After a recent LinkedIn post about AI accuracy in franchise operations, the conversation went somewhere I did not expect. The most common response was not about artificial intelligence at all. It was about what happens after the efficiency arrives.
One comment in particular stuck with me: “The risk is the savings just get absorbed into headcount reduction rather than reinvested into the things only people can do well.”
That is not a technology problem. That is a leadership problem. And it starts with a question most businesses have never seriously asked: are we measuring the things our customers actually care about?
The proposal problem
Here is a real example.
A team was producing proposals manually. Every proposal looked different. There was no consistency, no way of knowing what was resonating with customers and what was not. The team worked hard. They were busy. Nobody doubted their effort.
They measured success by the number of proposals sent out.
Nobody was measuring how quickly proposals reached the customer. Nobody was tracking acceptance rates. The two things the customer actually cared about — speed and relevance — were invisible to the business.
This is not unusual. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that firms contacting a potential customer within one hour were seven times more likely to qualify the lead than those waiting even an hour longer — and sixty times more likely than those waiting a full day. The speed at which you respond is not a nice-to-have. It is one of the strongest predictors of whether you win the work.
But if you are not measuring it, you cannot improve it. And if your team is too buried in manual work to respond quickly, you are losing business without ever knowing why.
What changed
Working with the business, we standardised the proposal process and freed up time. Not with AI — just by fixing what was broken. Templates were created. Workflows were simplified. The team stopped reinventing every proposal from scratch.
The results were clear. Acceptance rates went up. And for the first time, the business could see the direct link between how quickly a proposal was sent and how likely it was to be accepted. The data had always been there. Nobody had time to look at it.
The proposal management industry bears this out more broadly. Industry benchmarks consistently show that organisations with structured, standardised proposal processes report significantly higher win rates — often 40 percent or above — compared with those taking an ad-hoc approach. Consistency is not boring. It is profitable.
The founder trap
This pattern is not limited to operational teams. It shows up at the very top of the business.
A study published in Harvard Business Review by Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked how CEOs spend their time. They found that chief executives devoted just 21 percent of their time to strategy. The rest was consumed by operations, meetings, and firefighting.
For founders of growing businesses, the numbers are often worse. They are the ones writing the proposals, chasing the invoices, managing the team, and fielding customer complaints — all at once. They are so busy doing the work that there is no time to question whether it is the right work. So busy sending proposals that nobody asks why half of them are being ignored.
This is the real cost of inefficiency. It is not just wasted hours. It is the strategic thinking that never happens, the customer patterns that go unnoticed, and the opportunities that slip away because everyone was too busy being busy.
What AI makes possible — and why it matters
I am genuinely optimistic about what AI and automation can do for businesses. Not because they cut costs — though they can — but because the best businesses will use them to make work better, not just cheaper.
Give someone back two hours a day and they could spend it on the phone with a franchisee who is struggling. They could follow up with the customer who nearly signed. They could finally sit down with the data that tells them what is actually working and what is not.
The companies that will win are not the ones that use AI to do the same work with fewer people. They are the ones that use it to give their people more time for the work that actually matters:
Building relationships. The conversation with a customer that turns a one-off transaction into a long-term account. The check-in with a franchisee that catches a problem before it becomes a crisis. These interactions cannot be automated, and they should not be. But they can only happen if your team has time for them.
Understanding customers. Not through surveys that sit in a spreadsheet, but through the patterns in your data — which proposals get accepted, which customers come back, what the top performers do differently. The insight is usually there. What is missing is the time to find it.
Thinking strategically. Stepping back far enough to ask: are we measuring the right things? Are we solving the right problems? If we designed this process today, from scratch, would it look anything like this?
Measuring what matters
The proposal team in my example was not failing. They were working hard and producing output. But output is not the same as outcome. They were measuring activity — how many proposals went out — instead of impact — how quickly and how often those proposals converted.
This distinction matters more than ever as AI enters the picture. Automation can dramatically increase your output. But if you are measuring the wrong things, all you get is more of the wrong things, faster.
Before you automate a process, ask:
- What does the customer actually care about in this interaction?
- Are we measuring that — or are we measuring what is easy to count?
- If this process freed up 40 percent of someone’s time, what would we want them to do with it?
If you cannot answer the third question clearly, you are not ready to automate. Not because the technology is not there, but because the thinking is not.
The opportunity
The businesses that will thrive — in franchising and beyond — are the ones that treat AI not as a cost-cutting exercise but as an opportunity to refocus on what actually drives value. They will measure what their customers care about, not what is convenient to track. They will use freed capacity to build stronger relationships, not just to shrink the payroll. And they will give their people more satisfying, more impactful roles — not fewer roles.
That is not naive optimism. It is what happens when you start with the customer and work backwards, instead of starting with the technology and hoping it leads somewhere useful.
The question is simple: what is the metric in your business that everyone tracks — but your customers could not care less about?
Start there. The rest follows.
Colin Rees is the founder of Xpera, where we help franchise networks and multi-site businesses make smarter technology decisions. If you are rethinking what you measure and how AI could free your team to focus on what matters — we would welcome a conversation.