Every business deserves a COO.

For most of human history, the people who built civilization — cooks, builders, traders, founders, parents — spent most of their day on the work only they could do.

That stopped being true. Today, the people who run the world's small businesses spend most of their week on tasks no human should be doing: triaging email, copying numbers between tools, chasing approvals, drafting the same update for the fifth time this month, restocking, scheduling, replying to the same five questions on repeat.

Here's the part nobody talks about: this is why productivity has stalled. We invented computers, gave everyone email, then a smartphone, then SaaS, then the cloud — and somehow business productivity growth dropped from 3% a year in the 1960s to under 1% today. Every new tool created more admin to manage the tool. The economy got more digital. It didn't get more productive.

And the cost compounds. Operating expenses balloon because humans are expensive admins. Margins compress. Wages stagnate. Prices drift up. The standard of living quietly stops climbing.

We're going to fix this.

In 1987, the economist Robert Solow noticed something strange: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." Companies had spent two decades buying computers. The numbers refused to move. He called it the productivity paradox. The name stuck because the problem stuck.

Robert Gordon — the economist who wrote the canonical history of American growth — argues the 1990s tech-driven productivity blip was an exception. The long arc is stagnation. The internet, the smartphone, SaaS, the cloud — none of them moved the macro-productivity needle the way the steam engine, electricity, or the assembly line did.

A February 2026 NBER study surveyed 6,000 executives across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia about AI adoption. 78% of companies said they used AI. 80% reported no measurable impact on earnings.

The pattern repeats because every wave so far did the same thing: it added a tool. A faster way to write the email. A neater place to store the spreadsheet. A new dashboard to check on top of the seven you already check. The work stayed. The admin compounded.

Tools don't break the paradox. Workers do.

For the first time, software can take a job spec written in plain English and finish it. Not assist. Finish. Read the inbox, draft the reply, send it, log it, move on. Pull the sales numbers, write the summary, post it to the channel, schedule the follow-up.

Where measured, the gains are real. Workers paired with agents on repetitive tasks see roughly 40% performance lift. An insurance company in a 2026 case study moved from 6.2 to 8.1 claims processed per worker-hour and dropped data-entry time by 40% — the kind of step-change the digital era kept promising and never delivering.

The macro hasn't caught up yet because adoption is still mostly chatbots and copilots — additive tools, not substitute workers. What changes the macro is when agents take entire jobs off the human queue. That's what Caminu builds.

Coffee shop has a COO. Restaurant has a COO. Property portfolio has a COO. Manufacturing line has a COO. Not advisors. Not tools. A workforce that does the work.

Operators get back to the work only they can do: building the product, talking to customers, raising the kids, sleeping in on Sunday.

The cascade matters. Lower operating expenses means higher margin. Higher margin means more reinvestment, better wages, lower prices. The economy stops spending its best people on its worst work — and productivity grows again, the way it did when we last invented something that actually saved time.

That's the point. A more efficient economy means a higher standard of living. For everyone, not just the operators we ship to first.