Give AI a job. Give your team time.

One of the most useful questions last night, during our Campbell Clubhouse webinar on AI, was about something untechnical.

How does the team keep up?

We had already explored plenty of possibilities. Organising practice documents. Analysing business performance. Improving communications. Creating protocols for those irritating problems that have been hanging around for months.

Around the virtual room, experience varied considerably. Some were already building structured systems. Others were using AI occasionally to tidy up their wording. There was also understandable scepticism about confidentiality, accuracy and handing over control.

A useful conversation, precisely because everybody wasn’t nodding enthusiastically.

My starting point is to give AI a proper job.

Look across your finances, marketing, treatment conversion, operations and people management. Where is somebody spending hours collecting information, organising it or preparing a first draft?

Start there.

The preparation can be supported by AI. The interpretation, judgement and responsibility remain with us. A confident answer still needs checking, and confidential information needs proper protection.

During the webinar, I described an exercise we have been using on our current workshop tour.

Choose a problem that is getting on your nerves.

Perhaps appointments regularly run late. Perhaps short notice cancellations leave expensive gaps. Perhaps your recall process depends on somebody remembering to do something when they finally get a spare moment.

Sit down and talk it through. What is happening? Why does it matter? What have you tried? What keeps getting in the way? What would a satisfactory result look like?

Capture that conversation, remove confidential details, and use it to brief your AI. Ask it to question you before proposing a solution.

Then request two things: a practical protocol and a realistic plan for introducing it over the next 90 days.

That second request matters enormously.

I shared the story of a delegate at our Belfast workshop who created seven protocols over lunchtime. Seven things that needed fixing, with seven proposed solutions.

It sounds wonderful.

We then had to discuss what would happen when she arrived back at the practice on Monday morning.

Her enthusiasm could easily become everybody else’s overload.

The speed at which you can produce a document bears very little relationship to the speed at which a busy team can change its habits.

Choose one meaningful improvement. Agree who owns it. Make time for training. Decide how you will check that it is working. Give people a reasonable chance to succeed.

There was another concern during the discussion: will every practice end up sounding exactly the same?

That is where leadership and personality matter. Keep your own voice. Challenge the generic wording. Make the system fit the people and the practice.

For me, the prize is breathing space.

Less time wrestling with administration should mean more time noticing an anxious patient, explaining something properly or supporting a colleague.

Service is what we do. Hospitality is how we make people feel while we are doing it.

Give AI some of the preparation, then decide how you and your team will use the time you get back.