The AI Conversation Every Business Leader Needs to Have

Some conversations start with a question and end with a shift in perspective. My call with Jorge Rodriguez was one of those.

Jorge is the CEO and founder of YuCanDoIt, a firm that works with entrepreneurs and professionals across coaching, personal development, and investment analysis. He is sharp, direct, and deeply focused on results — exactly the kind of leader who has no patience for tools that don't deliver real value. So when he asked me to walk him through what AI actually does today, I knew I had to be concrete.

What followed was one of the most energizing conversations I've had in months. Not because AI is new — both of us have been watching it evolve for years — but because the gap between what most people think AI can do and what it actually does today has never been wider.

The question that reframes everything

Jorge opened with the right question: 'Where does AI actually save time for someone running a business like mine?' Not 'what is AI?' — he's past that. The question was specific: where does it create leverage for a leader managing clients, analyzing investment opportunities, and building a team?

My answer: almost everywhere you currently spend time on information. Reading, writing, summarizing, analyzing, drafting, researching — these are the tasks that consume hours in every business, and they are exactly where AI creates the most immediate return.

What AI means for coaching and investment analysis

For a firm like YuCanDoIt, the applications are unusually rich. Coaching is fundamentally about understanding people — their patterns, their blind spots, their goals — and helping them move. Investment analysis is about processing information faster and more accurately than the next person. AI accelerates both.

For coaching: preparation and pattern recognition

Jorge mentioned something that resonated: the preparation before a client session often takes as long as the session itself. Reading notes, reviewing previous conversations, identifying what has and hasn't shifted. AI compresses that dramatically. You can feed a session history into a model, ask what patterns are emerging, and get a structured summary in minutes. The coach still brings the judgment and the relationship — AI just removes the overhead.

For investment analysis: research at a different speed

The same compression applies to market research. Reading earnings reports, synthesizing sector trends, identifying comparable companies — tasks that used to require hours now take a fraction of the time. The analysis is still yours. The model doesn't replace the investment thesis. It just eliminates the time you used to spend gathering the inputs.

The tools we talked through

• Claude for complex reasoning, long document analysis, and drafting — it handles nuance better than most tools when the input is detailed and the output needs to be precise.
• Replit for building internal tools without a development team — Jorge was surprised that you can describe a tool in plain language and have working software within the same conversation.
• AI-assisted note-taking and summarization for client sessions — capturing key themes, action items, and follow-ups automatically so the coach stays present instead of taking notes.
• AI for financial document parsing — processing investment memos, term sheets, and reports to extract the decision-relevant data quickly.

The moment the conversation shifted

There was a specific moment in our call where something clicked for Jorge. I showed him how you can give an AI model a client profile — anonymized — and ask it to identify what type of coaching challenge this person is likely facing based on the patterns in the text. The output wasn't magic. But it was useful in a way that was hard to dismiss.

He said: 'This doesn't replace what I do. It makes what I do faster and better.' That's exactly the frame. The leaders who will fall behind aren't the ones who tried AI and found it insufficient. They're the ones who never seriously tested it against a real workflow.

What I would tell any business leader starting today

Pick the task in your week that consumes the most time relative to the value it creates. Not the hardest task — the most repetitive, information-heavy one. Give an AI tool one week to help you with just that task. Judge it by the output, not by the experience of using it.

If it saves you two hours and the output is good enough to use — that's the signal. You scale from there. There is no grand transformation. There is just one task, done better, that leads to the next one.