AI was meant to make business easier. And in many ways, it has. You can now write hundreds of emails in minutes, fill your blog with new posts, create social content every day, and build landing pages faster than ever before.

It sounds amazing. But there is a HUGE problem hiding underneath all of this speed.

Businesses are getting more stuff done, but that does not mean they are getting better results. They are sending more emails, publishing more posts, and creating more pages. But are they getting more leads? More sales? More growth?

That is where things start to get scary. Because AI may be making some business owners worse at the very things that once made them successful.

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Hello! In today's rapidly evolving landscape, artificial intelligence has become an essential tool for the forward-thinking entrepreneur. But here is the important part. What does this mean? And is this the correct rhetorical question to be asking, thinking, wondering or posing? It isn't what you think.

That is what AI sounds like to pretty much every single one of us. And yeah, we are producing three times more content, more emails, more social content, more blog posts, more sales pages. And 50% of all content on the internet now shows that AI had a hand in producing it.

I'd already been doing that for over a decade and it worked really well. But here is why it worked so well. Firstly, not many other people were doing it.

They weren't doing it because it took a lot of effort. And most people just didn't want to put the effort in. Also, the reason it worked was because the volume, the fact I was showing up every single day, was the advantage.

But now Claude can produce 300 emails in 20 minutes and he can send them out and then he can do it all again tomorrow if you really want. AI has killed the volume advantage. So any business thinking that they are doing the right things, they are getting their email sent.

Well, getting things sent is just a box ticket exercise. So here is why businesses are struggling right now. It is not the economy.

It's not what that politician did or what's going on in the world. It's not that coaching is dead. Email isn't dead.

Webinars aren't dead. These things that go around in the cycles of your marketing feed all the time. It's probably not your offer or your niche market.

Too many people are seeing the activities of their business as binary. And that's the problem I'm seeing. It's either done or it's not done.

And that is all they're seeing, which is completely bogus. It's completely mad, right? There is an illusion created in our little human brain sacks that says, is that thing done or is it not done? And before AI, there were blank emails that now AI can fill. So they get sent.

It's no longer in the not done category. It's now in the done, ticked off category. There were sales pages that never got finished, and now they get mailed out.

There was that blog of yours that almost never got updated, that now gets updated weekly with brand new articles posted to it. And you rarely post on your Instagram, but now stuff's going out every single day. But this is not a binary problem.

And this is the problem. Sending an email doesn't mean that you're doing email marketing. Putting up a landing page does not mean that it's going to convert into sales or appointments.

I'm seeing so many people mistaking done for good. Think of it like this. If you were a cyclist, you'd be blaming the hill for getting steeper, when the actual truth is that you are not pedaling as hard, and you're not as fit, and you just got lazier.

That's actually what's going on. That's the cold, hard, uncomfortable truth that you need to hear today. Because so many people are focused on getting more stuff done than getting any of the stuff right.

And there are a bunch of reasons this has happened. The first one is they have abdicated the thinking. This is a huge danger for businesses right now that I'm seeing across clients, and across other business owners who I hang out with.

When you used to have a creative problem, you used to spend a bit more time thinking about it. What should I name it? How should I do that? And what's that going to look like? And what could that be? Now you think, I don't really know the answer to that. And you immediately open up an AI tool and just see what it thinks.

That creativity is being lost. And we have to remember that AI cannot be creative. It is generative.

That's what this stuff is, right? Remember how AI actually works. After researching all this stuff on the internet, it simmers it down to an average and uses that as the knowledge and its understanding. So it's got a bunch of knowledge of all the stuff on the internet.

It brings the average together. Now it's got an understanding. And then it uses that training, that average, to then only predict the next most likely best thing.

And by best thing, I mean the thing that most closely matches that average that it's ingested. It's predicting the most likely best pixel to put in, or that next word to say. It's not creative.

We literally just got back from the world's largest arts festival. It's called the Edinburgh Fringe. To show you how large it is, there are literally 2,155 different shows happening every single day.

More than 2,000 shows a day. So when you're immersed in that, you come back so creative. Because you're immersed in creativity, right? You see, decision-making and creativity are muscles.

And if you don't use them, you lose them. Like, I was at the gym this morning, and I haven't been for a week because we've been away at the festival and we didn't book a place with a gym, and we didn't go and get a little week-long membership at one because we were busy eating, like, haggis and other Scottish delicacies. So there we are, not using the gym.

So I go back to the gym today. I didn't go in and still lift the 50 kilos. No, I didn't, because my muscles weren't as fit.

I didn't blame the gym equipment and say, oh, you've made that 50 kilos heavier. No, I didn't, right? But being around these creative people, I have literally come back with creative muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's how it feels.

But then now look at the marketing campaigns that you see right now. All that stuff that's in your feed, every ad that you click on, everyone is doing the same things. And their landing pages all look the same.

Look, I spent weeks coming up with exciting new marketing campaigns that built me a reputation of being the guy who has amazing campaign ideas. And people asked me to speak on stages all around the world, to come on podcasts and consult with me because of these attention-getting campaigns, because they were creative. And when I launched my online event, people all commented on how genius the name was.

It was called OMFG, which stands for Offers, Marketing, Funnels, and Growth. And it really stands out, right? It's a really cool name, but why does it stand out? Because AI didn't generate it. I used my creativity to create it, right? I used my creativity for that thing.

The one name of one of my products that gets the biggest reaction is a program I have about batch-creating email content, and it's called Batch It Crazy, right? People always love that. Again, AI cannot generate that. The more dangerous part of this, though, is not just the creativity, because obviously now things don't stand out anymore, and everything sort of looks the same.

We're going to get into that in another section. But the bigger part of this is decision-making. People seem to have abdicated decision-making to the robots.

Look, having your own business, whether it's your full-time thing or your side hustle, having your own thing is about making decisions. That's literally all we do. Every single day, I get up, I sit here at my office, and I make decisions about what should the price of that be, what should we offer next, what should we be pushing, what's working, what's not, what do I want to do? And so the better you get at making decisions, the more successful you will be in your business, in any area of your life, right? Because most people don't like making decisions.

Your point as a business leader, as a person who's doing their own thing, is you are the leader. You're the person in charge at the front. You get better at making decisions by using that muscle.

You get better at making decisions by making more decisions. And if you keep abdicating the decision-making to the machine, then you end up working for the machines. It is controlling the decisions.

And most importantly, the AI can look at the data. It can look at the facts. But the reason you are running your own business is to satisfy you, to do more of what you want to do, to hit your goals.

Even if it's a less commercial decision, a less logically correct decision, there are things you will and won't want to do. I'm also not a fan of dependence. The only thing you can depend on is you.

Because people leave. Systems get shut down. Things change.

Laws change. Access to different things in different parts of the world get changed. But you, no matter what happens in the world, will always have you.

So your big advantage, while everyone else is outsourcing their decision-making and letting that decision-making muscle get weaker and weaker, which is basically like getting somebody else to go to the gym for you, where their muscles get bigger while you pay for their membership, you instead are going to take control of decisions again, build that decision-making muscle, and you're going to be the one who rises up and stands out. Now, our second thing that's really costing businesses, and really costing them a lot, is bland content. Last week, I was giving feedback on an email campaign to one of my clients.

And I was sat here, and I just had to stop. It was like 7 a.m., that's when I like to do my work, and I was like, I have to just sit back in my chair, because it was literally straight out of Claude. And you could totally tell.

Not just I could tell, because I've seen a lot of copy, obviously, in my 17 years of doing this stuff, but it was obvious to anyone. And just like that opening bit, that skip that I did at the top of this episode, it was flat, it was lifeless, it was beige, it had no bite, it had no attitude to it. I actually asked AI to draft the script for this video, and I tried to record it yesterday.

And again, I just couldn't find a way of delivering it that would keep attention for anyone. It sucked, right? It was terrible. So I sort of threw my toys out of the pram in a little bit of a grump and went downstairs and had another cup of tea, because it sucked.

I wasn't sharing any piece of me. There was no attitude. So what I did is this morning is I sat up in bed with my first cup of tea of the day, and I wrote this all by hand myself, completely by hand.

But so many people are saying, oh, my emails aren't converting, and they're sending out AI emails, and they're sending out emails, and all of a sudden their landing page is not converting or whatever, right? But so many people are saying, oh, my emails aren't converting, but they're sending out AI-written emails that talk in circles instead of just saying what it actually means. I'm like, get to the point, right? They're saying their sales pages aren't converting, and they're blaming the market. Truth is, yes, the market is overwhelmed.

That is happening because there is more choice in the market because of AI, so it is overwhelmed with more content because of it, right? But all of the content that they're overwhelmed with is that bland and flat, no spikes, no peaks, no troughs, no variety. But if we were to rate every piece of content on the Internet between 0, terrible, and 10, amazing, and bear in mind that AI has studied it all and produces the average, which is 5 out of 10 content. Well, 10 years ago, top copywriters like me learned in the trenches to produce 8 and 9 and 10 out of 10 content and copy so that it would actually stand out because everybody else doing it was producing 9 and 10 out of 10 content.

But now, because most of what your audience sees is 5 out of 10 content, so in order to compete today, it's actually easier. You don't need to produce 9 or 10 out of 10 content like you did 10 years ago. You just need to produce 7 or 8 out of 10 content and you will win.

The blog posts, the social posts, the descriptions, the emails, the landing pages, all of it that is produced by AI is so muted. So here's how you actually overcome it. The first thing you want to do is actually have an attitude.

Stand for something. Have an opinion because AI can't. And the second thing I want you to do is just say what you mean.

Write how you talk. Get to the point. Don't waffle on around with too many metaphors and all this other stuff.

Just talk like a human. The best way to do this is literally to use an AI app like WhisperFlow, which you can get a free trial of. I use it.

I love it. And just talk your landing page. Talk your email.

Speak that social post in and then tidy it up by hand. That's a great use of AI because when you use AI to capture your ideas, then you're leveraging AI. You're not replacing yourself with AI because it's leveraging your ideas.

So what is it good for? Well, AI can do a lot of really good things. I don't want you to think for a second that I'm Mr. Anti-AI because I use it, right? I used it to do research for some of this video. And that's the first thing it's really good at.

It's really good at research. It's really good at finding case studies. I had it find for, I think it was last week's video, I had it look for the details of the psychology studies that I wanted to reference for all the psych stuff that we talked about in last week's video, which you can get by clicking the thing that's around this video, right? It's a really good video.

And then, of course, I went and checked all the facts. It's also really good at capturing information. So I use a tool called Granola, which listens in on all of my calls.

It listens in when I make a video. It listens in literally to anything I use this microphone for or any video I watch on my computers. So it's capturing all of my ideas.

So that means I've got this first party, my personal ideas that I can go and dip into. It's really good at capturing that. And thirdly, it's really good at analysis.

In fact, there's nothing that AI is better at than taking a shit ton of data and finding connections and analyzing it in a way that humans really cannot. That is literally what it does by default. And the fourth thing it does really, really well, which is really useful, is it beats the blank page.

It's really good for a first draft so you're not staring at that blinking cursor that's bullying you and telling you crap, right? You're crap, you're crap, you're crap, right? It's really good at producing a first draft. But then you've got to go in, you've got to rewrite it and add in your own punch, add in your opinion, add in how you would say that, add in your story to that. But it is really useful if you're staring at a blank page, you've got no idea whatsoever, to start getting your gears turning, for sure.

You see, the reason that businesses are struggling, especially with sales and marketing, when they're using AI, is because AI is a machine of patterns. But basic human psychology tells us that in order to stand out, to get attention and cut through the noise, we need to do something different. We need to interrupt and disrupt patterns.

But by its very nature, AI cannot do that, right? It seems to me like we're trying to use a razor to grow a beard. It makes absolutely no f***ing sense at all. We're trying to use the tool to do something completely different.

However, there is a major thing that you do need to change when you're selling your online courses because of AI. And without doing that, you are going to see your sales continue to slide off a cliff. So in this next video here, I'm going to show you how AI is destroying online courses unless you do this one thing.

Go check it.