Employee bloat is a phenomenon where large enterprises and rapidly growing companies hire more employees than they need to serve their expanding customer base. While employee bloat can occur in all parts of a business, like sales, engineering, and operations, the most common sign of this is small teams that are responsible for high-volume, repetitive tasks that are not essential to the company’s core business, yet continue to grow in headcount as the company grows.
As your company grows, many of these small teams that were built to handle one-off tasks like document parsing, responding to specific customer requests, making sure records are updated, often lead to death by a thousand paper cuts, both in company culture and operational efficiency.
Here are some common problems we’ve seen companies face with these teams:
The tasks that these teams are responsible for often correlate directly to usage and therefore vary greatly from day to day. While a single person on an average day would be able to handle the entire operations of this team, you might need ten people on a busy day. Since human teams don’t scale with your operations, the size of this team is decided by your maximum workload, not the average.
As the tasks these teams are handling are very often low-value tasks that are not within your core business operations, companies often don’t want to put their A-list employees on these teams, but rather hire for these operations directly. As a result, these teams consist of people who are at a lower caliber than your other teammates, and therefore can not be moved around to different parts of your operations.
Since these teams work on lower value tasks and can not be moved around different departments freely, this creates a disconnect between them and the rest of your team. This results in admin overhead and a long term disruption in the company culture and team morale.
Brainbase lets you build custom made AI workers that are connected to your existing systems and can handle the entirety of the operations of these teams. These AI workers can handle the same tasks as your human teams, but in a more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective way.
What sets us apart from other AI workers is that we understand that your company is unique, and that a one-size-fits-all solution that you can buy off the shelf will not work for you. Instead of trying to provide a single solution to all of our customers, we have instead built the best underlying infrastructure that lets you build custom AI workers that are tailored to your company’s exact needs.
We understand that every company is different, and that makes it difficult to understand whether or not AI workers will be able to reliably replace their operations. This is why we developed what we call the Black Box Test which helps assess whether or not a team can be effectively automated by AI workers.
Think of a team in your company and note down the following:
Let’s see this in practice for two teams in a company:
1. Does this team have standard, consistent inputs?
No. This team’s work changes with the campaigns they are running and varies between prospecting, qualifying, and closing.
2. Does this team have standard, consistent outputs?
No. Their metrics vary between closed deals, qualified leads, total leads sources, and more.
3. Do the people you hire for this team match the quality of the people you hire for other teams in the company?
Yes. We hire A players in sales just like we do in engineering.
4. Will this team’s headcount grow in proportion to your operations?
No. While this team will surely grow as we grow, their size does not directly correlate to the amount of operation or workload we’re under.
1. Does this team have standard, consistent inputs?
Yes. This team receives invoices (either handwritten or computer typed) through emails.
2. Does this team have standard, consistent outputs?
Yes. They input the details on the invoice onto our database.
3. Do the people you hire for this team match the quality of the people you hire for other teams in the company?
No. We tend to hire more broadly for this team since it’s low value knowledge work.
4. Will this team’s headcount grow in proportion to your operations?
Yes. This team will grow linearly with the number of invoices we receive over time.
While Team A (Sales) can still be improved in many ways through automation, it's Team B (Invoice parsing) that is a great fit for being completely automated by AI workers. This is because Team B has standard inputs, outputs, and headcount that grows in proportion to the operations of the company, meaning that a single AI worker connected to these input and output sources will be handle the entirety of the operations of this team, and do so in a more efficient and scalable way.
In fact here's a worker we set up for a similar use case which is to parse SEC filings:
In conclusion, Brainbase offers a transformative solution to the challenges posed by employee bloat in large enterprises and rapidly growing companies. By leveraging custom AI workers, your business can automate repetitive, high-volume tasks, thereby enhancing efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. This not only alleviates the operational inefficiencies and cultural disruptions caused by small, specialized teams but also ensures that human talent is allocated to more strategic and value-driven roles.
As your company continues to evolve, adopting Brainbase's tailored AI solutions will be crucial in maintaining a competitive edge and fostering a more dynamic, innovative workplace.
Schedule a demo with us today to discover how our AI workers can be seamlessly integrated into your operations, and join the waitlist to stay ahead of the curve in enterprise automation.