Short conversation (Jason M. Lemkin with others) defining 'layup roles' as tasks where trustworthy AI tools exist but the work isn't happening inside organizations. Lemkin recommends starting with areas that are neglected or hard to hire for; the two quickest-adopted areas are customer support and engineering/programming. He advises founders/executives to try their own support to see deficiencies.
So where do people start? You met you, you did a post that was about the layup roles.
Yeah.
And can you define, like, what are these layup roles? If somebody is like, you have now almost a year's worth of experience.
Yeah.
And getting agents into production, you've seen what works, you've seen what doesn't work. What are these layup roles? Where should people start?
I think the layup, maybe it's Captain Obvious. The layup are the things where there is a tool that exists that is trustworthy, where it's just not getting done in your org.
Right.
And there are a lot of reasons that might not get done in your org. It might be an area that's tough to hire in. You might be in a geography that's tough to hire. It might just be your DNA.
Right.
There are companies that are very sales centric organizations. There's companies that are very product centric. If you like hate salespeople and you like product, maybe you should start with agentic sales.
Right.
If you love sales and that's your superpower. Right. Maybe get an AI to help you as an se. Right. Or to help you to support you as sales is a superpower. So don't try to replace the stuff that's sort of working. Look at where there's literally no one doing the work.
Right.
So there's a lot of them. But at a basic level, the two areas that took off the most quickly were support and programming, engineering.
Right.
A lot of us have terrible support. Terrible support.
Right.
So that's still the easiest layup of all. Like go try your own support yourself as a founder, an executive. I bet nine times out of ten you're going to cry how bad your support is. Not all of you, but people are often in tears when they do it.
100%. Yeah.
