Building an AI tool on top of my standard services, not just using one has me thinking a lot about how I use my time, and what we’re all doing with the bits of it that AI apparently keeps handing back.
AI does provide me with more time. Mostly.
The analysis I used to do to gain insights on my clients’ marketing is done in a fraction of the time. I can churn out a performance dashboard with every key marketing insight, across all their channels in minutes. And, I can make recommendations on what they should keep doing, stop doing and start doing, in less time than it previously would have taken me to export the data.
With Collective Source now, I can write a blog that sounds like me and repurpose it into a month’s worth of posts that leverage my unique messaging framework and historical data of what’s working and what’s not for me in socials these days.
And yet I don’t come out the other side feeling like I’ve got more time. If anything I’ve just found more to fill it with.
So, where is all that additional time going?
Somewhere in the last year or two a lot of us started using AI to go faster, and then never really stopped to ask the obvious thing. Faster towards what? We got the speed. I’m not sure we ever worked out what it was for.
I’ve watched tools make this same promise for 25+ years, and it tends to go the same way. Every one of them was going to set us free, and mostly they just raised the bar for how much we were expected to produce.
Email was going to give us our afternoons back. You know how that went. The smartphone was going to make us efficient, and it did, right up until it started buzzing at us on a Sunday night.
AI is that story again, louder and faster. It really does give the hours back. What happens to those hours is the part I keep chewing on.
The bit that surprised me
When the busywork clears, you start to notice things you couldn’t see underneath all the doing.
I noticed it in my own feed first. So much of what scrolls past now sounds the same. Same openings, same shape, and none of it sticks, because it could have been written by anyone about anything. I’d read a post, nod along, and forget it four seconds later.
The easy explanation is that people aren’t telling AI enough about themselves. I don’t buy that one anymore. Most business owners I talk to know the drill by now. They know they’re meant to tell it who they are and who they serve, and they do.
The real problem sits underneath. A lot of them used AI to work out who they are in the first place. So the input was already generic before the output ever had a chance, their own identity run through the average of the internet and handed straight back as more of the same.
And even when the inputs really are theirs, something is still missing. The part that makes us human – the part that makes your business unlike the one down the road. Your values. Your purpose. A vision only you can hold for your clients, because of all the lived experience you’ve had.
A tool can’t hand you that, because it has never sat where you’ve sat or wanted what you want. And, because the tool has no heart. Or body. Or soul.
This has to come from you first. Only once you’ve done that soul-searching can you pass it over and expect something back that actually means anything.
I got asked about this on the Asia Tech Podcast last month, and my answer remains. “You wouldn’t ask AI to define your hopes and dreams. So don’t ask it to define your brand’s DNA.”
The reason this matters so much is bigger than AI.
Standing out is the whole job of marketing. You do it to create cut-through, to be the one a customer remembers when it counts. When everyone sounds the same, marketing stops doing anything at all, and you might as well keep your money.
So using AI in marketing without sounding the same is really just marketing, doing the job it was always meant to do.
The tool can only reflect what you put into it. Which means the way through starts with you.
Unfortunately, most time poor small business owners don’t make enough time for exactly this. And, in this AI-filled world of ours, it’s the first thing that really matters when it comes to your branding and marketing.
What actually keeps your voice yours
None of this is quick, and it isn’t meant to be. The things that make your marketing sound like you have to be dug out of you first, then written down somewhere the tool can reach them. For me the list looks something like this:
- Your actual brand voice, written down properly, so there’s something real for it to work from;
- The real words your customers use, pulled from proper voice-of-customer work, not the ones you assume they use;
- Your own point of view on your market, the thesis you’d happily argue over dinner;
- A clear sense of who you’re for, and who you’re honestly not;
- Personas built from real people you’ve worked with;
- Whatever is really going on for you this month, in this business, in your life; and
- The opinions you hold that you’re still a little nervous to say out loud.
Give AI that, and it stops guessing. It starts writing from you, because now there’s a you in the room for it to draw on.
Honestly, this is most of what we do with clients inside The Mentorship long before anyone even opens their social pages or starts updating their website for the hundredth time.
Get all of that out of your head and into a shape the tools can use. Do the groundwork once and AI becomes worth having around. Skip it, and it’ll keep making you sound like the rest of the internet.
So, to what end?
Which brings me back to where I started…
Say AI saves you six hours this month. What are those six hours actually for?
I don’t think I properly understood the answer until I watched our Collective Source pilot play out. One of our early adopters has been running her business for 17 years.
Last month, for the first time, she had a full plan for the month ahead, sorted before the month even began. Her week hadn’t got any longer. She’d simply pointed the same hours at something that mattered, planning and thinking ahead, rather than scrambling to get something posted by Friday. The tool gave her the time. What she did with it is what changed how the whole thing felt.
It enabled her to maintain visibility in the busy weeks without stress and pressure to post. It enabled her to be more active with her engagement online and offline. It didn’t remove her presence, it enabled her to show up with more energy – not because she had to tick a box, but because she was inspired in the moment. A moment that only came from having time and headspace she didn’t have before.
That’s the discipline I think AI is handing all of us now, whether we asked for it or not. Once you can’t reach for “I didn’t have time”, you’re left holding the more honest question underneath. To what end? What is the time really for?
The question you should be asking too
AI is only going to get faster, and it’ll keep giving these hours back. I don’t think the win goes to whoever manages to churn out the most with them. I think it goes to the people who stay clear about what the time is for, and are honest enough to actually spend it there.
So before you let a tool plan your next month, I’d sit with the question first. When it gives you those hours back, what are you going to do with them? Get that clear, and everything it makes for you starts pointing somewhere you actually want to go.
And if your honest answer right now is “I don’t know yet”, it’s ok. That’s where the real work is. It’s the whole reason The Source Method in our Mentorship programme exists – to get you clear enough, your voice and your actual point of view, that the time you save lands on the business only you can build.
If you’re ready to earn back the hours, without sacrificing the quality of your marketing, Collective Source may be for you too. Check it out here.