You’re a creative service provider or a wedding vendor, and everyone keeps telling you that you need to get on board with AI or you’ll get “left behind.” You wonder if you should be embracing this technology—will I become obsolete if I don’t adopt AI into my business? Where and how can I justify it and implement it ethically?

But if I were to take a guess, it’s NOT your clients telling you to adopt AI. It’s either (a) educators speaking at events you attend or (b) people who stand to gain from your use of AI (either monetarily or through your deskilling, and eventual reliance on the tool).

Industry summits, conferences, and educational events are RAMPANT with how to use AI in your business content right now. And I often joke that I speak at summits on how to not use AI in your business 😅

My saying that is not me being facetious or counter-culturalist, it’s because of two primary issues I’m seeing in the tech & systems space right now:

1. There is a lot of BAD advice circulating right now.

Earlier this spring, I spoke at the Wedding Summit Series – Tech & AI Edition. Wedding Summit Series is a generally well-respected virtual industry education event, and I spoke about ClickUp and how to leverage it to save yourself time with automated and templated task management.

The next day, I joined one of the speaker panels, and was the only person NOT there to talk about how to use AI to write your emails and your web copy and your reels scripts and your socials captions and create graphics—”that no one can even tell are AI.”

Well I call BULLSHIT. We can all tell. And your clients can definitely tell.

And the primary reason this is BAD advice is because I can almost guarantee you that your wedding or creative clients don’t want AI anywhere near their work.

Why? Because, say it with me, if they wanted AI to do it, they could’ve used AI to do it for FREE. Aka, if they are paying for you, a human, to do this work, they expect that you, a human, are doing the work! Literally the ONLY exception to this is if you state extremely clearly in your contract how you do and don’t use AI in your work, and your clients sign (learn more about legal tips about AI here).

And just like an author using AI to generate their book cover, you start to wonder if the entire book is just written by AI.

THAT is the impression using AI in your creative business leaves with your clients, and therefore, why it’s an absolute reputation-killer.

The other reason every educator shoving AI down your throat right now is full of shit is because:

2. AI is rarely the best option for saving time in your business

I have worked with systems for the better part of a decade. I have worked in over 30 different tools, across 8 industries, supporting many different types of roles, teams, and business owners. My last 3 years in corporate were in IT consulting. So I know a thing or two about tech and AI.

So I’m going to give you a few reasons AI is probably not what you need to save time in your business (beyond, you know, the environmental and ethical impact of it all).

We ALL want to save time in our business.

But AI is not a magic cure-all bandaid. If you do not have a strong foundation in place for how your work should operate, strong data, etc.; AI is just going to amplify your mess while feeding you incorrect information that, unless you’re fact-checking, you may just believe.

hink of it this way: if you have trouble delegating to your systems and/or an assistant because you don’t really have a handle on what’s going on, AI is just going to make that problem worse.

MOST of the creative service providers and wedding pros I work with have a pretty bare-bones foundation. Workflows that aren’t automated or have been broken for a long time, outdated information on their website, having to recreate the wheel literally every time they send a proposal or an email.

And if you’re like “oop, that’s me,” this is NOT me shaming you!!! I know you are AMAZING at what you do, and you are trying to figure it all out along the way, in between client work and life and all the things.

So if you’re in that situation, it might feel enticing when someone says “OMG AI is gonna save you SOoOoOo much time,” because like, holy shit, I do need more time 🫣

But unless you want that time savings to be at the cost of your reputation, what you actually need is a stronger foundation. Better systems. More automation in your workflows. More clarity and documentation around your process. More templates in your arsenal. Better task management.

THOSE are the things that are going to reliably save you time, maintain your brand and reputation, and increase your consistency.

Why do people respond differently to automation vs. AI?

Let’s think of it this way:

Automation is YOUR voice, YOUR brand. It’s the template that’s in your head already—the email or the document exactly the way YOU would have sent it.

AI is essentially a summary of the voices that AI has been exposed to the most. So even if you “teach” AI to learn your brand voice and style, while it may start to sound more like you at first, it goes on to do two things that make your work start to fall flat:

1. It uses the information you taught it to inform how it “writes” other brands’ content. Aka, it helps other brands sound more like you.
2. It uses the content it’s constantly being fed to inform how it writes your content. And it probably does it at a gradual enough pace that you may not even notice it happening until your brand has already felt detached from what makes YOU unique for a while. Aka, it makes YOU sound more like other brands.

Both of these effects together flatten your brand voice. So even if you’re saving time writing copy or captions or processes with AI, you are effectively giving away your UVP to the machine.

“What should I do instead?”

Invest in your systems. Your CRM and project management tools. Hire someone to build out your workflows and templates so they are a reflection of your brand and how YOU work.

Stop cobbling together the foundation of your business and slapping duct tape on it when it breaks.

And if you’re not sure where to start, hi, I’m Gail, and I would LOVE to help you save time without AI 🫶🏻