Ep. 74 How I Am (& Am NOT) Using AI In My Online Business
I’m going to be honest with you: I am getting tired of the AI conversation. It feels like it is everywhere, and most of it is either breathlessly enthusiastic or deeply suspicious, with very little nuance in between. Some people are acting like AI is going to replace entire industries. Others think using it at all is lazy or unethical. Most of us are somewhere in the middle, quietly wondering if we are behind, if we are using it wrong, or if our clients are going to judge us for it.
My position is that I am not anti-AI, but I am also not all-in on AI. I have tried to be careful and strategic about how I use it in my business as a brand strategist and designer, and that is what this post is about. Here is exactly how I am using AI, how I am not using it, and the questions I ask myself whenever I am deciding whether it belongs in a particular task.
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What AI Is Actually Good At And Where It Falls Short
I have been using ChatGPT and Claude interchangeably for about a year and a half, depending on the task. In that time I have gotten a pretty clear picture of where AI genuinely helps and where it falls flat.
Where AI excels:
Speed and efficiency
Synthesizing large amounts of information quickly
Recognizing patterns across data
Organizing ideas and information into a structure
Brainstorming outlines or frameworks for something I am already creating
Where AI consistently falls short:
Nuance and discernment
Sounding genuinely human
Thought leadership and original perspective
Understanding context and emotional subtext
Anything that requires lived experience
Because of that, I use AI as an assistant in my business, not the expert. It helps me do things faster. It cannot replace what makes my business valuable, which is me: my experience, my brain, and my perspective.
Three Ways I Am Using AI in My Business
Content Creation (But Not the Way You Might Think)
I am genuinely busy. Two small kids, a lot of solo parenting, and less than 20 hours a week of uninterrupted work time. So I need content creation to go faster, and AI has helped me do that without sacrificing quality or voice.
What I am NOT doing: going to ChatGPT and asking it what I should write about today, letting it generate a post, and lightly editing the result. That approach produces generic content that sounds like everyone else on the internet, because that is literally what it is. AI looks at what other people are already saying and regurgitates it. That is not thought leadership. That is noise.
What I AM doing: starting with what is already in my brain. My ideas, my opinions, conversations I have had with clients, my own stories, my brand voice. Then I use AI to help me get all of that out of my head and onto paper faster.
My favorite method is voice notes. I hit the microphone button in ChatGPT and talk for two to four minutes, brain dumping everything I want to cover in a podcast episode or a piece of content. Then it gives me a structured outline or rough draft based on what I actually said. The outline I was working from while recording the episode this post came from was generated exactly that way.
For social media content, I follow the same process. I give it my raw thoughts and ask it to use as much of my actual voice and words as possible, which genuinely helps keep things on brand. Then I edit heavily. The thinking is mine. The organization and speed is AI's.
The key rules I follow for AI-assisted content:
The idea always starts with me, never with AI
Voice notes produce more on-brand results than typed prompts
Everything AI writes gets heavily edited before it goes anywhere
I ask AI to use my actual words and voice, not generate new ones
Market Research and Pattern Recognition
This is honestly my favorite use of AI in my business right now, and one I do not see people talking about enough.
Over the years I have accumulated a significant amount of client data: questionnaires, call notes, design feedback, project feedback, post-project surveys. All of that contains incredibly useful information, including what my clients are struggling with, what language they naturally use to describe their problems, what patterns keep coming up across projects, and where there might be friction in my process that I could improve.
Sifting through all of that manually would take days. Instead, I give it to an AI tool and ask it to find the patterns, pull out recurring language, and surface themes I might be missing. Then I use those insights to improve my offers, refine my messaging, update my client experience, or figure out what to talk about in my content.
The important distinction: I am feeding AI actual data from real clients, not a hypothetical description of my ideal audience and asking it to build from there. Real words from real people produce infinitely more useful and accurate insights than AI-generated guesses about what my audience might want.
This approach has helped me to:
Identify the exact language my ideal clients use so I can mirror it in my marketing
Spot recurring pain points I was not consciously tracking
Find patterns in where clients get stuck so I can address those proactively
Make content decisions based on real data rather than guesswork
Organizing Information and Creating Structure
I am a naturally organized person and also I do not have enough hours in the day to be as organized as I would like to be. AI has become my go-to for anything that takes a lot of time but does not require my brain.
Content calendars are a great example. I give ChatGPT what promos I have running in a given month, how often I want to post on each platform, what topics I want to cover, and any events or speaking engagements I need to promote around. Then I ask it to turn all of that into a calendar that makes sense. I could do that myself, but it would take me 45 minutes. AI does it in seconds.
I do the same thing for project plans, launch timelines, and any situation where I have a lot of moving pieces that need to be organized into a coherent sequence. I am not asking it to do the strategic thinking. I am asking it to take what is already in my brain and put it in a logical order.
Most of us do not have an ideas problem. We have an organization problem. This is where AI genuinely earns its keep.
Three Things I Will Never Use AI For in My Business
Design Work
This is a hard no, and I feel strongly about it. I will not ask AI to design a logo, choose a color palette, create brand guidelines, or produce anything I would ever deliver to a client. The closest I get is using tools like Canva's background remover, which barely qualifies.
Why not? First, I think it is genuinely unethical. AI design tools work by scraping the internet and recombining what they find. That is not original creative work.
Second, and more practically, good design is deeply intentional and nuanced. It requires understanding brand strategy, reading between the lines of what a client is actually trying to communicate, and making judgment calls that come from years of experience and craft. AI is not capable of that. Any design work that comes from Spectrum Co. is done start to finish by a human being.
Brand Strategy
The same reasoning applies here. My brand strategy work is what clients are paying me for and it cannot be replicated by a tool.
A good strategy session involves listening deeply, reading body language, noticing which threads are worth pulling on, asking the questions no one else thought to ask, and connecting dots in ways that only come from experience. I could theoretically feed a client's questionnaire into ChatGPT and have it reorganize the answers into a document. But that is not what a client is paying for when they hire me. They are paying for my brain, my pattern recognition, and my ability to translate what they share into a strategic foundation for their brand.
Thought Leadership
This is the one I feel most strongly about, and I think it is the most important point in this entire post.
Thought leadership means my original perspective. My opinions. My lived experience. The things I am genuinely willing to take a stand for. That has to come from me. If I ask AI to generate my hot takes or formulate opinions on my behalf, I am contributing to what I can only describe as a sea of AI slop: content that sounds like everyone else, resonates with no one, and adds nothing real to the conversation.
Your brain is a muscle. If you stop using it, you lose it. And your audience does not follow you because they want more AI-generated content that mirrors everything else on the internet. They follow you because they want your perspective, your stories, and your take. That is the thing that cannot be replicated, and it is the thing that actually builds trust and connection over time.
When I see people clearly outsourcing their thought leadership to AI, it does not make me angry. It makes me a little sad, because I know they have genuinely good and unique thoughts that the world needs more of.
How I Decide Whether to Use AI for a Task: 3 Questions I Ask Myself
Whenever I am on the fence about whether AI belongs in a particular task, I ask myself these three questions. They get me to the right answer almost every time.
Question 1: Is it going to save me meaningful time? At its core, AI is a time-saving tool for me. If using it is not going to save meaningful time, I probably just need to do the thing myself.
Question 2: Is this something I actually need to be doing in the first place? With the rise of AI, I am seeing a lot of people use it to do things that did not need to be done at all. A twelve-month content calendar built in January that you never look at again is a good example. That is what I call procrastin-working: using AI to create the feeling of productivity without actually moving your business forward. If the task itself is unnecessary, AI just helps you do the unnecessary thing faster.
Question 3: How would I feel if a client knew I was using AI for this? If I would be embarrassed, that is a clear signal to stop. I would be mortified if a client thought I was using AI to design their brand or create their strategy. I would not care at all if a client knew I was using it to outline a podcast episode or organize a content calendar, and I would probably be happy to explain how I do it.
The Bottom Line on Using AI as a Service Provider
AI is a useful tool. It is not a shortcut to a business.
It cannot replace you, get inside your brain, or build genuine human connection with your audience. Your business still needs to be built on trust, skill, relationships, and your unique perspective, and those things have to come from you.
I use AI to save time so I can serve my clients better. I do not use it to be the business for me. That distinction matters a lot, and I think it is going to matter more and more as AI becomes more prevalent and the difference between businesses that use it wisely and businesses that lean on it too heavily becomes increasingly visible to the people hiring them.
I would love to know where you land on this. DM me on Instagram or Threads and tell me how you are or are not using AI in your business.
🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned In The Episode:
➡️ Follow me on Instagram @spechtand.co
➡️ Book Your Stand Out Brand Strategy Session (use code SFBPOD for $100 off)
➡️ Book A Brand Chat
🎧 Listen to episode 74 of The Six Figure Brand Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube
