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

Episode notes

What this conversation covers

$12,000 to build. $350,000 a year saved. One workflow. 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.

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.

What You'll Learn

• 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.
• The one question that surfaces process friction instantly, when “where is your process friction?” makes an owner’s eyes glaze over.
• 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.
• The five discovery questions to answer on a legal pad intwenty minutes, before you buy anything.
• 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.
• 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.
• Crawl, walk, run: how to sequence AI adoption so eachworkflow pays for the next one.

Ready to Take Action

Brandon Hurter and Pivot180: https://www.pivot180.ai

Free five-minute AI Readiness Assessment:https://www.pivot180.ai/assessment

Watch what an AI-native agency looks like from the inside:https://AskLewisHoward.com

Small Business Big AI: https://smallbusinessbigai.com/

Kim Lewis Howard on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-lewis-howard/

---MUSIC & SOUND CREDITS

Music: "I Am with You" by Dream Cave; Epidemic Sound via iStock.com

Sound Effects: https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/