Ops teams are always under pressure to cut costs, but they rarely get prioritised for dev time or allocated budget for new tools. They're stuck firefighting with no space to build something better.

If you're an ops person who learns to build automations or AI tools – even small ones – you can create tools with massive leverage. And you're uniquely positioned to do this well. You're in the weeds so you see exactly what's causing drag and with AI, you can build something quickly to fix it (or at least make it less bad).

The impact compounds as you move through the operation, continually improving it, fixing bottleneck after bottleneck.

If you don't have these skills in your team, you're stuck doing everything manually, hiring linearly with growth.

There's going to be a divergence where two similar businesses look identical from the outside, but one needs half the people to run the same operation.

The role of 'AI operator' doesn't really exist yet as a job title. But it will. And the companies who figure out how to build or hire or train for it are going to have a structural cost advantage that's very hard to compete with.