Is AI ruining your business? AI won’t replace you if you’re excellent—but it might replace you if you’re average. In a world where anyone can produce average content at scale, the real question isn’t how much AI you’re using, but whether the work coming out of your business is truly exceptional. This post digs into why AI is widening the gap between great businesses and average ones, and what you need to protect to stay on the right side of that divide.
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AI Is Widening the Gap Between Excellence and Average
AI won’t replace you if you’re excellent, but it might replace you if you’re average. That’s the conversation everybody is having lately. Everybody’s wondering if AI is going to replace us. We’re seeing ChatGPT graphics, Claude-written captions. You can build your own app now — whether or not it works consistently is another story. But AI, no doubt about it, is widening the gap between businesses that are committed to excellence and businesses that are okay with average.
This episode has been in the queue for a while, but I was really thinking about it after recording the book review from last week for Emma Grede’s book, because one thing I could not stop thinking about was the obsession with making things great. One of the things that truly makes her successful is her incredibly high standards. And I think that AI is making standards matter more than ever.
If you feel like you have been running on a treadmill to keep everything afloat with your business, and yet there’s also this nagging part of you that feels like you cannot keep up with AI, that you need to learn more about AI, that you’re falling behind — listen, if you’re listening to this marketing podcast, you probably already know as much about AI as the average person. And I would say it might even be better to experiment with AI less than to be on the other pendulum swing, using AI all the time, absolutely obsessed with it, spending 12 hours a day not getting better, but doing more — putting out more average content.
More Output Is Not the Same as Better Output
If you are right now posting twice a week on Instagram but the posts are really excellent, versus posting seven posts a week that are absolutely average because you’ve leaned into AI, I actually think the first option is going to do more for your business. That’s one example, but we could apply it to every single part of your business. If your onboarding is all automated and done with AI, but it is clunky and feels impersonal and feels very average, does that really outperform something you’ve spent time on that maybe requires more handholding because you don’t have the systems and automation in place?
To be clear, this is not an excuse to not have good systems in your business. But sometimes it feels like the thinking is: now that AI is here, AI can do everything faster, cheaper, and at scale. So things that were previously inaccessible to small business owners — most of us could not post seven times a week, most of us could not do email and LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok and all of these things — now, if we let AI do it for us, we sort of can. We can put out a ton of average stuff, whether that’s content or something else in the business. That’s why it’s possible AI ruining your business.
Years ago the advice was: be consistent, things don’t have to be perfect before you hit publish. But today, publishing average content is just adding more noise. Truly great businesses, because there is such a temptation to lean on AI for everything, are becoming significantly more valuable and are going to continue to become more valuable. And average businesses are going to have a harder and harder time doing literally anything at all.
The Problem With Letting AI Do Your Thinking
You may know that I’m a blog writer — I write done-for-you blogs, and I also have a membership where you can use an AI tool I’ve created to write blogs. But I’m not even making an argument about whether you should use AI to write or not. What I’m actually concerned about is less what you’re using AI to produce, and more that so many of us are falling into patterns where we’re using AI to think.
I talked about this at the Emma Grede episode last week, where she mentions in the very beginning of the book that some of us will look for a boss even when one doesn’t exist. I think some of us are letting AI become our boss.
We’re asking it what we should do next. We’re asking it what the strategy should be. We’re asking it what questions our customers might have about a topic. And the problem is we are not necessarily doing anything with that information, despite the fact that we might think we are. We’re recreating a strategy guide every single month or every two months. We’re building a spreadsheet with everything we need to do to project manage a new membership we want to launch. We keep building these things, but we don’t actually use them. In fact, I think we don’t even remember that they exist.
Groundhog Day: When AI Strategy Goes Nowhere
I was deep in the rabbit hole about this today. I have a friend who comes to me almost every month — and she is a friend, so sometimes she’ll come to me with this great plan to start blogging. She has these blogging questions and this strategy that ChatGPT clearly made for her, and I’m always giving her feedback because, again, friend.
But today I was like, do you not remember? We’ve been having the same conversation three months in a row and you’ve made no movement, but you’ve reinvented the strategy 85 times. The thing is, she has not invented the strategy 85 times. She has — I’ll call it very generously — co-created the strategy with ChatGPT. And it’s so easy to forget that it even exists. She forgets the work that she did because it was so passive during the initial creation process that she doesn’t realize she’s living Groundhog Day, because our brains just are not recognizing it the same way they would otherwise.
If you sat down and made a blog plan or any kind of plan with pen and paper, you are going to remember that you did that. But I’m willing to bet you have dozens of ideas that you’ve mapped out with ChatGPT or with Claude, where it built you the spreadsheet or the document and you never looked at it again — and in fact, you don’t even remember that it exists.
There was an MIT Media Lab study that found that when people used ChatGPT to write, something like 83.3% of users who used an LLM to write an essay could not recall or provide a single correct quote from an essay they had written just minutes earlier.
If you’re a psych nerd, you have to read it. It is honestly scary what relying on AI does to our brains after a short period of time. So I think the thing to remember when we’re all deciding what we’re going to use AI for — or when we’re feeling really behind on using AI — is that there’s no rush. You don’t win a prize for using AI in the most ways or doing the most with it quantity-wise.
The businesses that are going to see success using AI are the ones that are using it the best. They’re being efficient with it, getting stuff done that actually needs to get done, making things faster or higher quality with AI — but they’re not just putting out more or checking more things off a to-do list.
How to Be the Thinker, Not the Prompter
Personally, I’ve become really intentional about this. I obviously use AI a lot for writing, but I did find that I was leaning on it a bit too much for the planning I have to do as a business owner, and I just don’t think it’s that good at that, to be honest. So I’ve really focused on how I can be the thinker and then only use AI to execute on my own ideas.
I’ve been using Claude Projects a lot, and I definitely need to do a whole episode on the unique and exciting ways I’m using it to do more than AI has previously been able to do. It’s not just chatting with it — though as mentioned, you recall almost nothing from those conversations, which is still blowing my mind. With Claude Projects, we can get AI to do so much for us, but it can also become a huge distraction if we’re not being intentional about it.
A Real Example: How This Episode Came to Life
I’ll give a really tangible example. Even with this episode — how did it come to life? I uploaded my podcast statistics to an AI and asked it to evaluate them, tell me what kinds of episodes were doing well, what I should do, all of that. It gave me ideas, and one topic sounded interesting to me, so I asked for six sample outlines for it.
I didn’t take any of those outlines. What I did was voice-note all of my thoughts about each one. “I like this. I don’t agree with this. I feel like this needs to be talked about — make a note that I can tie in the personal anecdote about my friend. This is something I definitely want to touch on. I don’t want to talk about this.” I did that through all six outlines. Then I said, “Based on what I’m saying in this 15-minute voice note, can you put together a bullet point outline so I’m not reading from a script — something to make this episode as straight to the point as possible?”
Someone left a review on my podcast saying I was super rambly and they didn’t get anything out of it. And even though it hurt my feelings, I thought, you know what, there might be some truth to it. Some episodes I’ve just been popping on with quick thoughts, and sometimes I do let myself get a little off track. You have a billion podcasts to listen to, and it means so much to me that you chose this one. So I do want to start having a more succinct outline so you can get the most value possible from each episode.
That’s even why I turned to AI to help me organize my thoughts before hitting record, because I’m usually on a tight timeline.
I don’t have eight hours to record this. AI definitely helped me speed it up, but at the same time I wasn’t just saying, “What’s a topic? Okay, that one. What’s an outline? Okay, press record.” I think those extra steps are what’s going to separate podcasts you can’t even listen to anymore — because it’s very obvious the host is reading from a script they didn’t even write — from a podcast you keep tuning into. I actually talk about this in episode 118, about how one of the things you need to do if you want to use AI without ending up sounding like a robot is to really push back.
Do not accept the first draft of anything, because the first draft will be the most average thing.
Even if at first you’re thinking, wow, this sounds good — it will be the most average thing. You need to push back.
The 4 Things AI Can Never Replace
That brings me to the next thing I want to talk about, which is the fact that AI just can’t replace what makes us the most valuable (which is why AI ruining your business shouldn’t be a thing). It can’t replace the fact that we are humans and we understand humans more than an AI model ever will. In order to communicate that value in a world where we’re using AI, there are four things that really stand out to me.
1. Having Opinions
The first is having opinions. We need to be sharing our real-life opinions. Five-tips content has been dead for quite a long time, but whenever I hear somebody’s deep beliefs, things they’ve changed their mind about, lessons from clients, failures, stories — things that can only come from living your actual life — that is what is going to connect with people. And honestly, that’s one thing I said throughout my discussion of Emma Grede’s book: you know what she believes by the end of it. She shares some of her biggest failures and stories that you cannot help but connect with her. At least I couldn’t.
2. Taste
The second thing is taste. AI doesn’t know what’s good and what’s better. It can say, “this is an even stronger point than the one we just talked about,” or “yes, you’re right to push back on that, this is better” — but it doesn’t actually know. It really, really doesn’t. It doesn’t know the difference between bad, good, average, and exceptional.
Most people stop as soon as AI spits out something that sounds good, and AI will convince you that that is enough. I don’t think that’s enough. I think the abundance of AI that is everywhere has raised the bar.
Great business owners know when something can be stronger, and they don’t let themselves stop until they get there. Yes, maybe they’re using AI to help them execute, but they’re rewriting, they’re deleting, they’re simplifying, they’re making it sharper. They’re not just copy-and-pasting and calling it a day. They are incredibly discerning about the way their business is represented, and they don’t relent on their standards.
3. Strengthening Your Judgment
The third thing to prevent ai ruining your business is strengthening our judgment. I truly feel like this is almost like a muscle. I mentioned that MIT study earlier, and as someone who’s a bit of a psychology nerd, it’s such a good reminder of what I’d call getting your reps in. If you’re just publishing the same blog post you wrote with AI over and over again, that’s not really putting your reps in. You need to actively work on making something better and better in order to experience the compound effect.
Brock Johnson, who’s an Instagram expert, said — and this was around 2025 — that so many business owners are still making the same kind of reels that worked in 2022 and haven’t worked on honing their skills at all in the last three years. So the gap between where they are skill-level-wise and where they need to be to be favored by the algorithm is pretty wide, because they haven’t been slowly improving over time.
I feel like this is exactly what is going to happen with AI.
The people who are doing the exact same thing every single time they write a blog post or an Instagram caption — never taking a second to ask, does this sound like me? Is this still what’s working in my market? Is this still what my audience is looking for? — if you’re not taking the time to use your whole brain to think about these things, you’re going to be in trouble.
You’re going to wake up two years from now and realize the gap between where you need to be and where you are has gotten farther and farther, because people who are great are going to keep improving.
4. Curiosity
The fourth thing is curiosity, and I feel like curiosity is such a human thing. If you’re spending all day talking to ChatGPT, sometimes you just need to get out and touch some grass. There’s real power in things like a 24-hour screen detox on Sundays, where you’re taking a step back from you and your AI chatbot.
Now you can link AI to everything — you don’t even really need to sign into your inbox anymore, you can do it all from Claude or connect it to your CRM, send emails to your list, and so on. Depending on the kind of business, you could theoretically run your whole operation from one interface. AI is becoming that, in the way a CRM once was — where you could easily spend eight hours in front of your little chat window.
But you need to look outside that chat window.
You need to look at your competitors and what they’re doing. You need to see what the current standard is so that you can be better — not to spiral into comparison, but because if you want success, you need to be better than what the market currently has to offer. You need to have conversations, read books, talk to your customers, listen to podcasts that actually give you something. Be an observer. I always talk about this — I learn the most by observing my own habits as a consumer.
Protect Your Brain and Your Superpower
It is so easy to fall into spending way, way too much time talking to AI, and I think we need to be incredibly intentional about making sure we’re not doing that and protecting our brains. Because I genuinely worry about our brain health.
I’m a blog writer, so it’s important that I keep my brain engaged in my blog writing process. You might not need to protect it for that specifically, but you do need to protect it for whatever your superpower is — product development if you’re a product business, your photography skills if you’re a photographer. Don’t let a tool like Imagen AI take over your entire editing process. You need to protect what is your particular strength.
Not that you have to be exceptional at everything. It’s okay for some things in your business to be average if it’s not what you sell — not all of your marketing needs to be exceptional. But the pieces of your marketing that are going to deliver the most return do probably need to be exceptional, whether that’s investing in long-term efforts like blogging (which, hey, is something our agency can help with) or Instagram, if that’s your thing — do the yap challenge that everyone keeps talking about. I’m obsessed with it.
Whatever it is, you do need to be exceptional at some things. You can be average at others. But the danger is when you become average at everything, because everyone can be average — and in fact, Claude or ChatGPT can literally produce average entirely on their own. They do not need your input for that.
Average Is No Longer Valuable
So all that to say: AI is creating a lot of mediocrity, and it is also raising the bar. It sounds contradictory, but what it means is that everyone is average, which means nobody is terrible anymore — and it also means you need to do more than be average. What would have been impressive two years ago feels generic and boring today because everyone can do it. Everyone has access to it, and the market is adapting.
The businesses that win over the next five years won’t be the ones using the most AI. They’ll be the ones keeping their brain power and thinking the hardest about the things that matter most in their business. The ones that stay curious, the ones who care about excellence, the ones who obsess over their customers, and the ones that just keep improving.
AI has made average accessible, which means average is no longer valuable. Working on your craftsmanship is the best move right now. The businesses that treat their work like a craft instead of a commodity are the ones that AI will actually help.
If you want to be one of the businesses that AI actually helps — rather than one it quietly makes irrelevant — the next step is making sure your content is working as hard as you are. Check out the link below to learn more about how we can help you produce blog content that is anything but average.
LINKS MENTIONED
- Emma Grede’s book, “Start With Yourself
- MIT Study about the brain effects of using AI
- Hire us to write SEO-driven blog posts for you
- Learn more about our Pinterest management services
- Learn more about working with our marketing agency here
- Follow me on Instagram
