I had a lot of odd jobs growing up. I was a bus boy at a pizza place in college; I worked at a bookstore; I was a clerk at a bankruptcy law firm; and I did cold calls for Smith Barney (now Morgan Stanley) trying to get people to buy bonds. I even work…
I use AI heavily in my solo business. I’ve written previously about handing tasks over to artificial intelligence, and I’m a genuine advocate for it.
But I’ve also drawn clear lines around what AI does and doesn’t touch in my work.
The question isn’t just, “What can AI do for me?” (because the answer is “a lot”). It’s also, “What’s important enough that I should keep doing it myself?”
Where accuracy and trust are on the line
My clients hire me for specific work, based largely on a reputation I’ve built over the years. They’re relying on my skill and, in some cases, research that I complete.
AI still hallucinates. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index Report found that hallucination rates across 26 leading models ranged from 22% to 94%, depending on the task. You might use AI for research or brainstorming, but anything that goes to a client or has your name attached needs human eyes on it.
There’s an important distinction between AI-assisted work and AI-generated work. AI-assisted means you’re using AI to speed up a process that still has human oversight—drafting an outline that you rewrite, or pulling research that you verify. AI-generated means there’s no human in the loop.
The first can save you real time, while the second introduces risk—which can damage your relationships with clients and your reputation.
Where human connection matters
Clients, collaborators, and your audience can tell the difference between a genuine interaction and one that was generated by AI. This applies to networking, relationship-building, and any communication where your personality should be at the forefront.
The AI-generated comments on LinkedIn and the AI-generated cold outreach emails are obvious to the reader. You might think that involving AI saves time. Technically, it does, but the purpose of these interactions is to build trust with people. If the words aren’t yours, you’re undermining the goal.
That doesn’t mean you can’t use an AI-assisted process to help; you might draft a message and ask AI to tighten it up. But the substance of the message and the intent to form a connection should come from you.
Where your creativity is the core output
AI is an amalgamation of existing things. It can synthesize, summarize, and recombine—but it can’t originate.
If your business depends on writing, design, strategy, or any form of creativity, AI can’t replace the thinking that makes your work yours. That includes hiring people to help you with creative work for your solo business.
That said, AI can be a strong complement to creative work. If you host a webinar, you can use AI to take the long video and pull out short clips. I’ve used AI to draft social posts based on a long-form article I’ve written (which I still heavily edit).
The source material is always you. AI just helps you do more with it.
How to develop your own guardrails
Every solopreneur’s boundaries will depend on their business, their clients, and their comfort level. Ask yourself: What would damage my reputation if AI got it wrong? And what would feel inauthentic if AI did it for me?
As the models have gotten better, I have been able to hand off more tasks to AI, with human oversight. But my core boundaries haven’t changed since they’re based on trust, human connection, and creativity.
Whatever guardrails you set, they aren’t static. They should evolve as AI improves and as your business changes. Some tasks I do manually today might be handed off next year. But the goal is to be intentional about where AI shows up in your business.
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