Everyone promises you can automate your business with AI and chill at the grill. Well, automation and AI don’t always pay off.

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We’ve all read such headlines. The internet is full of them, and they carry a disturbing promise: Chill at the grill while your business works for itself, and your only job is to collect the profits.

Sorry to be direct, but this won’t work. I know from experience; I’ve been an entrepreneur for more than 10+ years. Back in 2015, I joined an existing company as employee #20, and a few years later, I founded Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, and built it from scratch. Neither experience involved any chilling at the grill, and profits were always hard-earned.

Now you might argue that those experiences were before the age of Artificial Intelligence, and that many of my tasks from back then could now be automated easily. And that’s exactly the topic we’ll dive deeper into in this article.

Automation: Effort vs. Benefit

Don’t get me wrong; automation is great. But, like every question in entrepreneurship, it’s about balancing effort and benefit. Is it worth automating a complex, error-prone routine that takes you 30 minutes every week? Probably yes. On the other hand, should you spend 5 hours building an automation that saves you 2 minutes per week? I doubt it.

Let’s go back to the chill at the grill analogy to assess whether automation makes sense. Do you prefer to spend 5 hours on a Friday night at the computer automating a petty task, or would you rather enjoy the evening with your spouse, your family, or your friends chilling at the grill and do those 2 minutes of work manually every week?

My choice is clear.

The Ticking Time Bomb: Token Costs

When people think of automation, they usually think about AI tools such as Claude Cowork. That’s certainly one option, but it has a couple of drawbacks: First, AI tools never provide quite the same answer for two runs of an identical task. And that’s what you would expect for many automation tasks. That’s why I still think tools like Microsoft Power Automate or n8n are more useful to automate everyday tasks than any AI tool. But building your Power Automate or n8n workflows with the help of the AI tool of your choice is a great strategy.

There is a second problem with AI tools that many people aren’t aware of. With the introduction of Mythos and Faible, Anthropic moved their frontier models out of their existing subscriptions into a pure pay-per-token model. That’s an unmistakable sign that the days of the cheap AI subscriptions are counted.

What will happen to your AI automations when all your AI subscriptions move to pay-per-token models? For sure, they will still work. But they will suddenly cost orders of magnitude more than that 20$-per-month Claude or ChatGPT subscription. And the more you run them, the more tokens they consume, and the more they cost. So maybe you need to think about doing that work yourself again instead of believing you can chill at the grill and wait for the profits to roll in.

Do You Need Everything on Autopilot?

Finally, let’s ask ourselves a more fundamental question. Do we need everything on autopilot, constantly running and accessible from our phones?

I argue that for many tasks and activities, we don’t need full autopilot and access to our business from our phones. As usual, automation isn’t the silver bullet everybody claims. Some tasks can be done once a week or once a month. For many of those end-of-week or end-of-month activities, I do something that might sound a little outdated for a tech entrepreneur: I depend on Excel sheets and manual work.

And when I’m done with that work, I’ll go and enjoy an ice-cold beer at the grill.