AI produces generic marketing because it has no context about your business. It doesn’t know your audience, your expertise, your offers, or your point of view. The businesses getting real value from AI clarified those things first, then gave them to the tool.
I’ve been creating brands for almost three decades, and most of that work has really been about one thing. Helping people understand what is uniquely theirs, and finding the clearest way to say it.
AI has made me more convinced than ever that this work matters.
The more accessible these tools get, the easier it is for all of us to put up a decent-looking website, write decent copy, generate content, research an idea, move faster. But AI doesn’t know what makes you worth paying attention to.
This was the part I had to work through for myself. I’ve spent my whole career helping people become more distinct, more recognizable, and more themselves. The last thing I wanted was to help them pour all of that into a machine and come out sounding like everybody else.
What I understand now is that the problem isn’t AI. It’s AI without enough of you in it.
I just spent twelve weeks deep in a training on how to automate parts of a business to create more freedom, fulfillment, visibility, abundance, and time. What I walked away realizing is how well the AI workspaces and business brains I learned to make pair with the DesignGood process and our frameworks.
This is where my old work and my new work started to make sense together. The work I’ve been doing with entrepreneurs for almost three decades creates the context. AI creates leverage from that context. First we understand the business, then we decide what AI should do.
Here’s what I mean in practice. Say you open ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to help with some part of your brand, your marketing, your outreach, or how you talk about your offerings. What comes back is pretty good. It just doesn’t sound like you, and it doesn’t know the things that matter:
- Who your audience is and what they’re actually navigating
- What’s important to you
- The experience, expertise, and lived wisdom you bring to your work
- The perspective you apply to everything you do, and what you want to be known for
- The vision you have for this business
If AI knows very little about you, it fills in the blanks with what it knows about businesses like yours. That’s where the sameness comes from.
What makes AI sound crappy is that it doesn’t know you and your business.
And if you don’t have clear answers to those things either, it’s very hard to move forward in your own business, much less hand any of it off.
Our favorite clients have businesses shaped entirely around their uniqueness. How they speak. How they see the world. Their own approach to the work. They’ve created offerings dialed in to exactly what their audience needs, or they’ve mastered a methodology and put their own spin on it.
The people getting the most aligned and useful guidance from AI are the ones who already have clarity around what they do, who they do it for, what they’re so great at, and what people can expect from working with them. And they’ve given the tool all of it, their offerings, their audience, what matters to that audience, their language preferences.
When you’re starting from scratch in a new chat every time, nothing accumulates. AI gets dramatically better when it stops guessing who you are.
Which means the clarity and positioning of your business and brand are the real soul work, and AI just made that obvious a lot faster.
There’s another reason this clarity matters now
AI isn’t only changing how we work. It’s changing how people find us.
You’ve probably heard the term GEO starting to get thrown around before you’ve even figured out your SEO. It stands for Generative Engine Optimization, and it’s the emerging work of making your expertise easier for generative search and AI answer systems to understand, associate with the right topics, and surface when someone is researching a person like you.
People are not searching the way they used to. Instead of typing three words into Google and scanning ten links, they’re asking long, layered, specific questions and getting back a short answer with a few names in it. Your website, your reviews, your content, podcasts you’ve been on, professional profiles, case studies, and anywhere else your expertise shows up are all part of how those systems build a picture of who you are.
The larger principle is familiar. Clear expertise, firsthand experience, credible proof, consistent positioning, and a strong reputation across the web all make a business easier to understand and trust.
I’m going to write much more about this soon, because your website is no longer your entire visibility strategy.
What I actually think is happening
We’re moving into an interesting time for people whose businesses run on their expertise, their perspective, their lived wisdom, and their way of doing things.
The tools are getting more powerful. That doesn’t make the person at the center of the business less important. I think it does the opposite. The technology can give you more capacity. What’s uniquely human about you is still what gives the business its value.
AI is going to keep getting better at more of the things businesses currently spend time and money on. That makes me more interested in the things it can’t replace easily. Judgment. Lived experience. Trust. Relationships. Taste. Intuition. Point of view. The way one human being changes another.
The opportunity isn’t to compete with AI at being productive. It’s to use AI to create more capacity around the work that is actually yours.
There’s something pretty profound about using technology to take repetitive work off your plate so you can spend more time on the things that require your presence.
Start with what AI needs to know
If you’re reading this thinking you’re not sure you could hand AI a clear explanation of any of this yet, that’s exactly where I’d start.
The Business Within™ Journey walks you through the foundational questions we use to understand the vision, audience, expertise, offers, and direction underneath a business. And now there’s another reason that work matters. It gives you the beginnings of the context your AI tools need to become useful, and you’ll leave with your own AI Business Clarity Partner, a tool that knows you and gets better the longer you use it.
It’s $97, self-guided, and you work through it at your own pace.
