I carry a few credit cards. You probably do too.
The fees are small enough that I stopped paying attention to them. The benefits changed, I didn’t notice. I was accumulating points in the wrong categories, paying for coverage I wasn’t using, and earning cash back on a card I should have stopped using two years ago.
So I tried something. I framed the problem, handed the lift to AI, and had it audit my full credit card spend against what I was actually eligible to earn.
Found out I’m leaving about $12,000 a year on the table.
I didn’t need a financial advisor. I needed to actually sit down and give AI all the right information, ask it the right question, and then be honest about what came back.
That’s a direct example of 10-80-10 at work.
You do 10% of the work framing the problem, AI does 80% of the lifting, you do the last 10% verifying, editing, and actually acting on it.
The verify part is where most people fall short. Not because they don’t trust the output. Because humans get as much internal validation from saying they’re going to do something as from actually doing it.
And AI will get you 90% done on almost anything, which makes it very easy to feel like you’ve solved the problem when you’ve really just described it well.
The $12,000 wasn’t going to show up in my account until I cancelled the cards, changed the spending, and did the annoying admin. I’ve done maybe half of it. The audit was the easy part.
But this is the thing. Most of the value your business is leaving on the table isn’t hiding in complicated places. It’s in the recurring costs you haven’t looked at, the workflows you’ve done the same way for three years, the processes where someone is manually doing something that could run in the background.
Frame the problem. Let AI do the lift. Then actually do the verification.
Don’t be me still halfway through changing my credit cards.
