Automate the Friction. Not the Person.

I love AI. I love technology. I just don't understand why every new piece of technology seems to start with the same question: how can we remove the person from this?

By Jade Valore, founder of DeskPanther and co-owner of Rad Coffee. 🐾

I think AI is amazing. I'm not against automation, and I'm definitely not interested in pretending we should stop technology from moving forward. I'm literally building a software company.

But lately I keep seeing technology built around replacing things employees are already perfectly capable of doing. Sensors that know when something is low. Cameras and software watching what's happening inside a business. AI reporting information back to an owner. Training tools designed to replace pieces of human training and management. Some of that technology is incredible, and some of it will absolutely make businesses better. But I think we're overlooking something really simple: the employee standing there already knows what's happening.

If we're out of oat milk, someone working the shift probably knows we're out of oat milk. If the sink is leaking, the person standing next to the sink knows it's leaking. If something broke, somebody probably watched it happen. I don't necessarily need technology to discover the problem for them. I need to give that person the easiest possible way to do something about it.

Remove the Handoff, Not the Human

That's a huge part of how I think about DeskPanther. I don't want to build software that gives owners another way to micromanage their employees. I want to build software that makes employees' jobs easier. Those are two very different things.

If something is low, reporting it shouldn't require a complicated workflow. Tap it. Done. If something breaks, there shouldn't need to be a game of telephone where the employee tells the shift lead, who tells the manager, who texts another manager, who eventually texts the owner. Things break. We're running food and beverage businesses. It happens. The employee standing in front of the broken thing should be able to report what's happening, attach a picture or video, and get back to their actual job. Let the technology handle everything in between.

That's where automation gets really exciting to me. Automate the annoying part. Automate the communication chain. Automate the organization. Automate the follow-up. Automate the little things people forget because they're busy making drinks, serving customers, cleaning, restocking, and keeping a store running.

Automate the friction. Not the person.

Sometimes the Employee Is the Best Sensor You Have

I also think employees deserve more trust than a lot of modern software gives them. More technology doesn't automatically mean better operations. Sometimes it just means more monitoring, more dashboards, more steps, and another system an employee has to remember while there are 20 drinks on the screen.

If reporting a broken blender takes seven steps and nobody reports the blender, I'm not immediately blaming the employee. The software failed the employee. That's why I care so much about keeping operational tools ridiculously simple. See it. Tap it. Done. Then let technology do the work in between.

Because here's the other thing: a sensor might know you're low on something. A human understands the context around why that matters. An employee knows there's another case in the back. They know tomorrow is unusually busy. They know somebody already moved product from another location. They know the machine isn't technically broken, but it suddenly sounds completely different than it did yesterday. People understand context. That's valuable.

I Don't Want My Team Worried That DeskPanther Is Coming for Their Job

This matters to me because I'm not building DeskPanther from somewhere outside the industry. I own food and beverage businesses. I have employees using this software. I don't want technology showing up in their workplace to feel like, cool, which part of my job is this eventually going to take? I want the opposite. I want them thinking, thank God I don't have to deal with that anymore.

I don't want the employee spending ten minutes figuring out who needs to know we're out of something. I don't want the manager digging through yesterday's group chat trying to find a repair photo. I don't want someone apologizing for texting me because they aren't sure whether something is important enough to bother me about. Those are not the meaningful parts of anybody's job. Get rid of those.

Let the barista make drinks. Let the shift lead lead the shift. Let the manager manage people. Let the owner run the business. Technology should make each of those people better at what they're already there to do.

And Yes, We'll Use AI

Absolutely. I'm not drawing some weird line in the sand where DeskPanther is anti-AI. AI belongs in the future of small business. I'm excited about it, and we'll use it wherever it genuinely makes somebody's job easier. That's the test for me. Does this help the human doing the job, or are we building technology just because we figured out another thing a human technically doesn't have to do anymore? Those aren't the same thing.

I don't believe every human action is an inefficiency waiting to be automated away. Sometimes the person working inside the business is the best sensor you have. They can see context a dashboard can't. They know what another employee meant. They know when something feels wrong. They know whether being low on something actually matters right now. Give those people better tools. Trust them to use them. Then let technology handle all the crap between noticing the problem and getting the information where it needs to go.

For me, the future of technology in independent food and beverage isn't an owner sitting somewhere watching AI run the entire company. It's people running the company with technology doing more of the annoying stuff around them. The employee knows what's happening. Technology should help them do something about it.

Not less technology. Not less AI. Better technology, with people still at the center of it. 🐾