Understanding A.I. For Established Entrepreneurs

Well, have you jumped on the A.I. bandwagon yet?

Or do you think it’s a bunch of malarkey?

The goal of this video is to outline some of the key things an established entrepreneur should be thinking about in the world of AI to decide if it’s a good fit for them to be using, or if it’s a distraction that’s actually getting in the way.

I’ve waited a long time to make this video because it’s been an ever-changing landscape, and I’m just starting to feel like some of the pieces are settling in place enough where I can speak a little bit on it and begin to outline things.

I will be covering

• The Cutting Edge of Technology vs. The Dull Edge
• AI For Marketing
• AI For Automations
• Initial Research with AI
• Critical Thinking with AI

This has been written with the established entrepreneur in mind, meaning someone who already has a business that exists, has a product/service people want, has ongoing sales, and is delivering on their product already. The advice for someone who is aspirationally wanting to launch something new would be different!

Let’s dive right in.

Cutting Edge of Technology vs. Dull Edge of Technology

Before we go too far, let’s talk about where technology fits in an entrepreneur’s existence right now.

If you are a brand new business owner just starting up or even pre-launch, going into the most cutting-edge of technology can be a very helpful accelerant.

If you are an established business, though, being on the dull edge has its benefits.

So I’ll talk a bit more about this concept and unpack exactly what I mean here.

If you have a new business that you have not started yet, then incorporating AI or making an AI-focused business can be a unique, cutting-edge frontier-type advantage where you can launch rapidly in a new space with lots of excitement and fewer established moats.

However, if you’re an existing ongoing business with employees, built-in customers, and systems, trying to be on that same cutting edge is a distraction from your daily operations and what’s gotten you to where it’s gotten you already.

And if you are always chasing the cutting edge of new technology as it comes out as an established business, you’ll end up betting on some things that are losers that don’t pan out. (I’m not saying whether AI is or is not this).

It’s important to recognize that every cutting-edge thing isn’t a good fit for you. It’s better to be on the dull edge of business when you have an established business.

Wait until an advancement is proven out and has shown some longevity before you dive on it, because then you’re not in that same risk pool and you get only the benefits (without the same level of risks) as the problems are flushed out.

You can look back at previous cutting edge examples,

• Blockchain
• Chatbots
• Social media marketing
• SEO
• Courses
• and many more…

These different trends happen in such a way that they seem to explode, and you feel this need and this pull to be on the cutting edge. But really, at the end of the day when the dust settles, there isn’t always benefit to being there. Sometimes there is, sometimes there is not.

So again, if you’re an unestablished business, being on the cutting edge is great.

If you’re an established business, I would recommend not letting this distract you from the day-to-day things you already know you should be working on.

Your to-do list is already a million pages long, so driving and learning a whole new system or area would be taking you away from that.

The longer you wait, the more guidance, and the more it’s fleshed out.

Using AI as an example, it has been iteration after iteration of improvement over time and remains a moving target.

The longer you wait, the better the product is when you do finally get into it. So just a general piece of guidance and thinking about things, depending on the stage of business, there’s higher or lower benefits.

Summarized Opinion:

If you are an established business, then playing with AI is probably a distraction from other activities you could focus on that have a higher impact. Definitely take advantage of it for specific use cases where you NEED it!

If you are looking to launch a new business, a new technology like AI could be a rocket fuel to get you further with less initial resistance because the competition isn’t as established yet and you have more time to dabble and learn.

Key Ways To Use AI In Your Business

Let’s discuss some of the key uses of AI in business right now to outline the framework in a way that affects everyday entrepreneurs.

• Using AI for Marketing
• Setting Up Automations Using AI
• Initial Research with AI
• Critical Thinking with AI

Using AI for Marketing

So one of the common uses of AI currently is for marketing.

I’ll break this down into

• Search marketing
• Content marketing

AI Search Marketing

Search marketing is one of the reasons I made this video right now. I’m seeing entrepreneurs starting to feel pressure that they are missing the boat if they aren’t focusing on this, and I wanted to dispel some myths.

The Pitch

It used to be that entrepreneurs would get tons of SEO emails saying, “Hey, we’ll get you to page one of Google, hire us and pass lots of money.”

In the early days of that, the entrepreneur had the idea that these SEO firms had this magic wand light switch they just flipped on. “Now my SEO is on, and tons of people are going to call me and reach out to me.” They’d hired and paid these firms lots of money, but unfortunately there oftentimes weren’t significant results over time.

Now it’s gotten to the point where many entrepreneurs would get dozens of emails a week or even a day from different SEO people making different promises. They just delete and remove them. On this new frontier right now is this idea of AI search marketing.

The pitch goes something like this. “It’s really hard to be found in Google. Therefore, people are using AI to search now for new things, and you should be listed there instead! If you can’t be on the top five search results of Google, you should do things to trick people into having ChatGPT show them your result instead.”

There are all sorts of hacks and new ideas about this space. Essentially, it’s getting shown as a magic wand switch to avoid the common areas of SEO, which is deemed to be hard to get results. Therefore, here’s a different workaround hack to make it easier.

I am making this video partially to help people not fall into this pit or this trap so much.

The Underlying Truth

Most people that are selling the “Rank Well In AI Search” service aren’t doing it out of a malicious negative aspect. They are excited about adopting a new technology and all the possibilities.

But one of the things to remember is that AI agents don’t have the entirety of the internet built into them.

They’re making a call to the internet, much like if you hired an office administrative assistant and said, “Hey, research this topic for me”, that person might go to Google or another browser, type in a search, and pull back a result. That’s how these agents are working.

There isn’t really a hack to make that agent find you differently because it’s basically going to Google or whatever web search already and pulling results back.

The big difference is if you have an established conversation, maybe it’s having more of a longer tail search.

Maybe it knows that you have two kids, this type of business, you like these types of foods, eat at this restaurant. It’s a longer tail versus just “restaurant near me.” But you could have typed that same thing in Google and had the same result.

So before you start trying to do a lot of spam posts on LinkedIn or on Reddit with the idea that’s going to somehow boost your AI presence, the actual core principles are the same as SEO, meaning content that’s helpful for a user that answers real questions clearly is going to typically do the best.

If you have poor SEO presence, you’ll have poor artificial intelligence presence. The big thing is that it’s unclear exactly how AI works in that realm, so it’s easier to kind of mask that if someone is selling that service to you.

I would say as of right now, if you’re thinking, “oh, I should be paying a marketing firm a lot of money so I can rank higher on AI,” that would be much better spent energy focusing on your general web presence, because if you don’t show up in the web presence, you won’t show up any better in an AI presence.

That’s one part of marketing.

Summarized Opinion on AI for Search Marketing:

This space currently is a lot of mythology and guesses to the inner workings of an unknown black box. What we do know is that AI currently makes calls on the existing internet engines for answers, so ranking better in those places has a known benefit versus the shifting sand of trying to “rank in AI.”

For a deeper dive into this topic, this video can be a great primer.

Content Marketing

The second part of marketing with AI is that you can actually pump out content much more quickly with AI right now.

I’ve seen people use it for

• Blog posts
• creating images
• social media content
• emails
• and so much more…

That’s a wide, wide array of ways to use this.

One of the considerations when deciding whether AI is a good fit for you here is recognizing that creating content shouldn’t be just checking a box that says, “Okay, I did my content today. I shared something.”

It matters that it actually has an IMPACT.

Did a user actually look at this, enjoy it, and respond and have a reaction?

Or was it instantly identifiable as some sort of AI slop that was put together that had no impact?

If you’re doing the second, you’re probably actually having a negative influence on your customers.

You’re starting to show them that you are cutting corners, that you’re not in tune and focused. You’re just checking the box.

It’d be better probably to do fewer posts or fewer blogs that were actually human-generated with some attention (or AI started and finished by humans) than to push a lot of stuff out just because you can.

That’s a key idea: DON’T use these tools just because we can, but because they actually have an impact.

Previously, some rules of general internet presence included a level of frequency, a level of presence had a level of impact to show that you are an active person. You might show up better in rankings, but it’s actually started to become pretty evident that the big players are penalizing that.

Just, this last week I saw the news that YouTube pulled a hundred thousand plus AI-generated videos. Spotify pulled hundreds of thousands of songs.

Google has been penalizing people who are doing a specific sort blog content called “Scaled Content” for a long time and AI makes it faster to create this penalized type of content unfortunately.

Scaled content is one thing that’s called where you maybe scrape a competitor’s website, create similar blog posts on your own site that cover similar topics. They can see that you’ve done that and actually penalize your page for that.

Notice that using AI for some of these things can be worse than doing NOTHING at all.

Finally, it’s a slippery slope. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should on the content marketing side of things.

Summarized Opinion on AI for Content Marketing:

AI tools can offer a great opportunity to save time on activities you are already doing. Don’t lose track of the importance of “quality over quantity” to connect with actual customers. Don’t get sucked into a hamster wheel of ever-increasing content just because you can.

AI for Automations

Now on the more positive side of AI, automations.

This, to me, is the number one thing entrepreneurs SHOULD be evaluating to see if there’s a reason or a need to incorporate AI into their business.

AI is used across a wide variety of topics, but the automation part of AI has been around for a long time.

It’s really not so much thinking for itself as ability to connect application A with application B, have them pass over a certain amount of data, and take an action for you.

Way back when Tim Ferriss wrote The Four Hour Work Week, he talked about If This Then That (IFTTT), which I started using way back then.

Zapier is another popular one I’ve been using for over a decade.

There are lots of different ways to set up automations, but both the tools above are very beginner-friendly.

Zapier, for example, has prebuilt recipes.

Some I have used include “If a Google Calendar event is one day away, then send an email reminder via Gmail”, “When a card is archived in Trello, send a text message”, and more…

Other AI models like Claude can be used to custom design more coded solutions, but for many owners, it is overkill to try to learn and build those skills while also running their businesses. And if those automations break, it can be hard to unravel exactly what happened with a pre-existing skill in understanding software.

As a business owner, it’s not uncommon that you have a number of tools across different ecosystems that you need to have talk together, and automation can help streamline that process. Now you don’t have to type information repeatedly or take extra steps. It can streamline things.

AI can be very good for that when the input data is known and the output data is known.

The automation side of things of AI is, I would say, on the duller edge of technology now. It’s quite proven that that can be very, very effective!

Summarized Opinion On AI For Automations:

For established business owners, this is one use of AI that pretty much everyone should be starting to explore. The number of repetitive tasks in a business that could be streamlined if different applications or programs talked with each other better is always enormous, and the ROI on time saved is huge. Playing around in this space for a few hours to get some automation set up can save a few hours a week every week for the rest of the life of your business!

Using AI for Initial Research

Let’s move on to the next part of AI. Initial research is another excellent use for AI.

If you’re just beginning to learn about a topic, let’s say that you don’t know much about sales yet as a business owner, and you’re like, What are some key concepts in sales? It can provide you some information. You can have a chat with it to ask some more and get a big picture idea of what that looks like.

The important part here, I said initial research.

The thing is, is that it is likely it will feed you some incorrect information.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re doing initial research because now you can go deeper on any topic using non-AI reliant methods. You can find books or more established human curated content that’s less likely to have errors.

But if you’re taking whatever it says as the end truth, then issues that can pop up where it’s inaccurate or not nuanced to your exact situation can create problems.

Use it only for the initial research and getting the big idea.

• What does the field look like?
• Where are the landmarks?
• Where are the goalposts?

It’s really, really useful for that as you’re trying to enter a market, saying, “you know, what are some of the things I should know about opening x type of business?” It can give you some starting points, places where you can dive in and do deeper research.

Summarized Opinion on AI for Initial Research:

This is a useful tool to start to get a grasp for the topic you are wanting to learn more about. It can give you a more condensed and organized structure to start thinking about a topic than one you’d have to model in your own head after reading a handful of the top search results yourself.

However it makes mistakes and pulls in information that doesn’t apply or isn’t totally accurate so it is best to use it only as a jumping off place and not the final say.

Getting Expert Advice From AI

Carrying on to the last point, expert advice and critical thinking are NOT a good use for AI.

Here is where I am concerned that people are going to get themselves into trouble.

Usually what I see is people who are using AI a lot; they are likely doing that in an area they don’t already have expertise in.

So they are very susceptible to misinformation.

If you are someone who uses AI and trusts it quite a bit, I would challenge you before you go too much further asking it for deep feedback is to ask it some questions about a thing you’re already a deep expert on and see how many areas it gets wrong.

Because if you don’t know much about a new topic, whatever someone says, you can assume it’s the truth.

But if you were talking to your friends around the campfire and they gave you feedback and advice, you might be skeptical of that.

But because it’s AI and technology, and we’re “living in the future”, and it knows “everything” because “all of the wisdom of the internet” is available to it, we sort of take it as a higher level of authority than maybe we should actually be granting it as for expert advice. (All of those quotations indicate biases that aren’t accurate..)

If you are using AI for expert advice, I would say to double check your sources similar to how you would for humans around you.

Start by evaluating “what am I already an expert on and do I agree with its feedback on that?”

And if not, why should I believe it on areas that I’m not an expert on?

A recent example I have seen was where people fed in house valuations for real estate into AI and got an opinion back that was not in line with what on the ground experts believe, including buyers, sellers, lenders, agents, and the market at large.

I’ve seen numerous other situations where AI has fed back information that has not been helpful in a real-world scenario.

AI Bias

And one of the key reasons is that they’ve done studies that in general, AI tends to agree with the user 50% more often than their core friend group would.

That even includes if the person is doing something unsavory, like cheating a business partner, the AI will still encourage that behavior 50% of the time, which is significant.

This was proven true across every AI Agent. None were immune. It is built into how they function.

This is not unknown amongst users.

I think many users think that they can work around that. But if you ask the AI a question, usually the way you ask it has a slight bias.

Let’s say “Should I consider cutting back on the marketing spend on X?” is the question that you put into it. Within that question is the idea that you think you maybe should already. So AI is more likely to agree and ask follow-up questions to take you down that path.

If you were to instead say, “Should I increase the marketing spend on X?”, it’s more likely to agree with you on that.

That means there is a compromised, non-reliable source that can come into play, which I think people are somewhat aware of, but I just wanted to bring to the forefront for discussion.

The Ability To Build Our Own Skills

The final part that has me slightly concerned is that it is really useful to use AI to jump forward in a project.

If you’re crafting an email, you can use that to get the rough draft down, but there is a chance of error, it’s not error proof right now, and it misses the human touch.

Now you can go in and toning it up. You had the initial skeleton outline to start with, you’re able to fill out the rest.

That’s great, but if you’re trying to use it to go all the way from something just from scratch, it can have its own problems.

When Shortcuts Become A Problem

I worry about the new generation coming up.

For example. Someone wants to be an author and write a book. They could use AI and have AI put together a book fairly quickly.

If they were to do it the old way and spend 10,000 hours of writing stuff that’s not very good, at the end of a few years they might have written a book that’s not great.

But AI could maybe have them put together a book that’s also maybe not great in a month or two months.

And so it’s hard to say why would that person EVER spend the years to write their bad book, when AI could write their bad book in just a month or two?!?!

And because of that, it’s unlikely they will invest the time to build those foundational skills over time.

If someone has put in those years of writing a book and writing their first bad book, well then now their next better book comes out in a year. Their next better book comes out in six months. A great book comes out a year after that. Then they can write a great book every single year potentially, because they’ve built those foundational skills.

So one of the concerns is that relying on AI can cause you to miss out on building foundational skills.

And I’ve found that skills tend to compound one on top of the other.

For example, if you’re using it to analyze your business finances, but you don’t internally understand and know what your finances mean or should be for your business. Now, whenever you’re looking at marketing ROI ad spend, you’re dependent on the information it has on the financial side of things because that skill is missing.

And now, when you look at the marketing spend and you’re talking about sales conversions, you’re relying again on those foundational pieces being outsourced by AI since you don’t know them yourself.

My concern is that you can become reliant on this tool and miss building those skills that allow you to actually go further and stack taller. It builds a quick tower, but the foundation isn’t as sturdy.

And now you’re built upon and reliant on it. So that’s my deepest concern.

Plus, to me, developing a skill is one of the most enjoyable parts of being a human, from writing bad poetry, to cooking a new meal, to trying to create art, to learning basic home repairs, and so much more.

Many business owners I work with actually started by building a skill years in advance of ever starting their business. They started to learn to groom their own dog and later developed the skills to groom all types of dogs and open a business. Or they build their abilities to make construction repairs and develop their skills into a broad expertise. How we learn one skill is how we learn all skills.

But there are plenty of times where just, “Hey, let’s shortcut to the end here and get this done. This isn’t a skill I need. This is a one-time-off thing.” We put this together with AI to get the job done and move on. That’s a great chance to let it jump you forward.

Conclusion

So I wanted to give the big picture.

My conclusion, my big takeaway, I hope that you have from this video is

1. Recognize if you’re an established business and how that impacts your thinking about the cutting edge or the dull edge of technology.
2. You don’t feel pressure to jump into this AI bandwagon just because other people are.
3. You start to see that there are some practical applications for AI that maybe are a fit for your business.

There are some nuanced ideas here, but I don’t believe everyone should be on it or nobody should.

I just wanted to kind of highlight some of the considerations as you’re moving forward, making decisions in your business. I’m sure this is ever changing, so use your best judgment, but don’t feel pressure or like you’re behind because you’re not. Let that go and have a great rest of your day.