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Stop treating AI like a coupon, a way to reduce headcount, save money, free up resources, and start treating it like a 10x multiplier.
Instead of using AI to shave a few line items off the budget, allow your partners to make more money or show “shareholder value,” you could use it to rewrite what your entire company is capable of.
This is not another “AI will change everything” think piece. It is a field guide for leaders who are tired of drowning in meetings, watching average teams do average work, while knowing deep down that the real constraint is not money, or talent, or technology.
It just takes some coordination.
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Five people, working with AI as a true teammate, can now do what used to take fifty, but only if you are willing to blow up the way you build teams, assign missions, and measure impact.
If you still think the smart play is to cut headcount and “get lean,” you are already playing the wrong game.
If you want to see what happens when you use AI to 10x the mission instead of shrinking the team, keep reading.
Let’s dance.
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Research
AI can look like a clever way to trim overhead. Automate a few tasks, consolidate a few roles, maybe yourself on the back for being efficient.
Now let’s fast forward a year. What have you changed? Are your sales the same? Strategy? Pointless meetings?
Harvard Business School in 2025 published The Cybernetic Teammate: A Field Experiment on Generative AI Reshaping Teamwork and Expertise. The working session reviewed 776 professionals across Procter & Gamble, focused on those who rely on AI, those who don’t, and how AI can enhance performance and hinder it.
I highly recommend checking out the research report.
If you want the TLDR version, here is an excerpt below on the results:
“Perhaps our most striking finding concerns AI’s role in transforming professional expertise boundaries. Traditional organizational theory has long emphasized the importance of specialized knowledge and clear functional boundaries. Our results suggest AI fundamentally disrupts this paradigm. Without AI, we observed clear professional silos – Commercial specialists proposed predominantly commercial solutions while R&D professionals favored technical approaches. When teams worked without AI, they produced more balanced solutions through cross-functional
collaboration. Remarkably, individuals using AI achieved similar levels of solution balance on their own, effectively replicating the knowledge integration typically achieved through team collaboration. This suggests AI serves not just as an information provider but as an effective boundary-spanning mechanism, helping professionals reason across traditional domain boundaries and approach problems more holistically.”The Cybernetic Teammate: A Field Experiment on Generative AI Reshaping Teamwork and Expertise, Pg. 21. Harvard Business School, 21 March 2025
Want to check out more of my articles? Check them out here:
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Dunbar’s Number
Most companies think they have a meeting problem. Too many calendars. Too many calls. Too many updates.
You do not have a meeting problem. You have a team size problem.
The math is simple. A team of 5 has 10 potential communication lines. A team of 20 has 190. You do not need an MBA to see why your days get swallowed by status checks and alignment calls.
The human brain is built to go deep with roughly five people. Not 50. Not 500. Five.
Dunbar’s number breaks down the depth of relationships and what the brain can remember.
But you have to look at how AI fits into your business.
If you keep the old structure in a new reality, you do not just leave money on the table. You lock your company into a permanent state of drag. AI keeps pulling you forward. Your structure keeps pulling you back.
Your edge will not come from who has access to AI. Everyone will. Your edge will come from who dares to rebuild the way work happens around it.
Leverage AI to Grow, Not Reduce
If you want growth from AI, you cannot just sprinkle it on top of your existing org chart or throw it randomly into your proposal or sales team and hope for the best.
And then you can’t come back next Quarter and ask your team why you aren’t seeing better results.
You need to redesign the way work gets done.
Start with this idea, the Rule of Five.
Instead of big, bloated teams, build a small, elite Tiger Team (start with just one). Five exceptional people, each one fully equipped with AI, pointed at outcomes that actually matter.
Here is how to start.
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Pick one high-stakes area
Not a side quest. Not a pilot that no one will read. Choose a problem that truly affects revenue, retention, or risk. Something your leadership team actually cares about. -
Form a five-person Tiger Team
These are not volunteers. These are your best operators and thinkers, pulled together for their judgment, not their availability. If you would not send them to fix your biggest client issue, they do not belong here. -
Give them full AI capability
Not partial access. Not one shared license. Every person on the team should have direct access to tools that can research, draft, analyze, and simulate at scale. The tech is their exoskeleton. -
Narrow their mission
Set one clear objective. Increase win rate in a specific segment. Cut cycle time on a core process. Open up a new region. Make it specific, measurable, and time-bound. -
Remove friction
Limit recurring meetings. Cut status updates. Give them a short feedback loop with leadership and then let them work. Their output should be judged on results, not attendance.
The focus is simple: correctness.
In a world where AI makes volume cheap, what becomes scarce is the ability to decide what is worth doing at all. Anyone can blast out content. Anyone can generate options. Very few can pick the right path, at the right time, in the right order.
Your Tiger Team exists to do exactly that.
When you run this play, two things happen.
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You see how much value a small, aligned, AI-powered unit can create compared to a large, slow committee.
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You realize you do not need fewer people. You need more people working this way.
Small Team Wins
Look at how most companies are talking about AI. They focus on looking at being lean.
They say, if AI gives us 5 to 10 times the productivity, maybe we can finally get that lean org we always wanted. A 500-person company starts doing the math on what it would feel like to operate with 50.
That is the wrong question.
If AI gives you the capacity of 3,000 people, why is the first move to get smaller?
The right question is, what mission could we pull off now that was impossible before?
Companies that get this are already playing a different game.
I can now move more quickly, accomplish more in a shorter amount of time, and spend less. A small firm can now be on a similar playing field as other companies.
They are using AI as a teammate, not just a tool.
Research from large enterprises is already showing what happens when individuals work with AI instead of more humans. The same HBS study from above found that a person using AI could match the output of a two-person team without it. That is not a small boost. That is doubling the headcount without changing the payroll.
But the real insight was deeper.
AI did not just boost output. It changed the way people thought. Technical people started showing more commercial awareness. Commercial people started proposing more technical solutions. The AI acted like a bridge between silos. It helped individuals generate more balanced, holistic ideas, regardless of their background.
On top of that, workers reported more enthusiasm and less anxiety. The machine was not just a calculator. It was a stabilizer. It made hard work feel more manageable.
Now imagine that effect at the level of your whole company.
You stop organizing around who sits where and start organizing around who can run with a cybernetic teammate at their side.
You stop thinking, our regional firm with 200 people can only handle three states, and start thinking, with AI-powered Tiger Teams, that same staff can credibly support 30 states.
You move from defense to offense.
Your competitors will obsess over how many roles they can cut. You obsess over how many new markets, products, or missions you can finally chase.
The companies that win will not be the ones that shaved the most cost. They will be the ones who expanded the most ambition, and had the structure to match.
Testing 1,2,3
Run a simple test. Call it whatever you want it to be.
Here is how it works.
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Pick one ignored problem
Choose something real that has been stuck for months. A broken onboarding process. A slow proposal cycle. A messy handoff between sales and delivery. A disconnect between bills being filed and their potential impacts on your business. It has to matter. It also has to be neglected. -
Assign it to one person for one week
Not a task force. Not a cross-functional working group. One capable operator. Give them full AI access and clear permission to redesign, not just document. -
Remove the noise
No standing meetings. No steering committee. No constant check-ins. Give them a single, sharp outcome and get out of the way. -
Evaluate one thing at the end, taste
Did they come back with a solution that shows judgment? Did they connect dots across functions? Did they use AI to explore options, then narrow in on something coherent and bold, instead of just dumping more information back on your lap
If the answer is yes, you just found a future Tiger Team leader.
From there, your next move is obvious.
Take that person, give them four more people operating at the same level, equip all of them with serious AI tooling, and point them at a mission worthy of the firepower.
You do not need more meetings. You need more of that.
This is an easier way to utilize AI to grow its capability within your business. Capitalize on it.
AI can be looked at through different lens.
Throughout one lens, you treat AI as a cost-saving feature. You cut a little overhead. You feel clever. You show a margin bump for a quarter or two. Then you stall.
Your structure stays the same. Your meetings stay the same. Your product looks the same. Your customers barely feel a difference.
Through another lens, you treat AI as a force multiplier.
You accept that your org chart was built for a world that no longer exists. You accept that the coordination tax is real. You accept that most of your current constraints were designed for a time when every extra body barely moved the needle.
Then you do something about it.
You build Tiger Teams instead of committees. You keep your people, but you change how they are assembled. You design work around small groups that think clearly and move fast, backed by a cybernetic teammate that makes them far more capable than before.
You stop asking, how many people can we save, and start asking, how much more can we do with the people we already have.
And you get specific.
You give one team a mission that would have felt impossible two years ago. You watch them prove that it is not. You scale what works. You make that the new default.
In ten years, no one will care which companies had the flashiest AI announcement. They will care which companies used AI to actually change what they are capable of.
You get to pick which side of that line you are on.
See you next week.
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Unlocking Hidden Potential – Reconnecting with Past Clients for Explosive Growth – Check out my free eBook on how you can find hidden gems in your past clients and help you crush your sales goals.
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AI for Business Development – Download our free eBook on how you can effectively leverage AI prompts to your advantage. From properly setting up your preferred AI tool, to how to shape your prompts, save time, and get the outputs you are looking for.
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