If You Take Care of Your People

My favorite dadism is, if you take care of your people, your people will take care of you. My dad has been a small business owner for my entire life. He owns an insurance agency here in Virginia, and has for over 40 years now.

In fact, the desk he started his business at is the very same desk I am sitting at today. He gifted it to me when I started my business, so that I could make my first million at the same desk he made his, which I think is pretty cool coming from a family of small business owners.

Being raised behind the scenes in a small business, I had a front row seat to what my dad meant by taking care of people. We are on the East Coast, off the Chesapeake Bay, so hurricane season was a very real problem.

When storms came through, my dad would load up his pickup truck with a chainsaw and cases of water, and then start driving out the back roads to check on people. Not to assess damage for a claim. Not to get paperwork started. He would show up at somebody's house with a tree across the road or with no power and say, "Don't worry about the policy right now. I'm here to help."

And then when my mom was injured in 1987, everything changed for my family overnight. My dad was sleeping on the floor at the hospital to make sure that she was being advocated for. So other agents who had started their businesses the same time he did, they would actually fill in my dad's agent number and give him commissions for the sales that they were making, so that my dad's business would stay afloat while my mom was in a coma for three months.

Nobody made them do that. There was no policy about it. There was no memo that went out. They just did it, because this was the community of small business owners that I was raised in. People who believed in taking care of others. People who put other people before profits.

If you take care of your people, your people will take care of you. It goes for your clients, it goes for your team, it goes for your colleagues, your community. That is the foundation of how I think about small business.

So I want you to hold onto that, because I'm about to spend the next 40-ish minutes talking about artificial intelligence, which might seem like it's coming out of left field after that introduction. But I've been behind the scenes of a lot of transitions in the landscape of small business, including seeing technology that completely changed the way business gets done. And I want you to know that if your business is built on relationships like mine is, that part isn't going anywhere.

So let's get into it.

Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook, and I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service-based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical, profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Why I Spent Six Months on This

Hey there, CEO. Racheal Cook here, founder of The CEO Collective® and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO® podcast.

I have had this topic on my mind for six months or more, and if you know anything about me, then you know I am not someone who jumps on trends. I am very much anti-shiny object syndrome. But when there is something that is truly revolutionizing how work gets done that's impacting small business owners, I have to pay attention. It's literally part of my job to stay on top of these things.

Here's the honest version about my history with this. I have dabbled with AI on and off since ChatGPT first came out, then Claude, and then suddenly every tool that I use in my business, every software that I use in my business, started to have some sort of AI component added to it.

So I have been poking around AI for years now, and to be honest, at the beginning, I wasn't super impressed. It was interesting, but it wasn't anywhere close to where it needed to be to actually be useful for my business.

And then somewhere around the beginning of this year, 2026, something shifted. I started seeing people in my communities come out very publicly with these strong stances on AI. They had decided that AI is the wave of the future, as impactful as the invention of the internet. And a lot of them started to declare they were completely shifting, pivoting, building what they're now calling AI first businesses.

That really rubbed me the wrong way, because I never want to have a business that puts a technology before actual humans.

So instead of posting a reaction, I decided I was gonna dig in and do the real work. Six months of AI trainings, coaching, an intensive, using the tools, building things in my business. Not just reading about it, not just collecting other people's opinions, but actually rolling up my sleeves and discovering what it could do for me, for my clients, for my community, so that I could form a real opinion that I'd actually feel confident standing behind.

That's what this entire series is. It's called Human First: The AI Series for High-Trust Businesses. Because like I said, people and relationships will always be at the center of my business. That is the lens that I run everything through.

The Technology Waves I Have Already Watched

So I've watched a few of these waves of technology transforming the world. I watched computers show up in the '90s.

My dad's insurance agency used to be lined with these enormous file cabinets full of paperwork, and that's how they did business for years and years and years. If you ever walked into a traditional old school office, you would see paper everywhere.

And my dad was thrilled when he found out that a desktop computer, back then it had a black screen with a green blinking cursor, it was a DOS-based computer, and he was so thrilled that this machine that he could put on a desk was gonna replace all those file cabinets and get all the paper out of his office. He was all in. That's how one of my biggest jobs through middle and high school was data entry, typing in an absurd amount of data into a very, now that we think about it, primitive database so that his agency could go paperless.

And then I watched the internet arrive, and then social media, which is the wave I actually rode as a small business owner, because I launched and started my business in 2008, 2009, right as those tools were starting to become available.

Every one of those technology waves did essentially the same thing. It dropped the barrier to entry, and I'm a big fan of that, because it meant that more people had the ability to go out and build something for themselves. It was so much cheaper to get started as a small business owner in the last 10 or 20 years, when all you needed was a laptop and an internet connection, than ever, ever before.

So I'm a big fan of that, right? That is a huge opportunity, especially for women, especially for people of color, especially for LGBTQIA, especially for anyone who previously didn't have the access and the resources to go out there and start a business.

And I think AI is the same type of wave. There's an enormous upside, and like every one of the previous big technology waves, there is a downside, and some of that downside we don't even understand yet.

What I Am Actually Worried About

I wanna be clear that I'm not discounting the downside. I'm very aware of the downside of AI, and if you've been anti-AI, I absolutely hear you. I hear those concerns. These are the same things I'm extremely worried about.

I'm worried about the environmental cost of AI. There are data centers going up all over the state of Virginia, where I live, and I believe right now we have more of them here than almost anywhere else in the country, and half the time they have been appearing without anyone really noticing until suddenly it's in the news. And it's becoming more and more obvious this is going to affect the people who live here.

I'm concerned about the water usage. I'm concerned about the power draw and the power grid. These are very real consequences that, let's be honest, are gonna be felt by disadvantaged people first. And I am not okay with that. It was a profit-driven decision that was made to put the profits of very large corporations over people.

And here's the thing that bugs me. Solutions exist here. There are solutions for the water usage problem. There are solutions for the power draw, but they are only going to get applied when more people are in the conversation, when more people are educated about what's happening, when more people are educated about those solutions, and more people start showing up in the conversation.

These companies are not going to go out there and put people over profits until people push back and say, "If you are going to do this, we need it to not harm us." And that's just a reality of the way big business is done in this country.

I'm concerned about the regulation around AI. I live only about two hours from DC, and I can tell you this is a huge conversation happening in our government right now. I have been listening to podcasts by people who are advisors to policymakers on AI, and their stance is all, "AI is here. AI is staying. People need to understand what it does and what it costs, and we need to put in place regulation that actually protects the people who all live here."

I'm concerned about the mental health impact. This is one thing I tested myself as I'm exploring my relationship to AI. I put some information, some questions into an AI chat about the anxiety medication I take, and asked a few questions. One model came back with recommendations as if it was my prescribing doctor. Another model came out with questions for me to ask my doctor.

It was the same input. I put in the same exact questions, but the responses were completely different, and that difference is not an accident. The way a model hands information back to you is shaped by the people who build it. Hold onto that for a second. I'm gonna come back to that one.

And then there's my kids. I have teenagers. I have twins in 11th grade and an eighth grader. My oldest son is in a specialty computer science program in his high school, a four-year program. It was super competitive to get into. And when he applied to that four-year program, he had the dream of becoming a video game developer.

Being a developer, we had been told for years, was one of the most sought-after career paths. It was one of the best jobs we were all told to go for. So everyone was telling our kids, "Get into coding. Learn how to code." Well, that has all changed in just a couple of years. There may not be entry-level work in the field he wants to go into, and we're not 100% sure what that's gonna look like. Nobody knows, and it's changing faster than anyone can advise him.

As a parent, I wanna know how this is going to impact his future career prospects. And on the other side, my other twin is an artist who is in a very competitive art school program. They spend hours and hours a day on their art, and they are very anti-AI, because she's already watching what generative AI is doing. She's watching the flood of crappy AI art and how it is impacting the art community. She's extremely worried about what's happening to artists.

So this is unresolved. This is the tension I'm carrying, where as a parent, as a mom, I'm looking at this is going to impact my kids' future, and we don't know what that's gonna look like.

That's a lot of tension to hold, right? And there's more I'm not gonna get into, because this episode would be four hours long if I brought up every single thing that I'm concerned about when it comes to AI, the unknowns and the impact that I don't have answers to yet.

Why Abstaining Is Not the Same as Being Safe

But it all comes back to one thought and one reason I'm really digging into this, because abstaining from it is not the same thing as being safe from it, as not being impacted by it.

Rachel Rodgers wrote a really great piece on her Substack earlier this year, and her argument is essentially where I've landed. When you opt out, you're not protected. You've just removed your voice from the rooms where this tool is getting built and regulated.

And it's even closer to home for me than that, because earlier this year I did an episode about the importance of all of us using our business as a form of political resistance. Your business is your political resistance, because the world we live in, the way work gets done, what small business is, is getting shaped right now by the people building it.

We are in a massive time of transformation. We are seeing corporations have to reckon with what they have done, placing profit over people. We are seeing the impact of so many people just expecting that getting a job leads to being overworked. We're seeing what happens when people are underpaid, yet the cost of living is just skyrocketing. All of this is being impacted by what is happening right now.

So in that episode about your business being your political resistance, my thesis here is it's so crucially important for all of us, for women, for minorities, for people of color, for anyone who is not basically pale, male, and stale, to show up and change the world by creating the businesses we want to see, right? If you wanna see a difference in how businesses are run, if you wanna see different industry standards, you have to be in the arena. You have to be creating that change yourself.

So I don't think this is an either/or. I think we can use AI and also fight for better regulation. We can use AI and also fight against data centers being built to exploit the communities around them. We can push for what we want and still benefit from a tool that is dropping barriers to entry and creating access to resources that a lot of us never had before.

I feel like these two things aren't actually in conflict. Sitting out is not the neutral position that it feels like.

What Happened to Creatives, and What Is Happening Now

Now, I know there's some creatives out there listening to this who are shaking their heads going, "I can't believe Racheal is talking about this," because you have lived it over the last few years, and many of you have talked to me about it.

I have had several creative service providers tell me that somewhere around 2024, they started seeing a massive change in their businesses, because organizations and businesses they had been working with stopped hiring them or even canceled contracts outright. They were told that the company chose AI over hiring a copywriter, or the company chose AI over working with a designer, or the company chose AI over hiring a photographer. And that happened. That was real. We all saw that happen, so I'm not gonna pretend like it didn't.

But I think we are watching the flip side of it now. A lot of those reactions from those organizations were knee-jerk reactions from organizations that were prioritizing profit first. And now they're realizing that AI without a human is not the solution.

You still need a human. You still need people with a point of view. You need people with discernment. You need people with real experience underneath it. AI is not gonna handle something the way someone with 10 or 15 or 20 years under their belt is gonna handle it. That's just not the reality. AI is only gonna give you back super generic results, a hodgepodge of the average of what it's had inputted into it.

And we're watching that happen right now. We are watching in real time what happens when everybody jumps into AI and starts pumping out AI-generated content, AI-generated imagery, AI-generated branding. It all looks the same. Everything is flat, and we're starting to tell when AI wrote something, and I know I can. I'm sure you can, too.

You're looking at videos going, "I can't tell if this is real or if this is AI." You're looking at AI-generated photographs and going, "I don't think that's exactly what that person looks like. I've met them." You're looking at AI-generated copy and content going, "This doesn't sound the way they used to sound."

The reason people hire creatives in the first place is their unique point of view, their creativity, the ability to bring something that is outside of the box. It's not what everybody else in the industry is doing. But AI is actually making everything look and sound the same.

The backlash is here. People are not responding to that, and it's becoming more and more clear that companies who felt like they could completely replace humans with AI are seeing that backlash. Companies that went all in on AI customer service are losing relationships right now, and they are having to walk it back.

There are companies, I don't know if you've seen this, but I've started to see there are companies that are trying to replace managers with these AI-generated managers, like a person who doesn't exist, and you're supposed to have basically a Zoom call with them for your one-on-ones. I have been seeing this on social media. It is the most ridiculous thing ever. They're expecting humans to report to an AI-generated human-looking animated thing as their manager. This is so creepy and weird.

The businesses that are rushing into this without any thoughtfulness because they're chasing profit first, these are the ones that are upsetting people the most. AI is damaging the relationship with the people they serve, with the people who work for them, and the people who buy from them. It's only going to accelerate.

The thought that you can remove humans completely and expect a machine to handle things with nuance, it's laughable. Like, how ridiculous is this? There's no way AI is going to do better than a human when it comes to the relationship side of business, ever.

Consider the Source

So over the last six months, I've been digging in. What's actually happening here? What parts could work for me, and what is a hard no? How do I use this in a way that is values aligned, that puts people over profits?

And I've had to look around quite a bit, because you've probably also seen people boasting as a flex, which is so gross, about how AI let them save $600,000 on payroll last year because they fired their whole team and replaced them with AI. That is such a turnoff. That makes me never want to work with that company.

That means there are so many people now without a job, and you are announcing that you felt like cutting their jobs, their livelihoods, so that you could save some money, was a flex. That does not endear me to you. In fact, that is the biggest ick.

So here's the second thing my parents taught me about running a business. Consider the source. Don't learn from people whose values are a mismatch. Learn from people who have the same values you do, who are on the same page as you are.

Who I Learned From

So that's what I did. I went looking for people who were talking about AI with context and nuance, who were not talking about how to fire your team and make a bajillion dollars. They were talking about it as a tool that helps you make a bigger impact and helps your people do more incredible work.

I wanna credit these people. I've learned so much from them, and I will be sharing more examples over the next few episodes that I learned directly from these folks.

The first was Michael Hyatt. He's someone I've respected for a long time. We are very values aligned, I believe. So when he announced his AI Business Lab, I signed up, because he was sharing workflows he'd already built and tested that I could very easily learn how to implement into my business.

And that's where I first saw what AI could do to a workflow, to our timeline. For example, it used to take up to eight hours to plan out, to record, and produce a single episode of this show. Now it takes maybe an hour, hour and a half for a 30-minute episode, including the time it takes to record it, because we're using AI tools like Descript that make it so much faster.

And that's a lot of time back into our calendar. That lets me take what I already know and get it out into the world faster. It's collapsing time for us. It's saving my husband, who edits the podcast, so much time every week so that he can work on other things behind the scenes in the business.

Then I worked with Maria-Ines Fuenmayor, who runs Codified in the City. I love her. She and I have known each other for a long time, and when I was in Italy, I discovered she was offering these one-day VIP sessions where we could actually build out some AI systems. And I was so excited when we did this whole day together.

We built a real dashboard that pulled data I had been looking at in five different places into one clear dashboard customized for my business, and now that's all automated. I have now saved my team so many hours of reporting, of pulling all the data that I need to look at every single week, every single month, into one clear, cohesive system that we've custom designed. And we are barely scratching the surface of the types of systems that we can fully implement into my business.

Finally, I've spent a lot of time in Callan Faulkner's program. Earlier this year, I joined her program Automate to Accelerate, and that has been another huge shift for me, because over the course of this program, I have actually built out a full AI infrastructure behind the scenes.

I've taken all these systems that I've built out using my 90 Day CEO Operating System®. Y'all know I love a system. So I came to her with existing systems, existing SOPs, and now I've built an AI infrastructure into all of it. So I have systems that are accelerating the speed for my marketing and sales. I now have AI systems that are helping us manage our client delivery, systems that are helping me streamline my business finance reporting, systems that make sure all the tech is talking to each other. And I'm seeing what a huge unlock this is for a small business owner.

So I do wanna be honest with you about something before we go any further, and I'm gonna keep, as always, being transparent all month long. Callan's team recently asked me to be an affiliate for her work, so if you go through a link of mine in my show notes, I will get compensation for that.

I do want you to know that, because I was already shouting her name from the rooftops just like I was shouting the name of Maria-Ines and Michael about the value I've gotten from their programs. I was already sending people their way, and I still want to send people their way, because that's how impactful all these services were for me. But I am now getting paid by Callan's team if you go through my link. I will have special bonuses if you go through my link, just so you know. I'm going through the program again because I know there's so much more that I have yet to implement.

The Conversation Nobody Is Having With You

So what I've noticed in conversations happening on Substack, on social media, in everybody's newsletters, is basically use AI, get on board, or get left behind. I think that conversation has been had, right?

And I think most people, if you're listening to this, are now curious. They're already dabbling in some way. If you're like me, you started seeing all these AI features pop up in the tools you're using anyway, so it's kind of unavoidable, right? You might have gone ahead and signed up for Claude or ChatGPT. You've played around with it. Maybe you've tried out some prompts. Maybe you're using it just to ask questions the way you used to ask Google. Maybe you're asking Google and realizing there's an AI layer on that now too.

Maybe you have tried things out, but it still feels off. You're writing something, asking it to help you write emails or helping you respond to things, and it just doesn't sound like you. It still sounds stiff. And no one's really talking to you about that. They're just arguing about whether or not you should use AI.

So I'm here with you, because that was me for a long time. I was dabbling for a while too, and I was frustrated because I wasn't getting the results I wanted out of it. It wasn't sounding like me. I was spending so much time revising stuff, it just felt like, what is the purpose in that?

So it became a real question. Am I actually gonna learn how to use this? Am I actually gonna go all in deliberately and integrate it in a way that aligns with my values, puts people first, and retains my voice and my point of view and the impact I want to make? Is it gonna keep all of that intact? That's the conversation I think is the most worth having, and that's what this series is gonna be about.

Whoever Builds It Shapes It

So let me tell you about the actual reason I went all in, because it is not that AI is the end-all be-all. It's that whoever is using it is who's shaping it.

The people who go all in and start building as the first movers, these are always the people who shape how a technology gets used, how it gets understood, how it gets regulated. We've watched this happen over and over and over again. And if we don't truly understand how it works, if we don't understand the pros and the cons, if we don't understand the nuance, we will never be able to advocate for the legislation we need. We will never be able to advocate for the changes we need. We're never gonna be able to make sure that the majority of people benefit from it instead of a select few who are using it to maximize profits.

There's a book I read a long time ago called Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble. I think it came out around 2018, and that book is about search engines, not AI. But the argument of the book is that the results you get back out of those search engines are shaped by who built the thing and what they were optimizing for, and if you weren't in the room when it was getting built, it's not going to work in your favor.

So SEO was already favoring the exact engineers that were building it, and those people had blind spots that they couldn't see. They could only see the world through their lens, through their perspective. So that's already happened, right?

Most of the technology we use, most of the SEO tools, most of social media, the majority of the algorithms that run our lives were not built by us. If you are a woman, if you are a person of color, if you are LGBTQIA, if you are not pale, stale, and male, then guess what? You were not in the room represented when the tool was getting built. And that has very real consequences.

It's the same thing I noticed when I asked the two different models about my anxiety medication, and they gave two completely different postures back. That difference came from people. Somebody decided to say, "There needs to be a limit here, and we cannot give medical advice. We can give questions to ask your prescribing doctor, but we are not going to give medical advice." That's a pretty big difference.

So I think this is incredibly important. I don't wanna step back and let someone else decide what this becomes.

There Is No 100% Perfect Solution

And here's the part I really wanna be honest about. Running a values-driven business, it doesn't mean that everything you do is 100% perfect. That's just not possible, and I think a lot of people opt out entirely because they want every single box checked.

And I feel like that's just a reality of running a business when you have to interact with these larger organizations. There's always going to be some level of conflict in the relationship between you and the platforms you use. There's never a 100% perfect solution 100% of the time.

I don't love that I'm spending as much money as I am on Meta ads. I really don't. Zuck doesn't need my money. He's got more money than God. But out of all the options I have tested to get in front of people that I want to serve, it is the best, most affordable option. So I'm taking the good and the bad.

And I also vote with my dollars everywhere that I can, and I do vote with my dollars hard. I make it a goal to hire women-owned and minority-owned businesses. When I host retreats, I make sure that we are hosting them at women-owned locations, women-owned event spaces. When I send out client gifts, those are coming from women-owned small businesses. When I'm looking at the majority of software I use, I have literally tried to make sure that the majority of what I use is as aligned as it possibly can be with my values.

And I'm doing that because I know, as a small business owner, I have the power to recirculate my dollars and amplify the things that I value. So I use the platform I have and the resources I have to amplify the values that I have as much as I possibly can. But I know I'm not perfect, and I can't get to 100%. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But hoping for 100% is actually what would limit the impact I can make, so I have to take the good with the bad.

This is exactly how I ended up choosing where to build. We have the agency to vote with our dollars. So when I was deciding between ChatGPT and Claude, I looked at who runs Anthropic. I looked at the team. I looked at what they say publicly about limits and safety. I looked at what was in the news about those organizations. And do I love everything? No. But out of all the options in front of me, Claude felt most aligned, and that's where I went all in.

And I have not been paid to say that. That's not necessarily a recommendation. I'm not telling you which tool to use. I'm telling you that which tool is best is the wrong question. Who is building this and what they are optimizing for is the right one, because I see that that's what shapes everything downstream.

Who Gets the Upside

And then there's another question I keep asking that nobody seems to be asking alongside me. Who's getting the upside?

About a year ago, I was talking with my cousin who works in tech about how AI was being rolled out in her company. She told me people were expected to be using it something like 70% of the time in their jobs. And of course, the reason is because everybody gets more productive.

So my question back was, okay, what do the employees get out of that? If they're more productive, meaning they are more profitable to the business, are the employees now making more money? Because they can get more work done in less time, are they able to work fewer hours and have better work-life balance? Why does only the person at the top seem to be the one that instantly benefits?

I have a major problem with this, and this is the way business has traditionally been. It's built on extraction. As long as we live in a hyper-capitalist, patriarchal society, the goal of business has been to provide as much value as possible to the shareholders. If it's a privately owned company, that means the business owner gets the most out of it. If it's a publicly held company, that means the people who own all the stock get the most value out of it.

And over the last 100 years since the Industrial Revolution, we have seen productivity skyrocket while wages stagnate. People do more work, have better output, more productive output than ever before, but their compensation is not rising at the same level, and we're seeing a cost of living crisis. That's extraction. That's exploitation.

Here's why this matters so much for small businesses. The power of this is it's collapsing timelines, and it's increasing access to resources that so many of us never had access to before. One person can now produce what used to take two or three or even five people. That's gonna change revenue, right? That's gonna change output. It's gonna change how fast a business can grow.

And across a team, it's compounding faster than we ever saw before. It used to be you grow simply by hiring more and more and more people, but that was a multiplier of one, right? You hire somebody, you're getting their 40 hours or whatever they're working for you. But now, if each new hire has a multiplier of three, oh my gosh, we are gonna see this collapse timelines.

It's gonna drop the barrier to entry just like the internet did. Just like social media did. Because it's giving us access to resources that we didn't have before, that we couldn't afford before. Now you can launch a website with AI with no website design development experience at all, and AI will tell you exactly how to do it and do it for you.

The $10,000 Deliverable

So people who are moving early are getting the majority of the upside. My question is, what happens with that?

Let me give you my own example here of how I'm thinking through this in real time. When I started building AI into my business infrastructure and seeing the impact this could have, first I'm gonna experiment on my business, but I'm also asking how can I use this to benefit my clients?

And I started realizing, as always, anybody who is doing similar work to me, you're a coach, you're a consultant, you're an educator, you know that implementation is always the bottleneck for clients, right? You can teach them how to do the thing, but the implementation is the hardest part.

So one of the tools I built out was to help me do voice of customer research. Now, this is something I used to do with my highest end clients. I would actually do the research for them, and this market research, voice of customer research or differentiation analysis, all of that used to be easily a $10,000 engagement, because it would take hours and hours and hours of research and synthesis and analysis, interviewing their clients, interviewing their community, in order to create something that I could hand off to a client.

All of these things were very time-intensive, and of course, I'm a consultant. My time is not inexpensive. I'll leave it at that. So that meant that was priced out of reach for a lot of my clients, which meant if they couldn't afford that level of service, then they were missing out on something that really could impact and make their business more effective.

But now, because I've collapsed the timeline, because AI has reduced the cost of delivering that same deliverable, that market research, I don't have to price it so high. If it suddenly takes me a couple hours where it used to take me 20 or 30 or 40, I can decide how I'm going to make that more accessible, because now it's more accessible on my end.

Shouldn't I pass some of those savings off to my clients? A lot of people would say no, that I should just take the savings myself, because now I've become more profitable with this one deliverable, and I should take all those savings and hoard it myself.

I don't think so. That's not how I work. It's increased the value I can provide to my clients, and because it is so much easier, so much less expensive for me to deliver that, I think I should pass some of those savings on to my clients. So I've built it in. It's making some of my highest level work more accessible to my clients, and I think this is exciting because it means I can get my clients better results without it costing what it used to cost.

That means if they're getting better results, I will get better reviews, I will get better referrals, and the whole thing starts to snowball. I really believe a rising tide should raise all ships together. We should all be able to support each other with this.

Recirculating Instead of Extracting

And there's that choice right there. The old model shows up right there. Do you take all that gain and keep it for yourself? Do you charge exactly what you charged before and deliver it at a fraction of the time and pocket the difference?

That's hoarding. That's exploitation, pure and simple. And this is what I've been arguing against for years. This is what I've been arguing against when it comes to taking the work and just outsourcing it at the lowest price point possible. And as your business grows and becomes more and more profitable, you just continue to push down the cost of labor more and more and more.

The old model of hyper-capitalist patriarchy hoards resources, and it hoards labor. It extracts as much value as it can out of every person, out of every client, out of every team member. And it's how you end up with people who, over the years, continue to do more and more and more work, the workload of two or three people, but they're still getting paid like one. All we've done is taken that from being done manually, to being outsourced overseas, to now being done with AI.

I want a new model where it recirculates. Recirculating means your client gets more. As you are able to create more value for them, you create more access, more resources, better results for the same money or less.

It should mean that you're recirculating to your team. If your team can do more in fewer hours, they shouldn't have to work the same number of hours. This should easily get us to a four-day workweek or less. Honestly, this is one of my biggest issues with how people have built teams here in this country, around the world. The productivity per person has just continued to skyrocket, and we're still treating the 40-hour workweek as the standard.

We're living through a cost of living crisis where a two-income household is struggling to get by. They're now saying that $100,000 a year family income is lower middle class. That is not wealthy anymore. That is not enough for most people to comfortably raise a family in this country. So clearly things should change, right?

And I think if we're building values-driven businesses, then if we're able to collapse timelines, if we're able to take advantage of these tools that are going to make us incredibly productive, we should be able to pass some of that along to the people who work for us. If we're able to be more profitable here, we should be able to pass that profit along to the people who work for us. We should be able to build teams that are able to work less and make more because the whole business is more efficient and more profitable.

And that means the owner, the business owner, you get a business that's more sustainable, because guess what? When you take care of your people, they take care of you.

Coming back to my opening thesis, when you take care of your people, your team is gonna wanna hang in there with you because you see the value in treating them well. Your clients are gonna be loyal to you because they see how you value the relationship and how you provide more value without taking advantage of them. And that all leads to a more sustainable business.

That is something exciting. For me as a small business owner, I've never been able to compete with big companies on a lot of recruiting and keeping talent, right? But if our businesses can stay lean and efficient and get incredible results, increase our profitability without overworking anyone, we can compete on the thing that actually matters to so many people right now, which is the ability to do work that's meaningful, have a good work-life balance, and be well compensated for it.

So here's a question that I want to leave you with. Your business will start to be more productive and more profitable when you start using AI. That's gonna happen. Does your team see any of it? Do your clients see any of it? Are the upsides of this massive explosion in productivity and profitability getting shared, or is it being extracted for just you?

Why Dabbling Is the Worst Position

I think the reason this is also hard to think about is it's just a lot of complexity, right? There's a lot of layers here, and there's a real learning curve. It's a lot to wrap your head around.

And when there's this much complexity, people often do one of two things. They either dismiss it entirely because they can't do it or they don't understand it, or they kind of barely scratch the surface. They just dabble with it.

And that is a problem for small business owners. Because if you're just kind of dabbling, if you're just kind of scratching the surface, but you're not really taking the time to learn this new technology, you're gonna find that your business goes beige the fastest. It's gonna be sounding and looking like everyone else the fastest.

And it's obvious. You can tell AI wrote it. You can tell AI generated that art. You can tell AI generated that photo. You can tell AI generated that video. It's the opposite of what relationship-based businesses actually need.

Where I Stand and What I Published

So here's where I stand, and I'm putting this on my website. I want to be someone who is always extremely explicit about where I stand with my values. If you go to our About page, there's a value statement about how we operate. This isn't just a vibe check, y'all. This is a set of decisions about how I run this business, and I just added my AI statement to it, as well as a deeper dive page that is going to live in the footer about how we use AI in this company.

On my values page it says, "Human first, always."

What this looks like in practice. You are never going to see a synthetic version of me, of anyone on my team, of any of my clients in front of you. There's no AI voice, no AI clone, no AI imagery, no AI photographs, no AI copy signed with my name. If it looks like me, if it sounds like me, it is me. I am the one who created it.

AI is not here to replace me, replace my team, or replace the relationships that this business runs on. It is here to amplify the work and streamline the systems behind it. Research, first drafts, operational documentation, production workflow. The judgment, the strategy, the intellectual property, and the client relationships stay human, because those are the parts that grow a business built on trust.

Most of the conversation about AI right now happens at the extremes. Founders bragging publicly about the payroll they cut, and founders refusing to touch any of it. I think both are missing the point. Used well, AI gives hours back and creates accessibility we've never had before. We believe in reinvesting and recirculating that productivity and profitability back into our team, our clients, and our ecosystem.

And to be clear, we do not sell AI programs. AI is not the product here at The CEO Collective®. The product is the methodology, the community, the planning rhythm, the 90 Day CEO Operating System® I have spent decades developing. AI is a tool. We use it with discernment, and we teach our members to do the same.

So that is now on my About page along with the rest of our values. And there's a full policy sitting right there with the terms and the privacy policy in the footer of my website.

Now, nobody expects a business my size to publish something like that. I did it anyway, because I feel like being transparent about this is so incredibly important. I wanted my AI policy to share exactly what tools we're using and how we use them. It shares what happens to the call recordings inside of my programs. It shares what we will never do with your information, and it's specific enough that you can hold me accountable to it.

I'm telling you partly because I want you to go read it, and partly because it is the entire argument of this series in one move. You need to create your own stance on AI. If it's not documented, it's not real. Not for your business, not for your team, not for you.

What Is Never Up for Automation

And whether you like it or not, AI is pretty much being built into everything that every small business owner uses. So I think we all have to make decisions about exactly how we are going to use this.

And I'm not saying you have to pick a side. You don't have to be all in or all out. You don't have to be pro-AI or anti-AI. But I think the pressure to declare your stance on this is making a lot of really smart people freeze up.

What I do think is important is getting clear about which parts of your business are never up for automation. Which parts are built on relationships? Which parts will always be handled by a human being? Which parts are the reason somebody chose you instead of the 11 other people doing exactly what you do?

So I'm telling you mine, and I've had the same answers for years, long before AI became mainstream.

My content requires my point of view. That is always going to come from me.

My community, because I believe business grows at the speed of relationships, and every time I spend real face-to-face time with real people, my business gets better, my client results get better, and honestly, I'm so much happier with my business.

My communication. Everything going out of this business, everything I communicate with inside of it, comes from me. It's my voice and it's my stories. It's my experience.

That's my list. Yours might be a little bit different, but I want you to think about it and consider making one. Because at a point where so many of the tools that we are using, whether they are 100% AI, like ChatGPT and Claude, or they are just tools that we are using that are having AI added to it without any questioning, I think we need to make our own guidelines so that you're making that decision deliberately instead of by accident. One inconvenient "oh, they added AI to this" at a time.

Human first. AI is a tool that amplifies what we can do, and with that increase in productivity and profitability, I believe we should be recirculating all of that value within our business and outside of our business. That's my position.

So that statement and the policy are linked in the show notes. Go check it out. I'd love to hear if this inspires you to create a version for yourself.

So as I go into this series, I'm gonna be digging more into the nuance of Human First: The AI Series for High-Trust Businesses. And I'm gonna start with talking about some of the biggest mistakes I'm seeing right now, and those mistakes are making everyone sound exactly the same. It's almost like if everyone went out there and hired the same designer, the same copywriter, and that is reducing results for a lot of people. We don't want that to happen.

So I'll see you in the next episode.