to ask:

“How would Bob handle this?”

And having an AI tool help them work through the answer based on the knowledge and best practices Bob helped build over his career.

That doesn’t replace Bob. It extends Bob.

And maybe that’s one of the more practical applications of AI that we should be talking about.

Every business has a Bob.

Maybe it’s someone who has been there 30 years, or the person everyone calls when something goes sideways.

Maybe it’s the person who seems to know the answer before you’ve finished asking the question. He always did that with me.

When that person retires, you don’t just lose a great employee. You lose an asset.

I think the question we should be asking is this:

What are we doing today to capture the value of what they know before they walk out the door?

Maybe AI can help us sleep a little better at night.

And Bob can finally start thinking about retirement.

He’s only been talking about it for 5 years.