Most people talking about AI sound like they just got a concussion during a TED Talk. Everything is “game-changing” or “disruptive,” usually in a voice that suggests they’re either selling you something or trying to get invited to speak at Davos.
Sure, the AI we’ve seen roll out over the last few years is super impressive and still manages to surprise me. But behind all the hype, there’s something quietly obvious going on.
Right now, a single semi-functional human being — maybe with a toddler in one arm and a leftover burrito in the other — can build something genuinely useful using AI.
You don’t need to start a “venture.” You don’t need a corporation with a Latin motto. You can just start. A little tool. A weird service. Or just deliver a boost to your already existing small business. Doesn’t matter; what you need is a kitchen table and a half-baked idea. If it’s specific, if it solves something, if it makes someone even mildly grateful — you’re cooking.
I’m not saying AI will run your business. But it helps you move faster, bridge skill gaps, and create surprisingly good work.
Here’s what I mean
You’re working on a flyer for your dog biscuit side hustle. You slap it together in Canva. It looks… fine. You’re not a designer. You take a screenshot and say, “Hey, ChatGPT, how can I make this better?” It tells you to move the logo 20 pixels to the left, darken the headline, and add a drop shadow. You do it. It looks better. You have no idea why. Doesn’t matter.
You’re writing your About page and it sounds like you’re applying for a job at a cult. You ask AI to rewrite it to sound “friendly but not fake,” and suddenly it reads like an actual person wrote it.
This stuff used to take forever. You’d stew over a product name and end up with something that sounded like a prescription drug. Rewrite the same paragraph twelve times before saying screw it and browsing Fiverr, only to find an even more clueless writer. Design a label and almost convince yourself that people will appreciate the MS Paint aesthetics.
Now you have a mildly competent assistant who never sleeps, never eats, and rarely judges — even when you ask it things like, “Should I name my beef jerky company ‘Meat Cute’?”
(Which, by the way, yes. You absolutely should.)
Here’s something you can try
Go to a tool like Perplexity and ask it to go spelunking through actual review sites and discussion forums. You don’t want ad copy. You want messy thoughts and real sentences written by people who bought something and had opinions.
You might ask it:
“Based on the notes I’ve shared about my ideal customer, find me real voice of customer phrasing around problems, frustrations, desires, and past failures. Prioritize patterns you see repeated across reviews or threads. Give me at least five examples in each of those categories — use direct quotes where possible. I want to use this to create content, product copy, and answer the stuff they’re actually thinking about. Don’t summarize what I just wrote — I want to see what real people are actually saying on discussion boards and on on real review sites.”
So let’s say you’re a small business consultant, or maybe just the go-to tech-savvy friend in your town. And your ideal customer is something like this:
A woman in her 30s to 50s who somehow became the unofficial COO of the family’s service business — plumbing, HVAC, construction, pest control, maybe landscaping. Her husband (or brother, dad, cousin, etc.) is great at the hands-on work. But she’s the one keeping the lights on — managing the schedule, sending out invoices, dealing with customer texts, posting the occasional blurry before-and-after photo on Facebook, and trying to make the website “not embarrassing.”
She’s not anti-technology. She uses Google Calendar and Venmo and maybe even QuickBooks. But she didn’t sign up to be an IT department. She just wants simple tools that make the business look legit, work better, and stop making her feel like she’s bolting everything together.
She’s tired of tools that promise the moon but are too complicated, so she ends up still manually reminding Jim to show up for a 10 am appointment. And she’s definitely tired of talking to website designers who want to onboard her into some mystical “brand journey” for $15,000 and three strategy calls.
Likely phrases you’d get back:
Problems
“I’m doing all the scheduling, billing, and customer calls on top of my own job. It feels like I have two full-time jobs.”
“Our website is so outdated, but every time I try to update it, I get lost. I just want something simple that I can manage myself.”
“I have to manually text every customer to remind them about their appointment because our system doesn’t do it for me.”
Frustrations
“I tried using [software name] but it was so complicated, I gave up. I don’t have time to watch hours of tutorials.”
“Every designer I talk to wants to sell me a ‘branding package’ when I just need a website that works and doesn’t look like it’s from 2005.”
“Why does every tool for small businesses assume I have a tech department? It’s just me!”
Desires
“I just want something that sends reminders automatically so I don’t have to chase everyone down.”
“If I could find one tool that did scheduling, invoicing, and messaging, I’d pay for it in a heartbeat.”
“I want our business to look professional online, but I don’t want to spend thousands or have to learn coding.”
“I’d love to spend more time with my kids instead of being glued to my phone all night.”
Past Failures
“We paid a guy to redo our website and it took six months. Now it’s still broken and he’s disappeared.”
“I tried QuickBooks but couldn’t figure out how to set it up for our business. I ended up going back to Excel.”
“We signed up for [software name] but nobody used it, so now I’m stuck with a subscription we don’t need.”
“Tried to automate our invoices and it just made more mistakes for me to fix.”
Most People Don’t Want to Disrupt an Industry — They Just Want Their Business to Work
She’s not trying to scale a tech company. She just wants to book jobs, send invoices that get paid, stop texting reminders by hand, and have a website that doesn’t make people wonder if they’re still in business. And most of all, she wants to spend her evenings with her kids instead of in front of a screen fixing problems that software was supposed to solve.
And what she really wants is to stop feeling like the weakest link in a business she’s basically keeping alive with duct tape, coffee, and sheer stubbornness.
That’s real voice-of-customer language you can build content around. That’s your roadmap. It’s blog posts. YouTube videos. Landing page copy. Services people actually want. Answer a real question with real solutions. The goal is to solve something in a way that makes someone nod and say, “Yes! That’s exactly what I’ve been dealing with.”
Now’s the Time to Build Something Small, Real, and Yours
So if you’ve had an idea — a little one, the kind you almost feel silly saying out loud — now’s the time. Make the thing. Sell it. Tweak it. Talk to your customers. And let AI help where it makes sense.
We’ve spent the last 20 years acting like every business has to scale, disrupt, and exit. But it turns out there’s something delightful about just making something people want and giving it to them in exchange for money.
Imagine that.
