Stop Asking What AI Can Do. Ask What Your Staff Hates to Do.

<p>$12,000 to build. $350,000 a year saved. <em>One workflow. </em>For one hundred episodes it has been Kim and Hal at thecoffee table. On episode one hundred one, Kim brings in guest: Brandon Hurter, founder and CEO of Pivot180 AI, a consultant who deploys AI inside small and mid-sized businesses for a living. Not the theory of AI for small business. The deployment of it, the part where it has to work on aTuesday for a real company with a number attached.</p><p>Brandon spent thirty years in B2B technology, most recently as chief marketing officer of an ed tech startup, where he watched AI move from a slide deck to something deployed at real scale. He left that seat in January 2026 because of a pattern he kept meeting in ordinary conversations:business owners reading every article about AI, feeling the train leaving, and having no bandwidth to figure out where to start. His answer is not a transformation. It is crawl, walk, run. One workflow at a time.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>What You&#39;ll Learn</strong></p><ul><li>Why the useful gap in small business AI is not accessto tools but knowing what to point them at, and why that gap is where all the value sits.</li><li>The one question that surfaces process friction instantly, when “where is your process friction?” makes an owner’s eyes glaze over.</li><li>The full anatomy of a real deployment: the Raleigh lawfirm, Filevine, the two paralegal workflows, the confidence-score design that keeps the attorney in charge, and the $12,000-in, $350,000-a-year-out math.</li><li>The five discovery questions to answer on a legal pad intwenty minutes, before you buy anything.</li><li>The three paths to your first workflow: the AI you already own inside Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, vertical tools built for your industry, and custom builds.</li><li>What AI sprawl looks like, why bolted-on tools create more work than they remove, and how to avoid buying the sexy thing your competitor mentioned at a conference.</li><li>Crawl, walk, run: how to sequence AI adoption so eachworkflow pays for the next one.</li></ul><p><br></p><p><strong>Ready to Take Action</strong></p><p>Brandon Hurter and Pivot180: <a href="https://www.pivot180.ai" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://www.pivot180.ai</a></p><p>Free five-minute AI Readiness Assessment:<a href="https://www.pivot180.ai/assessment" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://www.pivot180.ai/assessment</a></p><p>Watch what an AI-native agency looks like from the inside:<a href="https://AskLewisHoward.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://AskLewisHoward.com</a></p><p>Small Business Big AI: <a href="https://smallbusinessbigai.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://smallbusinessbigai.com/</a></p><p>Kim Lewis Howard on LinkedIn:<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-lewis-howard/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-lewis-howard/</a></p><p>---<strong>MUSIC &amp; SOUND CREDITS</strong></p><p>Music: &quot;I Am with You&quot; by Dream Cave; Epidemic Sound via iStock.com</p><p>Sound Effects: https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/</p>