AI & Automation
The Job You Do the Same Way Every Week My husband took a week and a half off recently. I had two very different reactions to that, and one of them wasn’t pretty. There was the voice that said, “You can’t go away that long.” And there was the other voice, the one that said, “Honestly? Good. He can parent, and I’ll get some work done with nobody talking to me.” If you run your own business, you’ve met both of those voices. And underneath them is a harder truth: my business still needs me for almost everything, and there’s…
The Job That Doesn’t Stop When You Take Time Off My husband’s taking a week and a half off starting next week. I’ve got two very different feelings about that. One of them isn’t pretty. There’s the little voice that goes, “You can’t go away that long.” And the other one is going, “Honestly? Good. He can parent, and I’ll get some work done with nobody talking to me.” If you work for yourself, you’ve met both of those voices. The thing is, my business still needs me for pretty much all of it. There’s no one else. It’s all…
This week I have a hot take. Pointing out that someone used AI to write their content is the new grammar policing. And grammar policing has never once made anyone a better writer. It just makes the person doing it feel superior for about four minutes. Nobody has ever died from a spelling mistake. Nobody’s business collapsed because of an em-dash. And nobody is going to lose a client because an algorithm suspects their caption was AI-assisted. The people scanning your content for “tells” are not your customers. They are procrastinating. We’ve Been Here Before When computers replaced typewriters, someone…
Three years of watching AI content, and I genuinely could not tell you what I had to show for it. I played with platforms. My feed was full of people calling themselves experts. A lot of noise, not much payoff. Then the CustomGPT suite I built changed that a little. Sales came in. Okay, maybe not a total waste. Then Came the Website Move I had 101 blog posts on a platform with no export button. It was not going to make leaving easy. I did not know how to get them out other than manual copy-and-paste, so I just…
Most small business owners have a general idea of how much money they made last quarter. They couldn’t tell you much beyond that. Which webpage brought in the most visitors? Whether those visitors did anything once they got there. Which part of their marketing actually moved someone toward buying, and which part just kept them busy? That stuff stays fuzzy for most people, most of the time. And without that picture, every quarter looks a lot like the last one. That used to be as far as you could take it without hiring someone to dig in with you. Not…
I saw something this week that I haven’t been able to shake. A creator announced they’re automating their Instagram DM replies and then teaching a class on how to do it. Not scheduling, not email sequences. The actual back-and-forth with real people who reached out. I keep thinking about that alongside everything I read about how lonely people are right now. Happiness levels are dropping and disconnection is everywhere, and the fix we’re building is a bot that replies to someone who took the time to reach out? Why This Bothers Me I understand the logistics of a huge account.…
They ask you to write another email, and you’d rather scrub your grout with a toothbrush. You know you need to email your list. You know it’s the only marketing channel you actually own, the one no algorithm can take away overnight. But the thought of coming up with another idea is exhausting before you’ve typed a single word. Another subject line, another blank screen, same feeling every time. You usually do have something to say. The pressure to be brilliant, witty, and strategic in every single email is what’s actually exhausting. It feels like a marathon with no finish…
You know you should email your list this week. You’ve known it since Monday. Instead you’ve reorganized a drawer and answered emails that didn’t need answering. You’ve opened ChatGPT four separate times without typing a word. So you finally type “write a newsletter” into the box. It hands back something so generic it could belong to any business on earth. That’s not AI failing you. That’s what happens when you ask a vague question and expect a specific answer. Here are five AI prompts for marketing you can copy, paste, and fill in today. Each one is built to break…
You know what nobody tells you about running a business? That you’d spend more time writing Instagram captions than actually doing the work you’re good at. The work that actually serves your clients. Last month, how many hours did you lose to marketing tasks? Not strategy. Not relationship building. Just the repetitive grind: writing captions, scheduling posts, tweaking email subject lines, reformatting the same content for five different platforms. If you’re like most business owners, it was easily ten to fifteen hours. Maybe more. And at the end of it, you were exhausted, the content was mediocre, and you still…
I’ve just pushed a major update to the Buyer Persona GPT and if you’re using it to understand your audience, this is going to make your work faster, deeper, and even more useful. Here’s what’s new: It now auto-translates into whatever language you write in French in, French out. Portuguese in, Portuguese out. No settings to change. Instead, it just follows your input. It now thinks more like a real person Not just surface-level traits. In fact, you’ll get richer emotional insight, deeper motivations, and stronger psychological detail, the kind of data that actually helps you make smart business decisions.…
Cue the stampede of “must-watch” webinars, $997 bootcamps, and 23-minute YouTube breakdowns on the “hidden features you can’t afford to ignore.” Translation: Another round of tech-drunk hype designed to make you feel late to a party you never RSVP’d to. Here’s the Truth If your business sucked yesterday, ChatGPT 5.0 won’t save it. If your business worked yesterday, ChatGPT 5.0 won’t suddenly make it obsolete. What It Will Do Distract the hell out of you if you let it. Steal hours you should be spending talking to actual customers. Convince you to rebuild systems that weren’t broken in the first…
Running a business solo means doing it all. You’re serving clients, creating content, managing tech, and handling every decision in between. So it’s no surprise it can feel scattered and exhausting. But what if you could get a little breathing room? And what if the tools you’re already using actually reduced your workload? Meet ChatGPT Tasks: Your Quiet, Reliable Assistant There’s a feature inside ChatGPT that can help. It’s called Tasks, and it’s available with ChatGPT Plus. So, think of it as a quiet, reliable assistant. It handles the repetitive parts of your business without needing reminders or direction every…
Every few months another AI tool shows up promising to write your marketing for you. Canva’s Magic Write is one people ask me about a lot. I think it’s genuinely useful. I also think most of the advice floating around oversells what it can actually do for a small business. Magic Write is Canva’s built-in writing assistant, the little sparkle icon inside any Canva design or doc. Type a prompt, and it drafts text right there in your project. No new tab, no separate subscription for a basic version. That part is real, and it’s worth knowing how to use…
AI is already part of how most small businesses market themselves. It’s woven into everyday tasks like writing captions and answering customer questions already, not some future thing to think about later. What’s worth figuring out now is where it’s actually paying off. And where it’s quietly setting you up for a problem down the road. Real time comes back to you A recent Ipsos survey for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation found that 54% of small business owners say AI has had a mostly positive impact on task completion time. That’s the most consistent win people report. First…