Marianne from FemmeELAN asked me on her podcast. We had met over a LinkedIn discussion about ChatGPT-sounding language, and that conversation was good enough to have again, this time with a microphone.
Somewhere in the middle I said something that surprised me when I listened back.
“AI can speed up a lot of things. You can do things faster. But you run the risk of speeding up things you shouldn’t be speeding up at all, because the foundation underneath isn’t right.”
That’s exactly what I see on websites every day, and I had never said it that short before.
“I should be doing something with this, but I don’t know what”
Marianne asked that question on behalf of half of small business. My first answer was: you don’t have to do anything.
That sounds like a cop out, and it’s the only honest place to start. As long as you’re looking for a tool because you feel like you’re falling behind, you’ll build something you won’t use. The question that actually works is about your own week. What do you do daily that annoys you? What would you rather do faster, or easier, or not at all? That’s your way in.
For me at home, that was cooking. I have a stack of Jamie Oliver books and I regularly know there’s a recipe with chicken and cream in one of them somewhere, just not which one. So I had AI build an index across all those books. Now I type “chicken, cream” and get every recipe that matches.
That’s not an impressive example, and that’s the point. It solved an annoyance I actually had.
Why a course won’t save you here
People regularly ask if I have a course on how to use AI. The answer is more complicated than yes or no.
By the time a course like that comes out, you’re already too late. Things move too fast. More importantly, a course puts you in a framework, and the framework is exactly what’s missing here.
“That’s the easy part of AI, but also the dangerous part: it can do so much. So you’re basically staring at a blank page. And then you have to work out yourself what you could even do with it. Look, if it’s already framed, like a word processor, you know what you can do with it, you know what it’s for. AI, we all have to rediscover it ourselves. And that’s different for everyone.”
That’s why so much AI advice falls flat. Someone tells you what it does for them, and you have a different business, a different week, and different annoyances.
What I do let it handle
My own use has changed a lot over the past few years. In the beginning I let it write everything, because it was new and fun. Looking back at what came out three years ago, it’s honestly rubbish, and everyone was thrilled with it at the time.
What I use it for now is the boring work. Organising and keeping track of things. So there’s room left in my head for the part I’m actually good at.
Concretely: I was building an online course about getting found by AI, and it kept turning into such a big thing that I kept wanting to clear a whole week for it, a week that never came. Now a task runs every morning that looks back at what I did yesterday and gives me today’s step. I work through it, tell it what I want different, and the plan shifts.
With one boundary that’s been there from the start. AI doesn’t dictate what I do. If I feel like working on a different chapter today, I pick that up, and the plan adjusts.
And it doesn’t always work either. My daughter was coming this way this summer, so I wanted a flight tracker that checked prices daily. That didn’t go well, it couldn’t get to current prices. And then I decided it wasn’t important enough to dig into either.
Where it starts working against you
Back to that line about speeding things up, because that’s the part that costs business owners the most.
Say your positioning is off. Or you’ve got a system that’s shaky at the core. Or your website tells a story that doesn’t land anywhere. Point AI at that and you’ll get more of the same, faster. You can have AI write lovely copy, and it won’t bring in customers if the story underneath isn’t there.
“So you’d better know exactly what you’re speeding up with AI.”
That’s also why I come across so many websites that look good and deliver nothing. Money was spent on the look, and nobody ever checked if the story held up. AI doesn’t make that problem bigger or smaller. It just makes it visible faster.
About AI-written text, and why I’ve gone easier on it
There’s a whole sport now in pointing out AI writing. I notice it myself too, I studied language and I recognise the patterns. And still, that complaining irritates me a bit.
“On the other hand, AI gives a lot of people the ability to write, to put something on the page, that they couldn’t before. Not everyone has the same feel for language to make those corrections themselves. They’re just happy their idea made it onto the screen.”
Someone who didn’t join in for years because writing felt too hard is now taking part. That matters more to me than my irritation at a sentence structure.
One practical thing almost nobody does
When I open a new tool, I go through every setting first. Before I ask it a single question.
Most people open the tool and start typing straight away. While that’s exactly where the toggle sits that keeps your data out of training, along with a few other things you’d rather decide yourself. You’ll find it just by having a look.
Where I’m still not sure
I notice a kind of AI fatigue around me. Every app is AI, every platform is AI, everything is AI. While not everything needs AI to fix it.
Whether that ends in a bang or a fizzle, I don’t know yet.
Want to know what is actually holding you back?
If your positioning is off, or your website story does not land, no AI check fixes that on its own. Truth and Dare is a live 60 minute session where you put your site, your AI use, or the plan you are stuck on, on the table. You hear straight away what is actually holding you back.
Not ready for that? Run the free AI Visibility Check first. It scores your site the way an AI engine reads it.
