AI is a tool. Judgement isn't.

Everyone’s asking whether AI can do what I do. Wrong Question.



I use AI almost every day. In my business AI genuinely helps me – Gather my thoughts, articulate a point, draft an email, work through a spreadsheet, build out a graphic. There are many uses for AI as a tool to automate things that can be automated in your business, streamline things that cannot, and simply to help brainstorm. So if you are paying a coach that claims they never touch the stuff, ask them again.

But I want to be precise about where the line sits, because the line is the entire value of what I do.

AI can give you an answer. It cannot tell you whether the answer matters.

That's the whole thing. Everything below is just detail.

Here’s what I think AI does exceptionally well:

Competitive analysis. Excellent, with one condition — it has to reflect your market. Ask it broad questions and you'll get broad answers. Give it your region, your customer, your price point, and it gets useful fast.

Creative writing. Absolutely yes! But be careful on this one. I can recognize an AI (particularly Chat GPT) written article from a mile away. And so can you if you are being honest with yourself. I will likely run this article through at least 2 AI tools to get my thoughts in order, but ultimately it will be my words on the page.

Math. OK, Here is where AI shines. They can give you the answers to complex formulas in their sleep. And more than that, if you don’t know the formula, they will help you to determine what the formula should be. It’ll help you determine what your gross margin is without breaking a sweat.

It just can’t tell you what it should be. They will give you the stats… GM in your industry typically runs at X%. Is that right for you? Who knows? — your suppliers, your market, your cash position, your goals — isn't a calculation. It's a judgement, and judgement comes from a person who knows the situation.

Creative development (images). In this case some are better than others. . I've had tools choke on a PDF that was scanned as an image, unable to read the tables or the text. I've had one do respectable work on a form-heavy document and produce something I'd have to hand back on an infographic. I've asked a tool to review its own rejected output and watched a competitor do better on the same brief.

That's a moving target. What doesn't move is this: none of these tools knew what I was trying to achieve. I had the picture in my head. They had a prompt.

A Cautionary Note: Marketing went from almost entirely human-developed to a huge share of what lands in your feed being machine-generated and shipped without a second read. That was never a clean win.

Google, Meta and the other search engines noticed. Their ranking systems penalise AI-generated content and favour original, human-produced material — content written to sound like content, with nothing of the person behind it, gets pushed down and sometimes filtered out.

So the pendulum is swinging back, faster than most people realise. The advantage is moving to people who can produce something only they could have written.

What AI cannot do:

Research. OK, Not true. It can give you the facts and figures, and can scrub a website.  But I do my own research. I look for strengths and weaknesses, I look for the offerings the company provides, I consider the market in which that company is doing business, I look at the competitors that they are up against. Can AI help with research? SURE. But can it put it in context? Not on your life! And context is the job.

It doesn't know the owner. Their hopes, their ambitions, why they chose this business over every other thing they could have done with their life, and what they want it to become. That's not a data problem. No amount of processing power gets you there, because the information isn't anywhere except in the owner's head and their own telling of it.

It doesn't know the relationships. Suppliers, vendors, customers, partners, service providers — who they work with and, more importantly, why. It's rarely about the price they can get. It's shared values. It's the kids who played hockey together. It's the person who showed up when a parent died, and the loyalty that came out of it. Understanding what holds a business relationship together is worth more than any line on a comparison spreadsheet, and it comes from the owner, not a query.

And it cannot confirm relevance. This is the crux. AI can generate a plan, a projection, a strategy, a piece of marketing copy. It cannot verify that any of it fits your situation. It can't check its own accuracy against your reality, and it certainly can't tell you what result you're actually looking for - it doesn't know what you're trying to build.

Think about the tools you already use. Word is a tool. It'll catch your spelling; it will not help you write. Excel is a tool. It'll compute the formula you give it; it cannot confirm the formula produces the outcome you need. AI is the same shape of thing, only vastly more capable.

A tool can be excellent and still not be accountable for the result.

And no, this isn't a defence of the coaching industry

Now that we're here — a word about my own profession, because I'm not going to pretend the scepticism isn't earned.

Too many self-proclaimed coaches are repackaging someone else's philosophies, quotes and catchphrases without knowing how a business actually works.

Patting you on the back and telling you that the right attitude makes all the difference does not change the dollars in the bank account.

Ten things every successful entrepreneur does before 6am doesn't change your return on ad spend.

Getting into better shape will do wonders for your health and precisely nothing for your cost of goods.

If your coaching is a pep talk you're paying for monthly, you should be sceptical. You're right to be.

But that's an argument about practitioners, not about tools.

Because the answer to “How do I make my business better?” probably isn't hiding in another list of things successful entrepreneurs do.

And it probably isn't sitting inside an AI prompt either.

It's probably already somewhere inside your business.

We just have to find it.

About Ron Farrell

Ron Farrell works with business owners who want better profit, stronger systems and a company that doesn’t require the owner to carry everything on their back.



After building, systemizing and selling his own business, Ron now works with owners on the numbers, people and operating structures that turn a demanding job into a valuable business asset.