I hope this written content finds you well.
Because apparently that’s how we open things now. We don’t say hello. We don’t say g’day. We say I hope this email finds you well, a sentence no human being has ever meant, in an email no human being really wrote.
I’m a copywriter, so I notice these things. And since AI turned up, the words coming out of businesses have changed. Everyone sounds polished now. Big words. Perfect structure. And the words no human has ever said at a barbecue. Nobody’s ever stood at the esky and announced, let me just delve into that potato salad before I take a robust bite of that delicious looking snag. Delve. Nuanced. Robust. Ask an AI to write something and it delves into things constantly. Emails read like a university essay that scraped a credit. And LinkedIn comments all say the same three things. Fail forward. Embrace the journey. Crush it.
And don’t get me started on social media. I manage it for clients. I see its role. I understand its worth. But I’ve always despised it, and AI has tipped more acid on people’s brains than there was before it arrived. There’s just no original thought anymore. Everyone’s spitting out posts and leaving frothy, fluffy, emoji-filled, uninspiring stuff everywhere, like a teenager ferociously brushing their teeth too close to the bathroom mirror.
The whole feed is foam. Nothing to bite into.
And here’s the bit that drives me batty. The people sending them think they’re cleverer than the next person because AI crafted their response. They have no idea what their own response means. They just know it’s got some big words in it. They press send and lean back like they’ve delivered the Gettysburg Address.
Meanwhile, my way of doing things has raised the odd eyebrow over the years. My way is turning up. Doing the work. Being loyal to my clients. Working as hard as I can to meet the objectives. Having fun along the way, because the alternative is death by spreadsheet and I refuse.
Fifteen years ago my tagline for LoudCow was get your small business found online minus the expense and the bullshit. I’ve never found a reason to change it.
And if anyone’s researching me or my work before deciding whether to get in touch, good. That’s smart. Here’s what you should know. My idea of professional is not billing every minute of my time. It’s building relationships with clients that outlast the invoice. It’s being loyal to the people who trusted me with their business, and doing my absolute best on every job, even the small ones, even when nobody’s watching. Fifteen years of work says more about how professional I am than any buzzword ever could.
Apparently that’s the eyebrow-raising list now. Turn up, do the work, have a laugh. Meanwhile the bloke who charged five hours of discovery fees and vanished at seventy percent of the job? Professional. His proposal had synergies in it. Twice.
The top ten list I swore I’d never write
I hate top ten listicles. Hate them. Every second headline is Seven Ways AI Will Transform Your Business and every single one of them could have been an email. But there’s a version of this list that actually matters, so fine. Here it is. The top ten things AI can genuinely help a small business with.
- Resizing a thousand images. One at a time, that job used to eat a week and your will to live.
- Creating a dot JSON template file for WordPress. That’s the file that stores your site’s content and settings so a whole page or theme setup can be imported in one hit. Building one by hand used to take a month of Sundays and a stiff drink.
- Auditing. Cross-checking an Excel spreadsheet against a product brochure so the pricing and the terms and conditions actually match. Nobody wants this job. AI doesn’t mind.
- Renaming three thousand files from IMG_4052 to something a human can find later.
- Meta descriptions. For every product. In one afternoon, instead of never.
- First-pass proofreading of that thing you’ve read so many times your eyes have gone soft.
- Turning an hour of meeting ramble into dot points that resemble a plan.
- Bulk find-and-replace across an entire website without your heart stopping.
- Comparing three quotes line by line and telling you what each one actually covers.
- Drafting the boring structural bits. Terms pages. FAQ skeletons. Then you add the personality, which is the entire point.
Every job on that list is boring and monotonous. And how awesome is it that AI can do all of it for us now. So we can get back to being the creative beings we all should be.
That’s the whole argument, really. AI is brilliant at the work nobody wants. It’s hopeless at the work only you can do. The boring stuff, hand it over today. The thinking, the talking to people, the showing up, keep those. They’re yours. They’re also the only parts your clients actually remember.
One last thing before you press send
Use AI for all the boring stuff. Please. Life’s too short for a thousand image resizes.
But remember this. When you use AI to communicate in the most polished of ways, you never appear intelligent. You appear artificially so.
The people you most want to impress can tell. They’ve always been able to tell. The polish isn’t the professionalism. The person is.
Frequently asked questions
Is it unprofessional to use AI for emails?
Using AI isn’t the problem. Sending words you haven’t read, don’t understand and would never say out loud is the problem. AI can tidy your writing. It can’t mean it for you.
What are the best jobs to hand to AI in a small business?
The boring, monotonous ones. Resizing images in bulk, auditing spreadsheets against pricing documents, renaming files, drafting structural bits like terms pages. Anything that makes your eyes glaze over is a candidate.
Will people notice if my messages are AI-written?
Often, yes. Wordy, polished and oddly formal is becoming its own tell. A shorter, plainer message in your own voice lands better than a small essay nobody asked for.
Can AI make me sound more intelligent?
It can make you sound more polished. That’s not the same thing, and the people you most want to impress can usually tell the difference.
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