I spent a couple of days this week inside an AI bootcamp, run by one of the leading voices teaching businesses how to use AI properly. The demos were extraordinary. The kinds of things businesses can now do with AI, even compared to just a few months ago, has changed enormously.
But the thing I most want to share with you isn’t what AI can do. It’s where you, as a creative entrepreneur, already fit in all of this. Because I think it’s something you really need to hear.
What Matters Most
While I was in that bootcamp watching all these incredible demos, I kept noticing something. The thing that kept being said, again and again, by everyone running it, was that the skills that matter most as AI advances are critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving.
And I sat there and thought, those are the skills you already have. Every single creative entrepreneur. That is exactly what you do. That is your daily work. That is how your mind operates.
If you’ve felt at all uncertain or behind or quietly worried about AI, I’d love for you to leave this feeling something quite different.
You’re Not Behind
Before recording this episode, I did some proper research. Because I wanted to know what the actual figures are.
Among the very smallest businesses (businesses with under five employees, which is most creative entrepreneurs) around 82% believe AI isn’t applicable to them. And the data shows this isn’t a real limitation. It’s an education gap. Nobody has shown them how it could work for their specific business.
The most recent figures from the US Small Business Administration showed that only around 8 to 9% of small businesses are using AI in any meaningful, productive way. And when researchers looked deeper, they found that even when businesses say they “use AI”, the gap between using ChatGPT occasionally and actually integrating it into their work is enormous.
So I want you to really hear this. The fact that you’re even thinking about this places you in a tiny percentage of small business owners who are paying attention.
You are absolutely not behind. You’re exactly where you need to be. And in many ways, you’re ahead, simply by being curious.
Why Your Skills Matter More, Not Less
The world’s leading thinkers on AI and business are now in agreement on what matters most as AI advances. The skills that will be most valuable, and that AI simply cannot replicate, are critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving.
These are not skills you need to go and learn. As a creative, they are the skills you already have.
AI can process data. It can generate content. It can follow instructions. It can recognise patterns in vast amounts of information. And it’s extraordinary at those things.
But it cannot see the connection nobody else has seen. It cannot sense what a client needs before they’ve articulated it. It cannot bring together seemingly unrelated ideas into something genuinely new. It cannot read a room. It cannot make the intuitive leap that turns good work into exceptional work. It cannot hold a vision for something that doesn’t exist yet, and bring it to life.
Those are your skills. And they are not being diminished by AI. They are becoming more valuable because of it.
What This Means for You
Think about what this really means for you specifically. The pattern recognition that lets you spot opportunities others miss. The intuitive understanding that lets you create exactly what someone needs, often before they’ve even told you. The ability to take complexity and turn it into something clear and beautiful. The comfort with iteration and evolution. The deep empathy that creates genuine connection with clients and customers.
These are the capabilities the future needs. And you’ve been developing them your entire life and career. Often without even realising how exceptional they are.
Your creative thinking is your competitive advantage. Not just now. Increasingly.
The most powerful use of any tool, including AI, comes from someone who can think critically, creatively, and with genuine problem-solving instinct. Someone who knows what good looks like. Someone who can direct and refine and make the intuitive decisions that no technology can make.
The Three Levels of Using AI
I read recently about three levels of using AI, and it gave me a much clearer way to think about where people are and where they could go.
Level one is AI as an assistant. This is where most people who use AI are sitting right now. You go to ChatGPT or Claude, you type a question, you get an answer back. You’re using it like a clever helper, one task at a time. And honestly, even this level is genuinely useful. If this is where you are, that’s a great start.
Level two is AI as a specialist. This is when you’ve trained the AI on your specific business. It knows your brand voice. It understands your values. It has context on the kind of work you do, the kind of clients you serve. It knows what you mean when you reference your own offerings.
This is where tools like Claude projects come in. You can give the AI a folder full of context about your business, your tone of voice, your previous work, your ideal client. And then every conversation you have with it starts from that foundation. Instead of writing in a generic voice, it writes in yours. Instead of giving generic advice, it gives advice that fits your specific situation.
If you can get to this level, you’re in a tiny percentage of small business owners. Most people who are using AI haven’t moved beyond the first level. But the moment you start training it on your business, the quality of what comes back transforms completely.
Level three is AI as an employee. This is where the AI runs autonomously. It’s set up to do certain tasks on its own, on a schedule, without you needing to be there. You manage it like you would a team member. You give it clear instructions, you check its work, you refine it over time, but it’s actually doing the work for you in the background.
Please don’t be scared by this idea. What it means is that the work that exhausts you, the work that feels repetitive, the work that nobody really needs you specifically to do, can quietly happen on its own. While you focus on the things only you can do. The strategic thinking. The creative direction. The actual relationships with your clients and customers. The design. The connections. All of the ideas.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Let me give you a simple example to make this feel less abstract.
Let’s say you’re a maker. You have a small product business. You ship orders, respond to customer enquiries, write a newsletter, post on Instagram, manage stockists, make the actual products.
At level one, you might use AI to help draft a tricky customer email. You’d type the situation in, get a draft back, edit it, send it. Useful, but transactional.
At level two, you’d have AI that knows your brand voice. It knows the warmth of how you write. It knows your standard processes for shipping delays or stock enquiries. So when you give it a customer situation, it drafts something that already sounds like you. You barely need to edit it. And it can help with newsletter drafts, social media captions, proposals to potential stockists, all in your voice.
At level three, the AI can be set up to do certain things autonomously. Perhaps every Sunday evening, it pulls together a summary of the week’s customer enquiries, flags anything urgent, drafts initial responses for you to review Monday morning. Or it researches potential stockists in a particular region and creates a shortlist for you to look through. Or it monitors your Instagram and gives you a weekly summary of what resonated and ideas for the week ahead.
You’re still the one making decisions. You’re still the one bringing your judgment, your creativity, your relationships, your design eye. But the things that used to take three or four hours of admin are quietly happening in the background.
That’s the future. And it’s actually a seriously exciting and beautiful future for creative entrepreneurs. Because it gives us back the thing we have least of: time and energy for the work that genuinely matters.
If You’re Feeling Behind
If you’ve been quietly thinking, “I haven’t even started, I don’t know where to begin, everyone else is so far ahead”, please hear me again.
You are not behind.
The data shows clearly that the vast majority of small business owners haven’t started either. The fact that you’re thinking about this puts you firmly in the group that’s paying attention. And the skills that matter most going forward, the ones that AI cannot replicate, are exactly the skills you already have.
Tools can be learnt. They change constantly. What cannot be learnt, what takes a lifetime to develop, is the way you think. Your critical thinking. Your creativity. Your ability to solve problems in ways nobody else would approach them.
That’s the foundation. And the tools serve the thinking, not the other way around.
The Starting Point
I’ll be sharing more on AI in future episodes. Practical things you can use straight away. Specific examples of how I’m using it inside my own business. And we’ll be covering this properly inside The Bright Line, because I really do believe every creative entrepreneur should be able to use AI confidently as a tool, on their own terms, without losing what makes their business theirs.
But the starting point is always this. Your creative thinking comes first. Everything else, including AI, works in service of that.
If you’d love to come and have a conversation about all of this with me, I’m running a free live session called The Missing Piece. We talk about what’s underneath the things that aren’t quite working in creative businesses. The link to the next date is HERE, and I’d love to have you there.
AI, used well, isn’t here to replace any of what you do. It’s here to take away some of what slows you down, so you can spend more time on the work that nobody else can do.
The work that is genuinely yours.
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