Many owner-led businesses are about to focus on a feature that won’t solve their real problem.
Last week, Microsoft released Work IQ. It’s a tool that connects Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, your CRM and other business apps. If you have a 200-person business with an IT team, Work IQ can be helpful right away.
For a 10-person service business without IT support, where the founder still runs daily operations, Work IQ is like having a Ferrari with no driver.
The work nobody sees in the demo
As always the devil is in the detail. It’s the ‘small stuff’ that gets overlooked.
You need to set up the connectors. Agree the standard a job has to hit before it goes out the door. Decide which outputs can go to a client without someone checking them first. You’ll also need to spot when the AI has picked up a bad habit and correct it before it spreads.
Most of this work only becomes clear once you start mapping it out. That’s also the work that earns the hours back. Not the engine. The configuration around it.
Here’s how I’d tackle it
Four steps, in order:
1. Decide which tasks need a human touch. Sales calls. Hiring. Pricing. Anything that relies on judgment or relationships. These stay with a person, regardless of how good the tool gets.
2. Write down the ‘we always do it this way’ knowledge that lives in your head. The bits that break when you go on holiday. The reason you say no to certain types of work. The exception you make for one big client. If it’s in your head, the AI can’t use it.
3. Look for the tasks where a tool like Work IQ can actually help. This is where automation earns its keep. High frequency, low judgment, low risk if it goes wrong once. Weekly reporting. Meeting follow-ups. Drafts that a human signs off. Done well, this is the part that returns 5 to 10 hours a week.
4. Join up the apps that don’t naturally talk. Make sure nothing goes out that shouldn’t. Cover the systems Microsoft will never touch — your industry-specific tools, the back-office processes nobody’s mapped, the spreadsheet a director secretly runs the business on. That’s the Business Butler.
Microsoft validated the category. The work is still yours.
By releasing Work IQ, Microsoft validated the Business Butler category. They also made it more obvious that the real value comes from the mapping before you start using these tools.
Buy Work IQ. Turn on the bits that fit. Then ask yourself who’s going to do the mapping, the connectors, the standards and the watching. If the honest answer is ‘me, in the evenings’, the tool isn’t going to give you the hours back. The configuration work is.