AI Saves $40K/Year on Employee Engagement Software with Liam Martin, Co-Founder of Time Doctor

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In episode 5 of This New Way, Aydin sits down with Liam Martin, co-founder of Time Doctor and Running Remote, to explore how AI is reshaping team productivity, SaaS economics, and the future of work. Liam shares how his team replaced $40K/year worth of employee engagement software with open-source AI tools — and how their internal R&D lab, Chainsaw, is building the future of workforce analytics.

You’ll hear how Time Doctor uses AI to reclassify productivity metrics by job role, how AI has changed their approach to product-market fit, and why they’re betting on proprietary agents as the next evolution of workplace tools. Liam also shares his personal tech stack, insights on open-source AI models like DeepSeek, and how he's replacing Google with LLMs in his day-to-day workflow.

You’ll walk away with practical ideas for how to reduce SaaS spend, empower your R&D teams, and get ahead of AI's disruptive force in remote work and beyond.

Click here to check out the AI-generated timestamps, episode summary and transcript.

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TIMESTAMPS

00:36 Liam’s McGill story and how he accidentally left academia

02:45 The early days of remote work and building Time Doctor

05:57 What Time Doctor actually does (and how AI is changing it)

08:08 How AI reclassified productivity by job type

11:03 Could product-market fit collapse due to AI?

13:44 Building the Chainsaw team

20:02 Replacing Google with LLMs

24:35 Why proprietary AIs might need to be “pushy,” not polite

28:03 Don’t wait for economics — just solve the problem

29:45 What’s coming next in the AI cost curve

35:58 GPT customizes slide decks based on personality types

39:07 Build complex no-code apps with just a prompt using Lovable

43:46 Engineers may be more disrupted by AI than customer service

TOOLS & RESOURCES MENTIONED

AI Tools & Models

DeepSeek OCR → replaced paid OCR tools, cutting costs by 90%

Do Browser (Chrome extension) → automates browser actions like a human

LM Studio → runs open-source LLMs like DeepSeek and Claude locally

Claude (Anthropic) → used for AI-based task delegation

OpenAI GPT-4 / Operators → tested against open-source alternatives

Internal Innovation & AI Systems

Chainsaw R&D Team → focused on building from scratch, not optimizing

Workforce Analytics with AI → redefining productivity dynamically by role

AI-driven feature decisions → testing new models before looking at ROI

OCR Video Analysis → used to assess best vs worst execution of tasks

Philosophies & Frameworks

“Build a chainsaw, not a sharper axe” → rethink, don’t just improve

“Solve one customer’s problem perfectly” → from Y Combinator playbook

Personal AI-first workflows → replacing search with LLMs