By Mark Williams
Rent One Home Furnishings | APRO Member
If you listen to the headlines, AI is either going to save the world or take everybody’s job by next Tuesday. The truth is a lot less dramatic and a lot more interesting. I’m not an expert, but I spend a good part of my week listening to people who follow this stuff closely. One of my go-to sources is The AI Daily Brief, a daily podcast hosted by Nathaniel Whittemore. It’s short, it skips the hype, and it does a good job of explaining why the news actually matters. Here’s what I’ve learned about where work is really heading.
AI Is Creating More Work, Not Less
The biggest surprise for me is that AI isn’t shrinking work. It’s expanding it. The AI Daily Brief recently covered a workplace study that found people who use AI heavily end up taking on more projects, not fewer. They’re running several things at once that used to be impossible for one person to handle.
That lines up with an old idea economists call the “lump of labor” fallacy. It’s the mistaken belief that there’s a fixed amount of work to go around, so if a machine does some of it, people lose out. History says otherwise. When tractors came to the farm and computers came to the office, the work changed and new kinds of jobs showed up.
From Doing the Work to Managing the Work
The real shift is in what a job looks like day to day. AI tools are moving past simple chat into what the industry calls “agents,” which are programs that can carry out multi-step tasks on their own. Instead of writing every report or answering every routine email, more people will be assigning that work to AI and checking the results.
Think of it like going from being the person on the line to being the supervisor. You still need to know the job inside and out, because you’re the one who has to catch the mistakes and make the judgment calls. That’s why the podcast keeps coming back to the point that agents still need humans. In many cases they’re creating more need for experienced people, not less.
The Catch: Burnout Is Real
This isn’t all upside. Whittemore has talked about something people are calling “AI brain fry.” When AI can keep cranking out work around the clock, the backlog never ends. People end up juggling too many things, and the line between work time and downtime gets blurry. Businesses that roll out AI without thinking about this will wear their people out.
Why We Fear AI
It makes sense that people are nervous. We’ve all seen the movies where the machines take over. Every big change, from the assembly line to the internet, came with warnings that jobs would vanish. And it’s hard to trust something you don’t understand. When the news is all hype and doom, it’s easy to assume the worst.
But the fear usually fades once people actually use the tools. AI makes mistakes, it needs direction, and it still needs a person to decide what matters. Economist Richard Baldwin summed it up better than anyone: AI won’t take your job. The person using AI will. The real risk isn’t the technology. It’s standing still while everyone around you learns to use it.
What This Means for Rent-to-Own
You don’t have to work at a tech company for this to matter. In our stores, AI can already help with the work that eats up a manager’s day: scheduling, customer follow-up, payment reminders, marketing, inventory planning, and paperwork. Every hour spent on that is an hour off the showroom floor and away from the relationships that make rent-to-own work. Used right, AI gives our people that time back for what our customers actually value: someone who knows them by name and treats them right, face to face.
The people who will do well aren’t necessarily the most technical. They’re the ones who stay curious, try the tools and learn how to point them at real problems. My advice is simple: start small, use it on something you actually do every week, and build from there.
How I Actually Use It
I’m not a tech guy, and I don’t write code. But AI has become part of my workweek at Rent One. I use it to analyze our monthly demand report and decide where our ad dollars should go. It builds my advertising and marketing reports, so I can see what’s working in each market. It also pulls together inventory buying summaries and forecasts, work that used to mean hours digging through spreadsheets. I use it to turn product information into ready-to-go spreadsheets for our website, size up vendor pitches before we spend a dime, build the business case for store remodels, and work through budgets and contract renegotiations.
It’s helped at home, too. When my family took on a house remodel, I used it to build a simple app that tracks every receipt, labor hour and payment, so everyone knows exactly what’s been spent and what’s still owed. No spreadsheets passed back and forth, no arguments over the numbers. We even built a recipe app for my family and friends.
None of that replaced anybody. It gave me back hours, so I can spend more time with our stores and our people.
Bottom Line
AI isn’t coming for everybody’s job. It’s coming for the way we do our jobs. The workers and businesses that come out ahead will be the ones who learn to work alongside it, set healthy limits and keep the human judgment that no machine can replace. If you want an easy way to keep up, The AI Daily Brief is a good place to start.
Full disclosure: I wrote this with help from Claude, an AI assistant. The ideas, experience, and final calls are mine. The AI helped me research and shape them. That’s exactly the kind of work I’m talking about.
About the Author
Mark Williams is Vice President of Sales & Marketing for APRO member SKC Enterprises Inc., dba Rent One Home Furnishings.
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