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AI is everywhere right now. It’s writing captions, outlining blogs, summarizing meetings, and promising to give small business owners back time, of which they never seem to have enough. Are these new tools giving you feelings of relief? Or increasing your overwhelm?
Both reactions are fair.
I’m not anti-AI…clearly I use it a fair amount and I’m building it into the new Social Media Strategy for Anti-Heroes update. I’m also not interested in pretending it’s a magic fix. AI can be genuinely useful for small businesses, especially when it comes to social media marketing. But only if we stay actively engaged in the thinking. The real risk isn’t that AI will replace us but that we’ll quietly stop thinking for ourselves and end up sounding just like every other small business out there.
When tools move faster than thinking
Now, I’m not religious at all, but I remember my childhood Bible stories, and there’s a moment in the Book of Jonah that often gets skipped over. Jonah doesn’t start with the whale. He starts with task avoidance.
He’s given a clear, but difficult, assignment, and instead of wrestling with it, he buys passage on a ship headed as far away as possible.
The whale tends to get all the attention in the story, but it might not be the most important part of the story. The moment that really matters is when Jonah stops engaging.
Then the storm hits.
The sailors panic. They’re throwing cargo overboard. They’re praying for help. They’re doing everything they can to keep the ship from breaking apart.
Jonah? Sleeping!
That’s the part most people forget. How he just completely disengaged. I mean, he didn’t even notice the ship rocking and rolling?
Eventually, the sailors wake him. They need all hands on deck, praying to all available gods. Survival requires participation. The storm wasn’t random, and Jonah knew it. When the sailors pressed him, he admitted what he had done and connected the chaos to his own avoidance.
Only after he acknowledges what’s happening does the sea calm down.
The whale comes later.
The whale isn’t the beginning of the story. It’s what happens after avoidance and disengagement finally catch up.
That’s the part that keeps coming to mind when I watch how people are using AI.
AI isn’t the whale, and it’s not really the ship either. It’s the sea. It’s the environment we’re all operating in now, whether we asked for it or not. You can’t opt out of it entirely, but you can choose how you sail through it.
The danger is in disengaging and avoiding the harder work, assuming AI will take care of it for you.
When people talk about being “swallowed” by AI, what they’re usually describing isn’t technology gone rogue. It’s what happens when they stop steering, stop questioning, and let the current decide.
AI isn’t the strategy, it’s a tool
This is where a lot of advice to small businesses goes sideways. Strategy gets confused with speed. Posting more becomes the goal. Publishing faster starts to feel like success. Letting the tool decide what to say becomes normalized.
But strategy has never been about output.
Strategy is about choice. It’s deciding what matters, who you’re speaking to, what you believe, and what you’re willing to say consistently, even when it would be easier not to. AI doesn’t make those choices for you. And when it does, you’re not operating strategically, you’re on autopilot.
Used well, AI can speed up execution, surface patterns, and reduce friction in the work. Used poorly, it smooths out your edges, flattens your voice, and quietly makes you sound like everyone else using the same tools. The difference isn’t the technology. It’s whether you’re still thinking.
How small businesses should be using AI in social media
If AI is helping you think, great. If it’s thinking for you, we have a problem.
One of the strongest uses is clarification. AI is excellent at helping turn rough ideas into something usable. It can clean up a voice note, organize a long paragraph, or tighten language without changing the core meaning. You bring the idea. AI helps you shape it.
It’s also useful for spotting patterns most business owners don’t have time to track. Reviewing themes you talk about most, noticing which questions keep coming up in comments or DMs, or identifying which topics consistently perform better can all inform smarter decisions. AI reflects what’s already there. You decide how to respond.
There’s real value in accessibility support as well. AI can help draft alt text that you then refine, suggest caption variations for different reading preferences, or simplify dense ideas without stripping out nuance. I use AI daily to produce image descriptions for accessibility.
And when it comes to repurposing, AI can help one strong idea go further. A blog can become carousel talking points. A post can turn into a short video outline. A long caption can be adapted for another platform. The message stays yours. Only the format changes.
Valentine’s Day is a perfect example of why thinking still matters
Valentine’s Day content is already flooding inboxes and feeds. If you’ve been paying attention, a lot of it sounds familiar, and that’s not accidental.
Ask ChatGPT for Valentine’s Day content ideas right now and you’ll likely get some variation of:
- “Fall in love with your business this Valentine’s Day”
- “Show your brand some love”
- “Why your customers should fall in love with you”
- “Five ways to love your audience better”
- “A reminder to nurture relationships”
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a florist, a bookkeeper, a coach, or a consultant. The framing is the same. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s become generic, and when everyone uses the same metaphors at the same time, generic becomes invisible very quickly.
This is where critical thinking has to come back into the picture. AI doesn’t know what you’ve already said. It doesn’t know what your audience is tired of hearing. It can remix patterns, but it can’t tell you whether those patterns still serve you.
That part is still on us. This is the critical thinking part.
Before AI, we trusted ourselves more than we think
This is the part I keep coming back to as I watch the seasonal content roll in. I’ve been writing holiday-themed strategy posts for years, long before AI entered the picture, and I wasn’t outsourcing the thinking then.
- In 2016, I wrote a Valentine’s Day post about finding leads on Twitter, framed as The Lover’s Edition.
- In 2017, I wrote about creating content your followers will actually love.
- In 2021, I wrote about how to love your social media plan.
I’ve done similar posts for Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, and Halloween too. Not because the holidays themselves were the point, but because they offered familiar moments to talk about strategy, behaviour, and visibility in a way that felt timely and human. The holiday was the hook. The thinking was always the work.
Now, years later, my inbox is full of “fall in love with your business” and “show your customers some love” newsletters. Not because everyone suddenly had the same creative spark, but because the tools are very good at suggesting what’s statistically safe and seasonally appropriate.
Safe doesn’t mean strategic.
Somewhere along the way, we’ve started assuming that if a tool can generate something faster, it must be better. That if we don’t use it, we’re falling behind. That our own ideas need validation before they’re worth sharing.
They don’t.
How small businesses accidentally give away their voice
This is where things quietly unravel. I see businesses posting AI output without editing, letting tools choose tone, and prioritizing efficiency over alignment. The result is rarely terrible…it’s just forgettable.
And the last thing you want is to take a shortcut to forgettable. Not to mention, you might just be remembered as the company that lets AI do all your talking, which certainly erodes trust.
Not choosing, not editing, not thinking critically about how you use AI is still a choice. And just like in voting, or boating, you might end up with a result you’re not happy with. Opting out of the decision-making doesn’t protect you from the consequences…it just gives away your power.
The guardrails I teach for using AI well
If AI is going to be part of your social media workflow, IT. NEEDS. BOUNDARIES.
Treat AI like a junior team member, not a decision-maker. Start with what you already know before you prompt. Edit for voice, not just clarity. Use AI to challenge your thinking instead of bypassing it. Pause before publishing and ask whether this actually sounds like you.
And realize that you DO NOT have to accept the first (or even the fifth) version of anything AI spits out for you. I have numerous examples of things that just didn’t work and I abandoned.
Why I’m adding AI tools to my course
I’m adding AI tools to Social Media Strategy for Anti-Heroes because pretending they don’t exist (or hoping they’re just a passing fad) isn’t strategic or helpful. Small business owners are already using them, often without guidance, and that’s where the problems start.
The tools I’m adding aren’t about automating everything. To be honest, they don’t even talk about automation of anything! I’m adding tools that ask you to use AI intentionally, inside a strategy that already exists based on your own choices, knowledge and experience.
The tools will help you organize your thoughts (HELLO! ADHD aligned entrepreneurs), fill in the gaps, and create plans that work for you.
The real differentiator going forward
Everyone has access to these tools now. The advantage isn’t who’s using them, it’s who’s willing to question the outputs and challenge the biases. If your content still has opinions, specific stories, and boundaries, you’ll stand out fast because so much of what’s coming out right now is technically fine but emotionally interchangeable.
AI can help you do the work better. It just can’t do the part that makes it yours.
You still have to steer.
As Mark Schaefer, renowned marketing speaker and author says “The most humany company wins” and that couldn’t BE any more true today (with emphasis on the ‘be’ so you’ll hear it in Chandler Bing’s voice and have yourself a giggle today).
