// Adoption

AI lets one person take on many roles – and do them well

Not long ago I rebuilt my whole website in a day. Content and all, live on the server by that evening – just me and Claude walking me through the code. No agency, no developer.

The day was fast. But what stayed with me was something else: that I had done, on my own, what would until recently have needed a small team. And that I never had to explain anything from scratch – the AI already knew my business, so it understood what I meant.

These days, when I want to change something on the site, I just dictate it. Claude knows the context of my business, so it turns my sentence into exactly the words I meant – in a few minutes.

And that is the point: one person or a small team can do today what once took many hands.

1. The same thing happens in the teams I work with

It usually starts with a workshop. I show what AI can really do, and together we map out concrete scenarios: what in their work could run more smoothly, where the most repetitive work sits, what eats the most time. We talk about how this particular team actually works.

Then, once people have the company context in order and know how to work with it, things happen that simply couldn’t have been done in that time before.

Training materials that once took weeks come down to a few days, sometimes hours – the process has been worked out once, so nobody has to reinvent it every time. The grant and project writing I help with shrinks from weeks to days, because the AI knows the language and the reality of the organisation and isn’t starting from a blank page. Marketing materials come together as fast as someone can dictate what’s in their head; the AI assembles the rest into something coherent, because it knows the company.

In practice a small team gains several roles at once. The same person writes, edits, makes the graphics, analyses the data – things that until recently were spread across a few people or sent outside.

And the thing that still amazes me: people who have worked with Excel for years now simply say what they want to pull out of the data. Copilot, or a ChatGPT or Claude add-in, returns pivot tables, conclusions, finished summaries in a few minutes. That used to mean hours of work and a really solid grasp of Excel. Now it’s quick, and the quality is there.

2. People gain a sense of agency

What surprises me most is the sense of agency people start to feel. They do things they used to outsource or wait a long time for – and they see the result straight away. It changes how they relate to their work. Something that was dull and slow becomes quick and, honestly, starts to be fun. The work becomes enjoyable, because it finally moves forward.

You see it best with proposals. Each one used to be put together by hand – enter the data, set the pricing, make sure everything added up. Now the AI knows our context and our earlier proposals; it has learned how we build the pricing and how we put a whole proposal together. A few good examples were enough for it to understand the logic we use. Today I enter a bit of data and I have a proposal ready to send to the client. And it all stays consistent, because every proposal rests on the same proven way we work.

3. Small firms are already doing this

The 2026 data says the same. The report Cyfrowy puls polskich MŚP 2026 (Digital Pulse of Polish SMEs 2026), by home.pl and IONOS – a survey of nearly 4,900 firms across nine European countries – shows that Polish small and medium firms are among the most digitally active on the continent. Only 14% of them have never reached for AI – the lowest figure in Europe, alongside Spain – and 26% use it several times a week, more than firms in any other country surveyed.

What’s interesting is what they use it for. Almost half (46%) see AI first of all as support for creative work – the highest result in Europe. They use it most for creating content (39%) and graphics and video (33%). Exactly the roles I described above.

And they take shortcuts: instead of moving through the usual stages of digitalisation, they reach straight for the newest tools. Fully 88% plan to spend something on digitalisation in 2026 – the highest result in the whole survey.

Tellingly, Polish business owners are the least worried in Europe that AI will take the human part out of work (38%, against 57% in Austria). AI changes how people work more often than it replaces them. I’ll come back to that.

4. First the foundation, then the magic

Except none of this happens on its own. First you have to build the foundation, and that takes a moment.

AI won’t fix chaos. If a process is broken, AI will only speed it up along with its mistakes. I have a simple test for this: if someone from the outside, looking at how things run at your place, couldn’t make sense of it, then AI won’t either. So very often the first thing we do has nothing to do with AI yet: we sit down and sort out the process. What repeats in it, what’s unnecessary, how it really runs.

Then comes the company context – how it writes, what it needs, how it talks to clients – gathered in one place the AI can draw on. And there’s a third thing, the most important: the time people need to get comfortable with it. This isn’t a small detail – in the same report, 42% of Polish firms name the lack of employee skills as a serious barrier to adopting AI. Cheap access to tools stops being enough when there’s no one who knows how to use them. That’s why I spread the work with teams over several weeks – long enough for them to test things, get something wrong, come back with a question.

All of it together takes a moment. But once the foundation is there, things start to happen that used to look like magic. And that’s the part I run alongside the team – I’m there while they learn to work this way.

The promise of AI, people say, is to work less. With my clients that isn’t what happens. They often work just as much, sometimes more – because the work gets more interesting and they want to do more of it. What changes is where the hours go. The dull, repetitive things shrink, and what’s left is time for what they actually came to do: thinking, talking to people, the work you don’t want to hand to a machine. And for that feeling of being capable again.

Because that is the point: one person or a small team can do today what once took many. You just have to build the foundation and give people a little time to settle into it. After that it really works – sometimes it’s hard to believe how well.

If you’re a small team or a one-person business and you don’t know where to start – start with your own context, and find someone to walk the first stretch with you. That part I do with pleasure.

Monika Kotus – AI consultant & trainer | monikakotus.com

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