Treat AI Like a New Hire, Not a Genie
A genie makes you careless. A new hire makes you a manager. Why everything I do with AI is propose-then-approve until trust is earned.
The mistake I see people make with AI is treating it like a genie — make a wish, get a result, trust it. I treat mine like a new hire. And that one difference changes everything about how much I actually let it do.
When you bring on someone new, you don't hand them the checkbook on day one. Not because they're not capable — because trust is something you watch get earned. You give them a task, you check the work, you see how they handle the thing that wasn't in the instructions. A few weeks of that and you know what you can hand off and what you can't. The trust is real because it was earned, not assumed.
That's exactly how I run AI in my business. Everything starts as a proposal. It suggests, I check. It drafts, I decide. For anything that actually matters — anything that touches the real record of a deal — nothing happens until I've looked at it and said yes. Not once as a formality. Every time, until that particular job has been watched being right long enough that I'd trust a good employee with it.
People hear "I approve everything" and think it sounds slow, or like I don't believe in the tools. It's neither. It's the same discipline that lets you delegate to a person without lying awake about it. The approval gate isn't friction for its own sake — it's the thing that makes delegation safe enough to actually do. Being strict about it is what lets me hand off more, not less, because I'm never one bad automation away from a mess I can't see.
And here's the part the genie crowd misses: a new hire gets better. You correct it, it adjusts, and over time the set of things you'd trust it with quietly grows. That's the relationship I want with these tools — not blind faith on day one, and not permanent suspicion either, but trust that expands at the speed it's earned. Propose, approve, watch, repeat. The circle of what I let it own gets bigger every month, and it gets bigger for a good reason.
A genie makes you careless. A new hire makes you a manager. I'd rather be a manager. The judgment stays mine, and the trust is real because I watched it get earned.