There’s a question I’ve been hearing a lot in the last few weeks. It usually arrives once someone has accepted that AI has a place in their creative business. The question is, where does it actually belong? What should I actually be handing to it, and what should I absolutely not?
I want to share the way I’ve come to think about this, because I think it’s genuinely useful, and because the answer (in my view) sits in a quieter, more thoughtful place than most of the AI conversation right now suggests.
Two kinds of work
If you look at any creative business honestly, almost everything that happens inside it falls into one of two categories.
There is work that is genuinely yours. The thinking that only you can do, the eye for what’s right, the relationships that depend on you specifically, the judgment calls that come from years of doing this work. The bit a client is paying for. The bit your business doesn’t really exist without.
And then there is work that just needs to happen. The admin, the scheduling, the recurring reporting, the bits that take time and don’t really need you specifically. The work that, if it disappeared off your desk tomorrow, the business itself would carry on perfectly well.
The mistake most people are making with AI right now is treating those two categories as if they’re the same. They’re not. Something quite different happens when you start running a creative business with a clear sense of which is which.
Three questions for any recurring task
Here is the framework I find myself using, both for myself and for the people I work with. When you come up against a task that happens regularly in your business, ask three questions of it, in this order.
Does this need my taste, my judgment, my relationship? If the answer is yes, this is genuinely yours. It isn’t going to AI. It probably isn’t going to anyone else either. This is the work your business is built on, and it stays with you.
Does this need a human, but not necessarily me? If the answer is yes, this is delegation territory. The work needs care and judgment, but it doesn’t need your particular care and judgment. This is the work that, eventually, the right person on your team holds. AI can help draft, prepare, organise. The human is still in the loop.
Does this not really need a human at all? If the answer is yes, this is where AI quietly does its best work. The recurring admin, the scheduling, the holding-things-together work. The bits that need to happen but don’t really need a person.
When you run any task in your business through those three questions honestly, what should be where becomes much clearer. The judgment calls go nowhere near AI. The genuine human work goes to the right human. The repetitive holding-it-together work can be handled in the background.
A small example from inside our own business
This week, an example I want to share with you, because I think it makes the framework concrete.
I’ve spent the last few weeks setting up a content calendar in Notion, with a project I’ve built in Claude that holds our brand voice, our audience, our pillars, the things we do not say. So when it pulls together a week’s content (the transcript from the podcast, the weekly newsletter, the journal post, the Instagram posts), it does so in a way that’s actually useful to us, rather than just organised. It cross-references against the year plan. If I haven’t covered a particular pillar for a while, it tells me. It even helps me spot the patterns across all of it, so the Instagram posts stay aligned with the bigger picture.
What I love is how the work is divided. The judgment about what to talk about and what to write is entirely mine. But the holding-it-all-together work, the noticing what’s missing, the laying-it-out cleanly, that’s quietly happening in the background.
It has saved me something close to a half-day a week. Which is time given back to the work I actually want to be doing, and the work that’s genuinely mine.
The hiring question
This brings me to something that comes up a lot, and is worth spending some proper time on. The question people are quietly asking, but nobody is really answering clearly: if I’m automating more, does that mean I should be hiring less?
The answer, in my view, is very much no. And I want to explain why.
AI is extraordinary at tasks. It really is. But it’s not good at ownership. And those are very different things.
A task is something that needs to happen, on a defined level, repeated and repeatable. AI can do that, brilliantly.
Ownership is something else. It’s noticing what’s going wrong before anyone asks. Bringing judgment to situations that don’t have a template. Knowing the client well enough to know what they need before they’ve told you. Caring about the outcome.
AI cannot do that. And it won’t, for a very long time, if ever.
So the question to ask is not “should I hire fewer people?” The better question is, what kind of person should I be hiring, given that AI can handle the tasks? And the answer is that you hire for ownership, not for task completion. You hire someone who can hold a whole part of your business, not someone who can work through a list. The human brings the judgment, the relationships, the sense of what good looks like. The AI handles the tasks.
For a creative business, this is genuinely good news. It means that when you’re ready to bring someone in, you can hire someone more senior, more strategic, than you might have done before. Because they won’t be spending their days on task-level work. They’ll be spending their days on the judgment that actually moves the business forwards.
And if you’re a solopreneur and that’s your long-term plan, this still applies to you. The three questions work exactly the same whether you have a team or not. The real point of all of this is about how you spend your own time, and where AI can quietly take some of the pressure off.
A quick word for anyone who already has a team
There is one thing worth naming for anyone who already has someone working with or for them, because this is where the conversation gets harder, and where most business owners get it wrong.
If you start automating tasks that someone on your team currently does, and you don’t bring them properly into the conversation, they will feel it. Even if they don’t say so. Their role is shifting, and they need to be part of shaping what it shifts into.
The leadership move here is to paint the future of the role properly. Not the role they have today (drafting captions, sorting the inbox, pulling together the supplier list), but the role they’re moving towards (running the editorial direction, owning the client relationship, holding a whole part of the business). Drafting is the current version of the role. Ownership is the real role. And that’s what you’re building towards together.
If you don’t have that conversation, the person quietly resists the automation that would actually get them there. Which is understandable. But the answer isn’t to slow the automation. It’s to have the proper conversation first.
And the bit underneath all of this
The reason most creative entrepreneurs cannot answer the what to automate question cleanly is the same reason they cannot answer the pricing question cleanly, or the positioning question cleanly. It’s because the strengths work hasn’t been done.
If you don’t know what you are genuinely exceptional at, then everything looks like it might be yours. Every task, every offering, every client, every piece of work, all of it sits in the same undifferentiated pile of “things I do.” And in that pile, you can’t easily say which bits should stay with you, which bits should go to AI, which bits should go to a human who isn’t you. The decision has nowhere to land.
The strengths work is what gives the decision somewhere to land. When you know, with proper clarity, the specific things you are exceptional at, the questions in this article become straightforward. The judgment calls that depend on those strengths, those stay with you. Everything else can be designed around them.
This is exactly what we do in GATHER, the first pillar of The Bright Line. Not because AI is the point of that work. The strengths work is the foundation for every other decision in your business. The fact that it makes the AI question easier is just one of many places where it pays back.
A way of thinking about all of this
If there is one thing I’d love you to take from this, it’s this. AI is not a replacement for any of the genuine work in your business. It’s something quite different. It’s something that protects the space around your strengths, so your strengths get the attention they deserve.
The work that is genuinely yours stays yours. The work that needs a human (but not you) goes to a human you trust. The work that doesn’t really need a human at all is exactly where AI quietly belongs.
What’s left, when those three categories are properly separated, is a creative business where the human work gets the time it needs, and the rest is quietly held in the background. Which is the right shape for a business like yours.
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