Small businesses using AI are pulling ahead. Here is how they do it...

THIS WEEK: Every week there is another headline about AI replacing jobs. Most of them are designed to make you anxious rather than informed. This week we cut through it: what AI is actually replacing right now, what it cannot replace, how I use it every single day in my own business, and what it means for you as a small business owner.

The AI conversation has a binary problem. On one side, you have the people telling you AI is going to replace everyone and everything and you should be preparing for the end of work as we know it. On the other side, you have the people telling you AI is overhyped and nothing has really changed. Both of them are wrong, and both framings are unhelpful if you are trying to run a small business and figure out whether any of this actually applies to you.

Here is the more accurate version. AI is very good at specific, repeatable, text-based tasks. First drafts of content. Summarising long documents. Generating options quickly. Answering questions based on information it has been trained on. Responding to common customer queries. Transcribing audio. Processing structured data. These are tasks that used to take human time and now take seconds. That is a genuine change and it is already happening.

What AI is not good at is judgement, relationships, context, and accountability. It does not know your customers. It cannot pick up the phone and talk someone round when they are about to cancel. It cannot walk into a room and read it. It does not have seventeen years of experience in a particular industry and the pattern recognition that comes with that. It cannot be held responsible when something goes wrong.

The BCG published research in April 2026 concluding that AI will reshape more jobs than it replaces. That is a more useful frame than the headline version. The tasks change. The job remains. The people who are going to struggle are not the ones whose entire job could theoretically be done by AI. They are the ones who refuse to learn how to use it and end up slower and more expensive than the people who did.

For small business owners, the opportunity is straightforward. AI can do the parts of your job that eat time without requiring expertise. That frees you up for the parts that do require expertise, which is where the actual value of your business lives.

How I Use AI Every Single Day

I use Claude every day. Not occasionally, not for experiments, every single day as a core part of how I work. Here is what that actually looks like in practice.

First drafts. When I need to write something, whether that is a client proposal, a blog post, an email sequence, or a social media caption, I use AI to produce a first draft. Not a finished product. A starting point. I then edit, rewrite, and apply the context and knowledge that I have built up over seventeen years that the AI does not have. The output is mine. The time saving is real.

Research starting points. When I need to understand something quickly, industry trends, a platform I have not used before, a topic a client has asked about, I use AI to get oriented fast. I then verify what it tells me and go deeper where I need to. It is not a replacement for proper research. It is a way to get from zero to informed faster than reading five articles would allow.

Summarising and processing. Long documents, meeting notes, briefs that clients send over: I use AI to pull out the key points so I am not spending twenty minutes reading something that takes two minutes to summarise. That time adds up across a week.

Generating options. When I am stuck on a headline, a subject line, a way to structure a page, or an angle for a piece of content, I use AI to generate ten options quickly. I usually do not use any of them directly, but seeing the options breaks the block and gets me moving.

Responding to repetitive queries. For clients who need the same type of information regularly, AI-assisted responses mean I can reply faster without reinventing the wheel each time.

None of this has replaced my expertise. It has made me faster at the parts of my work that do not require expertise, which means I have more time for the parts that do.

What AI Cannot Replace

Your relationship with your clients. The trust you have built, the way you communicate, the fact that someone has worked with you for three years and knows you will sort things out if something goes wrong. AI cannot replicate any of that.

Your industry knowledge. Knowing which approach works for a particular type of client, what Google is actually doing right now versus what people are saying it is doing, why a certain strategy failed for a business like the one you are talking to. That is accumulated experience. AI can approximate it with general information but it cannot replace it.

Your judgement. When a client wants to do something that you know from experience is a bad idea, you push back. You have a reason, based on something you have seen before. AI will often just help them do the thing, because it does not have the experience to know why it is wrong.

Accountability. When something goes wrong, someone has to own it, fix it, and retain the client relationship. That is a human job. It will remain a human job.

TOOL 1: Claude

Claude is the AI I use daily for writing, research, summarising, and generating options. Free plan available at claude.ai. The free tier is genuinely capable for most tasks. The paid plan is £15 a month and increases the amount of content it can process at once, which matters when you are working with longer documents or detailed briefs. If you are going to try one AI tool, this is the one I would point you at for content and writing work.

Link: https://claude.ai

TOOL 2: ChatGPT

ChatGPT is the most widely used AI assistant and has the broadest range of integrations. Free plan available at chatgpt.com with GPT-4o included on the free tier subject to usage limits. Better than Claude for some tasks, particularly anything involving data, code, or browsing the web in real time. Worth having both open and using whichever suits the task. Most people who use AI seriously end up with both.

Link: https://chatgpt.com

TOOL 3: Otter.ai

Otter.ai transcribes meetings and calls automatically and produces summaries with action items. Free plan includes 300 minutes of transcription per month. If you spend time on calls and then spend more time writing up notes afterwards, this removes the second part entirely. Connect it to Zoom or Google Meet and it runs in the background without you thinking about it.

Link: https://otter.ai

If you have been watching AI from a distance and not actually using it, here is how to start without wasting an afternoon setting things up.

Pick one task you do every week that is repetitive and text-based. Writing a social media post. Drafting a follow-up email. Summarising notes from a meeting. Responding to a common customer question. Something you do regularly and find slightly tedious.

Open Claude at claude.ai or ChatGPT at chatgpt.com. Both have free plans. Describe the task and ask for a first draft. Read it. Edit it. Use whatever is useful and rewrite whatever is not.

Do that once this week. Then do it again next week. Within a month you will have a clear sense of where AI saves you time and where it does not, based on your actual work rather than someone else's opinion about it. That is more useful than anything you will read in a think piece about the future of work.

NEED HELP? In over your head? Wearing too many hats already? No idea where to start? I can help you. Alternatively, feel free to WhatsApp me on 07800596333!

Perplexity (perplexity.ai) is an AI-powered search engine that answers questions with cited sources rather than a list of links. Free plan available. Useful when you need a quick, reliable answer to a specific question and want to see where the information comes from rather than taking the AI's word for it. Better than ChatGPT or Claude for research tasks where accuracy and sourcing matter.

Notion AI (notion.so) is worth knowing about if you already use Notion for notes or project management. The AI add-on costs $8 per user per month on top of any plan including free. It summarises pages, drafts content, fills in database fields automatically, and answers questions about your own notes. If your business information already lives in Notion, having AI that can search and summarise it is genuinely useful.

The AI headlines are not going to get calmer. If anything they are going to get louder as the tools get more capable. The question is not whether AI is changing things, it is. The question is whether you are going to use that change to your advantage or spend the next two years anxious about it while your competitors get faster and cheaper.

I have seventeen years of experience in web design and digital marketing. AI cannot replicate that. But AI can handle the parts of my work that do not require seventeen years of experience, and that makes the parts that do require it more valuable, not less.

The small business owners who are going to struggle with AI are not the ones whose work could theoretically be automated. They are the ones who decide that AI is not for them and carry on spending three hours a week on tasks that now take twenty minutes. That is a competitive disadvantage that will compound.

You do not need to understand how it works. You need to try it on one task and see what happens.

Got a tool you want me to review? Reply to this email. Need actual help with your business's systems or digital setup? I have been doing this for 17 years. Get in touch. Alternatively, feel free to WhatsApp me on 07800596333!