🎙️ Unscripted Small Business · Founder Roundup
Where Should a Small Business NOT Use AI?
Everyone’s racing to adopt AI — these founders are clear about where it backfires.
AI is the easiest leverage a small business has ever had — and these founders use plenty of it. But on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, the more interesting question isn’t where AI helps. It’s where it quietly backfires — the work where speed and scale turn into generic, soulless, untrustworthy output.
Six founders — a fractional CFO, a travel advisor, a business strategist, a direct-response operator, an AI-tools builder, and a marketing guide — each drew a clear line around the work AI shouldn’t touch. Click any name to listen to that full conversation.
The Question: Where Should You NOT Use AI?
Meaghan Wall — The Hot Girl CFO
“If you’re going to use AI, you should use it more. If you’re not going to use it, don’t use it at all.”
Meaghan’s line isn’t anti-AI — it’s anti-half-measure. She runs her practice on Count, an AI accounting platform that scans bank feeds and auto-categorizes expenses, and her honest assessment is that it’s wrong about 45% of the time. That’s not a reason to avoid it; it’s a reason to keep a human eye on every output. Her real warning is about shallow use: if you don’t know how to prompt well, you won’t even catch what the machine gets wrong. So go deep — learn it, supervise it, review it — or stay out entirely. The dangerous place is the lukewarm middle.
Cecily North — Traveling North Agency
Cecily encourages her travel clients to lean on AI for the planning stage: “Absolutely use AI, use ChatGPT to put the itinerary together, do your research.” Where she draws the line is the booking. “When you’re actually going to book, book with a travel agent — because ChatGPT can’t help you if something goes wrong.” She means it literally: when a client’s Scotland rental sold out from under them mid-trip, she found a new place while they kept enjoying their vacation. A chatbot can’t do that. “I’m not an 800 number. I’m not a bot,” she says — she’s a real person you can call when the trip breaks.
Kate Hendrickson — The Strategy Lane
“AI can’t replace that people connection. I market through conversations.”
Kate builds her business on relationships — podcasts, speaking, conferences, lunches — and she’s blunt that she’d rather sit down and have lunch with you than run a thousand ads. AI has a place in her workflow for efficiency, like mapping out systems, but she frames the risk with a memorable image: you can’t let AI drive itself like a Waymo. You still have to be in the vehicle making the judgment calls. For the long-term strategic work she does with plumbers, HVAC owners, and behavioral health clinics, the sale starts with a genuine human conversation — and that’s exactly the part no model can manufacture for her.
Thiago Cordeiro — OG Group
Thiago is no AI skeptic — he uses HeyGen and Dreamface for AI-actor ad creative and leans on Claude and ChatGPT for audience research and pain-point mapping. But for the actual copy that has to convert cold traffic, he’s firm: “If you go straight to AI and trust 100% on AI to write your copy, you’re going to be dealing with generic terms and seem like everyone else — the same promises, the same offers.” In direct response, differentiation lives in the specific pain points, the unique mechanism, and the voice. His rule: “Use AI for research and the base structure, but then come in and review with your expertise.”
Mason MacUmber — BuildWithMM
“It almost feels like a teenager on steroids. It’s hopped up and ready to go. But at the same time, it’s a teenager at heart — it goes in the wrong places, touches things it’s not supposed to. You’ve got to be on top of it.”
Mason builds AI tools for a living, yet he doesn’t use AI to write his own content — he says it has no soul, the bounce rates give it away, and he expects Google to keep penalizing for it. The deeper discipline he preaches is supervision and traceability. “Repeatability is scalability,” he says: if the AI doesn’t leave a trace of how it got to the perfect output, you can never repeat it — you’re just chasing that one high you got that one time. So the place not to use AI is anywhere you let it run unsupervised, undocumented, and unaccountable. Tell it to write down every step it takes.
Bruce Ashford — The Ashford Agency
Bruce has authored nine books and ghostwritten fifteen, so his verdict on AI writing carries weight: it can lift D-minus copy to a C, but it can’t reach B or A — even with skilled prompting. The failure is qualitative. “AI script is soulless. People can tell when something’s written by a machine,” he says. “And now that everybody is doing their writing with machines, it just all blurs together.” His point isn’t to ban the tool but to refuse to let it own your message. Marketing that actually converts — naming the customer’s real internal and justice-level problems — still demands heavy human involvement at every stage.
The Common Thread
The line these six founders draw isn’t technological — it’s human. AI is welcome for research, structure, drafts, categorization, and speed. It gets shown the door wherever trust, taste, relationships, accountability, and original voice are the actual product. Meaghan won’t let it run unsupervised, Cecily won’t let it handle the moment a trip breaks, Kate won’t let it replace the conversation, Thiago won’t let it write the copy alone, Mason won’t let it work without a trace, and Bruce won’t let it own the message. Use it more, or don’t use it at all — but never let it drive itself.
Want the full conversations? Each name above links to that guest’s episode. For more real talk from founders building across the United States, subscribe to the Unscripted Small Business Podcast.
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