Last time I wrote about what AI is genuinely good at and what it isn't. The 5 things on that "isn't" list are real limits, and they aren't going away. But there are another 4 that people put on the same list, and they don't belong there at all. They aren't limits. They're setup steps nobody told you to do.
Here's the thing that explains all 4. AI arrives knowing an enormous amount in general and absolutely nothing about you. Generic is its starting position, not its ceiling. Most people meet the starting position, decide that's what the tool is, and never go any further.
1. It doesn't know your business. Ask it to write something for you and you'll get copy for an average business that doesn't exist anywhere. That's not the AI being useless, that's it having nothing to work with. Write ten lines about who you are, who you serve, what you sell and how you talk, and the difference is immediate and slightly startling.
2. It forgets you between conversations. Every new chat starts from nothing, which is why it feels like introducing yourself to the same person every single morning. The fix is that every major AI tool now has a settings area where you save that information once, at account level, and it loads into every conversation from then on. Not a chat. Settings.
3. It's out of date. Every model is trained up to a cut-off point and then stops, so on anything recent it will confidently tell you how things were. Turn on web search if your tool has it, or simply paste in the current document, the current price list, the current rules. It's very good with information you hand it. It's unreliable on information it has to remember.
4. It doesn't follow your process. Ask how to onboard a client and you'll get a sensible generic answer that isn't how you do it. Describe your actual steps once, save them, and ask it to work to that. Then it stops giving you advice and starts doing the job your way.
Notice what all 4 have in common. Every one of them is really the same problem, which is that you haven't told it yet. Compare that to last week's list, where the issue was accountability and judgement and trust. Those you keep. These you fix in an afternoon.
**Action points:**
- Write the 10-15 lines about your business today and put them in your AI tool's settings, not into a chat. It's the highest-return 10 minutes available to you in this whole subject.
- Pick one job you do the same way every time. Write down the steps as you'd explain them to a new starter, save it, and use it the next three times you do that job.
Until next time
Loz Demousselle
AI Adoption Consultant at One Level Up, helping 8 to 80 person firms get their whole team using AI, daily and safely.
More at onelevelup.com.au