The smart way to use AI in business

Diana-Medrea Mogensen explores how entrepreneurs can use AI to reduce friction without sacrificing the human side of their business.

Photograph: Pexels: Tara Winstead

Text: Diana-Medrea Mogensen

At this point, most small business owners have already experimented with AI in one way or another. Maybe you used it to write a social media caption, structure an email, brainstorm ideas, translate text, or organise your thoughts after a long day.

You have probably also noticed two things quite quickly. Sometimes it saves an enormous amount of time. Other times, the result feels generic, disconnected, or simply wrong.

The problem is not AI. The problem is that thinking it does replaces the thought behind it.

AI tends to work best when you already understand your business reasonably well. If you know what you offer, who you help, how your customers behave, and where your bottlenecks are, AI can reduce friction significantly. If you do not, it often helps you produce confusion more efficiently.

Before choosing tools, it helps to step back and understand your current reality.

What repeatedly consumes time or energy in your business? Which tasks feel unnecessarily manual? Where do delays happen? What do you keep postponing because it drains you mentally? What already follows a repetitive structure?

Then ask a second question: what would you like this process to become instead?

Perhaps you want communication to feel clearer and faster, or onboarding clients takes too much back-and-forth. Maybe you lose hours planning content, searching through notes, rewriting the same information, or trying to organise scattered ideas across emails, notebooks, and WhatsApp messages.

This is usually where AI becomes genuinely useful.

For communication-heavy businesses, AI can help draft newsletters, structure workshop descriptions, rewrite unclear emails, generate first drafts for social media posts, or adapt content for multiple formats. For people working across languages, it can also help simplify or translate communication more efficiently.

For organisational tasks, it can summarise meetings, create checklists, organise notes, prepare FAQs, or help structure ideas into actual plans.

For repetitive administrative processes, AI can support invoice templates, onboarding flows, automated responses, customer support messages, appointment confirmations, or content scheduling.

This becomes especially relevant before summer, when many entrepreneurs are already stretched thin trying to close projects before July while preparing for slower periods in Denmark during the holidays.

A website builder, for example, may help you generate pages quickly, structure text, or simplify setup. Still, it cannot decide what your business actually is, who your customers are, or how you want people to experience your brand. The tool may speed up the process, but clarity still has to come from you.

This is where many people get stuck. They automate before they understand, generate content before defining their message, or ask AI to make decisions that still require human judgment, experience, and context.

Perhaps the most useful way to think about AI is not as a replacement worker, but as an assistant - a very fast one, occasionally brilliant, occasionally wrong, and still dependent on your direction.

Like any assistant, the quality of the outcome depends heavily on the quality of the instruction.

This is why identifying bottlenecks matters more than chasing trends.

Instead of asking, “What is the latest AI tool?”, it may be more useful to ask:

• Which parts of my business already follow a pattern?

• Which tasks consume energy without creating proportional value?

• Where do I repeatedly lose time?

• What could become simpler with support?

Those questions tend to lead to much more useful answers than technology trends alone.

The entrepreneurs who benefit most from AI are usually not the ones trying to replace themselves completely. They are the ones using it intentionally to support processes they already understand.

If you are curious about how AI can support your business in practical ways, We Are Entrepreneurs and one.com will soon open registrations for two free workshops focused on AI-supported website building and business communication.

The workshops will take place on 11 June (afternoon session) and 12 June (morning session). Follow We Are Entrepreneurs for registration details and updates.

Because AI will probably not build your business for you. It will help you run it with more clarity, structure, and breathing room.

Happy summer!