How to make AI less overwhelming as a Business Owner

Every single day, there’s another AI tool, another AI feature, another AI newsletter, another AI prompt, and another AI “game changer.” But I think a lot of business owners are exhausted. Not because AI is bad—I actually use AI almost every day—but because somewhere along the way, we’ve started asking, “What can AI do?” instead of, “Should AI be doing this?” 

Today, I want to talk about why I believe your biggest competitive advantage in the future isn’t AI. It’s being human.

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Transcript

AI Overload And The Human Edge

Carrie Saunders 0:00

I've been noticing that every single day that it seems like there's another AI tool, another AI feature, another AI newsletter, another AI prompt, another AI game changer. However, I think a lot of business owners are exhausted because I know that I have been very exhausted watching this. I've had to try to put my blinders on. And it's not because AI is bad. I actually use AI almost every day, but because somewhere along the way, we've started asking ourselves, what can AI do? Instead of should AI be doing this? Today I want to talk about why I believe your biggest competitive advantage isn't the future of AI, it's being human and using it purposefully. Let's dive

Welcome To Smarter Online Business

Carrie Saunders 0:44

in. Struggling to turn website traffic into real sales, you're not alone and you don't have to figure it out all yourself. Welcome to Smarter Online Business, the podcast for course creators, coaches, and e-commerce entrepreneurs who want their websites to convert visitors into buyers without the tech overwhelm. I'm your host, Carrie Saunders, a website strategist and conversion expert with over 20 years of experience. Each episode delivers simple, proven strategies to help you generate more revenue and make your website your smartest sales tool. Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking about how do we keep ourselves human, how do we keep our business human in this AI world, and how do we stay out of overwhelm with all the newness that comes. You know, now we're switching to this AI. Oh no, everybody's switching back to that AI. I've just, it's it's been a bit overwhelming, honestly, on social media lately, seeing all this stuff, all the advertisements, all the influencer posts about it. So I wanted to talk about that today because I see a lot of business owners in general, this is over 20 some years, will get in the newness trap, the new technology trap. And right now we're can be in the new AI technology trap. And I want us to talk about this and have a conversation because it can be so distracting and can really slow down your business if

Avoid The Newness Trap With AI

Carrie Saunders 2:06

you're not purposeful about adopting new technology and new ideas in a purposeful way. And you're just like jumping on the bandwagon and trying to, you know, figure out the latest things so you don't get left behind. We need to be purposeful about that when we do that. And I want to be clear, I do use AI pretty much every day. I use it for brainstorming these podcast episodes. I use it for organizing my outlines, I use it for refining my messaging when I'm not sure if I'm being clear. I can use it for technical troubleshooting because I find sometimes AI can, you know, gather up the data a bit better than Google can anymore. And I use it for summarizing and helping me think sometimes. I like to just, you know, sometimes it's good to talk it out, talk something out. So you can type or talk something out to AI and have it summarize it back to you. Sometimes it's good to do that and have it's kind of like having a second person. I've also used it for deep research. Some of the really cool things about AI is you can have it go off for 20 or 30 minutes, gather a bunch of data, and bring back summaries for you with you know links to resources so you can check them out and get more information. And it can help you do good customer research pretty quickly and pretty fast, much faster than if you did it by hand. So there are some really good uses for AI, and I do believe they should be in your business. But again, like I said earlier in this episode, we want to be purposeful about it. We want to make sure that it's not being distractive and slowing us down. So the biggest question is not whether or not you should use AI, it's whether you're using it intentionally. That's what this episode's all about.

Stop Chasing The Next AI Tool

Carrie Saunders 3:45

So for me, I have been having a lot of AI fatigue lately. And that's one of the reasons why I wrote this podcast episode. I'm seeing, like I said earlier, you know, this new AI feature, you know, we're going from Chat GBT to Claude now. Oh no, wait, ChatGBT is better at this. We're switching back to ChatGBT. Oh, now we're going to co-pilot or Gemini or whatever might else be out there now. And we want to make sure that we're not wasting our time jumping around. If there's a really good reason, sure, migrate to that new AI platform that might serve you better. But we don't want to just jump around because everybody else is doing it. This last wave of people moving from um chat GPT to Claude, I just ignored it. Um I know that Chat GPT works for me and works for what I needed to do. So I just ignored it and I let people do their thing and I was still being productive and keep going. It seems that Mac also has a lot to say on this. So you may hear him. He's decided to come in and talk on our episode. Some of the things I've been seeing lately is people say, you can replace your team with AI. You'll never have to write again. You can get these 100 prompts or a thousand prompts or 10 million prompts to do all the things you need to do in your business. And it can be so overwhelming. So, so overwhelming. I know even for me who I'm purposely ignoring most of this, it's still overwhelming to read this over and over again because you feel like you're being left out. And as human beings, we tend to not want to be left out. So then a lot of things I'm seeing consumers say on the consumer side is they feel so overwhelmed by all these posts, all this content that is AI generated. I see comments on businesses, uh, pages and or and images that they're using on social media. Man, I really miss this when that this wasn't an AI image, or man, I really miss this, you know, authenticity of this brand, or wow, everything sounds the same. This is what I'm seeing as a consumer and an observer on many of the you know top social media platforms too. So consumers are getting tired of it as well as us business owners are getting very overwhelmed. So then how do we balance

Let AI Assist Not Think

Carrie Saunders 5:58

this? How do we utilize AI, not be overwhelmed, and not have our consumers and customers really like seeing the AI be like a wall or a barrier to your business and seeing it as you dehumanizing your business? Um so where we want to go with this. So, what we want to think about is that we need to think about AI as helping us. It, for example, can help us think, but it should not think for you. So, what you can do is you can give it, you know, I have these five ideas, help me organize them, but not tell me what I should believe or tell me what I should do next. And what we've seen too, like, you know, maybe say a year or so ago, prompt engineering was out there so much. And it really isn't our competitive advantage anymore. Being human behind how you use AI is the competitive edge. It is the good judgment, it's how you can make sure that AI isn't uh over consuming you in your business. You don't want to outsource your thinking. You can use it to help you brainstorm, you could use it to help you um sort ideas or you know, try to solve a problem and help you, you know, work through that problem, but you still need to have that human element, that human judgment behind it. There are certain things that AI cannot replace. They cannot replace your experience, they cannot replace your stories, they cannot replace your failures, they cannot replace your opinions, your relationships, your intuition. We want to go back to that episode we had it. It was episode number 164 with Josh Hall. Your website shouldn't just explain, it should connect. And in that episode, he talks a lot about how do we use our stories to connect with humans. So while you can use AI to help you refine your story and make it more clear, because sometimes we can tend to be a little bit muddy with all the words we use, we can use it to make our story a bit more clear, but it shouldn't edit or it shouldn't produce a story that didn't actually happen. That's not a really good way to connect with your audience. And really, it shouldn't adjust your messaging too much because those little words that you might use that others don't use as much are part of who you are. And we don't want to come across as stiff, we want to come across as human. So having those imperfect words that you use all the time can really help show how human you are. People remember stories, not perfect paragraphs, and this is really hard and something I've always struggled with in business because you know, I started this business in 2002. Back then, the norm was to have perfect paragraphs, perfect everything, and we didn't have AI to help us with that. So even as a business owner, it's harder for me to transition from, you know, now people really want more of a human story and less perfect, less English, proper grammar or whatever language you speak, proper grammar in it. We want to have a bit more of a humanizing story. And so now that we're using AI, it's getting us back to that stiffness again. So we need to make sure that our human is in our stories. So then I want to talk about, you know, I mentioned I use AI just pretty much every day in our business. So

My Practical AI Workflow For Business

Carrie Saunders 9:25

I want to talk about some ways I use AI to help you get some ideas on how I use it and kind of help you assess, you know, what's a good idea and what's not. I'm still also a human. You shouldn't necessarily listen to everything every one single person says. You are you and you are your own. It's great to learn from others. We get knowledge much faster that way. But again, we don't want to completely copy somebody else either. So these are just some ideas for you to think about and think about okay, what can I use AI for to help me be more efficient and more effective in my business, but still not replace me. So some of these I mentioned a little bit early on, and one of them is I love to use AI to help me brainstorm ideas. For me, it takes me a lot longer to brainstorm an idea to you know figure out what I might want, what you guys might want to listen to or hear. And it takes me a long time to write an outline. Now, from that outline, I just speak to the outline, I edit it before I even start recording, and I make sure it's my own. But so it's not coming up with my content that I'm talking about, other than it gives me organized thoughts around a topic or an idea. And I prove those brainstormed ideas that I do with AI before I decide to record them. If if it doesn't feel like me, I don't do it. It's okay. It doesn't, it's not the end all, no all, be all thing. That's what we got to remember. Some people think that what comes out of AI is truth and what we should follow, and that's not necessarily true. And then I also use it for marketing. I use it for first drafts and marketing, or I might have my own first draft and I use it for editing to tighten up the words. So I'm a bit not too wordy, but still has my flavor to it. Um, I might use it for brainstorming headlines. Sometimes it's really hard to work on our own um business. And actually, actually, it's almost always is. I talk to other uh business friends about this a lot. We all struggle with working on our own business. So having it help you brainstorm, having it help you make your wording a bit more concise is all normal, natural. We would otherwise use somebody else to help us do that. So we're just using AI for that. I also use AI to do research on how to solve a problem. You know, sometimes Google's great, but anymore, most of the time I get a bit better answer through AI. So I use it to help me solve a new tech problem with, say, go high level that I'm not sure where to start with it, and it'll point me in the right direction. Then I go figure it all out myself. It can help me do deep research and try to figure out, you know, what are people asking right now? What are the trends? What are people afraid of with technology? What do they need help with with technology? What are the current questions? It saves me hours and hours of time of skimming Reddit and Facebook forums and things like that to collect this information and gather it. And that's what it's really meant for is going out, gathering information and sorting it and putting it in an organized manner. That is the perfect model for what AI is for. So I use it for that, and like I said earlier, I have it give me references that way. I can double check that what it's giving me is true and not made up. That's one thing we always want to do with AI. We want to double check the truth behind what it's telling you and the facts. And then anytime I use AI, I never publish it without making it mine. I have to read it, double check it. It only takes a little bit to make sure that it sounds like you. So even if you're using it to help you write marketing and copy, say that's not your strong suit. You really got to make sure you've fed it enough information first, and then I want you to review it to make sure it still sounds like you and it's still very human. So, in short, AI in general, you know, what most of these things I'm talking about are writing type exercises. I'm really good at AI or sorry, I'm really good at writing, but it's a lot of effort to get into that mode where I'm really good at writing. So AI helps me write faster. It doesn't decide what I believe, but it gets those main topics and the bigger ideas out more quickly and help me organize them in a better manner so then I can write from there. Because once I have the ideas and I know what I'm writing about, that's the easy part for me as that part of writing. It's the generation of ideas where my brain gets a bit stuck and a bit indecisive. So I want to give you some filter ideas that you can use for AI to help you decide should I be using AI for this task? So

Five Filters For Intentional AI Use

Carrie Saunders 13:54

before using AI, ask you this, ask yourself this question Does this save me meaningful time? If the answer is yes, yes, then that might be you know something you use AI for. Another question you can ask yourself, does it improve quality? Again, that's like we're taking our messaging and we're refining it. Does it improve quality? Another question to ask is, does this still sound like me? So when it gives you the information back, does it still sound like you? And you need to be very um strict about this, especially in the beginning, because sometimes we can start to believe what we hear. So in the beginning, be very ruthless about this and keep that ruthlessness throughout using AI. Does this still sound like me? If it doesn't, tell it and tell it how to make it you know sound more like you and change it. And then this this last fourth question, not the last question, but the next last question am I using AI because it's useful or because it's new? I see this so much as you know, my business friends just jumping on some new AI thing because it's new and not because it's necessarily useful or going to help them move their business forward. And then this last one I feel like is super important. Would my audience lose something valuable if I remove the the human element? This is another area I haven't really talked about much on this episode yet, but I am seeing people being really upset and um feeling like they're not getting the customer service they want when they go to chat on a website and it's an AI bot and it's really hard to get to a human. Now, I do see that a lot of people are okay with the AI bot if it's really easy to get to a human when they need it. So that would be an example of would my audience lose some value if I remove the human element. So that's where they could lose value if they remove the human element, is if you have a chat bot that's too AI having that doesn't get you connected to a human really quickly whenever the AI realizes it's not solving your problem or your customer's problem very quickly. So think about that. Let me read those real quickly again. Does this save me meaningful time? Does it improve quality? Does this still sound like me? Am I using AI because it's useful or because it's new? And then would my audience lose something valuable if I remove the human element? Technology should remove friction, not authenticity. So let's just keep that in mind when we're using it in our businesses.

Wisdom Beats Automation Over Time

Carrie Saunders 16:26

So I feel like the theme of this podcast episode is that one of the biggest opportunities in the next few years won't belong to those who are using the most AI. It'll belong to those who know when not to use AI. Because in a world where anyone can generate words, especially now, people will increasingly value wisdom. They will value perspective, they will value experience, they will value humanity. So if AI has been overwhelming to you and feeling so overwhelming, I want, I hope this episode encourages you to not try every tool, master a few that genuinely help you, and spend the rest of your time doing the things that only you can do, the things that you are great at. So this means ask yourself, where is AI genuinely helping me? Where is it distracting me? Where am I replacing that busy work? And where I might accidentally be replacing my own words. That's all we have for this week's episode of the Smarter Online Business Podcast. I hope it helped you really step back and give yourself permission not to use AI for everything, be more purposeful on how you use it so that you can be a more effective and more happy and less overwhelm business owner. And we will see you next week.