Starting in 2024, we decided to do something crazy: rebuild existing processes completely from the ground up to become AI-native.
We bet the company on this initiative because we’re also believers that there will be two types of companies in the future, those who are great at AI, and those who used to be in business.
The reason for this is simple: Digital Labor is better equipped to perform certain types of tasks than human labor is. Consider a parallel with the industrial revolution. Machinery was created to produce physical products much better, quicker, and more cost effectively. People’s time was freed up to solve new problems and a whole new era of innovation began. The same thing is happening right now with AI.
And in the future, not leveraging AI effectively will be like trying to compete with Toyota by building cars by hand.
The Delegation Paradigm
My business coach, Scott, was mentored by Stephen Covey of “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” fame. One of the most important concepts he learned from Covey is that “delegation is the only infinitely scalable thing ever created.”
Think about it. Every company that has more than a handful of people, regardless of industry, operates on delegation.
The CEO delegates to the C-suite. The C-suite delegates programs. Directors turn programs into plans. Managers assign work. Frontline teams execute. Day-to-day operations—the tickets, approvals, status updates, and ultimately work product—are all handoffs in one long chain.
Enter Digital Labor.
Now we have a totally new type of digital workforce that can be delegated to, and this workforce, just like humans, has several distinct advantages and disadvantages that are scenario dependent. These strengths and weaknesses vary depending on the task assigned and how the “manager”—the human in the loop—communicates the work and reviews it.
And that’s what I mean when I say that we relaunched Green Irony to be the first AI-native Salesforce and MuleSoft SI. It’s not a buzzword. We treat AI as Digital Labor that we delegate to as part of our core processes and we’ve seen significant increases in speed, cost, and quality of every output in the organization.
Just few examples:
- Increased knowledge of customer problems after one call, leading to faster deals
- More clear, well-defined technical scopes and budgets, leading to delivering outcomes faster
- Improved code quality in less build time, leading to more economical technology solutions
- Well-defined QA plans that can be executed more quickly, leading to higher quality deliverables
- Rapid turnaround root cause analysis for production issues, leading to less downtime for customers
With our relaunch, everyone at Green Irony became a Director of their own team of digital labor, and as a result, the entire organization and the products we’ve delivered for over 9 years for our customers got better, faster, and more cost effective.
“Go Do AI” Doesn’t Move The Needle
Many colleagues have asked me about the recent research on lack of ROI for AI in business, like the MIT study that found that 95% of AI pilots fail to deliver ROI.
I’d hypothesize that these companies did not take a top-down approach to how delegation works in the processes that produce their most critical organizational results. Many prospects I talk to are focused on narrow use cases that exist in processes that have minimal impact on key business metrics. While solving these problems might achieve some level of pain relief at the individual contributor or even Director level, the P&L doesn’t move.
Transformation is the result of a top-down approach to how work product is created through delegation. A good way to start this process is by asking the following question: “If Digital Labor had existed when this process was created, would we still do it this way?”
The answer is almost always “no”.
Unlocking New Opportunities for Green Irony
Prior to Generative AI becoming available to the masses, delegation could only happen through human labor.
In order to be competitive, competitors in our industry looked to hybrid delivery models leveraging offshore or nearshore resources. They did this to keep their costs down by delegating lower complexity work to cheaper resources. Since founding, we chose to remain a fully US-based staff for myriad reasons that are beyond the scope of this blog, so this meant that our services were limited to customers with larger budgets who wanted and needed the help of premium technologists to deliver outcomes that couldn’t fail.
With Digital Labor, we asked ourselves this question: can the types of cost models of hybrid offshore technology services be achieved without the negative consequences of offshoring?
Our conclusion is that Digital Labor unlocks a new alternative to hybrid delivery models for keeping costs down without sacrificing quality, speed, and customer success.
What This Means For Our Partners
Prior to our reinvention as an AI-native Salesforce and MuleSoft consulting agency, Green Irony partnered mostly with very large, name-brand organizations.
We delivered transformational outcomes for major airlines, massive telecom companies, worldwide beer companies, 30,000+ student universities, multi-billion dollar coastal P&C insurance companies, professional sports teams, and many other others. Our team is the best in the business at applying Salesforce technologies to tackle complex business problems, and we’ve partnered with large, recognizable organizations since 2016 to solve theirs.
Digital Labor now enables us to do the same thing for smaller customers.
Because of becoming AI-native, Green Irony can now serve markets where the price of labor made our services unattainable. We’re able to help small and medium businesses achieve the same types of transformational outcomes that we’ve delivered to household names.
As we embark on a new era as a company, it’s incredibly exciting to me that we’re leading the charge and helping smaller organizations level the playing field with larger competitors.
And it’s all enabled by a brand new delegation model: Digital Labor.
Want to learn more about how to incorporate Digital Labor Delegation into your processes? Contact us.