The Diary of a Mildly Chaotic Solopreneur: Entry Nine

AI Beg Your Pardon!

Like Taylor Swift on the radio, Stranger Things on Netflix, or that one flu that does the rounds every winter and flattens half the nation. Whether you like it, love it, or are currently pretending it’s “just a phase”, AI has arrived, unpacked its bags, and made itself very comfortable on the sofa.

And honestly? Trying to avoid it at this point is a bit like pushing custard up a hill. You can try. You’ll make a valiant effort. But you’ll mostly end up tired, covered in custard and questioning your life choices.

Now, as a self-employed human running a business on my own, I think it’s worth having an honest conversation about AI. Not the shiny, breathless “AI will replace us all” version. Nor the “absolutely not, over my dead body” stance. But the practical, small-business-owner reality of it.

Because running a business solo is not easy. You are the CEO, marketing department, admin assistant, strategist, finance team, and occasionally the IT support who Googles things at midnight while whispering, please work. If there are tools that can genuinely help you do your job better, faster, and with slightly fewer tears… it would be foolish not to at least look.

AI as the helpful intern

Let’s get one thing straight: AI is not here to run your business for you. It’s more like a very fast, very keen intern who doesn’t sleep and doesn’t mind repetitive tasks but who absolutely needs supervision.

Used well, AI tools can save time, reduce cognitive load, and help you move past the dreaded blank page. Used badly, they can create utter nonsense, hallucinate facts, and – more on this later – give you a forehead that could be seen from space.

For small businesses, the useful applications of AI tend to fall into a few sensible categories:

• Reading, summarising, and checking emails
  If your inbox feels like a Victorian novel (long, dramatic, and unnecessarily wordy) AI can help summarise emails, highlight action points or help you draft polite-but-firm responses that don’t accidentally sound like you’re starting a fight.

• Writing policies and documents
  Need a first draft of a privacy policy, terms of service, or internal process? AI is excellent at structure. You still need to check it (legally and ethically), but it can give you a solid starting point instead of staring into the void.

• Organising thoughts for marketing campaigns
  When your brain is full of half-ideas, bullet points AI can help order your thinking, map out a campaign, or suggest angles you hadn’t considered.

• Generating ideas for attracting clients
  Stuck in a messaging rut? AI can help brainstorm blog topics, workshop ideas, lead magnets, or social themes (and all those other ‘businessy’ words!) not to replace your voice, but to nudge your creativity back into motion.

UK research into AI use in small businesses consistently shows that the biggest benefit isn’t replacing people (because, frankly, there often aren’t any), but improving productivity and freeing up time. Time that can be reinvested into client work, strategy, or, if we’re being wildly optimistic, rest.

And Now… The Cautionary Tale

However.  And this is a capital-H However.

There are areas where AI struts far too confidently into the spotlight and should be promptly whisked away backstage by a responsible adult. Image generation is right at the top of that list.

Recently, I asked AI to do something astonishingly simple: put two existing photos side by side. Instead, it had what I can only describe as a creative meltdown.

Not only did it completely change how I look, it gifted me a forehead of truly heroic proportions. I looked less “me” and more “Ant from Ant and Dec.” Hannah from Mederi Wellness was also transformed into an entirely different human, and my carefully designed ClusterCast logo tagline was mangled beyond recognition.

It was a monstrosity.  And a useful reminder.

AI does not understand reality. It predicts patterns. Sometimes those patterns involve reinventing your face and casually rebranding your podcast without asking.

The Bit Where I Pretend to Be Wise

So, in the spirit of having survived several AI trends, one mild identity crisis, and an incident involving an aggressively enlarged forehead, here are some bite-sized nuggets of wisdom. Please imagine me offering these while clutching a lukewarm cup of tea and staring into the middle distance.

• Use AI to support your thinking, not replace it
  If you wouldn’t trust a stranger on the bus with the decision, don’t hand it entirely to a chatbot.

• Start small
  One tool. One task. Attempting everything at once is how you end up overwhelmed, annoyed, and quietly nostalgic for Excel spreadsheets.

• If it saves you time, spend that time wisely
  Not doom-scrolling (says the person who absolutely will!)

• Never publish anything without checking it
  Especially facts, names, faces, and your own actual head.

• Give good prompts.
  Context is king. Detail is queen. Vague instructions are how you end up with a banoffee pie recipe when you were hoping for a Christmas cake recipe.

And perhaps the most important thing of all: AI is not magic.

It’s maths in a fancy coat. It doesn’t know your values, your clients, your boundaries, or the emotional labour involved in running a business on your own.

That bit, unfortunately, is still on you.  Which feels unfair, really.  But there we are.