When I explain that a fair chunk of what I do is writing and improving content, I get one of two reactions.
The first is: AI could never write our content. Nobody understands this business except us.
The second is: you are just having ChatGPT write it, aren’t you. We could do that ourselves for nothing.
They sound like opposite objections. They are actually the same objection, and both are right about something important.
What they are both right about
Open ChatGPT, type “write me a blog post about boiler servicing,” and read what comes back.
You know exactly what you will get, because everybody has seen it. An emoji in the heading. 🔧 A bulleted list where every single item starts with two or three words in bold followed by a colon. A sentence somewhere saying that regular servicing is not just about efficiency, it is about peace of mind. Something about the importance of trusted professionals. A tidy little conclusion that restates the introduction.
It will be competent. It will be grammatically perfect. It will also be completely interchangeable with what every other heating engineer in the country would get from the same prompt, and it will contain nothing that is true about your business specifically.
That is why the first objection exists. People have tried it, read the output, recognised it as hollow, and concluded AI cannot write about their business.
And it is why the second objection exists too. If that is all it takes, why would you pay anyone?
Both reactions come from the same experience: watching a machine produce something fluent and empty.
What is actually missing
The machine is not stupid. It is uninformed.
It has never been to your workshop. It does not know that you refuse to fit the cheap version because you have seen too many fail. It does not know what you charge, which three towns you cover, why you stopped doing conservatories, or that you always ring the day before.
It does not know the thing your best employee knows without thinking about it.
So it writes the average of everything it has read about your trade, because that is genuinely all it has to go on. The problem is not the writing. The problem is that nobody ever told it anything.
The fix is boring and it is the whole thing
If you want AI to write anything worth reading about your business, it needs to know your business. Properly, in writing, in one place.
That is what I call a Business Brain, and it is the thing I will talk your ear off about if you let me.
It is not a clever trick. It is just the thing almost nobody does, and it is genuinely the difference between AI writing something hollow about your trade and AI writing something true about your business.
You can absolutely build one yourself, and plenty of businesses should. I will explain what goes in it to anyone who asks, because the idea is not the valuable part, doing it is. And if you would rather I built it with you, that is something I do.
Here is what goes in:
What you actually do. Every service, described the way you would describe it to a customer, including the things you will not do and why.
Who you are for. The customers you want and the ones you would rather send elsewhere. This matters more than people expect, because it shapes the tone of everything.
What it costs. Real numbers, or real ranges, and what moves them.
Your voice. How you talk. What you would never say. Words you hate. Whether you swear a bit. Examples of things you have written that sounded like you.
The things only you know. The problem that always comes up on Victorian terraces round here. The material you stopped using and why. The question customers always ask that nobody else answers. This is the good stuff and it is nearly always in somebody’s head rather than written down anywhere.
How you handle things. Your process, your guarantees, what happens when something goes wrong.
You do not gather all that in an afternoon, and you do not need to. It starts as enough to be useful and it grows. Every time you correct something, that correction goes in and it never has to be corrected again.
Why this is worth doing even if you never use AI at all
Here is the part I would have missed a few years ago.
Everything in that list is stuff you should have written down anyway.
Most small businesses carry their entire operation in one or two people’s heads. What you charge, how you decide, why you do it that way. It works fine until somebody is ill, or leaves, or you want to hand a job to someone else, or you are trying to explain to a new customer why you are more expensive than the bloke down the road.
Writing it down is just good practice. That it also happens to be the thing that makes AI useful is a happy accident, not the point.
Documentation used to be for humans who might need it later. Now it is also for machines that will describe you to strangers. Same document, two audiences.
What the machine does and what stays yours
I should be straight about the split, because it is the honest answer to both objections.
The machine handles assembly. Structure, first drafts, tidying, checking a claim I half remember, formatting things properly. It is quicker at that than I am and it does not get bored.
The knowledge is yours. Every fact, every price, every opinion, every scar. If it did not come from you or from something verifiable, it does not go in.
The judgement is mine. What is worth writing about, what is true, what will land, what to cut because it sounds clever but says nothing. That is thirty years of doing this and it is not something you can prompt your way to.
So: yes, AI is involved, and no, it is not “just ChatGPT.” The difference between those two things is entirely about how much the machine has been told, and who is checking what comes out.
The window
One last thing, and it is why I have been banging on about this for the last year.
Almost nobody here is doing this yet. The businesses doing it properly are mostly American, mostly bigger, and mostly six months to a year ahead of where the UK market is.
That gap is an opportunity if you move now, and it closes. In two years this will be ordinary, the way having a website is ordinary, and being organised will stop being an advantage because everybody will be.
Right now, a small business on the Fylde coast that has genuinely written down what it does, how it works and what makes it different is doing something its competitors have not thought about. That is not a small thing.
Want to know what a Business Brain would look like for you? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.