What Real Businesses Are Actually Solving With AI Right Now (Live From SMMW)
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You've been using AI. But are you actually using it?
There is a version of AI use that most of us start with. You open a chat window, you type something in, you get something back. Maybe it's a caption, maybe it's a rough email draft. You tweak it, you copy it, you paste it somewhere. And then you do the whole thing over again tomorrow.
That's not wrong. But it's also not what AI is actually capable of.
Last week, I had the honor of speaking at Social Media Marketing World and AI Business World in Southern California. My session on the AI CMO packed the room. They had to shut the doors and turn people away, with somewhere between 400 and 500 people inside plus another 100 on the livestream. The energy was unreal.
But the most powerful moments did not happen on stage.
They happened in the conversations in between sessions. While most people were scrambling to absorb everything from the packed agenda, I started doing something different. I walked around and asked attendees one question: What is the one problem you are most excited to solve with AI when you get back to work next week?
The answers changed how I'm thinking about everything.
The Shift Hiding in Plain Sight
One of the first people I spoke to was Jovi, a marketer for a restaurant. When I asked her the question, she paused. And then she said something worth sitting with:
"I most am excited to use AI to solve problems. I have not been doing that. That was like a very light bulb moment for me in general."
She had been using AI. She just had not been using it to actually solve her problems.
And she is not alone. Most of us start in the same place. We use AI as a content generator, a chat companion, a rough draft machine. It's useful. It saves some time. But it's not changing anything fundamental about how we work.
The shift happens when you stop asking AI to be your assistant and start asking it to be your problem-solver. AI gets really powerful when you point it at a specific problem in your business. That is the difference between chatting with AI and working with it.
The Copy-Paste Hellscape Nobody Talks About
One of the conversations that hit hardest was with my colleague Rhiannon Franz, who joined me for the week. She runs Rhiannon Franz Business and Owner Society in Los Angeles, and when I asked her what she was most excited to solve, she did not hesitate: automation. Anything that takes things off her plate.
She described something every solopreneur has lived: the content repurposing loop. You have a great idea. You write an email. Then you have to go into Flodesk and format it. Then you take a similar concept to LinkedIn. Then you adapt it for your social posts. Same idea, different containers, over and over again.
An hour to repurpose it across all of the platforms. And that's if you're lucky.
Here's what's wild: that hour is not the valuable part of your work. That hour is admin. It's a tax on your creativity, not the thing you got into business to do.
I've been building toward a world where that workflow runs through Claude Cowork and drops directly into Flodesk with the right audience segment, subject line, and preview text — and then just sends me a test to review. That is not a future possibility. That is what's available right now.
Solopreneurs, You Have Something Corporations Don't
Here's the thread I kept pulling at in conversation after conversation: solopreneurs have an unfair advantage right now.
The people at this conference who work in agencies or marketing departments at bigger companies? They are so many steps behind. Not because they're less capable. But because they lack the autonomy. Their bosses paid to send them here. And on Monday, they go back to their normal jobs. They don't have time to dig in and implement what they just learned.
You do. As business owners, we can decide right now to experiment, build systems, and try new things. Nobody has to sign off. That autonomy is a gift. Use it.
You Were Hired for the Valuable Stuff. AI Can Do the Rest.
The conversation that stayed with me longest happened at the speaker party. The topic: the difference between tasks and jobs.
When you hire a social media manager, you don't hire them because they're great at uploading data to a CRM. That's not why they get hired. But they still have to do it. They still spend hours on the admin, the formatting, the copy-paste.
AI can handle that layer. And when it does, you get to do the work you were actually built for. That's the real promise of AI. Not that it replaces you. That it handles the work that gets in the way of the work you were made to do.
The One Question Worth Asking Yourself
Before you open a chat window this week, before you start typing a prompt, ask yourself the question I asked those attendees:
What is the one problem I am most excited to solve with AI?
Not how can I use AI today. That's too open. Point it. Aim it. Give it a specific target. That's when things get interesting.
