Beyond ChatGPT
Using AI to write emails is a start. The bigger opportunity is using it to change how work actually gets done.
If you ask a room full of small business owners whether they're using AI, you'll probably see a lot of hands go up. Ask how they're using it, and the answers tend to sound familiar. They're writing emails faster, drafting marketing content, summarizing meeting notes, brainstorming ideas, or creating social media posts. Those are all valuable applications. In many cases, they're exactly where people should begin.
The problem is that many businesses stop there.
They discover ChatGPT, save a few minutes throughout the week, and conclude they've figured out AI. That's understandable. The technology is impressive. The first time it helps draft an email or organize a complicated idea, it can feel like magic. But as useful as those experiences are, they're rarely where the biggest opportunities exist.
The businesses seeing the greatest benefits from AI today aren't simply using it to create content. They're using it to improve the way work moves through their organizations. That's a very different thing.
The comparison I keep coming back to is spreadsheets. When spreadsheets first arrived, many businesses used them as glorified calculators. They were helpful, but they weren't transformative. Over time, organizations learned how to use spreadsheets for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, inventory management, and operational planning. The software itself didn't change nearly as much as the way people applied it. What started as a simple productivity tool eventually became part of how businesses operated.
We're seeing something similar happen with AI.
Right now, many organizations are still using AI one prompt at a time. One conversation at a time. One task at a time. Meanwhile, other businesses are beginning to build AI into the systems and processes that support day-to-day operations. Customer inquiries are automatically categorized and routed. Meeting notes become action items without manual effort. Information becomes searchable instead of buried in folders and inboxes. Proposals are assembled faster. Routine communications happen consistently without requiring someone to write every message from scratch.
None of these examples sound particularly dramatic. That's part of what makes them easy to overlook.
The public conversation around AI tends to focus on things that are easy to see. An AI-generated image is obvious. A blog post written with AI is obvious. A drafted email is obvious. Operational improvements are quieter. Customers rarely notice them directly. Employees often don't talk about them. Yet those improvements are frequently where the largest gains occur.
A business that saves ten minutes creating a proposal doesn't sound remarkable. A business that saves ten minutes on every proposal, for every salesperson, every day, starts to look very different by the end of the year. A company that reduces administrative work by five hours per employee each week probably won't make headlines. What it will do is create capacity.
And capacity is often what growing businesses need most.
This is why I think many small businesses are asking the wrong question. The question isn't, "What AI tool should I use?" The better question is, "What work keeps happening over and over again?"
Every business has it.
The repetitive emails. The recurring reports. The scheduling headaches. The customer updates. The internal questions. The information trapped inside someone's inbox. The process everyone follows but nobody has documented. These are often the places where automation creates the most value because they're the places where friction quietly accumulates over time.
That's ultimately how we think about AI at North & James.
We're not particularly interested in helping businesses chase trends or experiment with technology for technology's sake. We're interested in helping businesses understand where time is being lost, where unnecessary work is occurring, and where better systems can make a meaningful difference.
Sometimes the answer involves AI. Sometimes it doesn't.
The technology is important, but it's not the point.
The point is helping good businesses operate more effectively.
The businesses that benefit most from AI over the next decade won't necessarily be the ones using the newest tools or talking about AI the most. They'll be the ones that consistently identify friction, remove unnecessary work, and build systems that help their teams focus on what matters most.
Most of the time, that's where the real opportunity is hiding.
30 minutes. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about where AI can help your business.
