There's a pattern I keep seeing in coaching calls, and I've been sitting with it for a while before writing it down because I wanted to make sure I was seeing it clearly.

It goes like this: someone comes to a session stuck. Not stuck on tactics - they usually have plenty of those. They are more stuck on themselves and on whether their instincts are still trustworthy. Wondering why the business that used to feel like theirs now feels like something they’re administering from a distance. Frustrated that, despite an increase in marketing output, they aren’t seeing an increase in sales.

When we get into it, almost every time, AI is somewhere in the story. Not as the villain, that's too simple and not really accurate. More as the thing that arrived when they were already exhausted and overwhelmed by advice that didn't fit and pressure to produce more content than their business actually needed. It seemed, for a moment, like the answer to all of it.

So they handed it the social media first and got used to it coming up with ideas, so they handed it the strategy thinking they were saving money and time. Then they started to ask it to help with all the ideas and somewhere in that handover, without really noticing, they handed it the parts of the work they actually enjoyed.

I want to be careful here, because the anti-AI take is easy and I'm not making it. AI is a genuinely useful tool. I use it, I recommend it, and there are real tasks it handles better and faster than most people would. The problem isn't the tool. The problem is the specific category of work we've been offloading to it.

The general advice has been to use AI for the time-consuming stuff so you can focus on what matters. Which sounds reasonable, but in practice a lot of business owners have interpreted "time-consuming stuff" to include the creative work - the writing, the strategy, the thinking - because that's often where the anxiety lives. The blank page is uncomfortable and the strategy question feels too big. So AI steps in, the discomfort goes away, and it feels like a solution. It usually isn't. It's an avoidance mechanism with excellent PR.

If you hand off your marketing and customer interactions to AI, you're handing off your connection with those customers.

What gets lost in this trade isn't just creative output, it's the habit of thinking things through with other people. Of ringing someone whose opinion you trust and talking it out. Of sitting across from a client, or even just paying attention to them in a real conversation, and letting what you hear change the way you see the problem.

That kind of thinking isn't inefficient. It's actually how good strategy gets made. It's where the insight that doesn't come from a prompt lives.

When you’re deep in the AI workflow, hitting enter and wandering off to make a coffee, you can start to lose touch with your work and with the humans in and around your business. It’s not dramatic so you don’t notice it, but it creeps up on you. You stop reaching out as much. You stop asking. You stop being in the room with your customers in the particular way that requires you to be curious and a little uncomfortable. And the work becomes technically fine but somehow thinner, because it's no longer fed by real contact with real people.

Business, at its core, is human-to-human. Your clients or customers are coming to you because of what happens when you're actually thinking about their problem - not because your content calendar is consistent.

There's something else worth mentioning, which is what happens to your own capability when you stop practising the thinking. Creative work, strategic work, the kind of writing that sounds like a person who has actually formed an opinion - all of it requires regular use to stay sharp.

The discomfort of the blank page

This discomfort is part of the process. When you sit with a problem long enough to have an actual thought about it, a you thought rather than a generated one, that's where your perspective develops. That's when the work sounds like you. That's when someone reads your newsletter and thinks "she gets it" rather than "that's a well-structured piece of content."

If you allow AI to generate your audience personas and your strategy, it’s easy to let it design your services - surely it knows your audience as well as you do, after all it wrote the book on them…but does it really know them? Have you given it all the access and information it needs or is it just pulling knowledge from other people, other businesses, other places?

Skip the discomfort often enough and you stop getting better at it. Skip it long enough and you stop trusting yourself to do it at all. Your capacity atrophies quietly while you're busy being efficient, and the confidence goes with it. That's the self-redundancy I keep seeing - not job redundancy, but the gradual removal of yourself from the parts of the business that actually required you.

Your clients are not paying for output. They're paying because of the way you think, the way you see their problem, the specific combination of experience and instinct they can't replicate themselves. That is the product. It has always been the product. When the thinking is generated, the product changes. It might still look fine, and it might perform reasonably well, but the thing that made you worth hiring - the particular quality of your attention - isn't in it anymore.

A few checkpoints worth exploring

If you're not sure where you've landed on this, here are some honest questions to take into the week. Not a diagnostic, just places to look.

When did you last have a real conversation with a customer or client - not a survey, not a comment thread - a time when you were genuinely listening to understand something rather than confirm what you already thought? That kind of contact is what keeps your offer calibrated to the people it's actually for, and it's easy to deprioritise when you feel like you're producing a lot.

When did you last ring or message someone in your industry or network to think something through out loud? Peer conversation isn't just good for morale. It's where ideas get tested, refined, and occasionally dismantled before you build a whole strategy on something that doesn't hold up.

When you read back your last few pieces of content or client communications, do they sound like someone with a specific point of view, or like a reasonable summary of what most people in your field would say? There's a difference, and your clients can feel it even if they can't name it.

And finally, which tasks are you handing to AI because they drain you, and which ones are you handing over because they make you anxious? Drain is a reasonable criterion. Anxiety usually isn't, because the anxious tasks are often the ones that matter most.

Where the line actually is

So use AI for the things that genuinely drain you and require no particular genius from you specifically. The admin, the scheduling, the tasks that sit on your list for three weeks because you can't bring yourself to start them. That's a legitimate trade, and a good one.

But please keep some of the creative work and keep the strategy. Keep the conversations with people who challenge how you're thinking. Keep the habit of actually talking to your customers rather than modelling what you imagine they want. The moment you stop doing those things regularly, you stop being good at them, and being good at them is the whole point.

You got here by trusting your own thinking. By having an opinion, developing a perspective, making calls that weren't obvious. You need to keep that to stay connected to your customers and, importantly, to your business - the vision, the mission and why you started this in the first place.

Hi, I’m Erika McInerney - a marketing and customer experience strategist working with regional, suburban and small-town businesses.

I help you see where customers and revenue are leaking, build practical marketing strategies around your real capacity, and create systems that actually support your business (and your life).

Alongside one-on-one work, I partner with councils, business groups and organisations to deliver practical workshops that build marketing capability across entire communities.

If you’re ready for clearer strategy and more confident visibility, you can book a free discovery call or send an email.