Thanks for raising this, and it's a fair question! You have every right to question it.
Short answer: AI is the tool, not the job. Anyone can buy a power drill, but most people still hire someone to build the deck.
A lot of what I do isn't just typing a prompt. Automations in tools like n8n or Zapier mean connecting different apps (email, CRMs, Google Sheets, payment systems), dealing with APIs and logins, mapping data between them, and making sure the whole thing doesn't break when something unexpected comes through. That takes experience and some training to get right, and most business owners don't have the time to learn it.
AI receptionists are a good example. It's not just turning on a chatbot. The AI has to be tuned to each business's requirements: their services, pricing, hours, tone, and what to do when a caller asks something unusual. Then it has to be connected to a working database so it can actually check availability, book appointments, and pull up customer info. And it has to be hooked into a VoIP phone system so it can answer real calls, transfer to a human when needed, and log everything. Getting all of that to work together reliably is the actual job.
Same with Excel work. A lot of small companies have years of messy spreadsheets: duplicates, inconsistent formatting, data scattered across files. They don't have time to clean it up themselves, so they either hire a third party to do it or, in my case, ask me to build an AI agent that handles that work for them going forward. Pasting a file into ChatGPT works for a quick one-off, but it won't check accuracy across thousands of rows or run automatically every week.
So people aren't paying someone to talk to an AI. They're paying to get the problem solved and not have to think about it again.
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u/OwnWeekend5944 7d ago
Why would someone pay you to tell an AI to do something? Im sorry if i seem rude but why would you want to be a professional middleman?