The Boring Ways I Use AI to Run My Business Better (And What I See Working for Agencies)

I want to be upfront about something. When I started experimenting with AI tools in my workflow, I was not using them for anything revolutionary. No fully automated systems, no robots answering my emails. Just a handful of genuinely useful applications that started saving me real time in pretty unglamorous ways.

That's actually the point. The agencies I work with that are getting the most out of AI aren't doing anything flashy (that's what your creative team is for). They're using it to do the slow, tedious, brain-draining parts of their jobs faster.

Here's what that actually looks like ...

Content and communications

This is the obvious one, so I'll keep it brief. AI is useful for drafting, not finishing. I use it to get a first version of something on the page and then I make it sound like me. The mistake most people make is treating the output as done. It's not. It's a starting point. A pretty good one, but still a starting point.

Market research and competitive landscape

This one surprised me. Instead of spending an hour clicking around competitors' websites and taking notes, I can get a solid summary of what's out there in a fraction of the time. For agencies, this is useful when you're pitching in a new industry and need to get up to speed fast, or when a client asks a question you don't immediately know the answer to.

Turning call transcripts into something useful

This is probably my favorite application right now. Record your discovery call, run the transcript through an AI tool, and ask it to pull out the key pain points, priorities, and next steps. What used to take me 30 minutes of re-listening and note-taking now takes about five. I'm actually working on an entire workflow for generating a proposal draft based on discovery call notes ... because proposals, ugh.

Summarizing long documents

Contracts, briefs, research reports, meeting notes. If it's long and dense and you need the key points fast, AI handles this well. I use it regularly when I'm reviewing something before a client call and need a quick refresh without re-reading the whole thing.

Planning and thinking things through

This one is a little harder to explain but bear with me. Sometimes I use AI the way I'd use a whiteboard. I dump a messy problem into it, ask it to help me think through the options, and use the response to organize my own thinking. It doesn't always give me the answer. But it often helps me figure out what the right question is.

Templates and frameworks

Need a client feedback form? An onboarding checklist? A project brief template? AI can produce a solid first draft of almost any operational document in minutes. Again, you'll want to customize it, but starting from something beats starting from nothing every time.

Where it still falls short

Image generation. I know it's improved a lot, and for quick mockups or rough prototypes it's not bad. But for anything client-facing, it's still got nothing on your talented team.

The broader lesson is that AI is genuinely useful for the parts of your work that require processing and organizing information. It's less useful for the parts that require taste, judgment, and knowing your client.

To Summarize

• AI works best as a starting point, not a finished product.

• The highest-value applications tend to be the unglamorous ones: summarizing, drafting, organizing, templating.

• Transcripts into briefs is underrated and worth trying immediately.

• It won't replace your judgment. It will free up more time for you to use it.

  
  

If you're not sure where AI fits into your agency ops or how to set it up in a way that actually sticks, that's a good conversation to have. Reach out if you'd like a second opinion.