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

Subscribe at thisnewway.com to get the step-by-step playbooks, tools, and workflows. 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. . . . Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the episode with someone who will benefit from listening. . . . 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