One of the tricks in business is to arrange things so that you get more out than you put in.
Here’s a simple example from advertising legend Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy. He included it in the brilliant Foreword he wrote for my book Start With What Works: A Faster Way to Grow Your Business.
I’ll let Rory speak for himself:
“Just as I was finishing writing this Foreword, someone came to me with a very sweet story about a poor young woman in Africa who sold hard boiled eggs to people working on building sites. She’d discovered that when she bundled them with a tomato and herb salad, which cost almost nothing to produce, certainly far less than an egg, what she was selling was no longer just an egg, but lunch. At that point, she was able to charge more than double the price of an egg for something that cost far less than two eggs to produce.”
In case this seems like a quaint example, go and look at a ‘Protein Pot’ in an M&S Food Hall. It’s an almost identical product (it came out after the book – I don’t know if Rory had anything to do with it).
Rory concluded his story as follows;
“Never ever forget that lesson. Value resides in the mind of the customer. You won’t understand it if you spend all your time at your desk. You need a different perspective. Andy’s book will encourage you to get out and find one.”
It’s because value resides in the mind of the customer that you can get more out than you put in.
The first Start With What Works principle is to ‘Recombine existing elements so they create more value.’ You look beyond what you think you know about customers, and explore how they understand value from their point of view. The magic happens when you realise how much more you can provide for your customer using either what you have already, or what you can easily add to the mix. That’s how you turn an egg into lunch.
It’s also a clue as to the potentially most valuable application of AI to many businesses.
The temptation is to treat AI as a kind of external saviour – something you bolt on in the hope that it will transform performance. But the real opportunity is much closer to Rory’s example: finding better ways of combining what you already have so that they become something more valuable in the mind of the customer.
Last week I had lunch with the CEO of a fast-growing IT managed services business. We agreed that one of the most powerful and intriguing possibilities for AI was that you can profitably and disproportionately grow your revenue while ramping up your headcount more slowly and carefully. That means it’s easier to protect your culture because you onboard people more gradually.
That’s just one possibility. How else can AI become a form of amplification rather than substitution – a way of turning more of your existing ‘eggs’ into ‘lunch’?
Well, you could:
- surface and recombine insights already sitting in your people’s heads, turning tacit knowledge into repeatable commercial value.
- amplify your best people by codifying how they think and enabling others to operate at a higher level.
- turn existing customer interactions into a continuous source of value creation, extracting patterns and opportunities you’re already generating but not fully using.
- accelerate the translation between technical and commercial teams, unlocking value that is already present but is currently trapped.
- increase the yield from your current workflows by removing friction, allowing the same people to produce more valuable outcomes rather than simply more output.
The question, then, is not “Where do we use AI?” but “Where are we already creating value that could be amplified?” That requires a different perspective – closer to the customer, closer to the work that actually takes place, and closer to the often underused capabilities of your own people. If you get that right, AI doesn’t replace what you do. It makes what you already do more valuable: so you get more out than you put in.
© Andy Bass 2026