How to Use AI in Your Small Business (An Actual Plan, Not 1,000 Prompts)
The AI world has become exhausting.
Every time I open Instagram, someone’s pointing excitedly at floating text telling me…
🚨 “This AI tool replaced my entire team!”
🚨 “You’re 97 days behind if you’re not using THIS prompt!”
🚨 “I built a million-dollar business while eating crisps on the sofa thanks to AI!”
Good for you, Gary.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are over here wondering…
“Can someone please explain what I’m actually supposed to DO with this stuff?”
Because that’s the bit nobody seems interested in talking about.
Instead, they tell you to sign up for ChatGPT.
Then Claude.
Then Perplexity.
Then Gemini.
Then whatever shiny new AI tool launched five minutes ago.
Before you know it, you’ve got six subscriptions quietly nibbling away at your bank account every month…
…and you’re still writing your own emails because AI somehow made them sound like they were written by an overly enthusiastic customer service chatbot.
“I hope this message finds you well…”
No.
It did not.
Here’s the mistake I see people making.
They’re trying to learn AI.
Don’t.
That’s like saying…
“I’m going to learn electricity.”
You don’t need to understand electricity to make toast.
You need to know which button to press.
AI is exactly the same.
You don’t need to become an AI expert.
You need to know how to use it to make your business easier.
That’s a very different goal.
So…how do you actually use AI in a small business?
Don’t start with the tool. Start with the task.
Every single time.
Not…
“Which AI should I use?” Instead ask… “What do I keep doing over and over again that makes me sigh?”
Because THAT is where AI earns its keep.
I call it the Sigh Test.
If you catch yourself saying…
“Ugh…I have to write another product description.” That’s an AI job.
“Ugh…I need another week’s worth of social media.” AI job.
“Ugh…I’ve answered this customer question for the nineteenth time this week.” AI job.
Notice what’s happening?
You’re not looking for ways to use AI.
You’re looking for ways to stop repeating yourself.
That’s where the time savings happen.
Not because AI is clever, but because repetition is boring.
Let me show you what I mean.
Imagine you’ve just finished writing a blog post.
Most people stop there.
Smart business owners don’t.
They squeeze every last drop out of it.
I’d open ChatGPT and say something like:
I’ve written a blog post for small business owners about budgeting. My audience is busy women running small businesses who like practical advice with a bit of humour. Turn this into:
- Five Instagram captions
- Three Pinterest pin descriptions
- One email to my subscribers
- A LinkedIn post
- Ten headline ideas I haven’t thought of
Now you’ve turned one piece of content into an entire week’s worth of marketing.
In about the time it takes for your coffee to go cold.
See? That’s useful.
No fancy automation, no seventeen different AI tools talking to each other while you cross your fingers and hope nothing breaks.
One task. One prompt. Done.
“Fine. But mine still sounds like a robot.”
Yeah. Because it doesn’t know you.
You gave it nine words and a vague vibe, then got annoyed when it wrote like a stranger who’d never met you, which, to be fair, it is.
Think about it like this.
If you hired a new VA on Monday morning, said “write my emails,” and then walked straight out the door…
What would you expect to get back? Something polite. Something safe. Something that opens with “I hope this message finds you well.”
Exactly.
So before you ask AI for anything, you’re going to hand it the file.
One document, built once. Never again.
Stick this in it:
- Who you sell to, described like an actual person, not a demographic. (“Jess, 38, runs a candle business and is scared to open her banking app.”)
- What you sell and what it costs. All of it.
- Three things you’d say to a customer on a call that you’d never write on your website.
- Two bits of your own writing you actually liked. Even if it’s a text message.
- The words you refuse to use. Mine are elevate, unlock, and anything containing the word journey.
That’s it. About 20 minutes, and you can do it while you’re half-watching something you’ve already seen.
Now paste that whole thing at the top of the chat before you ask for a single word.
Every time.
I call it the About You file, and it’s the single difference between “wow, that’s basically me” and “I hope this message finds you well.”
“But I spend longer fixing it than I would have spent just writing it.”
Right. And this is the one that makes people quit entirely, so pay attention.
Here’s what’s happening. AI gives you 400 words. You don’t love it.
So you go in and personally rewrite 300 of them, mutter something rude, and close the laptop.
Then next Tuesday? You do the exact same thing again.
Stop editing the words.
Edit the instructions.
Go back and tell it what was wrong, out loud, the way you’d tell a person:
“Too formal. Cut the opening paragraph, I never want an intro. You used two words from my banned list. The third caption is the only good one, make the rest sound like that.”
Round two will be better.
By round four you’ll get something usable on the first try.
And here’s the bit people miss: the instructions are the thing you were building.
Not the captions. The recipe.
Which means you have to save it.
Copy that working prompt into a document. Right now, before you close the tab.
Give it a name you’ll actually recognise at 10pm on a Thursday.
Not “prompts.”
Call it “the one that works.”
Call it “STOP REWRITING THIS.”
Next month you paste it in, swap two details, and you’re finished before the kettle boils.
Now go and cancel four of those six subscriptions.
There’s one you use, one you used twice in March, and four you’d genuinely forgotten existed, all quietly pulling money out every month to fund Gary’s affiliate income.
Keep one.
You don’t need a stack of tools, buttercup. You need one tool that’s been taught one job properly.
Why AI keeps giving you rubbish
Can I tell you what I think the biggest AI problem is?
It’s not AI, it’s us.
(Yes, I said it.)
We treat ChatGPT like it’s a mind reader. We type something like…
“Write me an email.”
Then we sit back expecting Shakespeare mixed with Gary Halbert and a dash of Taylor Swift, and instead we get…
Nope. Delete.
Let’s try another one. “Write me an Instagram caption.”
AI happily spits out…
✨ Unlock your potential today! ✨
🚀 Transform your business! 🚀
💡 Success starts with one step!
Congratulations, you’ve just created the exact same caption as another 4.2 million people.
AI isn’t lazy, it’s clueless.
Imagine walking into a bakery and saying, “I’d like a cake.”
The baker asks, “What kind?”
You shrug. “Just…cake.”
Chocolate? Vanilla? Wedding? Birthday? For 12 people or for 200? Gluten free?
No idea.
Whose fault is it if you leave disappointed? Not the baker’s.
AI works exactly the same way, and the better your instructions, the better your results.
Here’s the prompt formula I use every single day. Whenever I’m asking AI to help with anything, I give it five things, and you can think of it as introducing AI to your business before you ask it to do any actual work.
1. Tell it WHO it is.
Don’t say…
Write me a product description.
Instead say…
You’re an experienced Etsy copywriter who specialises in helping small businesses sell digital products.
Instantly better.
2. Tell it WHO you’re talking to.
This is the bit almost everyone forgets, and it’s the one that changes the most. Don’t make AI guess.
For example…
My audience is busy women running small businesses who don’t have hours to waste learning complicated software.
Now AI has someone to write for.
3. Tell it WHAT you want.
Be ridiculously specific.
Instead of…
Write me an email.
Try…
Write me a friendly email introducing my new budget planner. Start with a funny everyday story, keep the tone conversational, use short paragraphs and finish with a soft invitation to buy.
See how much more information you’ve given it?
You’re not making AI cleverer, you’re giving it fewer opportunities to mess it up.
4. Tell it what NOT to do.
This one changed everything for me. I literally tell ChatGPT…
Don’t use:
- “I hope this email finds you well.”
- “Unlock your potential.”
- “Game-changing.”
- “Revolutionary.”
- Too many emojis.
- Corporate language.
- Over-the-top excitement.
It’s a bit like telling someone you’re making tea. You don’t say, “Make a drink,” you say, “White. One sugar. Don’t forget the biscuit.”
Specific wins, every time.
5. Give it examples.
This is the closest thing to a cheat code.
If you want AI to sound like you, show it how you sound. Paste in one of your emails, one blog post, one product description, and then say…
Use this as a style guide. Match the tone, sentence length and personality, but don’t copy the wording.
The difference is ridiculous. It’s the difference between hiring someone who’s read your work…
…and someone who’s never met you.
My favourite AI shortcut
Here’s one I use almost daily.
Let’s say I’ve written a blog post like this one. Instead of closing my laptop and calling it a day, I ask AI…
Based on this article, what questions would someone still have?
Honestly? It’s brilliant, because AI thinks like a curious reader.
It’ll come back with things like…
- Which AI tool should I start with?
- Is ChatGPT enough?
- Do I need to pay for AI?
- Can AI replace a VA?
- Is my information private?
Congratulations, you now have five more blog posts. Or emails. Or Instagram captions. Or YouTube videos.
One piece of content becomes ten, and not because AI created it, but because AI helped you squeeze every last drop out of an idea you’d already done the hard work thinking about.
The biggest mistake people make with AI is expecting it to do the thinking.
Don’t. You do the thinking, and let AI do the typing.
That’s where the sweet spot is.
Lets recap!!!
Step 1: Pick the task you’d happily pay a stranger $40 to take off your hands
Not the impressive one. Not the one that would look good in a Reel about your workflow.
The one that makes you groan out loud in an empty room.
Usually it’s one of these:
- Turning one long caption or one client call into 4 pieces of content, instead of staring at a blank Canva square for 25 mins
- Writing the product description you’ve now rewritten 4 times and still hate
- Answering the same 6 client questions you’ve answered 300 times, in the same tone, from your phone, in line at Target
- Chopping a workbook into a sales page outline so your product stops living in a Doc named “FINAL final v3”
- Looking at your own numbers and figuring out what’s actually profitable (this is the one you’re most scared of and it pays the best)
Pick the one that made your stomach drop a little. That’s your task. You get exactly one, and everything else on that list can GTFO until this one’s handled.
Step 2: Build your Brain Dump before you ask for anything
This is the whole ballgame, so don’t skip it because it looks like homework.
The output sounds like a press release because you handed over 9 words and a vibe, and then got mad at a machine for not knowing you.
So make one document. Once. Never again. Put in:
- Who you sell to, described like a person and not a demographic (“Jess, 38, has a spreadsheet she’s scared to open”)
- What you sell and what it costs
- 3 things you’d say to a client on a call that you’d never write on a sales page
- 2 pieces of your own writing that you actually liked
- The words you refuse to use (mine: elevate, unlock, and anything containing the word journey)
20 mins, tops. You can knock it out while something’s in the dryer.
Now paste that entire thing at the top of the chat before you ask for a single word. Every time. This is the step that turns the output from a LinkedIn post in a trench coat into a slightly boring cousin of you, which is a huge upgrade from where you were 4 minutes ago.
Step 3: Ask for the real thing, not a warm-up
Don’t ask it to “help you brainstorm.” You’ll get 12 mediocre ideas and no finished work, and brainstorming is not your bottleneck, finishing is.
Ask for the actual deliverable, in the actual format, with the actual constraints:
“Using everything above, write 3 versions of the product description for [thing]. Under 90 words each. Talk about what she gets, not what’s included. No intro sentence, start with the good part.”
Specific in, specific out. Vague in, and you get the raspberry-jam-grandmother version of a product description where you scroll for 6 paragraphs looking for the part that matters.
(Speaking of which, if you have ever hunted for a “jump to recipe” button that wasn’t there, you already understand everything about bad AI output.)
Step 4: Fix the instructions, never the output
Ohhh this one.
You get back 400 words, you don’t love it, so you personally rewrite 300 of them. Then next Tuesday you do the exact same thing, and now you’re spending more time babysitting the robot than you’d spend just doing the job, which is a completely reasonable reason to rage-cancel.
So stop editing the words. Go back and tell it what was wrong.
“Too formal, cut the intro paragraph, you used 2 words from my banned list, and the third one is the only good one, make the rest like that.”
Round 2 will be better. Round 4 will be usable on the first try. And the set of instructions you end up with is the actual asset here, not the caption.
Step 5: Save it like a recipe card
Copy that whole working instruction block into a doc with a name you’ll recognize at 10pm on a Thursday.
Not “prompts.” You will never in your life open a folder called prompts. Nobody has ever opened that folder. It’s where good intentions go to die, right next to the 14 free trials you signed up for in February.
Call it “the description one that works.” Call it “STOP REWRITING THIS.”
Next month you paste it in, swap 2 details, done in 6 mins.
Step 6: Now cancel four of the five subscriptions
There’s one you use, one you used twice in March, and 3 you forgot existed, and together they’re pulling about $60 a month to fund some guy’s affiliate income. He has a Notion database with 340 AI tools in it. He has never sold anything to an actual human being.
Keep one. Kill the rest. You don’t need a stack, buttercup, you need one tool that’s been taught one job.
Step 7: Repeat next month with the second-worst task
That’s it. That’s the entire method. There’s no level 2, there’s just this again, with a different ugh task, once a month, forever.
. Want the swipeable version of the Brain Dump doc so you don’t have to build it from scratch? Grab it free here 👉 [LINK]
