HaBeer54,000 Changes in One Day. And Nobody Knew What Changed. ๐
When AI makes "doing more" almost free, the one thing still expensive is understanding what's really happening in your business. One alert taught me that.
Let me tell you about one alert I got, and what it taught me.
On Saturday night, just after Shabbat ended, a single dry line landed in front of me: 54,473 changes in 24 hours. Threshold: 1,500.
My first reaction, and I'm not proud of it, was something close to joy. "Well, look at that. Someone's been busy." Our team, people working alongside AI agents around the clock, had moved a mountain.
Two minutes later the joy gave way to one question: what exactly had changed?
And I didn't have an answer. Neither did anyone else.
๐ฏ My blunt opinion
The number of changes is not a measure of productivity. Usually, it's a measure of how little you know about what's going on in your own business.
In an ordinary business, a thousand changes a day is a lot. Fifty-four thousand isn't work anymore. It's weather. No manager can review it, nobody can approve it, and there's no way to roll it back if something breaks. And in a business, anything you can't roll back has to pass through someone who understands what they're approving.
When AI comes into an organization, the cost of "doing more" drops to almost zero. That's the wonderful thing about it, and it's also the trap. What doesn't get cheaper is understanding. A business owner still needs to know what changed, why, and who answers for it.
๐ What we found when we dug in
When we broke the number down, the picture was simple to the point of embarrassment. Most of the changes weren't "work" in any sense we'd recognize. They were logs writing themselves, reports refreshing every hour, status files being rewritten over and over. Noise dressed up as movement.
And in the middle of all that noise, that very same week, two real tasks got stuck well past the time they'd been given. The things that actually mattered simply weren't visible, because they were small and quiet.
The big noise hid the small failure.
๐ ๏ธ What we changed
1๏ธโฃ We measure what got closed, not what moved. The question at the end of the day is how many tasks reached the finish line with a deliverable you can open and check, not how many files got touched.
2๏ธโฃ We separate noise from work. Logs and automated reports come out of the count. If they inflate the number, the number is lying.
3๏ธโฃ The threshold stays. It isn't a law of nature. It's the point where you stop and ask, "Wait, what's going on here?" A mechanism that stops you to ask is worth more than one more report.
After that change, the alert went back to being what it's supposed to be: a sign that something is genuinely out of the ordinary, not background noise.
๐ญ The vision
The next few years will split businesses into two kinds. The first kind will measure itself by how much the AI managed to get done, and will drown in activity. The second kind will measure itself by how much it can explain: what changed today, why, and what can be rolled back if needed.
I want us to be the second kind, and I help my clients get there. Not because we're slow, but because speed without understanding is just motion.
โ One question for this week
- If I asked you to tell me, in three lines, what really changed in your business this past week, could you?If not, that's where to start.
- Which metric do you look at: what moved, or what got closed?Only the second one tells you whether you made progress.
- Do you have a threshold that stops you to ask "what's going on here?"If not, there's probably noise hiding something from you.
Want to know what's really going on in your business?
I'm Yaniv. I help business owners bring in automation and AI without losing control: measuring what gets closed, not what moves.
Book a consultation with Yaniv ๐ฌOr visit my digital business card
