Read the headlines and you'd think AI is a big-company thing. Billion-pound data centres. Chips you can't buy. Talk of trillion-dollar IPOs. Names you've heard of, spending sums you can't picture. It all sounds like something being done to the rest of us, somewhere far away, by people in better suits.
The machinery is theirs, that part's true. But the power can't stay with them, because they're building a product. A product only pays if millions of ordinary people and businesses use it. To earn back all that money, they have to put it in your hands.
The Wall Street side, and the email side
Ask most business owners what AI is, and you'll get one of two answers. It's the Wall Street story: share prices, data centres, people getting very rich somewhere else. Or it's the thing that makes their emails sound a bit nicer.
Both are real. Both miss the point. Using AI to polish an email is like using a spinning jenny to hold a door open. It works, technically. But the machine was built to take the work away, not to make the work sound better.
The real value isn't a nicer email about the invoice that hasn't been chased. It's the invoice chasing itself.
It feels like it's run away. For everyone.
It's easy to think you're not included: that it all moved too fast, that the train's gone, that this is for people who understand it. If that's how it feels, you're in good company. It feels like that for nearly everyone, including plenty of people at the top of very big companies.
Here's a story worth knowing. A few years ago, some of the world's biggest banks banned their staff from using these AI tools. Too risky, they said. Within about a year, the same banks were rolling out their own versions to tens of thousands of staff. They hadn't stopped worrying about the risks. They'd worked out they were falling behind.
Meanwhile the tools haven't waited for anyone. They're ready now, and they get noticeably more capable every few months. Nobody is too late. But the gap between the people using them and the people waiting is growing.
The first jenny lived in a cottage
This business is named after a machine, so here's its story. In the 1760s, a Lancashire weaver built a spinning machine small enough to stand in a cottage. One person could turn the wheel and spin eight threads at once instead of one. It wasn't built for a factory owner. It was built for a family at home, and it let ordinary households spin more, earn more, and hold their own.
Then came bigger machines, too big for a cottage. Spinning moved into mills, and the mills belonged to a few. Same technology wave, two very different directions: one spread the power out to thousands of homes, the other gathered it up into a handful of buildings.
Every big new tool goes one of two ways. It either spreads the power out, or it gathers it up.
Right now, AI can go either way
For as long as anyone can remember, the big firms have bought an advantage the small ones couldn't. Whole departments. Consultants by the floor. Software built just for them. That's how a national chain could out-quote you, out-organise you and out-wait you.
That gap has just shrunk, fast. The same kind of tools the giants use can now take the grind off a ten-person firm for the price of a decent night out. A plumber can turn a voice note into a quote before leaving the driveway. A two-person lettings agency can stay on top of every certificate like a firm with a compliance team. A wholesaler can know what's running out before the customer does.
That's what we mean by AI & Me. Not AI for the boardroom. AI for me: my way of working, my customers, my edge, my Friday afternoon back.
It's not about replacing anyone
The fear is that this stuff is coming for people's jobs. In the hands of a small business, it's the opposite. It takes the boring, mind-numbing bit off the people you've already got, so they can do the part they're good at: the customer, the craft, the idea. The bit they love. A business that does that keeps its people longer, not shorter.
And it doesn't mean ripping anything out. The future never looks like the future. It looks like your business now, with better tools in it.
Power you don't use isn't yours
Here's the honest bit. None of this happens by itself. The tools are there for everyone, which means they're there for your biggest competitor too. If they flex it and you don't, the gap doesn't close. It widens, and it widens their way.
The cottage spinners who got a jenny early did well. The ones who waited for someone else to decide found the decision had been made in a mill.
You don't need a strategy, a big budget or a word of jargon. You need to pick one chore and get rid of it. Then the next.
Flex it
- Name the bit you hate. One sentence: the job you'd happily never do again. Tell us here, or in the chat.
- Come to The Worst Spreadsheet Club. Free, once a month, first pint on us. Save a seat.
- Spend an afternoon. £150, one small thing sorted, no audit needed. See what it feels like to have the grind gone.
The jenny didn't wait for the mill owners. Neither should you.
Revolutions start in Manchester. Not Wall Street.