I Use AI. I Am Not Ashamed of That. I Think You Should Too.
I have been in this industry for more than 25 years. I have watched it change in ways that would have seemed impossible when I started — and I have always believed that a professional owes it to their clients to use every legitimate tool available when it produces a better outcome. AI is one of those tools.
I want to be direct about something before going any further: I used AI to help write and polish my recent post, Your Website Has Cameras. Most Businesses Aren’t Watching. The camera analogy in that post — comparing web analytics to having a complete, always-on view of every customer in your store — is something I have been explaining to clients for over 25 years. The understanding, the insight, and the analogy are mine. AI gave it the structure and polish it deserved. That is not a confession. That is exactly how this tool should be used.
If using AI helps me deliver a clearer, more useful, better-written piece of thinking to my clients and readers — not using it would be the wrong choice. Professional responsibility runs toward the best outcome for the client, not toward proving I can do everything manually.
It Feels Like Talking to a Smart Employee. Because It Kind Of Is.
I have had conversations with AI tools that remind me — genuinely — of conversations I used to have with talented employees early in their careers. Real back-and-forth. Ideas being tested, pushed back on, refined. The kind of discussion where even a wrong answer moves the thinking forward because it forces you to articulate why it is wrong.
That is not a small thing. Good collaboration — the kind that sharpens thinking and produces better outcomes — used to require finding the right person, at the right time, with enough context to contribute meaningfully. AI makes that available on demand, at any hour, without the overhead.
Like any smart collaborator, AI can be wrong. Sometimes confidently wrong. But that is true of people too — and working through why something is wrong is often where the most useful thinking happens. The discussion itself has value, not just the conclusion it reaches.
The businesses and professionals getting the most out of AI are the ones treating it as a collaborator, not a vending machine. You get out what you put in — and what you put in starts with knowing enough about the subject to ask the right questions and recognize a bad answer when you see one.
If It Saves My Clients Money and Produces Better Work, Not Using It Would Be Wrong.
I take this seriously. When AI can compress hours of research into minutes, that time savings belongs to the client — in lower costs, faster delivery, or more hours spent on the work that actually requires human judgment and experience. Using AI where it genuinely helps is not cutting corners. It is doing the job well.
In my own work, I use AI regularly for research — compatibility questions, tool evaluations, aggregating information across sources that would otherwise take hours to work through manually. It does not replace the decision-making. It accelerates the path to it. I arrive at the work itself faster, with more context, and with more time to spend on the parts that require 25 years of pattern recognition rather than an hour of reading documentation.
I also use it as a writing collaborator — exactly as I described above. My strengths have always been in understanding, strategy, and the kind of analogies that make complex ideas land with business owners. Polished writing has never been my strongest suit and I have never pretended otherwise. AI helps me express what I know in a way that serves the reader. The knowledge is mine. The polish is a tool.
- Research and information aggregation — hours compressed into minutes
- Writing and communication — expertise expressed more clearly
- Code research — compatibility, tooling, documentation review
- Strategic collaboration — testing ideas, stress-testing assumptions
- All of it in service of better outcomes for clients, delivered more efficiently
AI Makes Knowledgeable People More Capable. It Makes Everyone Else More Dangerous.
Here is the part nobody wants to say plainly: AI does not make up for a lack of expertise. It amplifies whatever you bring to it. In the hands of someone who genuinely knows their field, it is leverage — more output, better quality, faster results. In the hands of someone who does not know what they are doing, it produces confident, well-formatted, professionally presented work that is wrong in ways the person presenting it cannot detect.
That is the real risk of AI in professional services — not that it replaces experts, but that it allows non-experts to produce deliverables that look like expert work. The output is polished. The recommendations sound authoritative. And the client, who hired someone precisely because they do not have the expertise to evaluate the work themselves, has no way of knowing the difference.
I have seen this firsthand and recently. An AI-generated audit reviewed a set of SEO pages built as part of a deliberate, structured strategy — pages that were well-targeted, properly built, and doing exactly what they were designed to do. The audit correctly identified them as high quality. It then recommended merging them. That single recommendation, if followed, would have dismantled the entire structure that made the strategy work. The AI had pattern-matched against a general best practice — consolidate, reduce duplication — without any understanding of the strategic intent behind the specific implementation. Nobody in the room caught it because nobody in the room had the expertise to know what they were looking at.
The tool was not the problem. The absence of expertise to filter its output was.
When Someone Leads With “AI-Powered,” Ask What the Human Is Contributing.
AI as a feature is not the same as AI as a crutch. When a vendor leads with “AI-powered audit” or “AI-driven strategy” as the primary credential, that is worth pausing on. The question is not whether AI was involved — it probably should be. The question is what expertise is being applied to interpret, filter, and act on what the AI produces.
A good professional using AI will be able to tell you why a recommendation makes sense for your specific situation, what they would push back on in the AI output, and what the AI got wrong or missed. If the answer to any of those questions is a blank stare, the AI is not augmenting expertise — it is substituting for it.
- Ask what the human expert disagrees with in the AI output — a good answer means they actually reviewed it
- Ask for the reasoning behind specific recommendations, not just the recommendation itself
- Be skeptical of audits or strategies delivered without any pushback or caveats — real expertise includes knowing the limits of the tool
- The presence of AI in the process is a good sign — the absence of human judgment filtering that output is not
The Tool Is Only as Good as the Person Using It. That Has Always Been True.
I have been doing this work for more than 25 years. The tools have changed dramatically and will keep changing. What has not changed is that the value was never in the tool — it was always in the judgment, the experience, and the ability to know what good looks like and what does not.
AI is the most significant tool change I have seen in this industry. It genuinely makes experienced professionals more capable, compresses real work that used to take hours, and opens up collaboration that used to require finding the right person at the right time. I use it, I recommend it, and I will keep using it because my clients deserve the best outcome I can produce — and that means using every legitimate tool available.
But I have also seen what happens when it is handed to someone without the knowledge to direct it. The output looks the same. The damage is different. The difference between those two outcomes is not the AI — it is the 25 years sitting behind the keyboard.
Use AI. Use it openly. Use it in service of your clients. And make sure the person you are trusting to use it on your behalf actually knows what they are doing — because with AI in the picture, the ones who do not are harder to spot than ever before.