3X Tech Founder Jeff Macpherson: You’re Doing AI Wrong. Do This Instead.
What if the reason AI is not transforming your business has nothing to do with AI?
The AI Problem Most Founders Are Solving Backwards
You have probably done it.
A new AI tool appears. Someone on your team sends you the link. A founder friend swears it changed everything. Your inbox fills with promises that this platform will save hours, replace headcount, generate leads, write copy, close sales, and perhaps make coffee before lunch.
So you try it.
Then another one.
Then another.
Six months later, you have more subscriptions, more logins, more complexity, and a team asking which system they are actually supposed to use.
Meanwhile, the business problem you hoped AI would solve is still there.
That is the founder recognition moment hiding in this episode.
Jeff Macpherson has spent years inside technology businesses, including building early Instagram automation that sent more than a billion messages before the business collided with one of the largest technology companies in the world.
Today, his view of AI is surprisingly simple.
Stop starting with the technology.
Start with the business.
AI Does Not Fix Your Foundation
Jeff puts it plainly:
“It’s just an amplification tool.”
That sentence sounds simple until you consider the consequence.
If your onboarding is weak, AI can help you create weak onboarding faster.
If your sales process is inconsistent, AI can spread that inconsistency across more leads.
If your best knowledge exists only inside the founder’s head, technology does not magically create institutional intelligence.
And if your company depends on one platform, one person, one process, or one piece of tribal knowledge, AI may accelerate the dependency rather than remove it.
Jeff learned this the expensive way.
After building technology on Instagram, his company ultimately ran into the brutal reality of platform dependency. As he describes it, one of the biggest lessons was that “your foundation is your most important piece.”
For a founder, that is not a technology lesson.
That is an enterprise value lesson.
Why “Which Tool Should We Buy?” Is the Wrong Question
Macpherson is blunt about the current market. Most AI products are prompted to sell convenience. They do not fix unclear thinking, broken handoffs, or a founder who has never mapped how work actually moves.
“You’re the tool,” he says. “You just need to know how to unlock your process.”
That is the part busy owners skip. They buy software to avoid the unglamorous work: documenting the customer journey, standardizing onboarding, getting a strategist’s brain out of a private notebook and into a system other people can run.
He has watched the same pattern across companies. Sales closes. The check gets collected. Fulfillment inherits a mess. Transcript here. Google Drive there. Notion somewhere else. The buyer experience collapses in the gap between “yes” and delivery.
“The onboarding process to our businesses is what makes us fall short,” he says.
AI does not heal that. It accelerates it. Good systems get better. Bad systems get louder, faster, and more expensive.
The Hidden Cost Of Shiny Object Syndrome
Most founders do not suffer from a shortage of ideas.
We suffer from too many.
A founder sees possibility everywhere. That is one of the reasons we build businesses in the first place.
It is also why shiny object syndrome can become a skeleton hiding in plain sight.
Every new tool creates another decision.
Another workflow.
Another training requirement.
Another integration.
Another place where information can become siloed.
Jeff sees businesses with knowledge scattered across Google Drive, Notion, ClickUp, transcripts, inboxes, and individual team members.
Then leadership wonders why execution feels harder as the business grows.
That is the contradiction.
Technology was supposed to remove friction.
Instead, poorly designed technology stacks can institutionalize it.
The result is not simply inconvenience. It can show up as slower onboarding, team strain, weaker fulfillment, inconsistent customer experiences, wasted payroll, and growth drag.
A future buyer sees those things differently than a founder does.
The founder may call them growing pains.
The buyer may call them risk.
What Cloud37 Actually Builds
Macpherson does not sell a magic agent. He positions the work as systems architecture.
Map the journey from first touch to fulfillment to repeat. Find the single biggest lever. Do not try to automate the whole company on Monday. Train the system on A-player knowledge. Keep a human in the loop. Then let B-level operators execute closer to A-level work because the thinking is already inside the machine.
He walks through a coaching company that taught people how to write bestselling books—and then sent those same clients out to hire ghostwriters. Cloud37 encoded the teaching, the process, and the expertise. The writers were no longer the bottleneck.
“In that launch alone, they did two and a half million dollars in 10 days,” he says, “launching a product around the exact service they were already providing.”
Same knowledge. Different container. Output instead of another course.
That is the offer founders keep missing. People do not want more content. They want speed, guidance, and a result.
Your A-Players May Be Your Biggest Untapped Asset
Here is where the conversation gets commercially interesting.
Jeff argues that the opportunity is not to ask AI to become your expert.
The opportunity is to capture how your experts already think.
His words:
“You take your knowledge, you take your A players, and you train AI around them.”
Now consider what that means inside your company.
There is probably someone on your team who handles difficult customers better than everyone else.
Someone who knows how to diagnose a problem before it becomes expensive.
Someone who understands the nuance behind your best sales conversations.
Someone who can take incomplete information and somehow produce an exceptional outcome.
What happens if that person leaves?
If the answer is panic, you have found a skeleton.
But if you can capture the logic, judgment, process, and patterns behind that performance, you may have discovered a Rembrandt.
That knowledge can become scalable.
Trainable.
Transferable.
And potentially monetizable.
The Only In Deep Wealth Reframe
Here is the mistake I see founders make.
They evaluate AI by asking, “How much labor can this eliminate?”
A future buyer may ask a very different question:
“How much valuable institutional knowledge has this company converted into a repeatable system?”
Those are not the same question.
The first is about cost cutting.
The second is about enterprise value.
A business becomes more valuable when its excellence is not trapped inside one founder, one rainmaker, one strategist, or one indispensable employee.
Jeff describes using systems to allow less experienced people to execute closer to an A-player level.
That can improve capacity today.
But zoom out.
You are also reducing key-person dependency.
You are creating operational consistency.
You are strengthening scalability.
You are turning expertise into intellectual property that can potentially travel beyond the person who originally created it.
That is where AI stops being a shiny object and starts becoming an X-Factor.
Your Existing Business May Contain The Next Revenue Stream
One of the strongest examples in the episode involves a business teaching people how to create bestselling books.
The company already had the expertise.
Already had the process.
Already had the knowledge.
The breakthrough did not come from inventing a completely different business.
It came from productizing what they already knew.
Jeff shares that the resulting launch generated $2.5 million in 10 days.
That should make every founder ask a different question.
What expertise are you already paying to create that could become another product, service, or recurring revenue stream?
Perhaps your premium service contains a lower-cost guided version.
Perhaps your internal methodology could serve customers who cannot yet afford your highest tier.
Perhaps an operating process your team takes for granted is precisely what another company would pay to access.
As Jeff says:
“The future of our business is already within us.”
That may be the most important line in the conversation.
Fix The Process Before You Scale It
Jeff identifies onboarding as one of the most common weaknesses he sees.
Think about your own company.
Sales closes the customer.
Everyone celebrates.
Then fulfillment begins hunting for information.
What exactly did the customer buy?
What was promised?
What problem matters most?
Where are the notes?
Who owns the next step?
Suddenly your expensive fulfillment team is reconstructing information that should have been captured once.
That is not an AI problem.
It is a process problem.
Automate it too early and you simply scale confusion.
This is why Jeff begins by mapping the customer journey and identifying where the largest leverage point actually exists.
Not where AI looks impressive.
Where the business gets stronger.
That distinction matters.
Build The Business So Technology Can Change
Technology will change.
The business fundamentals will not change nearly as quickly.
Jeff has a strong perspective here:
“The foundations of our businesses will stay true.”
That should be reassuring.
You do not need to predict which AI model wins.
You need a company strong enough to benefit regardless of which technology wins.
That means clear processes.
Documented knowledge.
Strong customer understanding.
Transferable systems.
Minimal platform dependency.
A business that can adapt without rebuilding itself every time Silicon Valley announces something new.
For the founder planning to keep the company, that creates freedom and scale.
For the founder preparing for a future liquidity event, it can create a more resilient business with less dependency and greater deal certainty.
Profitable now and ready later.
Stop Asking Which AI Tool To Buy
The wrong question is expensive because it sends you shopping before you have diagnosed the business.
The better questions are harder.
Where does execution repeatedly break?
Where does knowledge disappear between departments?
Which A-player does the company depend on too heavily?
Where are customers waiting unnecessarily?
Which process could become intellectual property?
What part of the business could scale without adding people if the underlying knowledge were captured properly?
Those questions do not produce the dopamine hit of another software subscription.
They can produce something far more valuable.
Leverage.
Hear The Full Conversation Before Your Next AI Decision
This episode with 3X Tech Founder Jeff Macpherson is not another prediction about where artificial intelligence is going.
It is a founder conversation about what your business needs to become before AI can create the leverage everyone keeps promising you.
Listen before you add another tool, another agent, another platform, or another layer of complexity.
Then subscribe to The Deep Wealth Podcast.
Because the expensive problems in a business rarely announce themselves as expensive problems. They begin as accepted habits, hidden dependencies, weak processes, and decisions that seem harmless until growth magnifies them.
The Deep Wealth Podcast is designed to surface those blind spots while you still have time to turn them into strengths.
And when you are ready to go beyond insight and systematically build a company that is profitable now, scalable tomorrow, and compelling to a future buyer, that is where Deep Wealth Mastery begins.
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In 90 days, Deep Wealth Mastery helps you uncover the blind spots, profit leaks, and hidden strengths that make your company stronger, more profitable, and more valuable.
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