“We should all hope for a world where intelligence is too cheap to meter.” — Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

Scarcity. Scarcity of time, money, talent...resources. It’s a particularly stark dilemma for running specialty as scarcity is amplified in any small business. But what if scarcity flipped? What if the biggest source of scarcity became knowing what to ask for, because building solutions suddenly got dramatically cheaper?

It’s 8 a.m. Monday morning in running specialty retail. The week is off to a typically chaotic start. Orders need to be placed and the stockroom is a bit of a mess. (Who decided to put that shoe in that spot?!) You’re opening at 10 a.m. and now there’s a callout. Priorities shift to floor coverage. Footwear futures will land in a few days and you should cross-reference those with what needs to be ordered today plus what hasn’t yet arrived from last week.

But pulling that together takes time you don’t have. So, you make decisions on instinct. Again.

Sound familiar? And there are many variations, all with the same theme: Often, the tasks that may have the biggest long-term impact on the business get pushed aside so that the tasks with immediate urgency can be addressed.

If only we had the time to compile the data we needed and to pore over it to gain valuable insights. If only we had the talent to build tools to customize the reports to better suit our needs. Or the money to hire someone to do it for us.

But this is changing, whether we realize it or not. The scarcity of time, money and talent to address the less urgent but arguably more important tasks is diminishing. And this is being made possible by AI.

“The hottest new programming language is English.” — Andrej Karpathy (renowned AI Researcher), January 2023

The ability to build tools using code is now far more accessible. A custom formatted report? Delivered at the cadence you desire? Along with insights? And automated so you can attend to other matters? Whether it’s directly via a language model (ChatGPT, Gemini or others) or through a coding assistant like Claude Code or Codex, the ability to build tools to reduce your workload can be done using that “hot” new coding language: English.

The stockroom may still be a mess on Monday mornings and callouts are inevitable, but the ability to have a dashboard, delivered automatically, with the information you need to make well-informed decisions can now be a reality and not just a dream.

With this new ability, scarcity of time, money and talent start diminishing. Which allows you to redeploy your most valuable resource — attention. And the new scarcity may become knowing what to ask for so you don’t squander this most valuable resource.

When so many things that were out of reach become accessible, the danger is now asking for too much. So, discriminating taste and knowing what is truly useful becomes the skill to develop. And it’s a skill to be learned, to be sure (like running). But, also like running, it’s a skill that can be learned by most.

Want to start? Pick one recurring task you hate OR pick a task you aren’t doing (but probably should be) because it is too time intensive and ask, “If this were solved forever, what would it give me back?” Now, spend a few focused hours trying to automate it with a language model. The first win is the hardest. After that, the benefits compound.

As intelligence gets cheaper, taste becomes more valuable. Running specialty has plenty of taste. Let’s employ these tools and buy back the attention we’ve been bleeding for so long.

Want to explore further? Shoot me a note at [email protected]