People ask me what I use AI for, and I think they expect a clever answer. The honest one is that it does the first pass on almost everything, and then I decide.
Every month I send three clients a KPI report built from Google Analytics, Search Console and LinkedIn. Two years ago that would have been a full day of copying numbers into a spreadsheet and then staring at them trying to work out what they meant. Now the pulling and the first draft of the commentary happen in minutes, and the hour I spend on it goes on the bit that matters, which is looking at the numbers and saying “this is the one thing you should change this month”. The report the client gets is better than the one I used to build by hand, and it costs them a fraction of the time.
Every Monday morning a search audit runs across four websites, including this one. It checks whether the pages still answer the questions people are searching for, whether anything has broken, and whether the AI assistants are picking up the right facts about each business. I read the results over a coffee and fix what needs fixing. Nobody is paying me to do that manually, and nobody should be.
Twice a week a prospecting pack goes out for one of my clients: a short list of the right people to talk to, with a personal note drafted for each one. The client reads every note, changes what he wants to change, and sends them himself from his own account. AI does the research and the first draft. He does the relationship. That order never changes.
Then there is the admin nobody sees. Meeting notes turned into action lists. Invoices matched to bank lines. A property database for a serviced accommodation client that stays current because the updates are systemised rather than remembered. Blog posts drafted from voice notes a client sends me from her car, in her voice not mine, ready for her to read and approve.
Here is what it does not do. It does not talk to my clients. It does not send anything. It does not decide what a business should do next, because that is a judgement call and judgement is what you are paying for. It does not know that a client is having a rough month and needs a phone call rather than a report. And it does not replace the bit where I sit in someone’s office, look at how they actually work, and spot the thing that has been quietly costing them money for three years.
The reason I can run six clients across six completely different sectors, and keep the depth on each one, is that the mechanical work happens fast and my time goes where a person is needed. I wrote a while ago about why I do not use a timesheet, and this is the other half of that: hours were never the thing being sold. Outcomes are. AI is how the outcomes arrive quicker.
The British Chambers of Commerce found earlier this year that just over half of UK small businesses now use AI in some form, up from about a third the year before. Which means the question has moved on from “should I” to “where, exactly, and how do I not waste money on it”. If that is the question sitting in your head, that is exactly the conversation I have with owners every week, and I am happy to have it with you too.