A phrase from a recent AI talk has been making the rounds: "burn tokens, not headcount." It sounds cold at first. The right way to hear it is one of the most useful framings a small-business owner can carry into the AI era.

Armando Perez-Carreno walks through how small teams are getting more leverage from AI than ever before, and where the trap lies. Hiring another coordinator or rep to handle volume can feel like the right move. But what if the workflow itself is the problem? People matter too much to waste their time acting like glue between systems. That's the work AI is genuinely good at, and the work humans should be free to stop doing.

This isn't a video about layoffs. It's about asking better questions before you add headcount: which parts of the work belong to a person, and which belong to a system? If your knowledge isn't captured cleanly inside the company, no AI tool will offload much.

Most businesses jump straight to chatbots because they look impressive. But if your underlying workflows are broken, a chatbot just moves the bottleneck somewhere else.

In this solo episode, Armando J. Perez-Carreno of PerezCarreno & Coindreau breaks down how to choose the right first AI project for your business, and why it's usually a workflow, not a chatbot.

If you want to move past the demos and start building AI that actually works, subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

Most companies are not failing at AI because the tools are bad. They are failing because nobody owns the messy middle between having access to AI and changing how work actually gets done. In this episode, Armando explains why every small and medium business needs an internal AI champion, what that role really looks like, and how to build a repeatable AI adoption muscle inside your company.