Every week there is a new AI headline promising to change everything. This week alone we saw ChatGPT learn to write in your voice by reading your inbox, Meta release an agent that can browse and buy things for you, and Anthropic publish a report on how people are trying to misuse AI. It is a lot. And if you are a business owner trying to keep up, it can feel like the ground never stops moving.

Here is what I want you to know. The tool is not the thing that matters most. How well you have taught that tool to know your business is what actually determines the results you get.

I have trained hundreds of business owners and I see the same pattern over and over. Someone opens ChatGPT or Claude, types a question, gets a flat, generic answer, and walks away thinking AI just is not that good. Meanwhile someone else, using the exact same tool, is getting content, documents, and ideas back that sound like they wrote it themselves. The difference has nothing to do with which AI they picked. It has everything to do with whether they trained it first.

This is the first pillar of what I teach, and it is the one almost everyone skips.

Before you ever type a real question, go into the settings of whatever AI you are using and actually fill out the customization options. Tell it who you are. Tell it what your business does, who you serve, and why. Give it your tone, your voice, your goals, your non negotiables. Most people have never even opened that settings menu. They would never hire a personal trainer and refuse to tell them their name, their goals, or their history. But that is exactly what they do with AI every single day.

Once your AI actually knows you, something shifts.

You stop needing to write a perfect prompt every time, because the AI already has the context. You are not starting from zero in every conversation. You are building on a foundation. That is the whole point. The businesses getting real value out of AI right now are not the ones with the fanciest tool stack. They are the ones who took a few hours to actually set things up.

And this is exactly why I do not spend my time teaching prompt engineering.

That is not a controversial opinion for me, it is just where I have landed after watching this space closely. AI is getting smarter every single day. Once it knows who you are, it can build a better prompt than most humans can write by hand. Your job is not to become a prompt expert. Your job is to become the person who trains the AI well and directs the strategy. Let the AI do the heavy lifting.

If you read this week's newsletter, you already saw a version of this idea.

ChatGPT's new feature that learns your writing style by reading your sent emails and files is powerful, but it is really just a shortcut to the same outcome. The safer, simpler way to get there is to teach your AI directly. Give it real samples of your writing. Show it what a good draft looks like versus a bad one. Correct it when it misses. That loop, teach, review, correct, is where the real transformation happens, and you do not have to hand over years of your inbox to get it.

So here is what I want you to do this week.

Pick one task you do over and over in your business. A follow up email, a social caption, a client update, anything repetitive. Sit down with your AI and actually train it on that one task. Tell it exactly what you want. Show it an example of your best work. Correct the first draft it gives you and tell it why. Do that once, properly, and watch how much better every future output becomes.

This is the difference between using AI and actually working with it.

Once you make that shift, you stop chasing every new feature that comes out, because you already have something better. An AI that knows you.

If you want help teaching AI how your business actually works, that is exactly the kind of practical, no drama work we do inside the Surfside AI Collective. You will learn alongside other business owners who are figuring out how to use AI in a way that actually fits their business, their voice, and their goals.

Learn more about the Surfside AI Collective:
https://surfsidesocialai.com/collectivehome

And if you want a more personalized look at how AI is currently set up in your business, what it knows, what it is missing, and where you could get better results, book a free 30 minute discovery call with Jessica.

Book your free AI training consultation:
https://surfsidesocialai.com/freeaitrainingconsult

Jessica Hosfeld | Surfside Social AI | I make AI make sense.
[email protected] | 407-900-1542 | www.surfsidesocialai.com | @surfsidesocialai