Here’s a tension I see in a lot of businesses right now - Execs want AI to do more of the work.

But the people who actually understand the processes well enough to automate them are often the same people worried that doing it well might automate themselves out of a job.

And honestly, I understand both sides.

In this episode of Drive by AI, I unpack how I’m thinking about this as a founder and through the conversations I’m having internally with our own team at Vokke.

I cover:

• Why dragging your feet on AI adoption is probably the riskiest response
• The shift from “process worker” to “problem solver”
• How the people who lean in now will likely become more valuable, not less
• Which roles I think are naturally more protected
• What humans still consistently outperform AI at
• Why trust, judgment, communication and customer proximity matter more than ever

I also talk through the reality that AI is absolutely going to change the shape of work, but that doesn’t automatically mean humans become irrelevant.

The people closest to customers, closest to revenue, and closest to real-world decision making still matter enormously.

This one’s less about tools and more about mindset.

If your role, career, or industry feels uncertain right now, this episode might help frame the conversation differently.

This is the first time I've sat down with someone for Drive by AI, and it's a good one. I'm in the studio with Ange Kallinikos, founder of AussieTel Technologies, who's been deep in conversational AI for the past few years.

We talk about the customer experience side of AI that doesn't get enough airtime, why some people love AI answering the phone and others reject it on instinct.

I share a story about a cafe that nailed the experience so well I didn't realise I was talking to a bot until they told me. And we get into what business owners are getting wrong when they think about AI as a replacement for staff instead of a way to free them up.

We also dig into the identity crisis hitting software developers, the difference between process workers and problem solvers, and why every "10x productivity" claim on LinkedIn misses how a business actually works. Speed up one step and the bottleneck just moves somewhere else.

This is for founders and operators trying to cut through the AI hype and figure out what's real. Thanks for tuning in.

Recorded on the way to work, Episode 2.

Everyone's chasing AI agents and autonomous workflows right now.

OpenClaude, agentic this, agentic that. Cool to play with, not ready for serious businesses.

In this episode, I break down a much more practical framework for AI adoption in your business. Three clear levels, in the right order, so you stop jumping between random tools and actually build something that lifts productivity across the whole team.

I cover why most teams skip the basics and pay for it later, the real difference between free and paid AI tools, how local file integration with tools like Claude Code and Claude Cowork changes the way you work, and when agentic workflows genuinely make sense. I also share a client example where we automated thousands of purchase orders for 5-10x cost savings versus doing it manually.

Built for founders, operators, and exec teams running real businesses, not startup demos.

This is Drive by AI with Jon Wellman.