AI seems to have become one of those subjects where you’re expected to pick a side.
You’re either embracing it wholeheartedly, using it to automate everything from your morning coffee to your entire business… Or you’re apparently supposed to be standing on a hill somewhere shouting, “This is the end of creativity as we know it!”
We are somewhere in the middle. Actually that’s not quite true.
We use AI quite a lot.
And we think it can be incredibly useful for a small business.
But we also think we need to stop treating AI as either the answer to every business problem other the downfall of civilisation.
Because, as usual, the truth is somewhere in between.
So, is AI good for your business?
It can be.
The OECD’s research into generative AI use among more than 5,000 SMEs found that 65% of SMEs using generative AI said it improved employee performance, while around a third said it reduced their workload.
That’s significant.
Particularly when you’re a small business owner who is doing the job of approximately seventeen people before breakfast.
AI can help you brainstorm.
- It can help you get started when you’re staring at a blank screen.
- It can help you organise your thoughts, repurpose content, explain something complicated or give you another perspective on an idea.
- It can save time.
But there’s an important word in all of that.
Help.
Not replace.
We use AI. Here’s how we think about it.
For us, Ai is much more as a thinking partner than as a machine that spits out finished work.
We might have an idea for a blog., we’ll talk it through with Chat, who will then suggest angles that we maybe hadn’t considered, it might point out something that it thinks should be included that we hadn’t thought about, it might help us structure the article or blog, it might even help us with a first draft.
But then comes THE important bit.
We take it back.
- We check the information.
- We decided what we agree with.
- We change the things we don’t agree with.
- We add our own experience.
- We put OUR voice into it.
And there have been times when we’ve had to tell it that we think what it’s given us is rubbish. That’s part of the process too.
Because AI doesn’t know our business better than we do. It definitely doesn’t know our clients better than we do. And it certainly doesn’t get to make our business decisions for us.
The problem isn’t using AI
There is a slightly strange attitude to AI at the moment..
Some people seem to think that if you use AI, you’ve somehow cheated. Others seem to think that if you aren’t using AI for absolutely everything, you’re falling behind.
We don’t think either of these positions is particularly helpful. We don’t question whether it’s acceptable to use:
- Canva to design something
- WordPress to build a website
- Mailerlite to send an email
- A spreadsheet to calculate something
- A spell checker to catch mistakers
- Google to find information
They’re tools. AI IS A TOOL.
The interesting question isn’t:
“Did you use AI?”
It’s:
“How did you use AI?”
Because AI can also get things spectacularly wrong
This is the bit we really want small business owners to fully understand.
AI can sound incredibly confident, but that’s DOESN”T mean it’s correct.
- It can give you a statistic that doesn’t exist
- It can confidently tell you something about a law that isn’t quite right
- It can invent a source
- It can misunderstand what you’re asking
And because the answer is usually written beautifully, it’s very easy to assume it must be true.
If it is matters, check it.
If we are writing something about a current law, regulations, statistics or anything where being wrong could cause a major problem, we don’t just accept what AI tells us.
We check the original source. Because “ChatGPT said so” isn’t a robust citation!
Then there’s the information we put into AI
This is another area where we think small business owners need to pause for a moment.
Imagine you’ve got a client who sends you a long email containing personal or confidential information. You want help writing a response, so you copy and paste the whole thing into an AI tool.
Easy… But should you?
That’s a different questions.
Before putting any information into an AI system, we need to think about what we are actually sharing.
- Does it contain personal information?
- Is it confidential?
- Is it commercially sensitive?
- Does it contain information about somebody else?
- Do you actually need to provide all of it?
Sometimes the answer might be yes. Often, you can achieve the same result by removing names and unnecessary details first.
The fact that you can put something into an AI tool doesn’t automatically mean that you should.
And then there’s the human bit.
This is probably the part we care about the most.
- We don’t want every small business website to start sounding the same.
- We don’t want every social post to have the same enthusiastic opening.
- We don’t want every email to tell me how it’s time to “unlock my potential”.
And we definitely son’t want your audience to lose the reason they chose you in the first place.
- Your experience matters
- Your personality maters
- Your stories matter
- Your opinions matter
- Your weird little phrases that nobody else uses matter
AI can help you communicate those things. But, and it’s a big but, it should NEVER remove them.
One of the questions we think is work asking before publishing AI assisted content is:
“Would my audience still recognise this as me?”
If the answer is NO, we would suggest going back and putting more of yourself into it.
What about copyright?
This is one of those areas where I’m deliberately not going to give you a nice, simple answer.
Because there just isn’t one at the moment, and probably won’t ever be a simple answer.
The UK government has been looking at how copyright law applies to AI, including the use of copyrighted material to develop AI models and the copyright status of AI generated outputs.
The position is developing, so we’d be very wary of anyone telling you:
“Anything AI creates is automatically copyright free”
Or:
“Anything you create with AI automatically belongs to you”
It’s far more complicated than that.
If you’re creating commercial content, particularly images, music, artwork or substantial written material, it’s worth understanding the terms of the AI tool you’re using and getting specialist advice where necessary.
What about AI making decisions?
This is where we think the line becomes much clearer.
Using AI to help you write an email is very different from using AI to decide whether someone gets a job.
Using AI to brainstorm ideas for a customer is very different from using AI to decide which customers receive a service.
The consequences matter.
The UK has rules around significant automated decision-making, and those rules changed under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025.
If an AI-assisted decision could significantly affect somebody, don’t assume that having human glance at the answer afterwards automatically makes everything OK.
Human oversight needs to actually mean something.
The human needs to be able to understand, question and challenge the decision.
That’s a very different thing from simply pressing “approve”.
So where does that leave us?
For us, it comes back to something very simple.
AI is a tool.
Use it where it genuinely helps.
- Don’t use it just because everybody else is.
- Don’t blindly trust it.
- Don’t feed it information without thinking.
- Don’t let it replace your judgement.
And don’t let it replace the thing that makes your business yours.
- You don’t need to become and AI expert,
- You don’t need to understand how large language models work.
- You don’t need to automate your entire business.
- You just need to understand enough to make sensible decision about where AI fits into YOUR business.
We’ve put it all together in a guide.
Because there is rather more to responsible AI use than we could sensible squeeze into one blog post.
We’ve created The Calm Guide to Using AI in Your Small Business to help you work through the practical side of it.
Inside you’ll find:
- where AI can genuinely help
- the traffic-light approach to AI use
- fact checking tips
- privacy and confidential information
- AI and customers
- AI and employees
- copyright considerations
- the environmental question
- when you might not want to use AI
- a simple AI decision framework
- my Calm Ai workflow
- a practical AI checklist
It’s not an “AI will change your life!” guide.
And it’s not an “AI is terrible and we should all go back to carrier pigeons” guide either.
It’s about finding the sensible middle ground. Because we don’t think the answer is to avoid AI. We think the answer is to use it thoughtfully
Let AI do the heavy lifting.
Keep the human thinking
If you’d like a copy of the guide, drop us an email and we’ll ping the link over once we’ve finished proof reading it.