My Dad Has Been Building AI Before AI Existed

Quick answer

My Dad Has Been Building AI Before AI Existed explains what the change means for UK SMEs and how to turn it into a practical next step. The process is to identify the business decision, connect the data, then automate only the parts that improve speed or reliability.

My dad is in his seventies. He's been a joiner for fifty years. He doesn't know how to get Netflix on, but ask him to make a box with hand-cut box joints and he'll quietly show you something that took a lifetime to learn.

This weekend I watched him build one. Before he cut a single piece of timber, he made a jig.

That's what he's always done. Any job, any task, anything repetitive, he builds a jig first. Cut once, cut a hundred times, the result is identical. No re-works. No measuring twice on every piece. No room for the kind of small human errors that compound into a ruined panel.

He never called it process automation. He never called it lean. He just called it not being daft.

Watching him work, it hit me that the entire industry I work in, digital transformation, Power BI, AI automation, all of it, is essentially trying to do for knowledge workers what my dad has been doing in his workshop since the seventies. We're building digital jigs.

A Power Automate flow that pulls invoices into a folder and tags them. A Power BI model that calculates margin the same way every Monday morning. An AI agent that reads supplier emails and pulls out the order numbers. These are jigs. The principle is identical: take a repetitive task, build the thing once, get the same clean output every time.

The interesting bit isn't that the principle is new. It isn't. Manufacturing has known this forever. Toyota wrote books about it. What's new is that the jig moved off the workbench and into the office. For decades, the people doing the same five spreadsheet tasks every morning had no equivalent. They just did the work, manually, every time, and accepted the re-works as part of the job.

That's the shift. Not the technology. The fact that office work is finally getting its jigs.

My dad would look at an AI workflow and not really care what's happening under the bonnet. But show him the before and after, the eight hours collapsed into eight minutes, the identical output every time, and he'd nod once and get on with his day. Because that's the whole point, and he's known it for fifty years.

He just calls it not being daft.