“Cutting costs with AI” sounds sharp until the bots get confused and your help desk catches fire. We sat down with Matt Peters of Fixify to unpack a smarter path: design for the mix—pair automation and agentic AI with skilled people who step in at the right moments—and invest in the management muscle that keeps quality rising as complexity grows.
Matt explains how Fixify handles roughly 75% of break‑fix tickets by integrating with existing stacks, not ripping and replacing. We dig into the false choice of quality versus cost, why seven direct reports remains a meaningful manager span, and how AI changes capital allocation more than it eliminates headcount. You’ll hear a practical hiring framework—experience, skills, traits—that helps teams screen for resilience, systems thinking, collaboration, and trust, the traits that actually scale when problems evolve and tools shift underfoot.
We also explore the idea that “everyone is a manager of one.” Communicating intent, setting context, decomposing work, and giving feedback aren’t soft extras—they’re now the core skills for directing AI agents and shipping reliable outcomes. Matt shares real examples of multi‑agent problem solving, the onboarding playbooks that prevent new‑hire limbo, and the performance conversations that name superpowers with concrete evidence so people grow where they add the most value.
If you’re leading a growing team or modernizing IT support, this conversation offers a grounded blueprint: integrate with what works, automate the obvious, reserve humans for the weird and the vital, and train managers to orchestrate it all. Subscribe, share this episode with a founder or IT leader who needs it, and leave a review with your biggest question about scaling people and AI together.