If I may... Um, I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now [bangs on the table]...your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

This is where AI stands today.

As much as I use AI as a thinking partner, researcher, and summarizer (is that even a word?!), I’m not a huge fan of using it for content. Four years into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc. we can tell when someone is posting AI slop.

If you don’t want to make the effort to give me YOUR original thoughts and use a machine to generate generic ideas, why should I read them?

Where AI shines is as a tool builder. Automating repetitive tasks. Summarizing long form content. Troubleshooting workflows. Recognizing patterns. Closing skills gaps.

The last one is tricky. I recently took a vibecoding class, and I’m still absorbing what to do with it all. I see the potential…create skills, build/borrow databases of knowledge, and deploy agents to do tasks. Oh, the potential!!! I’m determined to master this new skillset, and I’m confident I can. I’m a systems girlie, and when this all clicks, watch out!

The thing I see that makes me concerned and frankly kind of irritated is the use of AI without any foundation (see: Ian Malcom, aka Jeff Goldblum). I see business owners using AI to gin up a gorgeous website…and then have no idea how to make the backend work. They bring a page full of html code and “just need a button to take customers to a payment form and then deliver a digital product.”

Pretty is awesome…but it also has to work.

The ease of creating a beautiful frontend page quickly leads people to think that there is also a magic button to create the backend equally quickly, in whatever software they are using. And that if they ask AI, it will magically give them the solution in 3 sentences, and tell them exactly how to do it.

If AI miraculously understands the question (most people don’t know what to ask for) how will the user know how to do what AI tells them?

Your brain is bigger than a dinosaur’s brain. Don’t stop using it.

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At some point, I outgrow them. I don’t mean to…and I usually don’t want to, but there comes a time when their advice doesn’t fit anymore.

In one case it might be that they are teaching something that doesn’t align with what they are doing themselves. Or they push hard on strategies that work for them - probably because they have a big warm audience - that don’t work for those of us who don’t have that.

What’s a girl to do next? IMPLEMENT.

I don’t regret the dollars I’ve invested in coaching, but now I am far more interested in implementation. It’s easy to spend so much of your business budget on coaching and then have no money left to actually implement the ideas you are learning and have a business to run.

What could you accomplish if you took the $2000 you were going to spend on the next shiny object, magic sales script, brand shoot or fancy logo, and instead…hired a strategist who could help you build the lead generation machine that works for YOUR business, not a “7-figure business coach?”

That’s a question worth asking.

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“Mixtape?? What’s that? There’s a bar in my town called Mixtape.”

“It’s meant to be a collection of tracks that make me happy. It also signals to the GenX crowd that they might enjoy sticking around to read why I have to say. It’s fun and a little quirky and memorable.”

“I guess I don’t get it…I just think of a bar.”

Dear Reader, if I have piqued your interest, I’m delighted to hang out with the 3 of you reading this. Open Bar privileges for everyone, whether you fancy sparkling water, a vat of coffee, diet Coke (which might be why I didn’t sleep until 4 am last night), or something a bit stronger.

I talk about books, wine, marketing, transitioning out of a corporate engineering career, pop culture, single life on the edge of the empty nest, and lots of Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer references. I will be using double spaces after sentences and the Oxford Comma rules.

You’ve been warned

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