A year ago I recorded an episode about the AI tools that were changing my website design services business. Claude, ChatGPT, a browser, a couple of Airtable automations. It was helpful, and it saved me real time, but if I’m honest, most of what I was doing was prompting. Open a chat, ask a question, get an answer, use it.
This year looks nothing like that.
Last month I got to present at a workshop for Her AI Club, a group of women building things with AI, and while I was putting my slides together I realized just how far my own use of AI had shifted. It wasn’t about better prompts anymore. It was about systems that run whether I show up or not.
If you’re a small business owner trying to figure out where AI actually fits into your day, here’s what my current tool stack looks like, what changed, and how you might build something similar for yourself.
From Asking AI Things to Building Things That Ask Themselves
The biggest shift in my business this year has nothing to do with a specific tool. It’s a mindset change. Last year, everything I did with AI required me to be there. I had to open the chat, type the question, wait for the answer, and then go do something with it. It worked, but it was still me driving every single step.
This year, with tools like Claude Cowork, I’ve moved into building things that run in the background. A scheduled task checks my networking list every morning. A trained bot reviews client homepages without me sitting there. A system reads a call transcript and hands me back exactly what I need. I’m still the one making the final calls, but I’m not the one doing the repetitive work anymore.
That distinction matters more than people realize. If you’re only using AI to answer one-off questions, you’re leaving a lot on the table. The real value shows up when you stop asking and start building.
Claude Design Replaced My Hours in Canva
I used to build every workshop presentation the same way. Start with a template, swap out the words, swap out the images, adjust the spacing, repeat that for every single slide. It worked, but it ate an entire afternoon every time.
Now, when I want to build a workshop or a set of promo graphics, I talk it out first. I use a tool that lets me speak instead of type, and I just say everything I want the presentation to cover, out loud, the way I’d explain it to a friend. That gets fed into Claude, which helps me shape the actual content and wording.
From there, I bring all of that into Claude Design along with my brand colors, my fonts, and a few inspiration pieces, and I ask it to build the graphics. What used to take me an afternoon now takes about ten minutes. I still bring the final version into Canva to polish anything that didn’t land quite right, but the bulk of the work is already done before I even open it.
If you’re building things like workshop slides, Instagram graphics, or LinkedIn visuals on your own, this is worth trying before you spend another weekend inside a template.
The Coffee Chat Processor: Where This All Clicked for Me
Here’s a scenario a lot of small business owners will recognize. You’re networking, you have a great conversation, and somewhere in there the person mentions they’re looking for a specific kind of connection. A bookkeeper. A business coach. A copywriter. And in that moment, your brain reaches for the same one or two names every single time, even though you actually know a whole roster of people who could help.
That was me for years. I’d spent so much time hunting for the right CRM, something that could track who I talked to, remind me when to check back in, and hold onto the details of our conversation so I wasn’t starting from scratch six months later. I never found one that did all of it the way I needed.
So I built one. After a coffee chat call recorded through my coaching call and networking system, I run the transcript through a processor I built. It pulls the person’s name, their business, what they offer, and a summary of our conversation. Then it goes through my entire networking list and suggests three real people who’d make a genuinely good match for them, based on what we actually talked about.
A client I’ll call Maria came through one of these calls a few months back. She mentioned, almost in passing, that she was looking for someone to help with her brand photography. In the old days, I would have named the one photographer I always think of first, and that would have been that. Instead, the system surfaced three people from my network who actually fit what she described, people I’d talked with in depth and knew were a strong match. I reached back out to her a few days later with all three names and asked if she’d like an introduction. She took me up on two of them.
That’s the part that’s changed how I show up for people. It’s not that I got smarter. It’s that I stopped relying on memory alone to do a job that a system can do better.
Three Free Tools I Built to Give This Away
Some of what I’ve built this year isn’t just for me. I’ve also created a handful of tools for the small business owners I work with, all available through my free resources page.
The first is a free homepage clarity check bot, trained on how I actually review homepages during a website audit. Drop in your URL, choose a deep or simple review, and it gives you feedback the way I would if we were sitting across from each other.
The second is a quarterly website review system, also on the free resources page, that gives your site a regular check-in instead of treating it as something you build once and forget about.
The third is a copy support tool for my own clients, built to help them understand what each section of their website needs to do. To be clear, it’s not a replacement for a copywriter. The personality and impact a real writer brings to a website is something no bot replicates. But for clients who want to draft their own copy first, it gives them a strong starting point grounded in our actual strategy call.
What Hasn’t Changed
Even with everything running in the background now, I’m still the one steering. I don’t accept what AI hands me without pushing back, asking questions, and making the final call myself. That part of the process hasn’t changed and I don’t expect it to.
What has changed is how much of the repetitive, memory-heavy work I’ve been able to hand off. Reading through every newsletter and pulling performance patterns. Drafting a check-in email the moment it’s due. Matching people in my network without relying on whatever name happens to surface first. Those are jobs AI is genuinely good at, and they’ve freed up my attention for the parts of the work that actually need me, the strategy, the relationships, and the judgment calls.
If you’ve been treating AI as a question-and-answer tool, I’d encourage you to think bigger. Have a conversation with it about what’s slowing you down in your business and see what you could build together. You might be surprised how much of it doesn’t require any technical background at all.
Curious Where to Start?
If your website itself is the piece that still feels unclear, that’s exactly where I like to start with clients too. A website audit is often the fastest way to see what’s actually working and what’s quietly costing you leads. And if you’re further along and just need a thinking partner, a coaching call gives you space to work through it together.
You can hear the full breakdown of this AI tool stack, including the systems I mentioned here, on this week’s episode of the podcast. And if you want to see more of how I use tools like these day to day, I keep an updated list on my favorite tools page.
Curious how any of this could work for your own business? I’d love to hear from you on a discovery call.
