The shiny AI rendering tools that "experts" are pushing via their content at the moment are not going to change your business in a meaningful way.
I was getting annoyed about this so I decided to make a graphic to help you figure out where to spend your time with AI right now so that it has the highest ROI in your business.
Hint: the highest ROI is not spending hours playing with the latest AI video tool that has strange AI people walking around in your client's new homes!!! (see this video if you missed what I mean)
What I created is a four quadrant matrix that maps example AI tasks against two things:
1: how much effort it takes for you to set up
2: how much value/ROI it delivers back to your business
Quadrant 1: Automate what you already repeat (start here!)
This is the fastest win you can have with AI and it's where most of you should be starting.
Think about the things you write over and over in your business e.g. follow up emails, summaries from site visits, fee proposals, standard responses to commonly asked FAQs.
This is exactly the kind of task AI is great at. You feed it past examples and it drafts the next version for you. You spend 5 minutes editing instead of 45 minutes writing from scratch.
You just need to teach AI what your version looks like and then use it and you get hours back in your week immediately.
Your boring, repetitive admin work is where to start with AI.
Quadrant 2: Systemise how you sell and deliver
This is the quadrant that will actually change your business but it takes more work to set up.
This is where you stop using AI for individual tasks and start building it into the core of how your business runs e.g. a quoting system that takes a transcript from your initial consult and spits out a proposal in your exact style or a client onboarding workflow that generates your welcome pack, contract/agreement, design questionnaire and next steps automatically when someone signs.
This quadrant is great if you've already got the basis sorted but don't start here if you don't have established processes in place already. Get Quadrant 1 sorted out first then come back here once you have proper systems, SOPs and processes in place in your business that AI can amplify (if you need help with that part, we do that in Bootcamp together).
Quadrant 3: Speed up small annoying tasks
This is the "nice to have" quadrant. Useful, but not moving your business forward e.g. summarising long emails, drafting IG captions, brainstorming ideas you don't end up executing.
There's nothing wrong with using AI for this stuff but this work doesn't make you more money or measurably improve your business or day to day life.
The danger of this quadrant is that it feels like you're "using AI in your business" but none of the uses won you a client or freed up significant time.
Quadrant 4: Building things you don't need
This is where lots of people waste their time e.g. creating a custom AI tool when a simple template would do the job, trying to automate everything before you have proper systems and SOPs in place, building complex workflows for a business that isn't stable yet or spending weeks "learning AI" by watching tutorials instead of actually using it to find paying clients.
This quadrant is problematic because it feels productive. You're learning new things and building stuff but none of it is connected to actually running a profitable business. It's procrastination dressed up as progress (playing with AI mood board and video rendering tools falls into this quadrant!).
I see designers who have spent 40 hours building a custom GPT to do something that a 10 minute automation or template would have solved. I see designers who have watched 20 hours of YouTube tutorials about AI workflows and have not used any of them on a real project. I see designers building "AI design systems" that they will never use because they don't have enough projects coming through to justify the system in the first place.
If your AI work isn't connected to a real client, a real project or a real outcome you can measure, you don't need it!
What to do this week
Look at every AI task you've done in the last month. For each one, ask yourself...did this lead to more jobs, better clients or higher fees?
If the answer is no, it shouldn't be a priority.
To win over the next few years you need to think about treating AI as a tool to remove work, not a tool to fill your week with shiny new distractions.
Start with quadrant 1. Pick one repetitive task you do every week. Set it up properly with AI so you never have to write it from scratch again then move on to the next one.
