How I Use AI in My Business: Less Complexity, More Relationships
When it comes to asking what AI can really do to help us, we’ve gotten so caught up in calculating time savings and productivity, we’ve lost sight of the larger picture.
A lot of the people promising massive time savings are also building systems that require constant maintenance, monitoring, and troubleshooting. For most small and medium-sized businesses, the level of complexity attached to “automation” is intimidating, impractical, and often unnecessary.
This complexity drives people away from AI more than it encourages them to do more than output simple emails and documents.
Building better relationships.
Relationships are the lifeblood of my business. They’re critical to most businesses. But keeping up with all the details needed to manage relationships can be time consuming. That’s exactly where I put AI to work.”
Instead of deploying 27 agents to automatically run my business, I build small AI engines that remove friction from the parts of business where I want humans—not software—doing the important work. In other words, I use AI to make it easier for me to maintain my human relationships.
If you’d like to take a look behind the curtain of how I use AI to manage my business, read on.
My Business Command Center and Strategic Planning Engine
My most important AI integration is my mobile Business Command Center — which connects my AI to my email, calendar, tasks, and research tools. This is a starting place I recommend for most businesses that want to “do more” with AI.
You can ask simple questions like what deserves my attention today or what did I promise someone last week. The system reduces the mental load of keeping track of everything, especially because your work rarely happens in a neat, linear sequence.
From there, I built a strategic planning engine — I call my Passage Plan, because it’s meant to get me quickly and safely from one port to the next. It starts with a master goal for the year and breaks that down into quarterly priorities and practical actions. Crazy ideas are always welcome — they have their own place to live — but they don’t get to hijack my priorities.
This system won’t run your business for you. But it’s a good example of how AI can absorb the administrative overhead of staying organized, so your brain is free for the decisions that need your human input. If you’re spending mental energy just tracking what needs your attention, that’s usually the first thing worth fixing — before anything fancier.
Sales Latte: My Relationship-Building Engine
One of my core goals this year has been to schedule 50 coffee dates with local business leaders. The outreach has been great. Keeping track of hundreds of contacts, conversations, follow-ups, opportunities, and introductions has been harder.
I’ve used traditional CRM systems to manage information flow, but most of them feel like they were designed for sales departments with dedicated CRM managers rather than people who simply want to remember who they talked to and what happened.
So I built my own system. By connecting Notion with Claude AI, I built Sales Latte, in honor of all those coffee dates. And this is probably the AI engine that best captures why I use AI in the first place.
Because the results are tangible. This year alone, it has helped generate 30 in-person coffee dates, five new clients, and dozens of speaking and professional opportunities. Those opportunities didn’t come from some magical AI workflow.
They came from people. AI just made it easier for me to stay connected to them.
Sales Latte helps me:
- Scan business cards and get contacts into my system
- Research people and organizations so my outreach stays relevant
- Draft one-to-one emails I can quickly personalize
- Log conversations and outcomes
- Prepare call sheets before important meetings
- Remember when it’s time to follow up
If you’re networking hard but losing the thread on who you talked to and why, this is the kind of system that multiplies your efforts. And it’s surprisingly easy to manage, once the pieces are all in place.
I use AI to make it easier for me to maintain my human relationships.
– Monica Poling
Sizzle Scan: Creating Value Before the Conversation
My work focuses heavily on AI education, but one of the things I emphasize most is that businesses should never let AI erase their competitive advantage. If all the world uses the same tools to produce the same kinds of output, we end up with a sea of blandness.
The problem is that many small and medium-sized businesses struggle to define and articulate what actually makes them different.
So I created the Sizzle Scan.
You enter your website URL and receive a five-page business brief that looks at things like positioning, competitors, industry trends, opportunities, and how well your company is communicating your true value. And the Sizzle Scan is totally free.
The interesting part isn’t simply that AI can generate the report. It’s that I can use AI to create value for a potential client before we ever have a conversation. That’s a useful question for any business to ask: What incredible value can I create for my clients that AI can amplify?
What’s Your Sizzle?
Everyone has an unfair advantage. Does AI understand yours?
Enter your URL. Get your five-page Sizzle Scan analysis.
Ask the Expert: Turning Knowledge Into an Interactive Resource
The same value-first philosophy shows up in another type of system I build: custom knowledge engines. The idea is simple. Take all that wonderful knowledge you have that normally lives in documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, websites, databases, or someone’s head and make it easier to access through a conversational interface.
One of my first examples was Ask a Farmer, an interactive knowledge engine I built for my sister’s farm. My sister can maintain her information in one backend source, and the public-facing engine can use that information to answer questions.
That project became a top-five finalist out of hundreds of submissions in Make.com‘s Community Challenge.
If your expertise currently lives in your head—or scattered across documents only you can navigate—a knowledge engine can be a practical entry point into more sophisticated AI systems.
➤ Read More: Wondering where to get started? Read Building Your AI Roadmap.
More Engines That Help Keep Things Running Smoothly
I’ve built plenty of other engines to help amplify my business and that of my clients — and most of them started as a specific, unglamorous friction point in someone’s actual workflow.
- A proposal engine takes a client conversation and turns it into a tailored proposal aligned to your service offering — produced in minutes, not hours.
- An RFP engine synthesizes hundreds of pages of requirements against a compliance matrix, so nothing gets missed and nothing gets written from scratch.
- A sales reporting engine consolidates reports from spreadsheets, CSVs, and PDFs into one recurring summary that tells you what the numbers really mean and where to focus more of your time and energy.
- A news tracker monitors the sources that matter to your industry and surfaces what’s relevant — so you’re not spending your Friday afternoon searching for it yourself.
- An AI search optimization engine that reviews every blog post I write for AEO/GEO readiness. It checks whether key expertise and positioning are easy for AI systems to understand, and cross-checks my broader website for internal linking opportunities, supporting articles, and missing context that could strengthen how the topic is interpreted.
These systems are very different from one another. But the purpose is remarkably similar. They remove friction from your business.
How AI Can Help Your Business
If you look at all these systems individually, they may seem unrelated. But they all solve the same broader problem. They remove the administrative machinery around the movement of data, while preserving the work that still benefits from human judgment, expertise, and relationships.
That’s how I think businesses should approach AI.
Not: What can we automate because AI exists?
But: Where is unnecessary friction getting in the way of our best work?
That question usually leads somewhere much more useful.
➤ Read More: Not all AI trainings are built the same. Click here to learn What to Look for in AI Training: the questions to ask, the red flags to avoid, and which curriculum is worth paying for.
AI Should Make Business More Human, Not Less
There’s a lot of anxiety right now about AI making business less human. And in some cases, that anxiety is justified.
If you use AI to blast thousands of generic emails, automatically respond to customers without understanding them, or replace every meaningful interaction with a chatbot, you may save time.
You may also destroy the exact thing that made customers want to work with you.
Large companies can sometimes absorb that.
Smaller businesses usually can’t. If you’re not an enterprise business, your greatest competitive advantage is the humanity that makes you special. Your expertise. Your judgment. Your creativity.
And mostly, your relationships.
That is where I think AI has the most value for small and medium businesses. Not replacing the human part of business. Handling more of the machinery supporting our relationships — yours and mine — so we can spend more time building them.
➤ Read More: A five-minute AI memory audit may change the advice AI gives you.
TL;DR: How I Use AI in My Business
Because people ARE my business. I use AI to remove the administrative friction that gets in the way of connecting with them and serving them.
From strategic planning and relationship management to knowledge engines, reporting, proposals, and research, my best AI systems handle the machinery around the work—so I can spend more time on the judgment, creativity, expertise, and relationships that actually create value.
Key Takeaways
- Start with friction, not technology. Look for the parts of your business where managing information, follow-up, research, or administration is getting in the way of better work.
- AI doesn’t have to run your business to create value. Small, focused engines can solve meaningful problems without adding unnecessary complexity.
- Use AI to strengthen relationships, not replace them. Automate the machinery around communication while keeping the important human interactions human.
- Your competitive advantage is still human. Expertise, judgment, creativity, perspective, and relationships become more valuable—not less—when everyone has access to similar AI tools.
- Your own knowledge is your biggest asset. Knowledge engines can elevate information buried in documents, databases, and people’s heads.
- The best AI systems solve real business problems. A proposal engine, CRM, reporting system, or research tool may not sound futuristic. That’s precisely why they can be useful.
- Ask a better AI question. Instead of asking, “What can we automate?” ask, “Where is unnecessary friction getting in the way of our best work?”
Work with Me
Ask the
Expert
Turn your organizational knowledge into your biggest business asset
Most businesses have incredible expertise — but that knowledge is buried in emails, documents, and people’s heads — their website barely scratches the surface. That gap quietly costs leads, sales, and trust. Ask the Expert turns your expertise into a 24/7 AI-powered search engine and knowledge base.
Data on Tap
AI-Generated Biz Tools
Imagine how AI can visualize your expertise (and collect leads)
Data on Tap is a growing collection of AI-powered intelligence visualization tools that turn your knowledge into an interactive playground — data visualizations, calculators, and more. Using AI, you can build most of these tools in an afternoon. Follow along as I show you how. (Or contact me to build one for you.)
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AI is reshaping every industry — but most of today’s training focuses on tools. My interactive sessions start with strategy – where is your business feeling friction and how can you use AI to organize, share and monetize your knowledge. Customizable for large and small groups.
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Start with your Unfair Advantage
Most businesses can’t track where their revenue actually comes from — or where it’s quietly leaking out. These keynotes and sessions show audiences how to map their revenue, close the gap between strategy and execution, and use AI as a real thinking partner along the way. You leave with frameworks you can deploy Monday morning.