Who Moved My Cheese?

When Spencer Johnson wrote Who Moved My Cheese?, he wasn't writing about artificial intelligence. But if he were writing it today, AI would probably be the "cheese."

The real threat was never the cheese moving. It's standing still while everything around you changes.

For years, we've been comfortable with the way we work. We built careers around processes we know, expertise we've developed, and routines we've perfected. Then AI arrived, and suddenly people are asking the same question the characters in the book asked when their cheese disappeared: Now what?

The fear is understandable. Every day there's another headline claiming AI will replace jobs, automate departments, or eliminate the need for certain skills. It's enough to make anyone wonder if they're being left behind.

But I don't believe AI is the real threat.

The lesson from Who Moved My Cheese? isn't that change is unfair. It's that change happens whether we're ready for it or not. The people who succeed aren't necessarily the smartest or the most experienced. They're the ones willing to move, learn, and adapt.

I've watched this play out with real clients.

One business owner was pricing jobs too low. Money was coming in every week, so from where he sat, business was good. What he couldn't see was margin per job versus revenue per job. Job costing broken down by project told a different story: he was losing money on almost every job he took.

He didn't believe it at first. We went over the reports together, in detail, every week for months before he started to see the reality. It wasn't a single conversation. It was a slow shift, week after week, until the pattern he'd been missing became impossible to ignore.

Once he saw it, everything about how he ran his business changed. He stopped guessing at prices and started getting real bids before every proposal. He calculated margin into every job instead of assuming it would work out. He began looking at each job individually instead of averaging success across the business. He even trained his project manager to manage to the budget, not just to the deadline.

Every transaction had been categorized correctly the whole time. The problem was never in the data. It was that no one had shown him, patiently and repeatedly, what the data actually meant. AI could have automated every one of those entries. It would never have sat with him for months until he believed it, and it would never have changed how he ran his jobs.

Another client, a different problem, the same blind spot.

She was growing her team, confident that more people meant more capacity, and more capacity meant more revenue. For a while, she stayed optimistic that the numbers would catch up. They didn't. Revenue per employee wasn't scaling the way she assumed it would, and it took about three months of looking at the data together before she was ready to act on what it was telling her.

Once she did, she didn't guess at a fix. She put the employee on a formal notice period with clear KPIs to hit, tied directly to the output that should have been showing up in the numbers. If performance didn't improve against those targets, she'd know for certain, not just suspect, that the cost of the role wasn't matching its value.

On paper, payroll had always been just an expense line, correctly recorded every pay period. What it couldn't show her was whether that expense was actually earning its keep. That took someone sitting with her in the numbers long enough to turn optimism into a decision.

Neither client had a data problem. They had a visibility problem.

That's what bookkeeping actually is, at its best: not data entry, but the judgment to look at correct numbers and see what they mean.

That's the opportunity AI creates across every profession. If your value comes from repeating the same task over and over, AI will probably change how that task gets done. But if your value comes from solving problems, building relationships, making decisions, or helping people see what they couldn't see on their own, AI becomes a tool, not your replacement.

Business owners face the same choice.

Some are resisting AI because they're afraid it will change everything. Others are embracing it without understanding how to use it responsibly. The best leaders are learning where AI fits into their business, where it saves time, and where human judgment still matters most.

The question isn't whether AI will change your industry. It already has.

The better question is whether you'll spend your energy worrying that the cheese moved, or start looking for where the new opportunities are.

Our job has never been to hold on to the past. It's to make informed decisions, embrace better tools, and keep creating value for the people we serve.

The businesses that thrive over the next decade won't be the ones that fear AI. They'll be the ones that use it wisely while continuing to do what AI can't: lead people, build trust, and catch what correct numbers alone will never tell you.

Neither of my clients had a data problem. They had a visibility problem. If you're not sure which one you have, that's usually the first thing worth finding out.