I spend a significant amount of my time working with technology, marketing systems, sales processes and AI.
Over the last year, I’ve noticed something happening amongst the business owners and executives I deal with.
AI fatigue is setting in.
People know AI matters. They know it’s changing how we work. They know their competitors are experimenting with it, and everywhere they look someone is telling them about another AI platform they simply have to try.
ChatGPT. Claude. Gemini. Copilot. AI agents. Automation platforms. AI CRMs. AI content tools. Meeting assistants. New models. New features. New platforms.
So business owners try to keep up.
And something that was supposed to save them time starts consuming it.
I think we’re approaching AI the wrong way.
The objective isn’t to use more AI.
The objective is to use AI to do less.
Less administration. Less repetition. Less manual follow-up. Less time searching for information. Less time doing things that don’t move the needle.
If AI is creating more work for you rather than removing it, something has gone wrong.
1. Start With the Pain, Not the AI
Before looking for another AI tool, ask yourself a much simpler question:
What is wasting my time?
Where is the friction in the business?
What gets repeated every week?
What do you constantly put off?
Where are leads falling through the cracks?
What information do you repeatedly have to find, compile or explain?
Where are people performing work that a system could potentially perform?
These are the places where AI becomes interesting.
Don’t start with:
“What can I do with AI?”
Start with:
“What problem in my business do I want to remove?”
Then determine whether AI is the right way to remove it.
That’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about AI.
2. Stop the AI Tool Paralysis
One of the biggest traps I see is the constant search for the “best” AI platform.
Should I use ChatGPT or Claude?
Should I move to Gemini?
Which AI agent platform should I use?
Should I automate this?
Should I build my own?
Every week there seems to be something new.
The problem is that there will always be another platform.
There will always be another model.
And whatever you choose today will probably be overtaken by something else eventually.
I don’t think the competitive advantage is knowing every AI tool.
The competitive advantage is building the systems, processes and business context that allow AI to work effectively for you.
Document your processes.
Build your SOPs.
Define your ideal customers.
Capture your sales methodology.
Document your products, services, objections, competitors and goals.
Build the knowledge of your business independently of whichever AI platform happens to be fashionable today.
Then the technology becomes interchangeable.
Your business intelligence remains yours.
3. Capture What You Already Know — Just Talk
This is probably one of my strongest practical recommendations to business owners.
Install something like Granola on your phone and desktop and have a “meeting” with it.
You don’t need an agenda.
You don’t need a presentation.
You don’t even need particularly organised thoughts.
Just talk.
Explain what you’re trying to achieve. Talk through the problem. Explain the background. Describe your customers. Talk about what’s frustrating you. Explain what you’ve tried before.
Ramble as much as you want.
Think of it as the PA sitting in your office taking notes while you think out loud.
When you’re finished, you have your thinking captured in a transcript and structured notes that can then be turned into something your AI tools or AI agents can actually understand and work with.
For many business owners, this is far easier than sitting in front of a blank ChatGPT or Claude window trying to work out what to type.
And the value compounds.
Do it with meetings.
Do it with sales conversations.
Do it with planning sessions.
Do it when you have an idea driving home from work.
Do it when you’re trying to solve a problem.
Over time, you’re capturing an enormous amount of business knowledge that would otherwise remain trapped in your head.
Your AI doesn’t necessarily need you to become better at writing.
It needs better access to what you already know.
4. Stop Worrying About Becoming a Prompt Engineer
This is another area where I think we’re unnecessarily complicating AI.
People are being told they need to learn how to prompt.
There are courses on prompt engineering. Prompt frameworks. Prompt formulas. Huge prompts you’re supposed to copy and modify.
There’s value in understanding how to communicate clearly with an LLM, but does the average business owner really need to become a prompt engineer?
I don’t think so.
There are now plenty of tools that will help you build the prompt.
I personally use Pretty Prompt.
I can put in my thoughts, requirements and context and use a prompt optimisation tool to help turn them into a much better instruction for the LLM.
The important skill isn’t memorising some complicated prompt framework.
It’s knowing what you want to achieve and providing the right context.
What am I trying to achieve?
Who is this for?
What does good look like?
What does the AI need to understand about my business?
What information or examples do I already have?
What constraints does it need to work within?
Give the technology those ingredients and let it help you construct the instruction.
Combine this with the previous point and you have an incredibly simple workflow:
Think → Talk → Capture → Structure → Prompt → Execute.
Have your “meeting”.
Talk through what you want to achieve.
Capture the transcript.
Use AI to organise your thinking.
Use a prompt optimisation tool to improve the instruction.
Then give that to ChatGPT, Claude or whichever AI system is best suited to the job.
That’s much easier than staring at an empty prompt box wondering what you’re supposed to type.
5. Accept Some Productive Struggle
There is another side to this.
AI isn’t effortless.
This is probably one of the biggest technology learning curves many business owners have faced since the arrival of the internet.
There is going to be frustration.
You’re going to make mistakes.
You’re going to build things that don’t work.
You’re going to spend two hours trying to automate something that you could have done manually in 15 minutes.
I’ve done it.
But there’s an important difference between experimenting endlessly with tools and deliberately learning how AI can improve your business.
The technology is still new enough that almost everybody is learning.
That creates an unusually level playing field.
The businesses that learn how to turn AI into repeatable systems — rather than simply using it to write emails, create images and generate content — can build a substantial advantage.
6. Take Ownership of Your AI Education
Don’t wait for somebody to tell you exactly how AI should fit into your business.
Nobody understands your business as well as you do.
Experiment, but experiment around real business problems.
Learn enough to understand what’s possible.
Then decide what you should personally be doing, what your team should be doing, what should be automated and what should be outsourced.
You don’t need to become an AI engineer.
But as a business owner or executive, I believe you do need to understand enough about AI to recognise where it can create leverage.
That’s a very different objective from trying to become an expert in every new AI tool.
AI Should Give Business Owners Their Time Back
For me, this is ultimately where the AI conversation needs to go.
A business owner’s greatest resource is their time.
If you’re spending your days learning five new AI platforms, constantly changing tools, building prompts and experimenting without solving an actual business problem, AI has simply become another demand on that scarce resource.
Used properly, it should do the opposite.
AI should remove repetitive work.
It should make information easier to access.
It should improve decision-making.
It should make your sales and marketing systems more consistent.
It should help make sure opportunities aren’t forgotten.
It should capture knowledge that would otherwise disappear.
It should allow small teams to accomplish things that previously required much larger teams.
And ultimately, it should give the business owner more time to focus on the things where they genuinely add value.
That’s increasingly how we think about AI at 247 Digital.
We’re Revenue Engineers. We look at the entire revenue process — marketing, lead generation, sales, CRM, systems and increasingly AI — and identify where the friction is.
Then we determine where people, systems, automation, and AI should fit together.
Because the objective isn’t to have the most AI.
The objective is to build a better business — and give yourself some of your time back.