Watching the Washing Machine: What Employees With Agency Do With the Time AI Just Gave Them

By Jessica McNellis and Chris Gale Private capital is past the point of asking whether AI works. Advisors who'd never written a line of code are now building prospect utilities and portfolio models in a weekend, work that used to sit in a three- or four-year development backlog. The capability question is settled. The harder question, and the one most firms haven't answered yet, is what happens to all the time AI just gave back. The Grandmother and the Washing Machine Doug Fritz, co-founder of F2 Strategy and a 27-year veteran of private capital technology, put it plainly in a recent conversation on the The Definers podcast: "We're kind of in the watching the laundry machine mode right now as an industry, maybe as a society." Borrowing from an old analogy: a grandfather or grandmother, having done laundry by hand their entire life, watches their kid's new washing machine run its first 90-minute cycle, transfixed by the machine doing what used to take hours. A lot of our industry is in exactly that mode right now, watching the machine work and mistaking the marveling for a strategy. Doug is just as clear about where that leads if firms don't move past it. "We're just watching Kramer an extra eight hours a day or our golf handicap goes down. That's not really helpful in the industry." A funny line carrying a serious point. If a firm has no point of view on where saved time goes, the default isn't neutral, the default is nothing. Track It, or Regret It by Q4 The scale of the savings makes this urgent rather than academic. Industry leaders we're talking to say they see roughly a day per week in reclaimed time for advisors using these tools well. Left untracked, that number becomes a liability rather than an asset. "I guarantee by the end of this year, we're going to see firms that are reporting really aggressive AI budgets and then not aggressive ROIs or margin improvements," Doug says. The technology will have performed exactly as advertised, and it will still show up as a failure on paper because nobody measured what replaced the freed-up hours. That's not an AI problem. It's a management problem wearing an AI costume. The Instinct Leaders Should Resist The natural response is to solve this top-down. Decide what the reclaimed time is for, assign it, move on. That instinct is worth resisting. Doug's framing is more disciplined: "We don't want you staring at the washing machine. We want you doing something else. Do you have agency over what that is? Possibly, within some constraints. We don't typically give all of our employees infinite agency, but there could be a model of ‘choose your own adventure.’” That's the distinction leadership teams need to sit with. There's a real role for leaders here: you have to be giving your people those opportunities. You have to set them up for success. But that's different from unilaterally deciding what every advisor's reclaimed day should look like. One approach creates room and permission. The other builds a new backlog owned by leadership instead of the person doing the work. The stakes are higher than they first appear, because efficiency alone has never reliably converted into growth in this industry. "Every time we've given an advisor an efficiency, there is no direct correlation to growth. You have to ask for it. You have to focus on growth. There's a whole psychological reason around it," Doug shared, pointing to decades of advisor efficiency programs that never moved the needle on new business. Advisors, in his experience, are mostly in this business to help people, not to sell, which means a freed-up day left undirected is just as likely to become a day spent on nothing measurable, as it is to become a day spent on client development. The job for leadership is to keep the question in front of the organization and build enough structure that people have real, supported options, without collapsing that agency into a mandate. What This Looks Like in Practice Firms serious about capturing AI's value should be doing a few things now. Naming the time savings specifically, by role and function, rather than treating "AI is helping" as sufficient Resisting the urge to immediately refill freed-up capacity with a leadership driven initiative Giving people genuine, supported choices about where to reinvest their time Building the measurement discipline to show what that reinvestment actually produced, before a board asks for it. The technology has already answered the capability question. What's left is a leadership question. It's about how deliberately an organization manages the time it hands back. As Doug puts it, this moment is less about the tools themselves and more about "how leadership thinks about technology and operations and marketing." If AI is saving time for your team, how are they reinvesting that time? Find out.