A lot of small business owners are side-eyeing AI right now. Some days I’m right there with them. I’ve seen the captions that sound like a robot wrote them. I’ve seen the flyers that look like every other flyer that showed up in my feed this week. And I get it. If that’s all you’ve seen AI do, of course you’re skeptical.
Here’s my confession. I use AI, specifically Claude, in my business every single day. And I still sound like me. Not because I found some tool you don’t know about. Because I took the time to set it up before I ever asked it to write a single caption.
AI Was Never Just One App
First things first: AI isn’t just Claude, even though that’s the tool I use the most. It’s ChatGPT. It’s Google Gemini sitting quietly installed in your browser. It’s baked into Canva, the design tool half of you are already using. It’s in Zoom, which is what I was recording this very episode on. Descript, the editor a lot of podcasters lean on, is built on it too.
You can embrace that or you can not. Totally your call. But AI is already a tool in your toolbox whether you’ve opened the drawer or not. It’s not a flash in the pan. It’s not going anywhere next year. So there’s no use pretending otherwise.
More Platforms, Less You
Here’s the part that trips people up: much like I’ve said on this show before about not needing to be on every social platform, you don’t need to use every AI tool either.
Pick the platforms that fit who you are and how you show up for your people.
But here’s the catch. If you’re marketing across Meta and LinkedIn and YouTube and a Squarespace site, and you’re leaning on each platform’s own native AI to write for you, those platforms aren’t talking to each other. You end up with content that’s fast but not cohesive.
It stops sounding like one brand, or one person, said all of it. The more platforms you lean on for native AI, the further you drift from your own voice.
My actual take: AI is a real support for a business owner who doesn’t have a dedicated content or marketing person on staff. It fills a real gap. But it only works if you set it up to sound like you first. That’s the whole rest of this.
Pick One Tool and Actually Commit
My first real recommendation: pick one tool and start there. I used ChatGPT for a long time. I switched to Claude earlier this year because its language model fit what I needed better, especially for things like spreadsheets, while ChatGPT was stronger for flyers and image work.
Neither one is objectively better. It’s about what fits your business.
The point of picking one and sticking with it is relationship. (I know how strange that sounds. We’re not exactly building a friendship with a chatbot.) But the more you work with one AI, the more it learns your tendencies, your habits, the way you actually do things. It gets more accurate. More authentic. More yours.
Introduce Yourself Like You’re at a Mixer
Once you’ve picked your tool, introduce yourself to it. Literally.
Tell it who you are, what your business is known for, your mission, your values, your short and long term goals, your service area. Link your website. Upload your logo or brand kit. Tell it to save all of it for later.
Treat that first conversation like you’re meeting someone at a networking event, not typing keywords into a search bar. Have an actual conversation.
Then, once you’ve had that initial back and forth, here’s my favorite part of the whole process, the thing I do for my own business and for every client I take on. I play 20 Questions with my chat. I say, “Let’s play 20 Questions. What are 20 things you want to ask me?”
This is the secret sauce. The questions a chat generates dig into things I hadn’t thought to say out loud in my first introduction. And as a bonus, it starts noticing how I actually talk. The phrases I lean on. The jargon that’s uniquely mine. This is how my Claude figured out that I talk in long, rambly sentences with a structure that makes almost no grammatical sense but somehow always winds back to my original point. So when it writes captions for me now, it sounds like something I’d actually say.
Feed It Your Real Writing, Not Just Your Vibe
If you want your marketing to sound like you, and you already have clients or people in real life who know how you talk, they will spot an AI caption in five seconds flat. So take the time to write something real. Even a short paragraph about why you started your business, or why you’re still doing it ten years later, helps your chat understand how you write and how you see the world.
I don’t do this once and walk away. Every few weeks or so I’ll remind Claude, “Here’s a blog I wrote recently. This is how I write. Remember this so my voice comes through in what you generate.” It saves it, and the next round of output is that much closer to how I actually talk. It keeps my voice in the driver’s seat instead of letting the AI’s voice quietly take over.
Guardrails, Not Just Vibes
We love telling our chat who we are and what our big ideas are.
We’re much slower to tell it what we don’t want. Words we’d never use. Punctuation we hate. For me, that’s the em dash. I know people who write beautifully with them. I am not one of them. So I told Claude flat out: don’t write with an em dash, that’s not how I write, I use ellipses or parentheses instead. If one slips through, I say so, and it revises.
Point out your formatting habits. Point out where you’d use a sentence instead of a bullet point, or the other way around. Vague vibes get you generic AI. Specifics get you yours.
When a Draft Misses, Say So
If a draft doesn’t land, don’t just hit regenerate and hope for better luck. Tell it exactly what’s wrong.
“This sounds like a LinkedIn post.”
“I don’t talk like that.”
“I like to use the F word.”
It learns the same way a real contractor or team member learns: through correction, not silence. If you quietly accept a miss, it never gets fixed.
Keep Client Voices Separate
If you’re a service provider juggling more than one client or project (hi, hello, that’s me), keep separate chats or projects for each one. I have a project for my own business, one for this podcast, one for a client in leadership development, one for a client in grading and excavating, and one for a short-term local project. I run the same setup, the 20 Questions, the writing samples, the guardrails, inside each one. That way, when it’s time to create something, it sounds like that specific person or business, not like me, and not like generic Claude. It keeps the voices clean and keeps me from accidentally handing one client’s brand voice to another.
What Else It Can Do Once the Setup’s Done
Once you’ve done the setup, sure, use it for captions and image generation. But it goes further than that.
I use Claude to build out quarterly content calendars, complete with spreadsheets. It’s helped me build tracking spreadsheets for my own business goals, pitches sent, leads converted, whether my finances are on pace. It’s audited my website and a client’s website and handed back a prioritized, dated action plan in minutes, something that would have taken me hours on my own. It’s helped me frame out podcast episodes like this one, and pull key points out of my own writing so I can repurpose it elsewhere. If you want to go further, you can even connect it to your QuickBooks or your CRM so the admin side of your business gets a little lighter.
The Molly Operating System
The coolest thing I’ve built with this so far: I plugged in my Enneagram type, my Human Design chart, and my CliftonStrengths results and asked what it meant about me as a solopreneur. What came back was a two page document I now call my Molly Operating System.
On a low day, I can pull it up and see, at a glance, why I might be feeling the way I’m feeling, whether it’s a beginning of the month thing (my low periods tend to land there) or something new I’m running toward. I hand it to contractors and clients too. It explains how I work best, where I might miss the mark, how I like to communicate. It’s become a shortcut for other people to understand me faster, and for me to understand myself a little better too.
You Are Still the Last Line of Defense
Here’s the part I won’t skip past: AI isn’t always accurate.
It can generate something in a confident tone and still be completely wrong. It can cite a link that doesn’t exist. You are still the person behind it. You are still the one who owns the final word. So don’t take everything at face value. Read it. Make sure it still sounds and feels like you before you send it out into the world.
AI isn’t going to run your business for you. It shouldn’t. But set up right, with your voice, your guardrails, and your actual words feeding it, it can become one of the best support systems your operation ever gets.
If you try any of this, especially the 20 Questions exercise, I want to know about it. Message me at @mollyknuth or molly@mollyknuthmedia.com and tell me what your chat figures out about you.
Go find something.
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