Everyone used to get knocked up at 5am…
No, not that kind of knocked up, here’s what I mean.
There was a job, where a man walked your street at 5am and tapped a long stick against your bedroom window so you wouldn't be late for your shift at work.
They called him the knocker-upper.
No alarm clocks yet in the 1800’s. So English mill towns paid a guy to walk the same route every morning with a pole, sometimes tipped with wire, sometimes firing dried peas at upper floors. He'd wake a whole street, one window at a time, for measly pay.
I can imagine people didn’t like his wake up call very much.
It was a real profession. It lasted close to a hundred years.
Then it was gone.
Not because anyone banned it. Alarm clocks got cheap. And here's the part nobody tells you: the knocker-uppers didn't vanish into nothing.
Lamplighters went the same way when electric streetlights showed up.
Switchboard operators disappeared when phones learned to dial themselves. Rooms full of "human computers" doing math by hand got replaced by the thing we now just call a computer.
Every one of those jobs died. And every time, a bigger set of jobs showed up on the other side nobody could've anticipated.
I watched a version of this coaching martial arts school owners for years. Half of them burned real hours a week on stuff that felt like the job: texting reminders, chasing no-shows, billing admin work. It wasn't the job. It was knocker-upper work.
The owners who let AI take that over didn't end up with less to do. They ended up with different work. Actual teaching and relationship building.
That's the bet with AI right now, for any business. It's not coming for your company. It's coming for your knocker-upper tasks, the repetitive stuff you still do by hand because nobody's built you an alarm clock yet.
"What will AI replace" is the wrong question.
The right one: which three things on your plate this week only exist because no one's automated them, and what would you do with your time if they stopped needing you?
Time to try the Knocker-Upper Audit
Copy this into ChatGPT or Claude:
I run a [type of business]. Here's a rough list of everything I personally did this week that I believe could be automated: [use wispr flow to talk about everything you did] . Flag anything that's repetitive or rule-based, the same every time, tasks that exist because no one's automated them yet, not because they need my judgment. For each one, tell me what a simple AI workflow to handle it would look like, and what I should do with that time instead. Ask me up to 5 clarifying questions, one at a time, then feed me your answer.
Somewhere on your list this week is a guy with a long grey beard and a stick, tapping on your window. Find him, retire him. Then go do the work only you can do.
Matt
PS: If you want help finding your knocker-upper tasks and building the AI that retires them, reply "knocker."
BTW- I don’t AI is taking all of our jobs, you won’t get doom and gloom from me, but I do believe the people who use AI efficiently will put those who refuse to use it out of work.