NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Why Now Is the Time to A.I. Audit Your Business

A.I. isn’t an optional add-on. It’s foundational and roughly equivalent to electricity or the internet.

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

Jun 17, 2025

 

In most of my conversations over the last year with new business owners and seasoned operators, all of whom are all concerned about ChatGPT’s impact on the economy, I’ve found an interesting contradiction in the way entrepreneurs are approaching the use and incorporation of A.I. I see a whole lot of wait and see.  Is it a genius or a clown?

While the novelty is starting to wear off, and the hiccups and hallucinations are certainly reasons for caution, the critical need to investigate, engage with and integrate these new technologies has yet to be fully appreciated and folded into the planning and operations of millions of businesses that really can’t afford to wait. They’re taking their time when the time to move is now and the timing couldn’t be more critical.

It’s not that hard to see why they’re conflicted. They’ve lived their entire business lives trying to be innovators, first movers and early adopters of new technologies in order to stay ahead of the competition. The “ready, fire, aim” attitude has mostly served them well over the years. But the truth is that smart entrepreneurs are far more careful and conservative than we’ve been led to believe. In fact, many are control freaks.

So, when they’re confronted with a pitch that basically says they should turn over some of their business processes to the “machine” because it will be good for their bottom line, they’re more than a little wary and reluctant to jump right in.  00:0001:49

Add to their basic mindset the fact that they understand almost nothing about how these black boxes really work, that they rarely have anyone presently onboard who can help them learn or who is up-to-speed on AI themselves, and that things seem to be moving ahead and changing at a ridiculously rapid pace. This makes for a perfect formula for angst and analysis paralysis. But, as is always the case, worrying never gets you anywhere and standing still is never the right solution.  A bad decision is often better than no decision at all. 

The good news is that there are simple and cost-effective steps forward –“toes in the water” if you will – that every company can take to get the ball rolling, and none are “bet the ranch” actions or expensive decisions. They’re simply smart ways to get smarter sooner.  

Every business today needs to conduct an AI audit if they don’t want to be left behind. AI isn’t an optional add-on at this point; it’s foundational and roughly equivalent to electricity or the internet. In the call center industry, for example, it’s now estimated that AI agents will handle 70 percent of all contacts by 2028. 

The first order of business doesn’t require technologists or AI experts. It’s simply a comprehensive review by your senior leaders of various areas of the business where AI may be able to help. Not, to be sure, by working immediate miracles (in spite of all the hype about eliminating hundreds of jobs overnight), but by helping you identify improvements, import better practices, and eliminate obstacles in your current operations.  

In my experience, this audit and review exercise also encourages your people to do some wishful thinking, to look forward to what could be, and to even think outside of their day-to-day, nose-to-the-grindstone activities and responsibilities. It’s a literal license to iterate and constantly improve.  

Broadly speaking, I’d break the critical categories down into four major buckets: automation of various internal processes, automation of various external processes, cleaning up and streamlining basic operations, and all your employee issues from augmentation, robotics, and realignment to concerns around recruitment and retention.

Once you’ve built a hit list and a wish list, you can bring in some professional help, a prompt engineer or two, and other AI resources to start building some solutions. Here are four examples.

Internal processes 

The long-term dream of a paperless digital world remains a remote and ambitious fantasy for millions of companies still drowning in reams of paper reports, receipts, requisitions, and records of all kinds. From the accounting department to the shipping center and personnel department, AI tools will create massive improvements in the traditional systems and antiquated procedures used in virtually every business, government agency and regulatory authority. Automation, digital records and AI-enabled identification processes will improve diagnostics in medical facilities, security in all of our transportation hubs and public areas, and in the entire finance world. 

External processes 

As the world becomes increasingly comfortable with ATMs, self-service checkout counters, and other forms of automation, AI systems can speed up, simplify, enhance and scale all of your front-of-house interactions with customers, clients and consumers including sales, service, and support. Millions of bank customers already acknowledge that they would rather not deal with a teller if efficient alternatives were available. AI tools can also streamline, simplify and optimize websites which, in many instances, companies haven’t reviewed or updated in years to improve customer experience and speed up the process.   

Basic operations 

Real-time review, ongoing support and enhancement, and timely intervention to avoid problems, breakdowns and other system interruptions are already being implemented in manufacturing firms around the world. The ability to project needs, demands and resource requirements will build even further upon the economic success of many just-in-time supply and warehousing chains and save huge amounts of time and money. Having AI systems review months or years of prior actions and activities and generate detailed analytics on the fly will provide insights, new directions, and even concrete suggestions for process improvements and better use of personnel and other materials and resources.  

People  

AI and related intelligent agentic devices and robotics can augment and supplement the work done by your employees to improve accuracy, capacity and safety as well as avoiding burnout, repetitive behavior injuries, and human errors. Systems are already being designed to identify, evaluate and categorize job applicants on a variety of criteria, to assist in scaling and speeding their documentation, onboarding and training, and to outline and create multi-year individualized career paths for each team member which serve as great recruiting tools and help to manage education, expectations and attitudes as well as improving retention. MIT and Nvidia Research have already developed a new algorithm that enables a robot to “think ahead” in a planning process and evaluate thousands of alternative paths in seconds. 

The bottom line is, you don’t know what you don’t know about your own business until you ask. Now’s the time to start asking. There’s no better, more cost-effective system than an AI system built for and based upon your own data as well as employing comparable data and other information drawn from the industry, your competitors’ reports and activities, and all manner of other external information and data sources. An AI audit is step number one.  

The Tyrant Test

 

The Tyrant Test

A leader who uses military force to suppress his political opposition ought to lose the right to govern.

By Adam Serwer

California Highway Patrol officers arrest a demonstrator in the overpass of the 101 Freeway as protests continue in response to federal immigration operations in Los Angeles on June 10, 2025. (Apu Gomes / AFP / Getty)

June 16, 2025, 12:43 PM ET

 

For as long as I’ve been alive, American presidents have defined tyrants by their willingness to use military force against their own people in reprisal for political opposition. This was a staple of Cold War presidential rhetoric, and it survived long into the War on Terror era.

Ronald Reagan declared in 1981 that “it is dictatorships, not democracies, that need militarism to control their own people and impose their system on others.” His successor, George H. W. Bush, did the same in 1992, talking about American presidents confronting the Warsaw Pact, which had been “lashed together by occupation troops and quisling governments and, when all else failed, the use of tanks against its own people.” Bill Clinton, when justifying strikes against the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1998, emphasized that Hussein had used his arsenal “against civilians, against a foreign adversary, and even against his own people.” George W. Bush repeated that justification when invading Iraq in 2003, saying that Hussein’s government “practices terror against its own people.” Barack Obama, when intervening in Libya on behalf of rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi, warned that Qaddafi had said “he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people.”

It would be absurd to say that American presidents have always been principled defenders of freedom and democracy, but their long-shared, bipartisan definition of tyrant is one who oppresses his own. So it’s striking that these warnings about tyrants in distant lands, who were supposedly the opposite of the kind of legitimate, democratic leaders elected the United States of America, now apply to the sitting U.S. president, Donald Trump. It is a simple but morally powerful formulation: A leader who uses military force to suppress their political opposition forfeits the right to govern. You could call this the “tyrant test,” and Trump is already failing it.

Trump came into office promising to carry out a “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants. Because of a degraded information environment riddled with right-wing propaganda, many Trump supporters came to think this meant he would target criminals whom the Biden administration allegedly was allowing to rampage freely throughout America. Instead, driven by Stephen Miller, immigration authorities have targeted workers, families, and asylum seekers—people who show up to their ICE appointments—for deportation. Agents have raided schools, workplaces, and homes—masked and out of uniform—methods more akin to secret police than civilian law enforcement in a democracy. Some deportees have been sent to a Gulag in El Salvador, while others have vanished or been expelled to third-party countries where they face dangerous circumstances. Predictably, these heavy-handed tactics have produced a backlash, most extensively in Los Angeles, where the Trump administration has sent detachments of Marines and the National Guard to discourage American citizens from expressing opposition to these methods.

Although there are circumstances where an intervention by the National Guard might be justified, such a decision typically involves the judgment of local authorities—and what’s happening in Los Angeles now is nothing like Arkansas’s school-segregation crisis in 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Guard to protect Black students facing a racist mob trying to prevent them from attending school.

Targeting California is no accident. Republican propaganda consistently paints blue states such as California as unlivable hellholes. Some of the protests have been violent and have  given way to vandalism, but not at a level that requires a military deployment, regardless of right-wing propaganda outlets’ best efforts to depict L.A. as a city on the brink of destruction. American service members have been ordered there not to protect their compatriots but to intimidate them at gunpoint for the sin of opposing the president. On Friday, for the first time, U.S. Marines detained a civilian, in apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. The person in question was an Army veteran headed for the Veterans Affairs building in L.A.

The president and many of his prominent supporters seem eager for escalation. Trump has said that Los Angeles has been “invaded and occupied by illegal aliens and criminals,” and that “violent, insurrectionist mobs” have been “swarming and attacking” immigration-enforcement officers. Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X that “insurrectionists carrying foreign flags are attacking immigration enforcement officers, while one-half of America’s political leadership has decided that border enforcement is evil.”

Miller accused L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who had pointed out that the city had been more peaceful prior to the administration’s response, of “insurrection.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has been urging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use the military to detain American citizens, vowed at a press conference to “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city”—just moments before federal officers forcibly removed Senator Alex Padilla of California and pushed him to the ground when he tried to ask questions.

Right-wing media, aware that the administration’s actions and rhetoric resemble those of dictatorships, have been telling their audiences that the protests have all been cooked up by Democrats to trap Trump into acting like a dictator—never mind his obvious fondness for dictatorship. “Democrats are causing mayhem in their cities, so when Trump restores order, they can label him a dictator and stir up even more hatred and violence against him,” the Fox News host Jesse Watters said on Monday. “They’re burning their own cities just to prove to their bloodthirsty base that they’re fighting Trump in the streets, burning their own cities for power.” Someone might be bloodthirsty, but it’s not the Democrats.

If L.A. had been taken over by insurrectionist mobs, the Trump modus operandi would be to pardon them and give them money—though only insurrectionists who try to overthrow the government on Trump’s behalf, of course. Instead, the protests provoked by the administration’s authoritarian tactics appear to be mere pretext for using force against Trump’s political opposition. The L.A. police chief, Jim McDonnell, said the city’s police force could handle the protests without assistance, but such a move would deny Trump his excuse for using the military against Americans who have the temerity to oppose him. This has long been a fantasy of Trump’s—he praised China’s crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protest movement as having “put it down with strength.” Last week, he warned that anyone who protested his wasteful, self-worshipping military parade would be met “with very big force.”

How did Republicans go from condemning leaders who threaten their own citizens to becoming sycophants for one? Here, too, we find a holdover of Cold War rhetoric: the use of Third World to describe multicultural communities such as Los Angeles.

In the 1950s, the terms First World, Second World, and Third World emerged as a means to describe Western-aligned nations, Soviet-aligned governments, and emerging nations not allied with either faction, respectively. Third World soon came to be used as a pejorative term for poor, nonwhite countries—full of human beings who could be considered disposable.

And that’s exactly how Trump officials and their allies are referring to communities such as Los Angeles in order to justify using military force. Last night, following the massive “No Kings” protests across the country, Trump posted on his social network Truth Social that he was directing ICE to “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities,” which he called “the core of the Democrat Power Center”; he further described immigration as turning America into a “Third World dystopia.”

The post echoed similar language from right-wing-media figures who, last week, began repeating the same rote talking points about the need to ban all “Third World” immigration. The conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, who spoke at Trump rallies during the 2024 election campaign, displayed on his podcast, as part of an argument for Trump using the military to “take back the streets of LA. Do it and do it fast,” a chart from a white-nationalist website showing the white population of Los Angeles declining. Kirk also made explicit that he wasn’t borrowing just the chart from a white-nationalist website but also its ideological conclusions about the threat that nonwhite people pose. “This is the Great Replacement Theory,” Kirk explained. “Remember we talked about how they want to replace white Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants with Mexican, Nicaraguans, with El Salvadorians.” The term Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants is wildly archaic, 1930s racism. What’s next in the Republican-aligned podcast world? Rants about swarthy Sicilians and perfidious Jews?

The increased support Trump received in the 2024 election from nonwhite voters hasn’t altered prominent Trump proponents’ view that America is the white man’s birthright and that all others are merely interlopers. “The deeper goal is to reshape America demographically. It is to make America less white, less European by descent,” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh declared. “You’re not gonna destroy Western civilization just by winning the next midterms or whatever. You destroy it by importing non-Western people.”

These ideas weren’t coming from just commentators. Attorney General Pam Bondi said L.A. “looked like a Third World country” on Fox News; Miller posted on X that “huge swaths of the city where I was born now resemble failed third world nations. A ruptured, balkanized society of strangers.” If Los Angeles is “balkanized,” that is because it has a long history of being forcibly segregated by race, starting decades before Miller was born. But here, Miller’s objection is not a call for integration but an expression of rage that the city is less white than it used to be. On Thursday night, Trump said “illegal aliens” were turning America into a “Third World Nation” and declared, “I am reversing the invasion. It’s called remigration,” using a European far-right term for ethnic cleansing of nonwhite immigrants from European countries, regardless of status or citizenship.

The math here doesn’t take much effort. In the view of these officials and commentators, California (and, by extension, America) has been ruined by immigration from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, which is what makes mass deportation and the use of American military force against their own people necessary. As it happens, this coincides rather neatly with Miller’s expressed view that the repeal of racist restrictions on immigration in the 1960s destroyed the country. Both inside and outside the administration, the consensus of prominent Trumpists is that if you are not white, you are a threat to Western civilization. This is how they rationalize Trump failing the tyrant test—the threat of military force is being made against people the administration and its propagandists want you to see as not truly American.

This is how a tyrant thinks. Every dictator who has ever cracked down on political opposition has done so by rendering them internal foreigners in rhetoric and deed, invaders of the body politic who can justly be crushed like insects. Those serving in uniform, military or civilian, should ask themselves whether becoming a tyrant’s instrument against their own communities is what they had in mind when they signed up.

America Is at a Terrifying Turning Point—and There’s No Going Back

 

This political violence is different from the Weathermen–Patty Hearst iteration back in the ’70s. Today, one of our two political parties abets it. That isn’t going to change, and it’s almost certain to get worse. That will lead to more acts of violence on the other side, and eventually … Libya, here we come.

 

America Is at a Terrifying Turning Point—and There’s No Going Back

Why the events of this past weekend should worry everyone who wants a peaceful democracy

 

Saturday was a surreal day in American politics, in ways simultaneously horrifying and heartening. The horrifying part was the news we all woke up to about the political assassinations (both attempted and consummated) in Minnesota. The heartening was the millions who showed up for the nationwide No Kings marches, which probably made June 14, 2025, the largest single day of political protest in American history. Somewhere in between was Donald Trump’s poorly attended military parade, which turned out to be more troubling in conception than execution, but which nevertheless did not rest comfortably, to put it mildly, within the tradition of the military not being exploited by presidents for political purposes.

Add them all up, though, and throw in the manhandling late last week of a United States senator and the sneering reaction to it on the right, and you can’t help but feel that the country is coming further apart and lurching toward a state of violence—specifically political violence—not seen here since the 1970s.

There’s a difference, though, between the violence of that era and today’s, and it’s an important one to understand. Back then, it felt aberrational and temporary; like America was going through a generational convulsion over some specific issues (civil rights, Vietnam) and that matters would somehow sort themselves out in time. Now? It feels like it’s getting worse by the year and it’s here to stay—that political violence will just be a feature of American life, sort of like, oh, Libya.

I did not choose Libya entirely at random. ACLED, which stands for Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, is an international group that “collects information on the dates, actors, locations, fatalities, and types of all reported political violence and protest events around the world.” Sunday, I had a look at the ACLED Conflict Index issued in July 2023. As you can see from this map, it places the world’s nations in four categories of political violence: extreme, high, turbulent, and low/inactive.

Ten countries occupy the “extreme” category. Twenty are in the “high” group, and another 20 are marked as “turbulent.” These 50 countries, ACLED says, account for 97 percent of all political violence in the world.

The United States is fiftieth—right behind Libya at 49. Now, for some context, I should note that some countries that rank well below the United States are hardly paradises on earth. China, for example, ranks sixty-ninth—not, presumably, because everyone is tickled to live there but because even theoretical attempts at violence against the state are suppressed by the regime in so many ways, like the infamous requirement that Uyghurs register with the local authorities the existence in their homes of kitchen knives.

Still—50 ain’t where we wanna be, folks.

If this isn’t persuasive to you, then let’s look at the matter from the other direction—that is, from the degree of peacefulness that exists in a given country. A group called Vision of Humanity produces a yearly report called the Global Peace Index, which, according to their website, takes into account “23 quantitative and qualitative indicators” and gives the nations of the world a score from one to five, lower being more peaceful.

The top ones on the 2024 index are roughly what you’d expect. Iceland at 1.112, Austria at 1.313, New Zealand at 1.323, and so on (Singapore is up there, indicating, again, that nation-states have different ways of maintaining the peace).

The United States? We rank 132nd, just behind Brazil and ahead of Iran and Lebanon. We did fare better on the group’s 2022 Positive Peace Index, which measures societal resilience; we tied with Spain for twenty-sixth. That’s not embarrassing, although one could easily argue that, for the country that is by far the world’s richest nation, which should have many billions to invest in such resiliency in the form of various social supports, 26 isn’t so hot.

 

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All of these reports, as you may have noticed, are from before Trump’s return to the White House. It’s pretty hard to imagine next year’s numbers will show an improvement.

Is there violence on “both sides”? Sure there is. Some of the recent violence against Jews, like the Molotov cocktail attack in Boulder and the shooting of that Israeli couple in Washington, D.C., was perpetrated by people who were acting on behalf of a cause associated with the left. These attacks were repulsive on every level, and we need to call them what they were.

But I had to laugh darkly Saturday evening as I saw many conservatives on social media, prominent and not, try to locate an aha! moment in the fact that Vance Boelter, the Minnesota suspect, was appointed to a state advisory board by two Democratic governors. Please. He was targeting abortion providers. His neighbor said he was a Trump voter.

As for violence at the No Kings marches—there was a little. But the most notable instance was the man driving his car into a group of anti-Trump protesters in Culpeper, Virginia. Gee, I seem to remember another man in Virginia who drove his car into a phalanx of protesters, killing one of them. Which side was he on again?

“The left,” very broadly defined, engages in some acts of violence. Sure. But America’s culture of violence is driven by the right. And here’s the important point. This broadly defined “left” includes people and groups that despise the Democratic Party as much as or even more than they do Republicans. Antifa activists weren’t racing to the polls to vote for Kamala Harris, I assure you. Whereas on the right, the extremists worship Trump. He is their avenger. No Democratic presidential candidate would welcome the support of violent extremist groups (not that they would even offer it). Trump has. Repeatedly. They were at the U.S. Capitol for him on January 6, 2021, ready to administer a little street justice to his vice president in his name and in order to keep him in office illegally.

And that is why this political violence is different from the Weathermen–Patty Hearst iteration back in the ’70s. Today, one of our two political parties abets it. That isn’t going to change, and it’s almost certain to get worse. That will lead to more acts of violence on the other side, and eventually … Libya, here we come.

Michael Tomasky