You tried it. It gave you something generic and slightly wrong. You closed the tab and got on with your day, and somewhere in the back of your head it filed itself under "not for us".
I want to make the case that you were right to close the tab and wrong about the conclusion.
Here is what almost certainly happened. You asked it to do a piece of real work in your business, and you gave it none of the things you would have given a new hire on their first morning. It did not know what you sell, who buys it, what you charge, who you are not for, or how you talk. So it did the only thing left available to it, which was to write the average version of your industry. Generic and slightly wrong is exactly what that produces. It is not a sign of a weak tool. It is a sign of a tool with no information.
Think about how absurd the equivalent would be with a person. You would not hand a new hire a customer email on day one, tell them nothing about the business, and then conclude from the result that hiring does not work for companies like yours.
Four things fix most of it, and none of them are technical.
Tell it what you sell, in the words your customers use rather than the words on your website. Tell it who your good customer is and, more usefully, who is a bad fit. Your prices go in too, including what you will not discount. Then give it two or three examples of work you were happy with, so it has something to copy that sounds like you rather than like the industry.
Write that down once, keep it somewhere you can paste from, and put it in front of the tool before you ask for anything. That is the whole fix. It takes an afternoon at most and it is the difference between generic and useful.
Now the part most owners have not thought about, and it is the one costing money.
The same gap works in reverse. When somebody asks an AI assistant to recommend a business like yours, it is answering from whatever it can find about you. If your business is not written down anywhere it can reach, it guesses, and it often guesses somebody else. You are not being beaten there. You are not in the room.
Everything above you can do on your own this week, and you should. The one thing you cannot do from your own desk is see what the machines already say about you, because you cannot un-know your own business well enough to read your site the way a stranger's assistant reads it.
So I built a free scan that does it for you. It reads your site the way an AI assistant would and shows you what it can and cannot work out about your business. About a minute, nothing to install, no call: catalystworks.consulting/scan
Look at the gaps it finds. Those gaps are the same four things above. Fix them for the machines and you will have fixed them for the tool on your own desk at the same time, which is the part I did not expect when I started doing this.
And if you read the result and think you would rather not be the one to sort it out, hit reply and tell me what it said. I read every one.
Three things before you go
Forward this to one business owner who is trying to figure out where AI fits in their business. One forward is more useful to me than ten retweets.
Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe at signal.catalystworks.consulting. The moment you do, you also get a free scan that shows how visible your business is when people ask AI for a recommendation.
Reply with one sentence about what is stuck in your week. I read every one and it shapes what ships next.
Boubacar
I spent over a decade in HR at a Fortune 100. Now I'm a fractional AI leader who can help small businesses put AI to work.
[email protected] · signal.catalystworks.consulting