Last week was a busy week. I spent it in NYC, participating in Tech Week. For those unfamiliar, each year, Andreessen Horowitz orchestrates a decentralized week-long tech conference in key tech ecosystems. This is my second year attending in New York. There were >1,500 events that covered pretty much any topic in tech you could imagine.

This piece won’t be all about the trip. I bring it up because a topic I often discuss with entrepreneurs surfaced repeatedly in 1:1 conversations and panel discussions: Before you automate, understand the business problem and map the process.

So often, the temptation is to jump to a solution: “[Insert] is so manual. Tell me how to use AI to automate it.”

One of my first questions is typically: “Have you mapped out the process?”

More times than you might think, the answer is no.

When that happens, it’s back to the basics.

Remember, AI is a tool. A powerful one, but definitely not omniscient.

Think about your favorite SaaS platforms built for the prior wave of automation: Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, Zapier, HubSpot, Zendesk, Slack. Each has power. Each is also capable of creating more noise than structure when configured around a poorly understood process.

AI is no different. The quality of the output is a direct function of the clarity of the input (i.e., context), the logic of the workflow and the humans who shape it. Put a broken process in, get a faster broken process out.

In a 2024 study, RAND outlined five root causes of AI project failure. Three of them point directly at this problem:

The teams that will see the most impact from AI-related projects will be those that do the unglamorous work of understanding the business problem and underlying process first.

Before jumping straight to the finish line, slow down (just a smidge). These five steps will help you get to the right place for your business.

AI may or may not be the optimal way to solve the business problem at hand.

But, if it is, your life will be much easier at implementation if you follow the steps above.

AI is all about context. That context includes a clear understanding of how work happens and what you need the AI to do.

What helps with that?

Process mapping (a la Steps #3 and #4). Not a novel concept. But consistently, one of the first steps people want to skip.

To circle back to NY Tech Week, the last event I attended was hosted by IBM and titled: “How AI is transforming the workforce model – and what comes next for talent strategy.”

The panelists included the Chief People Officer of Bank of America and the Chief HR Officer at IBM. At one point, one of them said (and I may not have the quote 100%, but it’s close enough):

This isn’t just my soapbox. It isn’t only these two senior executives, either. It came up many times with different groups of people last week. That’s a theme worth paying attention to.

If you’re trying to figure out where AI or automation fits in your business, don’t start with the tools. Start with the problem. Follow these steps and see where you land.

Juni is an app for parents of children under 1 year old. For the parenting questions that are too important to Google, Juni gives you a real answer drawn from pediatric experts and science. While other apps track your baby's milestones, Juni focuses on what you need to do to prepare for them with practical tips, checklists, and reminders that take the mental load off of new parents.

Q: When did you know you were destined to build a business?
A: “I did not, at least not for most of my life. If you looked at my resume, you would see a straight line and assume it was a plan. I'm an immigrant. I came to the U.S. from India for my Master's and PhD in Computer Science, and then I spent ten years building large-scale systems at startups and at companies like Teradata and Intel. Every step looked deliberate, but none of it was aimed at starting a company. I was good at building systems, I had the title and the career, and the plan, to the extent there was one, was to keep climbing.

Then I became a mother and everything changed. I was burnt out long before that, but postpartum was harder than I expected. The sleep and the recovery were part of it, but what actually broke me was the cognitive load of being responsible for every detail of another person's survival while having nothing left over to look as competent as I always had. When it was time to go back to my job, I didn't want to do it. That frightened me, because I had spent 15 years being the person who always delivered, and now I could not return to the work I was supposedly built for.

During that same period, I kept running into the same realization. Every decision I was making as a new parent was one that millions of parents had already made before me, and I was still figuring out each one alone at 3 a.m. on Google, as if I were the first person who ever needed to know whether a fever meant a trip to the ER. The information was out there and so was the expertise, but there was no system that actually held any of it for you, and whether you got real support depended almost entirely on your circumstances: who you knew, what you could afford, whether your own mother lived close by. The part of me that had spent a decade building systems that hold load at scale recognized that for what it was, a systems problem. That was the point where things changed.

It felt less like being destined to be a founder and more like finding a problem I could not stop thinking about, one I happened to have exactly the right background to work on. I went to Stanford Business School for two months for their Ignite program. It was where I let myself take it seriously, where it stopped being something I complained about and became something I was building. What I understand now is that I am not drawn to building a business for its own sake. I am drawn to a mission, true support, and accessibility for new parents, because that should never depend on your situation. That mission became Juni.

Behind it sits a longer ten-year goal of building early childhood intervention systems for parts of the world that do not have them yet, especially India. So the honest answer to how I knew is that I didn't. Life broke the plan and put the problem in front of me, and the conviction came once I had found the mission.“

Q: What’s the most unexpected thing (+/-) that’s happened along your entrepreneurial journey?
A: “The first is confidence in failing. I spent twenty years in environments where one visible mistake could undo a lot of quiet good work, and I assumed running my own company would make that fear worse. The opposite happened. When you fail this often and keep going anyway, the fear loses its grip.

The second is how generous people are when you are actually building something. I came from a corporate world where access is guarded and earned slowly, so I expected founding a company to be lonelier and more competitive. Instead, people I barely knew gave me their time, honest feedback, and introductions, simply because they wanted the thing I was building to exist.

The third is harder. I underestimated how much of this would be grief. Not dramatic failure, just the slow letting go of a version of myself with a clear title, a steady paycheck, a visa tied to a stable job, and a story my immigrant parents could explain easily back home. I expected the challenge to be the work. The unexpected part was mourning the identity I left behind to do it.

If I had to name the single biggest one: I assumed building a company would mostly test my skills. It has mostly tested my relationship with uncertainty, with my own brain, and with who I am when the external markers are gone. That is not the journey I signed up for, but it is the one that has actually changed me.“

Q: When did you hit your first scaling challenge, and how did you overcome it?
A: “It showed up at the seam between product and distribution, which is not where I expected it. I spent a decade building large-scale systems, so the product side came naturally. I have been building Juni for a decent scale from day one. You go from 10 users to 100, then 1,000, then 10,000, and the architecture can mostly take that path. The harder problem is that you have to build distribution for 10,000 long before you have them, and you cannot fully scale both at once. The real question becomes which one you scale back on, product or go to market, and for me, the bottleneck has clearly been the second one. There was also a quieter scaling problem underneath both, and it was me.

Every decision, every reply to an early user, every piece of the build ran through one person, and that person has ADHD and a small child. No amount of clean architecture fixes a constraint sitting in your own calendar. I could not solve it by hiring, so I changed what I optimized. I started treating my time like a scarce system resource, assigning a rough value to every task in a week and only protecting the highest ones, and I leaned hard on generous people instead of being the single point of everything.

On distribution itself, marketing is the part I am actively scaling, and it does not behave the way systems do. I have leaned on community partnerships and getting into the room with my ideal customer rather than paid channels and ads. That choice is deliberate, but organic, authentic growth is genuinely hard to scale before product market fit, because the trust and word of mouth that make it work are exactly the things you cannot buy or rush. The honest answer is that I have not fully circumvented this. I have accepted the trade. I keep the product slightly ahead of where we are, scale myself as deliberately as I scale the company, and grow distribution at the pace authenticity allows, on the bet that trust compounds better than spend once we hit PMF.“

Q: If you were starting all over, what’s one piece of advice you would give yourself?
A: “Don't be afraid to fail trying bigger things. And learn to delegate effectively.“

Q: Do you have one ask or offer you would like to share with the Empower community?
A: “If you are in late pregnancy or have a child under 1 year of age, sign up for Juni parenting app:”

Q: A fun one, what’s your all-time favorite restaurant and where is it located?
A: “It is authentic north Indian food in the city I grew up in - Kolkata, India.“

For more about Juni and to sign up as a Founding Member, check out the website here. You can also follow along on IG or TikTok.