Start Narrow: How Small Businesses Can Stop Drowning in AI and Start Thriving With It

Your team already has AI. So why doesn't it feel like an advantage?

Most small teams have added ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot to their daily routine — and yet the results are underwhelming. Work still moves at the same pace. The same three people are still the bottleneck. AI drafts emails and summarizes documents, but nothing about how the team actually operates has changed.

That's because using AI and redesigning work around AI are two different things — and almost no one is doing the second one.

"Start Narrow" is a practical, research-grounded guide for founders, managers, and small teams who want to move past ad hoc AI use and build a team that is genuinely organized around human-AI collaboration.

Instead of asking "which AI tool should we use?" — this book teaches you to ask the questions that actually determine whether AI helps or wastes time:

• Which of our tasks are actually suited to AI, and which only look that way?
• Should this work be human-only, AI-augmented, or AI-automated — and who decides?
• Where do handoffs and coordination costs quietly kill the value AI promised?
• When is a workflow ready for an AI agent, and when is that a mistake?
• How do we build a shared "team brain" so AI has the context to actually help?

Drawing on current research into agentic AI, human-AI collaboration, task allocation, and workflow design, the book gives you working frameworks — a Human-AI Allocation Matrix, a Task-Fit Test, an AI Agent Readiness Assessment — along with recurring case examples of small teams applying them in consulting, marketing, software, and professional services.

This isn't a book about prompts or productivity hacks that will be outdated in six months. It's a book about a durable skill: deciding, deliberately and repeatedly, how work should be divided between people and intelligent systems as that boundary keeps shifting.

By the end, you won't just be using AI. You'll know how to redesign your team's work around it — one workflow at a time.