How to Use AI to Automate Your Business (So You Actually Work Less)

Oct 12

9 min read

Key takeaways

Most business owners use AI to create content. The bigger gains come from using it to automate the repeat work in your business.
Let AI take on roughly 80% of the grunt work, and keep the 20% that needs judgement, relationships and nuance for yourself.
Different AI tools are good at different jobs. Use more than one instead of staying loyal to a single platform.
Ask AI to review your regular tasks and tell you which ones can be automated and how. It's one of the most useful conversations you can have with it.
Decide in advance where the time you save will go. If you don't, it fills up with more work.

Kate De Jong and Sam Morris with headphones on

Kate wanted a logo slider on her website, a scrolling row of logos from businesses she's helped. None of the free plugins did it easily. So she asked Claude, which wrote the code, and she pasted it into WordPress. Done.

That was one small fix. The bigger story, and the reason we wanted to talk about how to use AI to automate your business, was the quote she'd had for the rest of her website work.

“I'd been quoted $10,000 to do all the updates to my website that I needed to do, and I ended up doing it myself with Claude, and it took me a day.” — Dr Kate De Jong

In this episode of the Thriving Business Podcast we talked through the AI tools we use every day, what each one is good for, and why automation is where the real gains are.

We're Dr Kate De Jong, a PhD engineer turned business strategist, and Sam Morris, a Navy veteran who's spent 20 years in business working out what makes businesses tick and what makes them stall. Neither of us claims to be an AI expert. We use it all day, every day, and we test a lot.

Why aren't you working less if you already use AI?

Because most of us use the time AI saves to do more work.

AI makes you faster, and most business owners spend that speed on extra output. To work less, you have to point AI at the repeat work in your business and then protect the time it frees up.

When we first talked about AI on this podcast in September 2023, it was all about writing. Sam remembers when a blog took her a day to a day and a half. Now a good draft takes well under an hour, as long as you put your own voice back into it.

Kate called it productivity on steroids. Sam's worry is what we're doing with it.

“We are just increasing our capability and our productivity. We aren't using it … to work less.” — Sam Morris

There's an old idea that explains this. In 1955, naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in The Economist that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” That's Parkinson's Law. If AI saves you ten hours a week and you don't decide where those hours go, they'll quietly fill up again.

Kate shared a simple way to think about it. There are three ways to use AI: to create (content), to think (research, analysis and brainstorming) and to automate. Most people are only using the first one. Automation is where the big gains are.

What should AI do, and what should you keep for yourself?

Give AI the grunt work. Keep the parts that need you.

Use AI for the repeat, rules-based work, and keep client conversations, sensitive decisions and anything that needs your real voice for yourself. Kate calls this the human-in-the-loop principle.

“AI ideally should be handling the 80% of grunt work while you handle the 20% that requires judgment, relationships, and nuance.” — Dr Kate De Jong

Research backs up why that split matters. In a field experiment with 758 Boston Consulting Group consultants, Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Ethan Mollick and colleagues found that on tasks AI handled well, consultants using GPT-4 completed 12.2% more tasks, finished 25.1% faster and produced work rated more than 40% higher in quality. On a task outside what AI could do well, consultants using it were 19 percentage points less likely to get the right answer than those working without it (Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier, Harvard Business School working paper, 2023).

In plain terms, AI is brilliant at some jobs and confidently wrong at others. Your judgement is what tells the two apart, so stay in the loop.

Which AI tools should you use for which jobs?

Don't marry one platform. Each one has strengths.

Use more than one AI tool and match each to the job it does best. If you're still putting everything through ChatGPT, it's worth trying the others. Here's how we each use them.

Claude: Kate's favourite for writing. She uses it to draft, to critique her work, to analyse spreadsheets and profit and loss statements, and to write code.
Claude Cowork: the agentic side of Claude, available on paid plans on desktop. You describe the outcome, step away and come back to finished work. Sam used it to reorganise her whole filing system, including finding duplicate files, and to build a sales page from a product she'd worked out in Claude.
Gemini: Sam's go-to for functional work. Gems are saved instruction sets for anything you do on repeat. Because Gemini connects to Google apps, Sam uses it to sort her inbox, add tasks and send reminders to her calendar as she thinks of them.
NotebookLM: Sam's favourite for repurposing. It works only from the sources you upload, so the output uses your language. Feed it a podcast transcript or a YouTube link and it can produce blog posts, infographics, slide decks or an audio overview.
Reve: a free image generator Sam uses to create images of the two of us for podcast thumbnails. The free version limits how many images you get a day.

If your business runs on Microsoft, Copilot can do a lot of the same jobs. Sam put it down to an Apple versus Android thing. Pick the system you already live in, find your way with it, and go outside it when it can't do what you need.

How do you use AI to automate your business, step by step?

Start by asking AI what to automate.

The easiest way to use AI to automate your business is to list the tasks you repeat each week, then ask AI which of them can be automated and exactly how to set it up. Then follow the steps it gives you.

Sam did exactly this with Gemini when her work felt chaotic, with apps here and apps there and things living in too many places.

“These are all the things that I'm using. Which parts of this process can I automate? How can I set this up?” — Sam Morris

Gemini gave her step-by-step instructions to set up automations in Make for parts of our podcast production. That's the shift we keep coming back to. You don't have to work out the automation yourself. You ask AI to work it out with you.

Here's the process we'd suggest:

List your repeat tasks. Anything you do every week, every client or every month.
Ask AI to sort them. Which of these could be automated, which could AI draft for me to check, and which need me?
Save the instructions. Put the steps for a repeat job into a Gem, a Claude project or Cowork so you're not re-explaining it every time. Long chats also get expensive, because the longer the chat, the more it uses up.
Connect the tools. Use something like Make or Zapier to pass work between apps without you in the middle.
Decide where the saved time goes. Block it out for the work only you can do, or for time off.

Our own podcast is a good example. We used to need a virtual assistant to stitch the audio together and an editor to polish the sound. Now we upload the file, ask an AI tool to polish it, and get high-quality audio back. The next step is automating the hand-offs between tools.

“It's the automation that I think is going to be the real freedom creator.” — Dr Kate De Jong

This matters most for small business owners who have to be good at everything. Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond studied 5,179 customer support agents using a generative AI assistant. Productivity rose 14% on average and 34% for novice and low-skilled workers, with minimal impact for the most experienced (Generative AI at Work, NBER Working Paper 31161, 2023). AI helps most where you're least experienced, which for most of us is the admin, the tech and the bits we've been putting off.

If you want a head start on setting AI up as part of your team, our free AI Setup Workbook gives you eight prompts to do exactly that.

How do you stop AI-written content sounding like AI?

Read it out loud.

Read every AI draft out loud and change anything you wouldn't say. People are getting good at spotting AI copy, and once they spot it, they trust it less.

Kate did a deep dive into AI tells when she ran a workshop for a not-for-profit in the Northern Territory. The ones we see most:

Em dashes everywhere.
Words nobody actually says, like “no fluff”.
The “it's not this, it's that” sentence pattern.
Everything in threes. The rule of three is a real copywriting principle and it works, but AI overuses it.

As Sam put it, AI struggles with the strategic use of those copywriting rules. It applies them everywhere, and the copy ends up over-structured. Her fix is simple.

“I read it out loud and I'm like, if I wouldn't talk like that, I'm not writing like that.” — Sam Morris

Do you need to be an AI expert to get started?

No. You need to be willing to try things.

You don't need to be an expert. You need to experiment, notice what works and keep going. The tools change so fast that our own AI episodes from two and a half years ago already sound dated.

“I like to refer to myself as an explorer, not an expert.” — Sam Morris

A few low-risk places to start:

Check your website. Give an AI tool your URL and ask it to review the site for basic SEO. It'll tell you if a page has no H1 or three of them, or if you're missing meta descriptions and alt text on images.
Build faster. The Thriving Business Podcast website was built with Wix's AI website builder overnight. We then reworked the wording so it sounded like us. You still need solid marketing foundations to do it well.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the best AI tool for a small business?

There isn't one best tool. Claude is strong for writing, analysis and code, Gemini works well if you live in Google apps, NotebookLM is great for repurposing your own content, and Copilot suits Microsoft businesses. Use the one that fits your existing systems and add others for specific jobs.

What tasks should a small business automate with AI first?

Start with tasks you repeat every week that follow clear rules, such as sorting email, turning a transcript into content or working through the same calculation. Ask AI to review your list of regular tasks and tell you which ones it can automate and how.

Will AI replace my virtual assistant?

It's changing what VAs do. Work like audio editing that used to take a person hours now takes a click. Plenty of business owners still don't want to run AI themselves, and good VAs are now helping clients choose and use the right AI tools.

How do I make AI content sound like me?

Give it your own material to work from, such as transcripts, past writing or brand guidelines, then edit the draft. Read it out loud and rewrite anything you wouldn't say. Watch for tells like em dashes, “no fluff” and the “it's not this, it's that” pattern.

Three things to do this week

Write down every task you did more than once last week. Ask an AI tool which ones it could automate and how.
Pick one repeat task and save the instructions for it as a Gem, a Claude project or a Cowork task.
Try one AI tool you haven't used before on a real job, and decide where the time you save will go.

“Go and do this for me, go and do that for me.” — Sam Morris

AI for Maximum Efficiency: How to Automate the 80% and Focus on the Work Only You Can Do cover art

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