The Margin I Made — and What I Did With It
This time, I am the business owner in the story.
It is nearly midnight. I have been waiting several minutes for a response from my AI — work that would have taken most of the day is almost done in a couple of hours. While I wait, I pull up another tab. There is one more thing I could get to tonight.
This is not a complaint. It is a confession.
Every article in this series has followed a similar shape. A business owner faces a decision. A named employee — someone whose livelihood, dignity, and calling are at stake — stands in the background of that decision. We introduce the GRACE framework as a tool for slowing down to fully examine the implications of the decision so that the decision can be made thoughtfully and intentionally, and not just responding to the accelerated pace enabled by AI.
This issue is different. I cannot share client stories at the level of detail this analysis requires. But I can share my own. So this time, I am the business owner in the scenario — and the employee whose formation is at stake is also me.
The Scenario
Several months ago, I narrowed focus of my consulting business to helping small business owners navigate AI. We also increased our own use of AI in five significant ways.
- Website redesign. Using AI to sharpen our positioning and Claude Code to rebuild the site, we completed a full redesign in less than a day — a process that previously would have taken weeks.
- AI Roadmap service. We designed this service from the ground up — a complete, customized AI plan for a client that, with AI’s help, we can deliver in one to two weeks; without it, the same engagement would take a month or more.
- This newsletter. AI now helps me plan, draft, and edit every issue of The Smart Steward, cutting what once took a full day down to an hour or two.
- Client portal. We built a secure hub for consulting documents, tutorial videos, and a growing resource database using AI-assisted development.
- Faithful Intelligence. I launched a second weekly newsletter, using AI to summarize and filter fifteen or more industry sources into a curated briefing for faith-driven business leaders.
The work has genuine value. Clients are getting better outcomes faster. Readers are being served.
And yet.
The Challenge
Here’s what AI adoption has really produced in my business: more output, more deadlines, and more capacity for more of both.
The margin AI created has not become rest. It has not become depth. It has become fuel for more production.
There is something underneath this worth examining closely, because it is not unique to our situation. AI adoption can quietly feed a particular kind of urgency — the sense that faithfulness requires keeping pace, that stewardship means producing more, that slowing down is a failure of calling. What begins as genuine productivity slides, without much fanfare, into performing.
This is the challenge this issue takes seriously: not whether AI creates margin, but what that margin is actually for — and what it reveals about the character of the leader who holds it.
Applying GRACE
Goods in Tension
The goods in tension here are real and legitimate on both sides. There is genuine value in the output AI has enabled — client work delivered more completely and more quickly, newsletters that help leaders think more faithfully, tools that extend what a small firm can offer. These are not trivial gains.
But there are competing goods. Sanctification can’t be rushed. It requires spending time reading and reflecting on scripture, and heartfelt prayer rather than rattling through a prayer list. It is about steady attentive growth, not checking off goals. Being present for the important people in your life is not a product of efficiency. We can’t design metrics around these important goods. We can’t “manage” them to be more productive.
Efficiency is genuinely good. So is depth. And in a small business running on AI-created capacity, they are quietly competing with each other.
Responsibility
The question Responsibility asks is: what do we remain accountable for, even when AI handles the task?
In this case, the task AI cannot handle is sanctification. The Holy Spirit’s work in us as leaders — shaping patience, attentiveness, and trust — does not run on automation. Productivity gains do not accumulate there. Cooperating with the Spirit’s work is a responsibility that cannot be delegated, streamlined, or deferred — it belongs entirely to each of us.
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This is easy to acknowledge in principle and easy to neglect in practice. When the efficiency gains are real and the outputs are genuinely helpful, it is very natural to assume that full calendars mean faithful stewardship. They do not.
Allegiance
This is where the analysis gets most direct.
What is actually driving the pace? It may have started with a desire to serve clients better, but has it become something more? Have we allowed a kind of urgency to take over, thinking that the AI window is closing, that small businesses need help now, and that a small shop like ours cannot afford to slow down?
Faithfulness leaves no room for this kind of anxiety. Paul, in Philippians 4 commands us, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”
When we sense that the clock is becoming our taskmaster, it is time to take a deep breath, recognize God’s sovereignty, and take our concerns to Him.
Even then, are we letting AI set the pace? We may be consistently praying for wisdom, but if we immediately fill the margin AI creates with the next deliverable, are we really listening for God’s wisdom?
Character
The Character question asks who this pattern is shaping us to become.
After several months of this pace, I must ask, has this pattern produced a person who is more productive, but somewhat less present? Cranking out content for a growing base of readers, but perhaps somewhat less attentive to the image-bearers directly in front of me?
In The A,B,C,D’s of Glorifying God with Your Business, faithfulness runs in two directions: being trustworthy to others, and being full of faith in them. The fruit of faithfulness that has anchored this entire phase of the series applies here too. The question is not whether we are producing faithfully. It is whether I am trusting faithfully — trusting that God is at work in this AI moment, in my clients’ businesses, in my readers’ lives, whether or not we are maximally productive. Faithfulness and anxious striving are not the same thing, even when both produce real output.
Sanctification is not something that can be hurried or outsourced. As Paul wrote “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.” This requires diligence — focus and hard work over a long period of time.
Effect
Who bears the consequences of a packed margin?
In prior issues, we have asked this question about employees and applicants — the people most likely to be displaced or diminished by AI-powered decisions. In this case, the answer is twofold.
When we get too busy and distracted to pay attention to the people right in front of us, we all suffer. Our employees and our loved ones deserve the fruit of the Spirit in us, not just whatever’s left when we’ve completed our task list or run out of AI tokens.
But the Effect is also personal. A leader whose margin is perpetually consumed is a leader whose sanctification is being quietly deferred. Peter wrote “But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Our growth in the Lord requires our faithful time and attention.
What This Tells Us
AI does not automatically create margin for faithfulness. It creates capacity. What we do with that capacity is entirely a matter of character — and character is still formed the slow way, through choosing spending time with people over optimizing productivity, and trusting in God over trying to achieve everything ourselves.
This is not an argument against using AI generously or building output that genuinely serves others. It is an argument for examining what the margin is actually for — and for resisting the assumption that full is the same as faithful.
A Practical Starting Point
If AI is creating real margin in your business, the GRACE question worth wrestling with is not What else can I now do? It is What is this margin for?
Rest is not laziness. Depth is not inefficiency. Presence with the people directly in front of you is not a failure to scale.
Two concrete practices are worth considering.
Let the margin serve spiritual growth, not just the task list. The tendency is to treat every gap as capacity for more output. But the stillness AI creates — the minutes while a task runs, the hour reclaimed from a workflow — is the kind of space in our lives that the Spirit can put to work. Within the constraints of being a faithful worker, while waiting a few minutes for AI to finish a task, there may be time to read a passage of Scripture, work on memorizing a verse, pray for a family member, or simply praise God for His goodness and grace.
Pay attention to the people in front of you. The image-bearers in the room, not on the calendar, not in the inbox, may be the most important measure of whether AI-created capacity is becoming faithfulness or simply more work. They deserve the fruit of the Spirit, not the residue of a full task queue. In the Bible we read about two sisters, Martha and Mary. Luke writes that “Martha was distracted with much serving” while Mary prioritized spending time with Jesus. He said to Martha “you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.”
If the pace of AI adoption in your industry is generating urgency — the sense that you must keep up or be left behind — it is worth asking whether that urgency is the voice of faithful discernment or the voice of anxiety wearing the costume of stewardship.
God is going to accomplish His perfect will. The question is whether we are moving so fast that we stop recognizing it when it arrives.
A somewhat ironic note on process: This article, like all issues of The Smart Steward, was developed in collaboration with AI tools — reflecting the very intersection this newsletter explores. In this case, AI helped me interview myself. The confessions are real; the editorial judgment is my own.
Russ McGuire writes The Smart Steward. Each month I work with a small number of business owners on exactly these types of questions. If that’s you, reach out. I also publish a weekly AI market intelligence newsletter with a strategic and faith-based lens. Find it on Substack at Faithful Intelligence.
