Last week I watched a $150,000 project get done in three hours.
A client needed a full market segmentation analysis, for a U.S. state that’s bigger than the entire country of Canada. They were about to pay an outside firm six figures to do it.
Here’s what we did instead.
I had Perplexity’s Model Council build me a plan of prompts. It handed back 14. Obnoxious. I ran ten of them anyway, before I finally admitted the whole thing was garbage.
So I stopped, fed the mess back in, and asked for the minimum viable version instead. It cut those 14 prompts down to 6, run in two chains of three.
First chain worked. Second chain spit out 98,388 customers, sorted into 23 families, fully laid out and ready to hand over.
Three hours. Not three weeks. Not six figures.
Now, there’s a distinction here that matters the most.
I didn’t point this at something that just saved me time. I pointed it at something that was already worth money.
The second an outside firm quoted it at six figures, the value of that deliverable was already proven. AI didn’t create the value. It just collapsed the time and cost it took to capture it.
This is about margin.
That’s a project that used to eat up a team, a timeline, and a six-figure invoice. Done by one person in an afternoon.
Compare that to what most people are doing with AI right now: using it to clean up meeting notes a little faster, or draft an internal email in half the time.
Great. That’s ten minutes back.
But it doesn’t touch your revenue line, because the task itself was never worth much to begin with.
That’s the filter that matters.
Before you ask “can AI do this faster,” ask “is this even a task someone would pay for.”
Saving time on work nobody was going to pay for isn’t leverage. Saving time on a six-figure deliverable is a completely different business.
I walked our State of AI community through this live, in our first session together this afternoon.
(If you’re curious to join, comment below and I’ll send you the info)
If you’re pointing AI at your inbox instead of your margin, you’re using a very expensive tool like a very cheap one.
