How to actually use AI in your business

Without outsourcing your brain, losing your voice or sounding like everyone else online.

You’ve probably heard both extremes: AI is coming for everyone’s jobs, or AI can run your entire business while you sit on a beach with a coconut. I don’t believe either.

I’ve spent more than 20 years in marketing. I know how to build a brand, position an offer and write a strategy that actually holds together. AI hasn’t replaced any of that knowledge, but it has completely changed how I work.

I use AI a lot. Most days, for most things. The important bit isn’t that I use it, it’s how. I don’t hand it a problem, nod at whatever comes back and hit publish. I work with it. I argue with it. I make it work harder. I ignore it when it’s wrong, correct it and help it to learn.

And I use it for far more than marketing. It’s where I put the approximately 4,000 thoughts going through my head at any given moment. I use it for parenting questions, planning days out, travel, clothes, things on school forms I don’t understand and things I absolutely could Google but don’t particularly fancy opening 14 tabs to answer. And recipes. Oh my God, recipes.

I find recipes quite hard to follow. I can read the same instruction four times and somehow still be standing in the kitchen wondering whether I was supposed to add the butter already. With AI, I can give it the recipe and say, “Right. I’m doing this now. Give me step one.” Then step two. Then, “Hang on, mine doesn’t look like that. Is that okay?” Or, “I’ve only got 2% milk.”

I have even spent a frankly unreasonable amount of time with ChatGPT investigating why my Yorkshire puddings in Canada refuse to behave like my Yorkshire puddings in England. A cookbook can’t do that.

And I know Yorkshire puddings have very little to do with marketing, but that’s sort of my point. Once you stop thinking of AI as something that generates content and start thinking of it as something you can have a conversation with, you realise how incredibly useful it can be.

Most people I speak to are using AI now, and I think that’s great. I’m obviously not here to tell you not to use it. My concern is almost the opposite: that we start using it for everything, including the bits where our own judgement, effort and point of view should still matter.

I can usually tell when something has come straight back from AI and hasn’t really been touched by the person behind it. Sometimes I genuinely don’t care. I hate writing certain emails, for example. I’ll dump what I’m trying to say into ChatGPT in a slightly chaotic mess and let it turn that into something clear and well articulated. Brilliant. That is exactly the sort of thing I want AI to make easier.

Where I do have an issue is when AI starts replacing the part another human is supposed to bring. If I’ve asked a client for feedback on work, I want their judgement, their experience and their opinion. I don’t want them to paste it into AI because they can’t be bothered to think about it themselves and send me back the answer. That’s not collaboration. That’s outsourcing the bit I actually needed them for.

So my concern isn’t that people aren’t using AI enough. It’s that we use it so much that we stop noticing which parts of the work still need us.

So here’s how I actually use it. Feel free to take what you want…

Stop treating AI like a vending machine.

Here’s what most people do: PROMPT to ANSWER to COPY & PASTE. Put a coin in, get a snack out, walk away. And then wonder why everything falls flat.

What actually works is much more like YOU to AI to YOU to AI to YOU. It’s a conversation, not a transaction. And, most importantly, it starts and ends with you!

I’ll brain-dump an idea, usually with half-finished sentences and typos everywhere. AI reflects back what it thinks I’m saying. I’ll tell it, “Yes, but you’ve missed the point about X.” We go again. Then I might ask why it thinks something, or tell it to argue against me. It points out something I haven’t considered. Annoyingly, it has a point. So I rethink something, add more context and we go again.

Eventually the slightly chaotic thought I started with becomes an actual idea, offer, strategy or piece of content. That’s the collaboration.

The first answer doesn’t need to be the final answer. It almost never is. And I think people need permission to know that. You’re allowed to tell AI, “No, that’s not what I mean.” You can say it’s too generic, ask it to challenge you, ask why it thinks that, tell it you liked your original line better, or say, “I hate all of these. Let’s go back.”

You haven’t failed at prompting because the first response wasn’t perfect. You’d never hire someone, give them one sentence of context and expect them to understand your entire business immediately. AI is no different.

The prompt is everything.

By “prompt”, I do not mean one clever sentence you copied from a LinkedIn post. Sometimes my prompts are so long they probably take me longer to write than it would have taken me to just do the work myself. 😂

But that’s the point. You are briefing something. Teaching it. Giving it enough information to understand what you mean, what you are trying to achieve, what good looks like to you and what you absolutely do not want back.

The better the prompt, the better the conversation. Every time. In fact, let’s actually think of prompts as conversations from now on.

Take: “Write me five Instagram posts for my marketing business.” What does AI actually know about you from that? Nothing. Not who you are, who you help, what you charge, what you believe or how you talk. So it reaches for the statistical average of marketing content on the internet and gives you something along the lines of, “Ready to level up your brand? 🚀”

Straight in the bin.

Now imagine it knows who you are, what you’ve done, who you work with, what those people are struggling with, what you sell, what you believe about your industry, what you disagree with, what your customers actually say, how you naturally communicate and what you’re trying to achieve.

Now we’ve got something to work with.

I give AI loads of context. Old copy, tons of notes, thoughts, voice-notes, examples I love, examples I hate, feedback, research and previous decisions we’ve made. And I tell it why we’re doing something, not just what I want it to produce.

That bit matters. Don’t just say, “Write an email.” Tell it that the person already knows you, they’re interested but nervous about the investment, you don’t want to hard-sell them and you want them to feel understood and confident that you know what you’re doing. You’re giving it the job (and context) behind the job.

You need to train it to have your back.

And there is another reason I think AI massively helps me: I am a human being. I am not consistent. I get tired. I get distracted. I change my mind. I am very friggin’ hormonal. Some days I can see something instantly and other days I can stare at the same thing for an hour and not spot what is wrong with it.

AI does not have that problem. Once I have taught it how I think, what I care about, the decisions I have already made and the standards I am trying to hold, it can give me a level of consistency I cannot always give myself.

It can notice when I am contradicting something I said three weeks ago. It can pick up a blind spot. It can remind me that I rejected this exact idea last month and why.

That does not mean I hand over the decision. It means I have built myself a very useful, neutral, second set of eyes.

Most AI assistants now give you ways to retain useful context, whether that’s projects, memory, custom instructions or something similar. Use them. But still correct the AI. Your business changes. Your thinking changes. Your offers change. And sometimes it will confidently tell you something about yourself and you’ll have to go, “Absolutely not. Where did you get that from?”

Use AI to help you think better, not for you.

This is probably the biggest thing I want you to take from this: Don’t ask AI to do your thinking for you. Use it to help you get more out of your own thinking. There’s a massive difference.

You bring the idea. The experience. The instinct. The opinion. The knowledge of your business and your customers. AI can help you get it out of your head, organise it, question it, challenge it and sometimes show you an angle you hadn’t considered.

That’s how I use it. I think of it as a second brain. Not because I don’t have a first one. Because my first one is busy and over-crowded a lot of the time.

As a small biz owner, there are constantly hundreds of things competing for attention. Client work, marketing, sales, pricing, operations, an idea you had in the shower, something you’ve been meaning to research for three weeks, a website section that isn’t quite right, a proposal you need to send, a decision you’re going round in circles on. AI gives me somewhere to put and organise all of that.

And then there’s proofreading. Man, oh man, I make typos. I’m very happy to own that. I write quickly, I brain-dump, I miss words, I repeat myself, and sometimes what’s in my head is moving considerably faster than what ends up on the page. AI has been a massive game changer for that. I can give it something I’ve written and say, “Proofread this. Fix the typos and grammar, but don’t rewrite me.”

That distinction matters. I still want the idea, the opinion and the phrasing to be mine. I just don’t need every typo to be mine too. And, look, humans don’t always get it right either. That’s exactly why I like using AI as a second pair of eyes, not as the person doing the thinking.

In addition to proof-reading, I use it for customer research, offer development, positioning, brainstorming, competitor research, marketing strategy, content ideation, search research, analysing statistics, website & copy critique, project planning, processes and learning something unfamiliar. It can help me see patterns in a pile of reviews, pressure-test an offer before I launch it or read a web page as a sceptical potential client and tell me where I’d lose them.

But the thinking still starts with me. And the decision still ends with me.

One of my favourite things to do is tell it not to agree with me. AI can be a terrible people-pleaser. You tell it you’re thinking about launching something and it immediately tells you it’s a fantastic idea. No. I don’t need another cheerleader. I want someone to say, “Okay, but here’s why you might be wrong.” or “Here’s what you could be missing.”

Ask it to argue against you. Ask why the offer won’t sell. Ask what you’re assuming. Ask what a sceptical customer would think. Ask what your competitor would say. Ask what you haven’t considered. That’s infinitely more useful than asking AI to validate an idea you’ve already decided you love.

What I would NOT use AI for.

I love AI. That doesn’t mean I think you should throw your entire business into it and hope for the best. Knowing where the edges are matters.

Don’t blindly trust facts. AI can be spectacularly confident while being spectacularly wrong. If you’re publishing a statistic, legal information, medical information, financial information or anything else factual that matters, check the original source.

Don’t casually paste sensitive information into it. Client information, customer data, passwords, confidential documents, anything under NDA. Understand the privacy settings and policies of the tool you’re using first.

Don’t ask it what your opinions should be. That’s your job. Give it your opinion and ask it to challenge you. Much more useful.

Don’t publish things you don’t understand. If AI has written something incredibly clever and you couldn’t explain it yourself in a meeting, it shouldn’t have your name on it.

Don’t outsource your judgement. AI can give you options, tell you what it sees and point out something you’ve missed. You make the call.

Don’t let it make you sound like everyone else. Your slightly weird phrases, stories, opinions, humour and way of seeing things are the good bits. Don’t sand them off.

Don’t use it to manufacture expertise. AI can help you articulate what you know. It cannot give you 20 years of experience because you typed “act as an expert.”

The rule I keep coming back to is this: if you couldn’t defend it in a conversation without ChatGPT sitting beside you, don’t publish it under your name.

How to stop sounding like AI.

Everyone can spot bad AI content now. The dashes. The tidy little lists of three. The dramatic one-line paragraphs. The “It’s not about X. It’s about Y.” The “Here’s the thing…” and the “In today’s fast-paced digital landscape…”

PLEASE STOP.

But look, I don’t think the problem is necessarily that someone used AI. I think the problem is that they let AI have the final say.

I never want AI to be the last person to touch my work.

Although I will very happily let it be the person who spots my typos. Using AI as a proofreader has been a massive game changer for me. I can write the thing in my own words, keep my phrasing and my opinion intact, then ask it to catch the spelling mistakes, missing words and sentences that have gone slightly rogue. And look, it doesn’t always get everything right either. Neither do we. The point is that I’m using it to clean up my work, not replace the thinking behind it.

So edit it. Properly. Put your stories back in. Put your opinion back in. Use the specific example rather than the vague one. Change the sentence that is technically “better” but sounds nothing like you. Delete the weirdly inspirational ending it insists on adding. Read it aloud and ask yourself whether you’d actually say it.

I regularly prefer the messy thing I originally wrote to the polished version AI gives me, and I keep it. Sometimes the slightly too long, weirdly phrased sentence is what I need in my life!

You don’t need 14 AI tools.

This is another hill I’m quite happy to die on. You do not need 14 AI subscriptions. Free or otherwise.

You don’t need one AI tool for Instagram, another for emails, another for blog posts, another for meeting notes and something called SuperGenius.ai promising to “10x your business productivity.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m a one-relationship kind of girly. I’ve never been someone who needs hundreds of friends, and apparently the same applies to my marketing tools.

Pick one. Maybe two. And go all in.

Because every time you jump to the next shiny new tool, you’re starting again. New interface. New prompts. New learning curve. Whereas the more you use the same tool, the better you get at using it. You learn what it’s brilliant at, what it gets wrong, when you need to push back and how to get the best out of it.

And if you’re putting the work into teaching it how you think, how you write, what your business does and what good looks like to you, there’s even less reason to keep starting from scratch somewhere else.

So don’t spread yourself thin trying to keep up with every new AI tool someone tells you that you “need.”

Pick one. Learn it properly. Go deep, not wide.

You’ll get far more from that than 17 logins you barely use.

Eight prompts (or conversations) I’d actually use.

I’m not giving you 100 prompts. Firstly, because you don’t need 100 prompts. Secondly, because I don’t want you scrolling through a 47-page PDF trying to find “Prompt 76: Write an engaging Facebook post.”

What I’d actually encourage you to do is stop thinking so much about prompts and start thinking about conversations.

Personally, I like to start every new conversation with a voice note /dictating. I find it easier, but I also think it gives AI a much better sense of me. How I actually speak. What I’m trying to say. The bits I’m unsure about. The context I probably wouldn’t think to include if I was trying to write the perfect prompt. Sometimes I’ll ramble for five minutes before I even get to the point, but that’s kind of the point.

So don’t worry about making your prompts polished. Give it the messy version. Talk to it like you would a person you were briefing. Tell it what you’re trying to do, what you’re worried about, what you’ve already tried and what you absolutely don’t want.

The more real you are, the more useful the conversation becomes.

1. Get the idea out of my head

“I’m going to brain-dump an idea and it’s going to be messy. Don’t write anything yet. Just reflect back what you think I’m saying, ask me the questions you’d need answered and tell me what’s unclear.”

2. Challenge my thinking

“Here’s a decision I’m leaning towards and why. Don’t agree with me automatically. Argue against it as convincingly as you can. Then tell me what would have to be true for my original decision to be right.”

3. Help me understand my ideal client

“Here’s everything I know about my best clients: [notes, reviews, emails, sales call notes]. What do they have in common that I might not have noticed? What do they seem to care about more than they explicitly say?”

4. Pressure-test an offer

“Here’s an offer I’m thinking of launching: [details, price, who it’s for]. Look at it from three perspectives: a sceptical buyer, a competitor and someone who understands this market really well. What concerns, gaps or opportunities would each see?”

5. Turn my expertise into content

“I’m going to talk through something I explain to clients all the time. Ask me follow-up questions until you properly understand what I think about it. Don’t create content yet. Once we’ve got the thinking clear, suggest five angles I could explore.”

6. Critique something I’ve already created

“Here’s a [page/email/post] I’ve written. Don’t rewrite it. Tell me where it’s vague, where the errors are, where it sounds like everyone else, where I’ve buried the best bit and what a potential client might still be unsure about.”

I particularly love “don’t rewrite it.” Sometimes I want feedback on my work. I don’t want AI barging in and rewriting the whole dang thing.

7. Research before I make a decision

“I’m deciding whether to [decision]. Help me research it properly. Give me the strongest case for and against, what questions I should be asking and what information I need before committing. Clearly flag anything you aren’t certain about.”

8. Tell me what I’m missing

“Here’s my plan for [thing]. Don’t tell me it’s a good plan. Tell me what I haven’t thought about, what assumptions I’m making and the most likely reason it doesn’t work.”

Ok, let’s wrap this up.

AI isn’t going anywhere. And personally, I’m excited about that. It has saved me a ton of money on therapy alone…and I’m not even kidding.

I think it’s one of the most useful tools we’ve been given as small business owners in a very long time.

It can help a one-person business do things that would previously have taken a team. It can help someone with decades of experience finally get what’s in their head out into the world. It can save hours of staring at a blank document, help you see something differently, challenge you, teach you and make you faster.

That’s incredible. But you still need to be there.

You don’t need to become an AI expert. You don’t need 300 prompts. You don’t need to automate your entire business. And you absolutely don’t need to hand over the thing that makes your business worth buying from in the first place: you.

Bring your experience. Bring your opinions. Bring your judgement. Bring your stories. Bring the 20 years of stuff that’s sitting in your head. Then use AI to help you do more with it. Just don’t let AI think for you.

Ready to build your personal brand?

AI can help you get your ideas out of your head. But it can’t decide what you want to be known for, what makes you different or why the right people should choose you.

That part starts with you.

You, Branded. is my personal brand strategy for people who are brilliant at what they do, but need to get much better at making sure the right people know it.

We’ll get clear on what you stand for, who you want to reach, what you want to be known for and how your personal brand can actually help you grow your business.

Ready to build yours?