Most business owners are using AI like a high-tech vending machine – put a prompt in, get a generic answer back, and wonder why their business feels less than human. But what if AI wasn’t there to replace your brain, but to act like a partner that buys back 10 hours of your week for your family, your business, or whatever you wish?
In this milestone 350th episode, Lori shares the exact “thinking partner” blueprint she uses to stay creative without burning out – and why AI isn’t going to build your business for you, but it might be the fastest tool you have for getting where you actually want to go.
This is week 9 of the Dream Business Blueprint series, and it’s not about AI replacing jobs or creativity – it’s about how AI can help you build the business you actually want, not a generic one.
3 Main Takeaways:
-
Treat AI like a partner, not a brain. A brain hands you a finished decision to execute. A partner is something you think alongside – you bring it a half-formed idea, push back on what it gives you, and build something together. That shift is what turns generic output into something that actually sounds like you.
-
AI doesn’t kill creativity – it clears the runway for it. The organizing and sequencing work that used to eat up Lori’s creative energy now happens fast, which leaves more time for the part that actually makes content hers: the stories, the phrasing, the personal spark. Efficient isn’t the same as finished – the real value shows up in the 2-3 hours of refining after the first draft.
-
AI is most useful as business infrastructure, not just content generation. Beyond writing, AI can spot patterns you’re too close to see (recurring client objections, energy-draining clients, content themes), turn a narrated task into a repeatable system in minutes, and build an ideal client profile from your actual best clients instead of a guess.
This Week’s Action: Pick one thing – play devil’s advocate on a decision you’re sitting on, write down a system you’ve been meaning to document, or dig into who your real dream clients are. Try it with AI this week, and give yourself permission to actually refine what it gives you instead of judging it by the first draft.
Ready to figure out where your business is costing you freedom? Book a Dream Business Design Session at TalkWithLori.com
Resources:
Download your Dream Business Blueprint workbook HERE
Join Lori’s private Facebook group – The Midlife Business Academy. A Facebook group for The Typewriter Generation! A community to share business growth strategies that work for us! Join now!
Connect with Lori Follow me on social media – grab other free resources of book a call – it’s all right here!
Apply for a “Hot Seat” coaching session to work through your business challenges live:
Episode 350 — Dream Business Blueprint, Week 9: AI
Most Business Owners Are Using AI Like a Vending Machine
Most business owners are using AI like a high-tech vending machine. They put a prompt in, get a generic answer back, and wonder why their business feels less than human.
But what if AI wasn’t there to replace your brain, but to act like a partner that buys back 10 hours of your week for your family, your business, or anything else you wish? Today, for our 350th episode, I’m showing you the exact thinking partner blueprint I use to stay creative without the burnout.
AI is not going to build your business for you, but it might be the fastest tool you have for actually getting where you want to go.
Welcome to the Midlife Business Academy
I’m Lori Lyons, and welcome to the Midlife Business Academy. If you’ve ever felt like your business is running your life instead of supporting it, you’re in the right place. Around here, I believe a dream business isn’t measured by its size. It’s measured by the freedom and the life it makes possible.
A Quick Milestone
So a quick milestone before we dive in. This is episode 350. For over four years, every single Tuesday, without missing one, we’ve been in either your ear or now on your video. We’ve officially been together longer than most celebrity marriages, and I’m not sure which one of us is more surprised, me or my calendar.
But consistency is one of the most unglamorous things nobody talks about in business. And showing up every single Tuesday for over four years, that’s something I’m genuinely proud of. So I’m giving myself a little pat on the back there.
So we’re on blueprint number nine today, the AI blueprint. There’s a lot of noise out there about AI replacing jobs, replacing creativity, replacing us entirely. But that’s not this episode. This one’s about something narrower and more useful: how AI can actually help you build the business we’ve been talking about this whole series. Not a generic one, but yours.
Lori’s AI Origin Story
I first heard about AI several years ago, back when ChatGPT was basically a newborn. I played around with it, and I could see the possibilities right away. Even though it was new, and honestly a little dated with its information at the time — I don’t know if you remember the early days of ChatGPT, but the most recent content it could give you was like two years old — hey, it was a start. And it very quickly changed how I was able to build my podcast episodes. It made me a lot more efficient.
Now, I have undiagnosed ADHD. Back when I grew up, we didn’t have ADHD, we were just unfocused, we were trouble, we needed lots of stuff to keep us engaged, and nobody had a name for why. I was also, at the same time, in what was then a gifted program, before they had gifted programs, or at least the 1970s version of one. So I was good at keeping myself from being bored. I was always the first one finished with a test or a task, always looking for the next thing. If you’re a certain age, you remember the reading boxes with different levels, all different colors. I’d pride myself on being the first one through all the levels and all the colors. That’s what started my love of reading, even back then.
But AI now helps me keep all of that jumble organized, because I’ll be honest, I can go down a lot of rabbit holes very easily. My brain and a tool that will follow any thread or rabbit hole I give it is a dangerous combination.
I was intrigued enough that I went to one of the first ChatGPT seminars I knew of, to actually learn how to use it well. And somewhere in there, I became a bit of a prompting nerd. Prompts for me aren’t single commands anymore. They’re conversations. I use it to organize my thoughts, my day, my budget, my finances, and even my garden.
Lori’s Actual Workflow
So here’s what my actual workflow looks like now. I use ChatGPT to put together my podcast outlines. Then I bring Claude in to fine-tune the content and the flow. A rough outline and a first version of a script in roughly five minutes. Then it takes me another two to three hours to get the version you actually hear. This script today took me almost four hours. I inserted my own stories — I wanted it to be in my words, and it was shaping into something that’s really my thinking, just better organized. That’s what I was struggling with for a long time with my podcast — the content flow, making sure everything fed on everything else. AI is very good at seeing the patterns — we’ll talk about that more a little later.
Claude still has a hard time — it wants to get real “coachy” on me, and I’m constantly pulling it back from that. But when you go over it word for word and line by line, it can really be a big help. So that two- to three-hour gap is basically what this episode is about — how to close it.
You’re Already Using AI (You Just Don’t Know It)
I hear this all the time: “I’m just not an AI person, that’s not really for me,” or “I don’t want AI to take over, I want to do my own things.” You know, if you’ve used Siri or Alexa, you’ve actually used AI. If you’ve scrolled Facebook or Instagram, you’ve used AI — that’s what’s deciding what shows up in your feed. If you’ve searched something on Google, AI is already shaping those results. Now it’s gotten to the point where if I want to shop for something, I just search for it on Facebook, because I know I’ll get ads from all kinds of companies, and that’s AI too.
So you’ve been using it for years — you just haven’t been using it on purpose yet for your business. And it goes further than that. Your bank app reading a check photo — oh my gosh, how much time does that save us, being able to snap a photo of a check instead of going to the bank? An AI fraud alert from your credit card, AI. Netflix or Spotify recommending something you actually like, AI again. Your spam filter, autocorrect, your phone quietly grouping photos of the same person together — and my husband says that last one isn’t AI, but I still think it is. GPS rerouting you before you hit traffic, probably a little of both. A Ring doorbell that knows the difference between a person and a squirrel — all AI.
But none of that actually felt like AI while you were using it. It just felt like your phone doing its job a little better. And that’s the shift I want you to make. This isn’t some separate, intimidating category you either get or you don’t — you’re already fluent in it. The only new part now is doing it on purpose.
The Single Biggest Mindset Shift: Partner, Not Brain
So if you’re already using AI without thinking about it, let’s talk about what happens when you do think about it on purpose inside your business, starting with the most important shift, and the one that made the biggest difference for me.
The single biggest mindset shift with AI is this: it’s not your brain, and it’s not replacing your brain. It’s a partner.
When I first started using ChatGPT for my podcast episodes, I didn’t quite understand that yet. I’d just take whatever it gave me and expand it off the cuff, right there while I was recording. If you go back and listen to some of those episodes from about three years ago, you’ll hear the difference between then and now. It was a starting point, but I was still treating it like a machine that spit out facts and information. There wasn’t a lot of me in it at that point.
Then I realized I could actually have a back-and-forth with it, a real brainstorming conversation, not just me requesting things. That’s the moment AI stopped being a computer for me and became what I call my partner — something I think alongside, not something I take orders from or that just does what I say.
A brain would mean you hand it a problem and it hands you back a decision, fully formed, and you just execute it. That’s not the relationship. A partner is something you think alongside. You bring a half-formed idea, it reflects it back, pushes you on it, helps you organize it, and you build something together in that back-and-forth. I tell it all the time: push back, tell me what’s happening, tell me what could go wrong with this, or what’s the pattern here? That, to me, was the genius part — what’s the pattern in all this? Sometimes I’ll even tell it to quit blowing smoke, because sometimes it’ll just be a yes-person, and not all my ideas are good ones. Let’s figure this out.
For someone like me, whose ideas come faster than I can sequence them, that partnership isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between a good idea that stays a good idea, and one that actually gets built.
Does AI Kill Creativity?
Once AI is a partner instead of a brain, here’s where it gets fun, because it doesn’t just organize ideas — it can help you generate better ones.
There’s a myth that AI kills creativity, that if a tool is helping you write or brainstorm, the result can’t be yours. And I’d argue the opposite. For me, it’s done the opposite, because the organization and sequencing isn’t eating up all my creative energy anymore. That used to be very hard for me — going back in and putting things in an order that makes sense. With AI helping me, I have more time left for the parts that actually make something mine — the stories, the phrasing, the parts that sound like me and nobody else.
Creativity isn’t just the first spark. It’s also the shaping of your ideas and the content you generate. AI can carry the shaping without touching the personal spark. And that’s what I love about it — and I don’t think enough people try this: have AI argue against your ideas before you commit to them. Play devil’s advocate with it. Ask it to poke holes in it, find the pitfalls, tell you every way something can go sideways. And boy, is it good at that. You don’t have to agree with all of it — you can tell it, “I beg to disagree here.” But if you catch a bad decision on paper in five minutes, that’s a whole lot cheaper and less time-consuming than going through with it and finding out six months later. It saves a lot of time, a lot of energy, and sometimes a lot of angst.
You can flip the idea around too — reverse brainstorm. Instead of asking, “how do I fix this,” ask, “what would make this problem worse?” Because sometimes seeing the failure laid out clearly gets you to the actual fix faster than hunting for it directly.
How Much Time Does This Actually Buy You Back?
Now let’s talk about the thing everyone actually wants to know: how much time does this genuinely buy you back?
Five minutes. Let’s look at my podcast — five minutes to build a rough outline and a first draft. That’s real time. But efficient doesn’t mean finished, and a lot of business owners stop at the five-minute mark and call it done. That’s where AI gets a bad rap. My actual finished product, as I said earlier, takes another two to three hours beyond that draft. AI didn’t eliminate the work — it moved the work away from staring at a blank page or screen, and toward refining something that already exists. That’s a much better use of the hours you’re trying to protect. I found that huge for me.
One more time-saver in that same category: repurposing instead of recreating. Huge, huge time saver. One podcast episode doesn’t just have to be a podcast episode — it can become a week of social content, an email, a handful of reel scripts, all pulled from the same place instead of starting from a blank page five separate times. That’s hours of your week back.
I take my finished scripts and run them through again, and say, “okay, generate the fun reels or shorts from this.” Those are all AI-generated scripts you’re seeing. If I don’t like them, I change them, but having the script come up first, and going, “okay, that’s pretty darn funny, I’ll do that,” or “oh, that’s so not me, not doing that” — that was a brilliant use of AI, and it made it so much easier for me to actually start doing those. My VA Vanessa really loved that I started doing them.
So picture where those hours go, because that’s the whole point of this series. Building your dream business means you have time for the stuff you enjoy. For me, it’s time in the garden, it’s self-care, it’s going to the gym — things I’d ignored for years because there was always something more productive I had to do instead. I felt guilty not working on my business, going out into the garden or reading a book instead, because I wasn’t “working.” AI bought me that time back. But buying back those hours only matters if you actually spend them on the life you started this business for in the first place.
AI as a Thinking Partner for Decisions
So time saved is great, but this isn’t just about doing things faster. It’s about doing the right things. And that’s where it gets really interesting. I think AI quietly earns its keep here more than anywhere else, because so much of what we’ve talked about in this series gets built as much by what you say no to as what you say yes to.
Talking through a decision with something that can hold a lot of context and reflect your thinking back to you is especially useful when you’re the only one in the room making a hundred small decisions a day. It’s not going to make the decision for you — it shouldn’t — but it can help you see it more clearly, and faster than sitting by yourself just thinking about it. That’s another great way for us solopreneurs to use AI: as that thinking partner.
Pattern Recognition
There’s a specific version of this I mentioned earlier: pattern recognition. Take the last six months of client questions, sales conversations, content topics, and ask it what it notices. What’s the through line? With client questions, you might start seeing a lot of questions about your initial proposals. Have it look at your proposals and see if you’re already answering those questions for potential clients, or not.
The thing is, you’re probably too close to see the day-to-day recurring objections, the topics that keep resonating, or the type of client who keeps draining you. Put that in there and see what’s actually draining you, because that shows up fast when something else is looking at the whole picture instead of just one part. I love using it for that. Sometimes I’m pretty good at seeing it myself, but sometimes I just don’t.
AI and the Skip-Step Problem
Better decisions build a smarter business. And there’s one more piece of AI that’s very useful: the actual infrastructure of your business.
As I said earlier, AI’s gotten some bad rap lately, because people will spit out AI content and throw it out into the world, and that’s all they do — they don’t generate anything more, they just say, “this is me, this is how I think.” I don’t think that’s really about AI. That’s how people are using it, and that’s where it goes negative — when it becomes the brain instead of the partner.
I think about the business owner who asks AI for a week of social posts, gets something back in ten seconds, and then just posts it word for word — generic hashtags, generic voice, could belong to anyone’s business. And then they wonder why it doesn’t sound like them, why it doesn’t convert. That’s not an AI problem. That’s a skip-step problem. The tool did what it was built to do: hand back a fast first draft. Nobody did the two-to-three-hour part. Are you doing the two-to-three-hour part?
Two Underrated Uses: Systems and Ideal Client Profiles
Two of the most underrated uses I know for building something that actually holds up: first, systems. Last week I talked about how a good system lets somebody else run a task without needing you. That’s exactly where AI can close that gap fast. Narrate a task out loud, or type it if that’s more you — I can type better than I can talk out loud, in case you haven’t noticed, I tend to ramble. Once you’ve done that, turn it into a clean, followable system, and it generally takes minutes instead of hours, certainly far less than sitting down to write one from scratch.
Last week, I put all of our finances into it — the dates things were due, the pay schedules, everything — and said, “here’s my goal financially, let’s figure out how to make this happen.” Within a couple of minutes, I had something I hadn’t thought of. It was very doable from a financial standpoint. If I decide to retire at some point, I now know what that looks like. Not that I’m anywhere close to that, since I’m enjoying what I’m doing.
The second thing I tell clients to do is have it build their ideal client profile. Most people guess at this — a little bit here, a little bit there. What I want you to do instead is put in several of your favorite clients and let it find the pattern of who your ideal client actually is. It gives you very specific language by taking real details from your actual best clients — real patterns about who they are, what they’ve struggled with, why they hired you, why you love working with them. That’s something AI can do really well: give you real data, not something you make up or pull out of the air. It gives you a map of who your clients are, and who you want to look for.
It can also give you warnings. We’ve all had a client we look back on and think, “I probably shouldn’t have taken that client.” And you probably knew it at the time, because there were warning signs. AI can really help you identify what those warning signs are, so when you’re building your dream business, you’re building it on ideal clients, real dream clients. You don’t want somebody who’s going to drag you down and be an energy drain, because that costs a lot more than they could ever pay you. AI can help you find that.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
So if you take the time to actually learn to use AI well, as a partner, not a vending machine, you can build something meaningful over time. It can make you smarter, freer, able to do a lot more, or at least feel like you can. But if you skip that time, you just get more generic noise, like a lot of what’s already out there.
But the flip side of that is worth naming: the cost of doing nothing isn’t zero. Whether or not you’re deciding AI is good for you, other business owners in your exact space are already using it to move faster, decide things faster, and free up more hours, while you’re still spending time doing things the old way. Standing still doesn’t keep things even. It just means you’re a little farther behind, week after week.
Manners Are Cheap, Even With AI
And one more thing, and I say this half-jokingly: I do still say please and thank you when I’m working with AI. I don’t know if it matters to the tool, but I know it matters to me. And I guess if someday AI takes over the world, I want it to remember I was polite and had good manners. But really, it keeps me in the habit — the way I’d say please and thank you to anybody on my team who helps me. It keeps me thinking of it as a collaborator, not a machine I’m just barking orders at. Manners are cheap, even with AI, so keep them.
This Week’s Action
So here’s your challenge for this episode. Pick one thing from today: play devil’s advocate on a decision you’re sitting on, a system you’ve been meaning to write down, or your actual clients that turn into real profit for you. Try it with AI this week — feed some of that information in and see what it gives you back. Give yourself permission to spend real time refining what it gives you, instead of just judging it by the first draft. Take the time to say, “nope, this isn’t it, you got it wrong, let’s redo this, and here’s where you’re wrong.” If you don’t give it correction and course-correct it, it’s not going to know — it’ll just keep spitting stuff out. But if you course-correct it, you’ll get some really valuable information.
And if that still feels like a lot, take it down even smaller. Grab the free version of Claude, or the free version of ChatGPT, and ask it to brainstorm one problem you’re having. It doesn’t have to be business-related — if you’re planning a trip and want points of interest along the way, ask it. If you need to put together a lead magnet, ask it for some ideas.
I’ve used it when I’ve been traveling, telling it where I’m going and staying, and asking it to generate photo locations for B-roll. Do I do it every time? No. When I was in Colorado a couple of weeks ago, in a beautiful place called Loveland, I’d asked it to generate some photo ideas while we were busy all day and never got around to actually taking them. But I had the list, and if we’d had the time, we would have used it. It gives specific directions. Last year in Dallas, I told it where I was staying, and it gave me some parks within walking distance of the hotel, and we got some nice B-roll there — you’ve seen some of it in my social media, and AI generated those locations for me.
So you can use it in very small, cool ways like that. But the point is, have the conversation once, so you can feel what the back-and-forth is actually like. If you haven’t played with it, do that. Don’t just stop at the first rendering.
This Week’s Worksheet: The AI Assessment
So let’s go to the workbook. In today’s episode of the workbook, you’ll find the AI Assessment. Five statements, rated one to ten, as always — things like whether you regularly use AI in your business, whether it’s actually saving you time, and whether you’re using it as a thinking partner rather than a shortcut. Add it up out of 50, and you’ll get an honest read on where you are with today’s tools.
There’s a reflection question I really want you to sit with: if AI could remove one recurring frustration in your business, what would it be? That’s usually exactly where you want to start.
Closing Thoughts and Next Steps
So AI isn’t replacing business owners. It’s opening the door to new possibilities for building a business that better supports the life we want to live.
Grab the AI Assessment in the show notes, and if you want to figure out how AI or anything else fits the business around your actual life, go to talkwithlori.com and book a Dream Business Design Session. Because remember, it’s never too late to build the business of your dreams. I’m Lori Lyons, and we’ll see you next week.