AI won’t kill your business, you will. Now, I could substitute the words growth, health, relationships, or literally countless other concepts in for the word business. But today’s post was inspired in the business world, so I’m going to keep it there.

Some people are afraid of AI. I’m not. I enjoy AI. I find it fun. I find it to be a tremendous helper for menial tasks that I don’t like doing. I find it to be a great way to become unstuck when I am mentally stalling.

I know there are a lot of people out there afraid of AI. They shouldn’t be. At least no more afraid of AI than they are of any other potential negative events occurring in life. Nonetheless, a pessimist can find a reason to find the negative and anything. Don’t be that way.

This is not about finding the negative. It’s about accentuating the positives.

And yet, I’m concerned for how some use AI. Some personify AI. They call it their Bestie and substitute real human relationships for artificial intelligence. I think those that do are missing the point as to what AI is designed to do and missing the point as to what type of potential they truly have inside of them themselves.

AI is a computer program, that even though it is advancing well, it still has many limitations. I use it daily, and it has trouble remembering significant details about my work and the things that I asked it to do as little as a week ago. 

At times, it’s the best assistant I could ask for and at times it’s the worst assistant I’ve ever had. It’s growing and I know this is all part of growth, so you gotta take the good with the bad.

But that type of growth and how AI is virtually still in its infancy is what makes how some use it so troubling to me. It’s still growing and that’s forgotten way too often. 

Imagine going to a first year med student and hoping that they can perform like a world renowned brain neurosurgeon. I think too many professionals are looking at it expecting the brain surgeon and getting a party animal freshman. But they don’t realize this is a freshman, they think it’s the brain surgeon until it’s too late.

I experienced this firsthand earlier this year. I was exploring different ways to leverage AI and find out how I can use its tools and systems to prospect in the Real Estate world. I was hoping to design a system that not only worked, but then could be replicable that I could sell to other agents. 

My hope was that I could figure out a way to use AI to automatically begin conversations with for sale by owners. Then, judging by the for sale by owner response, AI could disqualify the ones that weren’t leads, and then I could continue the conversation personally with the ones that were.

So, I went into ChatGPT and started designing a program. Chat laid out a very detailed way to do this. It told me step-by-step what programs to invest in and purchase, how to code certain things, and what to do.

And it started working. Until it didn’t.

Seemingly at every step, it would hit a limitation on how to solve a problem that I ran into and then I’d have to backtrack multiple steps to find a solution. After a few weeks of trying to make this work, I gave up on it. It was becoming clear that based on chat’s limitations, I was going to still have to be hands-on with the system, which completely negated the benefit of creating a system like this. 

This example shows how Chat can be limited and doesn’t quite get foresight. At least not yet. It might put a skeleton in place that works, until you analyze the skeleton. And then you see the skeleton has three arms instead of two and instead of a spinal cord, it has some licorice.

However, I do believe this is the type of thing that AI can be good for. It should be good for helping with specialized administrative tasks. In a perfect world, it should be your assistant. That could be a traditional secretary/admin, that could be a programming assistant, it could be a webpage designer, there’s a lot it could do.

A professional should be able to rely on their assistant to pull data, to write an email, to create a visual, even to have surface level communication. AI can do all of this.

But these are all non-creative tasks. Creativity is where AI falls short.

A business leader should never delegate the most important aspects of their business to their assistant. Once that happens, the assistant isn’t the assistant, the assistant is now the leader.

Unfortunately, I am witnessing this type of irresponsible delegation way too much in the real estate industry.

The most glaring example happened in my office just the other day. I’ve been beating the drum over and over again for the last month to try to get the agents in the office to begin their 2026 business planning. For those not in Real Estate, it might sound early. But Real Estate runs on a 90 day lag, meaning the leads generated today typically don’t close for at least three months. So if somebody wants to start 2026 strong, they’ve got to be working in their plan right now, not working on it in December.

But I digress, and back to the example that I’m trying to share. I’m on our office’s monthly call, where the office’s owner tells the agents what’s going on in the office, gives a chance for the brokers to provide updates, etc.. On this call, she said one of the most shocking things about business planning in AI.

She started encouraging her agents to simply know how many homes they want to sell next year, and then go to ChatGPT and ask it to build a business plan for you. Now, keep in mind, a Real Estate business plan is not buried in minutia and breaking down complex tasks. It’s basically a roadmap that gets you from where you are to where you want to go. It’s high-level thinking and it becomes the tasks that you do day in day out and week in week out to get the results you want to experience month in and month out.

Basically, your business plan in the real estate industry. Is your battle plan for the next year.

And this thought “leader” was telling all of her agents to delegate that to an app. Basically, telling these agents to just delegate the most important thing you’re going to do for the year, plan their business, out to their secretary/assistant. 

Dumbfounded probably doesn’t even begin to describe my thoughts and feelings about this when it happened. I tried to interject and explain why it makes no sense to do this, but the right words escaped me on the spot and what came out only scratched the surface of how much I disagree. 

Because, you see, I believe that type of mentality around AI is what will destroy businesses and minds. AI itself won’t, but using it incorrectly will.

No one is going to be attached to a plan that they didn’t create. They’re going to look at that as just another to do item and if it gets done, it gets done, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

I heard a really great parallel to this on a Simon Sinek podcast recently. On his program, A Bit of Optimism, Simon was interviewing the founder of LinkedIn. They were talking about the subject of AI. At some point, they started talking about AI writing books, which definitely perked my interest since I’m an author and I’ve found it hard to get her in a world where there’s so much content.

Long story, short, Simon and his guest explained how even though authors can create content by having artificial intelligence do it, it won’t help them advance. They hypothesized that advancement ultimately comes from the process that you go through while you create. And when you don’t create, you don’t grow.

I found that both inspiring and optimistic. It told me that as long as I keep creating, I can grow into the person I want to be. I can grow my business into what I want it to be. I can grow my music career into what I want it to be. As long as I keep creating then I will keep growing.

You should not be using AI to create content for you that which needs to authentic. AI can help you plan a little bit. But it can’t be you. It can’t replace you. 

Not if you want to live an irreplaceable life.

Let me share a story of what I’m doing right now to promote my coaching business: creating authentic content, while using AI for help. Because to me, this is how we should be using AI currently.

One thing I’ve struggled with for a long time has been content creation. I don’t like putting a lot of thought and heart and effort into something only to feel like I’m screaming into the void when it ends up with two likes (thanks Mom and Dad). I probably need to take my own lesson here and stay focused on the journey, not the destination. Focus on the efforts and not the result. But, I digress.

Because of my struggle around content creation, I decided to ask AI to help line up the nuts and bolts. Since I’ve written my business plan, I know that a major part of it is social media content creation. But I don’t know what to post and when to post or how to regulate this. That’s where AI came in.

I wrote a prompt and got Chat to put a content calendar in place for me for October that balanced everything from Instagram reels, carousels, YouTube long form, and YouTube shorts. And it put a plan in place that would have me post a short and reel every Monday and Friday, a long form video on YouTube on Thursdays, and a carousel on Instagram on Wednesdays. Part of my prompt was that I only wanted to use those two platforms.

But here’s where I had to take a break from AI. I asked it to give me ideas and create the subjects of the October posts. Some of them were on brand with me or close enough to go with. But then some just made no sense and would be a complete opposite of who I am. Other things that come straight from my heart weren’t anywhere near AI‘s plan. That’s where I had to put my creation in there. 

By the way, imagine if this was something as major as a business plan, and I were new agent. I would probably just work that plan even though it didn’t connect with me. And then I would flame out. Is there any wonder why this industry has such a high turnover rate and so many businesses fail to make a profit?

But let’s go back and go a step further. If I asked AI to help give me a script or help me plan out what this post is going to say, it never gave  my words. It all sounded inauthentic and off brand for who I truly am. Again, this is an example of where AI fails to keep up with human connection.

(Feel free to check out any of my posts, by the way, on my Instagram page @robfoglia and my Real Estate YouTube page @realestatereset if you want to see the results of this experiment.)

I hope what I’m detailing today is clicking. This isn’t about AI being amazing or horrendous. Instead, it’s about maintaining control over your destiny. Maintaining control over what it is you want to get out of life. A computer program can’t tell you that. An app can’t tell you what you want or what’s going to provide the most fulfillment for you as you try to get what you want. You’ve got to figure that out.

An app might be able to fill in some minor details. But you’ve gotta put your brain to work.

I guess all of this is my attempt of saying, AI won’t kill your business. While obviously some businesses will naturally die off through technological innovation, the way that the travel agent has gone the way of the dinosaur in a world full of travel sites, this won’t be a direct result of AI. It’ll be a result of non-thinking and replaceable mindsets.

So don’t be lazy out there. Get out there do the hard work and plan. Create. Go out there and be irreplaceable.