Where to actually start with AI, without losing a week to it.
My dad ran a small business. He was practical, he worked hard, and he had absolutely no patience for things that were more complicated than they needed to be.
He passed away in 2018, right before AI became the thing everyone won't stop talking about. I think about him a lot when I'm doing this work, because the people I most want to help are exactly like him. People running real businesses on their own energy, without a tech team, without an innovation budget, without the bandwidth to become an expert in something new on top of everything else they're already carrying.
This is what I would have wanted him to read. So that's what I write.
You don't need to understand how AI works to use it. You don't need to know what a large language model is. You don't need to have a strategy or a roadmap or a dedicated afternoon to figure it all out before you start.
You just need one thing that's costing you time.
That's it. That's the whole entry point.
The reason people get stuck isn't that AI is too complicated. It's that the conversation about AI is too big. “How do I use AI in my business?” is an impossible question. There are a thousand answers and none of them are specific to you. So you google it, you get a listicle with 47 ideas, you skim it, you close the tab, and you go back to doing it the way you've always done it.
Understandable. Also a waste.
Let me give you a better question.
What's the thing in your business that takes time you don't have, happens more than once a week, and follows roughly the same pattern every time?
For most small business owners I talk to, it's one of these:
Writing quotes and proposals. Sending follow-up emails. Responding to inquiries in a way that sounds professional when you're actually typing it out on your phone between jobs. Writing something. A post, a description, a bio, a response to a review. Staring at the blank page for longer than the actual writing takes.
That's your starting point. Not “AI strategy.” Not “digital transformation.” Just the thing that's eating time right now that looks roughly the same every time you do it.
AI is genuinely good at that stuff. Those tasks are predictable enough that you can give it a clear brief, get something useful back, clean it up in two minutes, and send it. The version that used to take forty-five minutes now takes eight. That's real time. That's the thing worth chasing.
What it actually looks like
Say you're a builder. Every job ends the same way: you need to send a follow-up message thanking them, noting what was done, reminding them how to reach you if anything needs attention. You've typed a version of that message a hundred times. It lives in your head. It takes ten minutes every single time.
That's a template. You write it once, properly, with a tool like ChatGPT. You tell it: “here's what I do, here's the tone I want, here's what needs to be in the message.” It drafts it. You fix the two things that aren't quite right. You save it. You never write it from scratch again.
That's not AI replacing you. That's AI doing the bit you didn't need to be doing yourself.
Or say you're a coach. You spend twenty minutes before every client session reviewing your notes and thinking through what to cover. You could do that with AI as a thinking partner. Put in a few dot points about where the client is at, ask it what questions you might not be thinking to ask. You won't use the questions verbatim. But they'll prompt things. The prep gets sharper and shorter.
Neither of these requires a subscription to five tools. Neither of these requires you to become a tech person. Both of them are available to you right now, with ChatGPT, which has a free version, which is probably already on your phone.
What's not worth starting with
Honestly: your social media content.
I know that's what everyone says to use it for. And yes, technically it can write posts. But the posts it writes sound like posts written by AI, which is fine until your audience notices. And they do notice. The flat cheerfulness. The phrase “I'm excited to share.” The way it summarises your point instead of making it.
Your content is where your voice lives. That's the last thing you want to outsource wholesale. Start somewhere lower-stakes, get a feel for how to work with it, and come back to content once you know how to steer it properly.
Also not worth starting with: paying for multiple tools. I talk to business owners spending $200 a month on AI subscriptions they're using at maybe 20% capacity. That's not investment. That's guilt dressed up as ambition. Start with one thing, use it properly, and add from there.
The actual first move
Open ChatGPT. Free account is fine.
Think of the task you identified, the one that's predictable, repetitive, and eating time. Type this:
“I need help with [the task]. Here's the context: [two or three sentences about your business and what's involved]. Can you give me a first draft?”
See what comes back. Fix what's not right. Notice what you'd do differently next time.
That's it. That's the whole first move. You don't need to read a guide before you do it. You learn faster by doing it badly once than by preparing to do it perfectly.
My dad would have hated how long this took me to explain. He'd have wanted the short version ten minutes ago.
So here it is. Find the repetitive thing, give AI a clear brief, fix what's off, save what works. Do that once. Everything else gets easier from there.
If you want to figure out specifically what to tackle first in your business (not in theory, in your actual situation), that's what the dreamstorm Community Hour is for. Free, once a month, no agenda. Just an honest conversation.