Not because it is trendy. Because the alternative is doing things that drain me, and I have done enough of that.

I did not work at all in 2025. Not because I did not want to. Because burnout had completely removed my capacity. I restarted my business as the operations consultant I had always intended to be, rebuilt my offers, and made a very deliberate list of the things I was not going to do in this version of the business. A lot of what was on the “not doing” list was things that had eaten enormous amounts of time in exchange for very little.

AI is now doing most of those things. Not as a trend, and not because everyone says you should. Because it frees up the bandwidth I need to do the work I am actually here to do.

CONTENT WITHOUT THE CONTENT TREADMILL

I write. I always have. Putting thoughts down in long form comes naturally. What did not come naturally, and what burned hours I did not have, was turning those written pieces into a full content calendar across multiple platforms, designing the graphics, scheduling the posts, varying the formats.

Now I write the piece, and AI takes it from there. It repurposes the content into the formats I need, builds out a posting calendar that works for my actual schedule, and handles the production work that used to consume a day or two of my week. Followers remain a vanity metric I do not care about. What matters is who decides to work with me. AI helps me show up consistently without making consistency my full-time job.

PROSPECTING WITHOUT THE SCROLL

I have specific parameters for the kinds of businesses I want to work with. AI takes those parameters and returns a list. My job is to spend a few minutes on LinkedIn and a company’s website to determine whether they are actually a fit. If they are, I reach out. If not, I move on.

The searches AI completes move faster than manual research, and I cap the number of results so it does not become overwhelming. I give feedback on each search, and the quality of the results improves over time as the AI learns what I am actually looking for.

This keeps prospecting from becoming a half-day task that I procrastinate on because the manual version is tedious. It happens, it happens efficiently, and I stay focused.

WEBSITE WORK I GENUINELY DID NOT WANT TO DO

I rebuilt my website by hand. All the main pages. I enjoyed building them, which is part of the problem I had in the last version of my business. Website design is something I like and am good at, and it became a rabbit hole I kept falling into.

When it came to the resources page and the application forms, I handed those off to AI. I provided my branding guidelines and the Google Form questions I needed incorporated. AI built them. It also built a calculator that uses real math to show business owners what operational drag is costing them, and a speaker inquiry form with features I could not build on my website platform. Getting the site done quickly and correctly took significant weight off.

I am aware that I have to actively stop myself from going back in and redesigning things. Having AI take over certain builds keeps me from falling into that particular trap.

RESEARCH AND FEEDBACK WITHOUT SYCOPHANCY

This one required setup, but it was worth it. The default behavior of most AI tools is to agree with you, which is useless. I set up parameters specifically designed to produce genuine pushback, require the AI to ask clarifying questions before answering, and prevent the kind of sycophantic response that tells you everything looks great when what you actually need is a critical eye.

Going through Anthropic’s Claude certifications helped me build a proper instruction set that I copy into projects and chats when I need this kind of feedback. If you are using AI as a thought partner and it is just agreeing with everything you say, you are not getting the value out of it that you could be.

DOCUMENTS AND FORMS DIRECTLY IN GOOGLE DRIVE

AI has created forms and documents directly in my Google Drive. Not drafted them for me to then go build, actually created them in the drive. This is a workflow that saves meaningful time and keeps the output in the place where it actually needs to live.

THE GOVERNANCE QUESTION EVERYONE IS MISSING

Here is the thing nobody is talking about while they are handing out “57 prompts to grow your business”: AI needs to be managed. Not just used. Managed.

Who in your business is responsible for AI usage? Who decides what tools are approved? Who tests automations before they go live? Who documents the AI workflows? Who updates them when capabilities change? If you have contractors, are they using AI to complete work for you, and have you given them permission to feed your intellectual property into external tools?

These are not questions only large companies need to answer. Every business using AI needs usage guidelines and governance. Since the federal regulatory landscape is still being built and states are moving at wildly different speeds on AI privacy laws, the businesses that get ahead of this now are the ones that will not be scrambling to comply retroactively later.

AI is not magic and it is not a replacement for thinking. It is a tool that, when deployed intentionally as part of a real strategy, can significantly reduce the operational load on a business owner and shift time toward the work that actually matters.

The question is not whether to use it. The question is whether you are using it in a way that is connected to where your business is trying to go, and whether someone has thought through the governance around it.

If the answer to that second question is no, that is worth putting on the list of things to address.

AI governance is one thing addressed when you work with me.