I launched AI with Leah on Substack on December 21st, 2025. As of today I have 450 subscribers, 814 followers, 5 paid subscribers, 60 published articles, and $580 in total revenue. I wrote 30 articles in my first 30 days.

Those numbers are small. I’m sharing them anyway because the polished version of early-stage growth that most people publish after they’ve already made it is useless to someone who is actually in the middle of building.

The Part Nobody Sees

There was a stretch in late January where I seriously questioned whether any of this was going to work. I had been publishing daily for over a month. The subscriber count was crawling. I’d look at the numbers every morning and the line was barely moving. 67 new subscribers in all of January. I was putting out some of my best work and the engagement on certain pieces was brutal.

I published “AI Won’t Fix Your Business” and got a 4.9% engagement rate. I wrote “The Dirty Secret Behind Most Influencer Engagement” and got 3.8%. These were articles I was proud of. Articles I thought would land. And the response was basically silence.

That’s the part nobody tells you about building a Substack. The compounding everyone talks about is real, but there’s a long stretch before you can see it where you’re just publishing into what feels like a void and choosing to believe the math will eventually catch up. For WEEKS, that’s all it was. Publishing and believing.

I kept going because I didn’t have a better option. I had committed to this platform publicly. I had 120,000 words of unpublished content that proved I could think but not finish. AI had finally solved the finishing problem. And quitting after 30 days would have confirmed every fear I had about myself as a writer.

And then March happened.

The Growth Curve

December 2025: 28 new subscribers (launched Dec 21st, so really 10 days) January 2026: 67 new subscribers February 2026: 77 new subscribers March 2026: 256 new subscribers April (first 11 days): 25 new subscribers

March was the breakout. 256 new subscribers in a single month after averaging about 70 for the two months before it. A 232% increase month over month. And I can tell you exactly what caused it.

Substack Notes Changed Everything

58% of my total subscribers came from Substack Notes. FIFTY-EIGHT PERCENT.

Not from Pinterest, which has 200,000+ audience and drove 2 direct subscribers. (Two. The number after one. LOL.) Not from Instagram. Not from Facebook (which drove 34, the second highest social source). Notes drove 265 of my 453 tracked subscriber additions.

Read more

I posted that as a note on Substack. 178 likes, 91 comments, and 12 restacks. One person told me I should list the LLM (the AI language model) as the author and put myself in the acknowledgments as “prompt creator.” Another said it’s “false or illegitimate” to use AI for writing. Period.

The objections people have to AI-assisted writing have a lot more to do with ego than they do about writing. The fight is over who gets to call themselves a WRITER.

Every Creative Field Has Had This Fight (And the Gatekeepers Lost Every Time)

Music producers went through this exact thing when digital audio workstations replaced tape recording. “Real musicians record live.” The old guard said Pro Tools was cheating and auto-tune was an insult to talent. The whole idea that anyone could make an album now was treated like a threat to the craft. And then Billie Eilish recorded an album that won five Grammys in her brother’s bedroom using Logic Pro and a USB microphone. Nobody argued about whether the tools were legitimate after that. The industry moved on. The gatekeepers found something else to complain about.

Architects went through it when CAD replaced hand drafting. “Real architects draw by hand.” There were entire professional organizations that resisted the shift. They said the soul of design was in the hand-drawn line, that something essential was lost when you let software do the calculations. Every new building you’ve walked into in the last 20 years was designed in CAD. And the buildings got more ambitious, not less.

This is what happens every single time.

A tool arrives that makes the work faster and more accessible. The people who built their careers doing it the hard way feel the ground shift. They frame the new tool as cheating because that’s easier than admitting the game changed. They gatekeep for as long as they can. And then the tool becomes standard and nobody remembers the argument.

Writing is going through this right now. AI is the tool. The arguments are identical. “Real writers don’t need it.” “You’re not a real author if AI had any part in it.”

The premise of the objections are the same. It’s a different decade and a different tool, but it’s the same motivation and fear of losing relevance underneath. It’s being driven by the same ego.

But the gatekeepers are going to lose this one too.

What the Loudest Critics Are Actually Protecting

Some numbers first so you understand what’s actually happening in the field.

45% of authors surveyed by BookBub (over 1,200 of them) are already using AI in their workflow. Publishers Weekly found a 31% productivity increase among authors who use it. The global market for AI writing tools is projected to hit $47 billion by 2034.

Here’s the biggest and most telling stat of them all. Of the 45% using AI in their writing process, 74% of them don’t tell their readers about it.

Nearly half of working authors are already doing this. Most of them quietly. (Which tells you everything about the climate right now.) And the reason they’re quiet is because admitting you use AI feels like professional suicide because most of the publishing houses and authors associations are taking a hard line on AI generated content right now. In early 2026, Hachette pulled a contracted horror novel over suspected AI use. The Authors Guild launched a “Human Authored” certification program. And virtue-signaling writers are putting anti-AI badges on their profiles like it’s a political campaign.

The writers who are most vocal about AI-assisted writing being illegitimate are almost always writers who built their audience on craft. They spent years developing their skill and earned their position through a process that was slow, difficult, and exclusive to people who had the time, the discipline, and the cognitive wiring to do it the traditional way.

AI changed the economics of that overnight. And that scares them.

A person who thinks beautifully but writes slowly can now produce finished work. Ministry leaders who preach with fire on Sunday but can’t get a blog post written during the week can finally get their ideas into a format that reaches people beyond the room. People who were locked out of the writing world because their brains didn’t work the “right” way can now participate.

That means more competition and more voices in the space that weren’t there before. And if your entire identity is built on being one of the few people who could do this well, that’s a problem for you.

I clearly have strong feelings about this. Wrapping your competitive anxiety in a moral argument about the “sanctity of writing” is ridiculousness. If your writing is good, AI-assisted writers entering the space shouldn’t threaten you. Period. And if it does threaten you, it’s worth asking yourself if your real value was actually the writing itself or just the fact that fewer people could do it and it made you feel special.

The Blank Page Bottleneck

I’ve talked about how my brain works in previous articles, but here’s a recap in case you missed it. I process ideas fast. Frameworks form fully in my head and I can effortlessly explain them out loud and have someone walk away understanding completely. Everything breaks down because my brain is thinking three ideas ahead of the paragraph I’m trying to finish so I get frustrated and then just stop.

I spent YEARS thinking that was a discipline problem. It wasn’t. And once I figured out why, everything changed.

Writing involves two completely different processes. Getting ideas onto a blank page from nothing (generating) and shaping a draft that already exists into something good (editing). My brain is wired for developing ideas quickly and also for editing. I work best when I can explain via talking (typically in an audio to text transcribing tool). Those ideas are usually delivered in a way I would explain it to someone and not necessarily in linear steps or in a format that makes sense simply converted to writing. The beauty of working with AI is that it can take my ideas and thoughts, organize them and get them onto the page for me. Then I can push back, cut, restructure, and refine until it sounds exactly like me. I’m fast at that part and I genuinely enjoy it. Generating the first draft is where my brain stalls, and it always has. The ideas are there. Getting them into linear written form from scratch without help is the part that breaks down.

AI eliminated the blank page. It gives me a draft to edit. And editing is where my actual skill lives. The blank page was just a bottleneck that had nothing to do with whether I had something worth saying or not.

I’m not the only person this is true for. In a world of increasing neurodiversity, the cut and paste playbook no longer works.

The question the anti-AI crowd never answers is this: if the thinking is original, the voice is real, the editing is rigorous, and the final product is indistinguishable from hand-written work, what exactly was lost by not staring at a blank page for four hours first? Nobody has given me a good answer to that.

The closest thing to a real argument I’ve heard is the idea that the struggle of writing IS the thinking. That when you’re fighting to find the right word or restructuring a paragraph for the fourth time or deleting everything because the argument just isn’t working, that friction is what sharpens the ideas. And that if you bypass all of that with AI, the thinking never fully develops.

And look, I take that seriously. And for people who type a topic into ChatGPT and publish whatever comes back, the criticism holds. That work IS shallow because the thinking was shallow.

But in my process, the thinking happens BEFORE the draft. I know what I’m arguing, who I’m talking to, and what I want the reader to understand before Claude writes a word. Then the draft comes back and I fight with it. Sections get restructured. Entire paragraphs get rejected. I rewrite openings three and four times and add the examples and personal details that make the piece mine. The struggle is still there. I’m just struggling with a draft instead of a blank page. The intellectual work is all still happening. The only thing that changed is that the production bottleneck is gone, and the thinking can actually reach the reader now.

If the struggle itself was the point of writing, we’d still be chiseling stone tablets.

For these people, AI is an accessibility tool. Calling it cheating is the same as calling a wheelchair cheating because the person using it can’t walk as fast as you can. And I don’t hear anyone in the anti-AI writing crowd getting riled up over that! LOL.

See for Yourself

This is from this article. The opening of the Blank Page Bottleneck section.

What Claude wrote:

“I’ve talked about my own brain before. I process ideas fast. Frameworks form fully in my head. I can explain them out loud and have someone walk away understanding completely. But sitting down to write them in linear, long-form prose? My brain is three ideas ahead of the paragraph I’m trying to finish before I even get through the first section.

I spent YEARS thinking that was a discipline problem. It wasn’t. My brain just works faster than the traditional writing format allows for. AI solved that by giving me a structured draft I could edit instead of a blank page I had to fill. Editing is a completely different cognitive task than generating from scratch. My brain can edit all day.”

What I published:

“I’ve talked about how my brain works in previous articles, but here’s a recap in case you missed it. I process ideas fast. Frameworks form fully in my head and I can effortlessly explain them out loud and have someone walk away understanding completely. Everything breaks down because my brain is thinking three ideas ahead of the paragraph I’m trying to finish so I get frustrated and then just stop.

I spent YEARS thinking that was a discipline problem. It wasn’t. And once I figured out why, everything changed.

Writing involves two completely different processes. Getting ideas onto a blank page from nothing (generating) and shaping a draft that already exists into something good (editing). My brain is wired for developing ideas quickly and also for editing. I work best when I can explain via talking (typically in an audio to text transcribing tool). Those ideas are usually delivered in a way I would explain it to someone and not necessarily in linear steps or in a format that makes sense simply converted to writing. The beauty of working with AI is that it can take my ideas and thoughts, organize them and get them onto the page for me.”

Claude’s version was competent but generic. And Claude only produced that because I had already loaded it with my voice sample, my guardrails, and detailed context about who I am and how I write. Without all of that, the output would have been generic slop. My version added the frustration (”so I get frustrated and then just stop”), the audio-to-text detail, the distinction between generating and editing as separate processes, and the explanation of HOW AI actually fits into my workflow. That’s what editing a draft looks like.

“Just Make Sure the Author Is the LLM”

Someone in my comments told me that if I write a book using AI, I should list the LLM as the author and put myself in the acknowledgments section as “prompt creator.” Aren’t keyboard warriors fun?

That comment reveals exactly how little most people understand about what AI-assisted writing actually involves.

A “prompt creator” types “write me a blog post about productivity” and copies what comes back. That’s what this person thinks I do. That’s rubbish. Here’s what actually happens when I write.

Before AI writes a single word for me, I’ve already decided what I’m writing about, who it’s for, what problem I’m addressing, what point I’m making, and what I want the reader to walk away thinking. That’s the work, and AI cannot do it for me. If I skip that step, the output is garbage every time. I’ve proven that to myself more times than I want to admit.

Then there’s the system I built. A voice sample I created by recording myself talking for ten minutes and transcribing it so Claude knows how I actually sound. A guardrails document with 98 specific patterns that AI must avoid. Things like mirrored contrast phrases and performed vulnerability, plus dozens of structural and tonal tells I identified by spending months being annoyed by the output and writing down exactly what was wrong with it. On top of that, there are voice rules that define how my content should sound, a personal lexicon of words and phrases I favor and ones I refuse to use, and a set of required patterns that every piece of content has to meet before it publishes. That system took a long time to build and I refine it constantly.

When Claude gives me a first draft, I read every word and push back on phrasing that doesn’t sound like something I’d say out loud. Entire sections get rejected. Then I add the personal stories, the real examples, and the specific details that only exist in my head. The piece goes through a multi-pass editing process that catches AI patterns at the sentence level. And I read the final version out loud to make sure it sounds like me.

I have 98 editorial rules, a voice training system, a multi-pass audit process, and the final creative authority over every word that publishes under my name. The person who left that comment has a snarky one-liner and zero understanding of the process they’re criticizing.

The Part I Don’t Talk About Enough

My process isn’t perfect. If I only talk about the wins, I’m doing the same thing the AI slop creators do, just from the other direction.

Early on, before the guardrails were tight, I published pieces that had AI fingerprints I didn’t catch. Phrases that were too polished, structures that were too symmetrical. I look back at some of those early articles and I can see it. A reader who knew what to look for could see it too.

That’s actually why the guardrails document exists. Every pattern in that document started as a mistake I made. Something Claude produced that I let through because I was tired, or moving too fast, or hadn’t trained my eye to catch it yet. The 98 patterns didn’t appear overnight. They were built from failure, one cringe at a time. (And there were a LOT of cringes.)

If you’re going to use AI to write, you WILL publish things you wish you hadn’t. You’ll miss patterns. You’ll let something through that doesn’t sound like you and someone will notice. The question is whether you learn from it and tighten your system or just keep pretending the raw output is fine.

I tightened. And I keep tightening. That’s the goal.

What I’m Doing Next

I’m writing a book right now using this exact process. Same Claude projects, same guardrails and voice training, same editorial standards I use for every Substack article. And I’m documenting the whole thing as I go.

I’m putting together a working experience where you write your own book alongside me, using my guardrails and my process, and come out the other side with real progress on your manuscript. More details on this are coming soon.

If that interests you, make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it or send me a DM and let me know you are interested.

Write well. Be honest about how you do it. And stop letting people who’ve never examined their own process tell you yours doesn’t count.

I’ve written about AI-assisted writing before. If you missed those articles:

What AI-Assisted Writing Actually Is (And Why the Debate Around It Is Missing the Point)

I Have Hundreds of Thousands of Words Written and Nothing to Show for It (Until AI)

If you want the system behind everything I write, the AI Writing Guardrails is the exact framework. 98 patterns to avoid, voice rules, a guided builder for creating your own custom rules, and a 5-pass editing process.

Because “make it sound more human” was never going to work.

Self-Guided or Custom Build options available.

guardrails.aiwithleah.com/info

Happy Easter.

All of it, the blog, the podcasts, the products, the systems, started with something dying first.

The Life That Had to End

I ran a multiple seven-figure online coaching business in the wealth consciousness space. From the outside it looked like everything was working. Revenue was high, programs were selling out, and the audience kept growing. I was living the “dream” life, living in a multi-million dollar home on the beach in Bali. I had the clothes, the jewelry, the glam team. I was also deep in the New Age and the occult, operating in frameworks I believed were helping people create financial breakthroughs. And they were, in the short term.

But I was miserable. My marriage was degrading. My children were being raised by nannies. I had gained over forty pounds and was living in chronic pain. I was chasing the next $100,000 month and the next sold-out program while my body and my family were breaking down around me.

I didn’t realize at the time that for all the power and influence I was gaining while operating in the kingdom of darkness, there was a price being paid. That price was my health, my marriage, my presence with my children, and ultimately my own soul.

By the summer of 2023, everything was falling apart. I was separated from my husband, and I had been away from my children for five months in another country chasing the next million dollar business idea. I had chronic inflammation, thyroid disease, and migraines that lasted five to seven days. I remember sitting in an apartment in Porto, Portugal. I had laid out large pieces of white paper on the floor because I like to whiteboard and map things out. I wrote down everything happening in my business, everything happening in my life, all the programs I was preparing to launch, the new business. And as I looked at it, I realized I didn’t want to do any of it.

I fell to my knees and cried out to God. I told Him I didn’t know what I was doing. I told Him I needed help. I surrendered all of it. Even my children, if that was truly what was best for them.

That was the day my old life died.

What Came After

The next day I woke up and heard from the Lord clearly for the first time in a long time. He told me to go carnivore, to completely change my diet, and to stop drinking alcohol entirely. I did. Within two weeks, about seventy-five percent of my pain was gone. The inflammation was leaving my body and my brain. With that physical clarity came spiritual clarity I hadn’t experienced in years.

Over the next year I began reading the Bible seriously. I reconciled my marriage. I moved back in with my children. I walked away from my online coaching business completely because I could no longer participate in New Thought or New Age frameworks. The Lord taught me about provision (I don’t use the word abundance anymore because it belongs to a worldview I left behind). The difference matters.

I shifted into network and affiliate marketing, a model I had always respected because it allowed me to help people build income without spiritual compromise. After another year, I finally gave my life to Jesus. I had resisted Him for a long time, and the moment I stopped, everything changed.

The Resurrection Pattern

I’m telling you this on Easter because the pattern of my life mirrors the pattern we celebrate today. Something had to die for something new to live. The old business, the old frameworks, all of it had to go into the ground.

What came out of that death is everything I’m building now. Especially today, I want you to see what that looks like.

What Grew From the Ashes

The coaching business that died? That’s where AI with Leah came from. I spent years unable to finish long-form content. 120,000 words across two unpublished books sitting in a drawer. God kept those New Age manuscripts from ever reaching the world (thank God), and then gave me a tool that matched how my brain actually works. 50+ articles published in 90 days. A Pinterest account at 200,000 audience. Over 430 Substack subscribers. A book on AI for believers currently being written. All of it built with AI systems, one VA, and a laptop in Bali. After years of finishing nothing, I have more published work than I know what to do with.

The Cul✞ure Cast grew directly out of the years I spent in deception. When you’ve lived inside a false system and watched it operate from the inside, you learn to recognize the mechanisms. Cultural analysis grounded in Scripture, naming what’s actually happening behind the headlines. I couldn’t do that show if I hadn’t lived in the dark first.

My husband came to Christ a few months after I did and launched his own business, Joyful Jesus Apparel (shameless plug because I’m so proud of him)!

https://joyfuljesus.life/

We’re building together now. That floor in Portugal where I surrendered my marriage to God didn’t just save the relationship. It produced a family operating in the same Kingdom for the first time.

And then there’s Faith on the Fringe, which came from the two years I’ve spent studying Scripture obsessively.

Faith on the Fringe

I’m co-hosting this with Malaine Lea Butler and we launch April 27th with four episodes dropping on day one.

The tagline is “Spirit-Filled. Bible-Obsessed. Slightly Unhinged.” Slightly unhinged because we’re going into the parts of Scripture that most churches won’t touch. The Divine Council. Genesis 6. The Nephilim, the Watchers, fallen angels, giants. Pre-flood history. Spiritual warfare with real scriptural backing. Fulfilled eschatology. All of it examined through a Kingdom-forward lens rooted in the finished work of Christ and the authority of believers. We explicitly reject fear-based dispensationalism and rapture theology.

This space in podcasting is overwhelmingly male-dominated. Shows I love and respect like Blurry Creatures and Into the Supernatural are doing incredible work, but there is no female co-hosted show going this deep into supernatural biblical theology with this level of scriptural grounding. Malaine and I looked at that gap and decided to fill it. We bring deep theological roots, humor, and the kind of long-form conversations (one to two hours, with guests) that make you want to open your Bible and start digging. Serious scholarship with real scriptural grounding, and we’re having fun doing it.

It will be available everywhere podcasts are streamed and on YouTube on April 27th. We are also launching a Substack alongside it for deeper conversations and community interaction. I’ll share more about this as we get closer.

What’s Still Coming to Life

The resurrection pattern doesn’t stop. It keeps producing.

I’m working on a series of historical biblical fiction books with two of my besties in Christ. It’s called House of Eden. Think viral BookTok fantasy meets the Bible. Supernatural worldview, and real scriptural foundation, written to bring people to Jesus through story. I am SO excited about this project. It’s a collaboration that feels like exactly the kind of thing God puts together when you stop trying to plan everything yourself.

The AI book is being written. The fiction series is taking shape. Faith on the Fringe launches in three weeks. My husband is building Joyful Jesus Apparel. And I’m answering new assignments to reach people in ways I couldn’t have imagined three years ago when I was on that floor in Portugal.

The resurrection pattern is how God actually works, not just on Easter but in the lives of people who surrender to Him. He lets the old thing die completely and builds something entirely new from the foundation up. And He keeps building.

Three years ago I was a miserable, sick, absent mother running a business built on frameworks from the wrong Kingdom. My family is together now, my marriage is restored, and everything I’m building serves the same mission: stewarding truth, protecting identity, and equipping people with tools and theology that produce real fruit.

I didn’t plan any of this. I surrendered and then I obeyed, one step at a time.

Happy Easter. He is risen. And He’s still making dead things come back to life.

March 2026 was the month AI stopped being experimental. Four things happened in the span of 30 days that, taken together, signal a permanent shift in how this technology affects your business and your daily life.

The Layoffs Are Real and They’re Explicitly About AI

In late February, Block (founded by Jack Dorsey, the guy who created Twitter) cut roughly 4,000 employees, nearly 40% of its workforce. Dorsey was blunt about why. He said the growing capability of AI tools to perform a wider range of tasks made the cuts necessary. That’s a CEO saying AI can do what these people were doing and he doesn’t need them anymore.

On March 11, Atlassian (the company behind Jira and Confluence, project management tools used across the tech industry) cut 1,600 employees in a single morning. Over 900 of those cuts came from research and development. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said the layoffs were necessary to “self-fund further investment in AI.” Self-fund. That means they’re firing people to pay for the GPUs (the specialized chips that power AI) and data centers required to compete.

Meta cut hundreds more around the same time. Same story. Redirect the money into AI.

Companies explicitly cited AI and automation as the reason for over 9,200 tech layoffs in Q1 2026. That number jumped from less than 8% in 2025 to over 20% this quarter. The stock prices of these companies went UP after the announcements. The market is REWARDING companies for cutting humans and investing in AI.

I’m living this right now. I run my entire business with one VA working 20 hours a week and AI systems handling the rest. The workload I carry today would have required a full team two years ago, and now it runs on systems, clear thinking, and AI that I’ve trained to work the way I need it to.

OpenAI Killed Sora and a $1 Billion Disney Deal Died With It

On March 24, OpenAI shut down Sora, its AI video generation tool. Six months after launching it to the public, they pulled the plug.

The Wall Street Journal investigation told the real story. Sora was burning through roughly $1 million every day in compute costs (some analysts estimated the peak was significantly higher). Total lifetime revenue from the app was $2.1 million. The math was never going to work. User counts peaked at about a million and then collapsed to under 500,000. Downloads dropped 66% between November and February.

Disney had committed $1 billion to a partnership built around Sora. They found out it was being shut down less than an hour before the public announcement. One hour. The deal died immediately. No money had changed hands. (Imagine being Disney and finding out your billion-dollar AI partnership is dead via a press release you didn’t know was coming.)

I’d already moved away from Sora months ago because the output was inconsistent and there are much better tools available. I use Veo 3.1 and Grok Imagine for my video content now. So the shutdown didn’t affect my workflow at all. I think it was actually a smart move by OpenAI. Their applications chief told employees they “cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” and she was right. OpenAI was pouring resources into a video toy that couldn’t pay for itself while Anthropic was quietly winning enterprise customers and developers with Claude.

But most creators and businesses weren’t paying that kind of attention. They were planning workflows, content strategies, and even business models around Sora. And it vanished overnight.

I’ve seen this pattern before in online business. The platform you build on is the platform that controls your future. The lesson from Sora is the same lesson I learned years ago: if a tool can’t sustain itself financially, it will disappear. Build on tools that have actual revenue models and staying power, because the ones that can’t pay for themselves won’t be here next year.

Social Media Addiction Just Became a Legal Liability

Two verdicts landed in the same week in March, and they may reshape how every content creator and business owner uses social media.

If you want to know more and what to do about it… plus get access to the full AI in Action LIVE recordings (7 days of structured AI training) and the weekly AI with Leah: Unfiltered podcast become a paid subscriber!

Read more

One of the most common reasons people give me for not using AI is privacy. They don’t want to “give their data away” and they don’t trust the companies handling it.

So first let me just say that I get it and those concerns are valid. But here’s what really needs to be said: that ship sailed a long time ago. Years ago. Possibly decades.

If you’ve EVER typed your Social Security number into a website or applied for a credit card online, your data left your hands a long time ago. If you carry a smartphone right now, it’s still leaving. And the idea that avoiding AI is somehow protecting you is one of the biggest misconceptions keeping people stuck right now.

The Reality Nobody Wants to Sit With

There are over 4,000 data brokerage companies operating worldwide. It’s an industry worth over $250 billion and their entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to other companies.

One company alone, Acxiom (now LiveRamp), holds profiles on 2.5 billion people with up to 11,000 data points per person. Think about those numbers for a second. That’s insane right? Those data points include name, address, income range, political leanings, health conditions, what you buy and how often. They know your family members and your estimated net worth. And all of it is sitting in a database you’ve never seen, being sold to companies you’ve never heard of.

That’s ONE company out of thousands.

98% of Americans have personal data exposed by at least 35 different data brokers. The average person (aka YOU) has around 300 pieces of information publicly accessible right now and available for purchase or sometimes for free, on sites most people don’t even know exist.

Your Phone

A Vanderbilt University study found that a stationary Android phone with only Chrome running in the background sent location data to Google 340 times in a single day. That’s a phone just sitting on your nightstand doing nothing, and it’s STILL pinging your location every few minutes.

When they tested a phone during normal daily use, that number jumped to 450 location transmissions per day (roughly ninety per hour). And a New York Times investigation found that some apps logged a user’s location up to 14,000 times in a single day.

Your phone knows where you sleep and where you work. It knows what time you leave in the morning, what route you take, and whether you stopped at the gym or skipped it. It tracked the doctor you visited last Tuesday and how long you were in the office. Your phone knows MORE about your daily life than most of the people in it (and that’s not an exaggeration).

82% of iOS apps collect private user data. The location data industry alone is a $12 billion market. Companies openly advertise that they’ve collected location data from 25% of all US adults. And 62% of Americans believe it is straight up impossible to go through daily life without companies collecting their data.

They’re right. It is.

The Part People Miss About AI Specifically

When someone tells me they won’t use AI because of data privacy, I know they haven’t really thought it through or they just don’t have the information. Because I know they will type their credit card number into an online store, share their location with a food delivery app, give their Social Security number to a tax filing website, let their phone track them 450 times a day, and use social media platforms that literally sell their behavioral data to advertisers. But typing a business question into ChatGPT? That’s where they draw the line.

I use AI every single day knowing everything I just told you about data collection. I paste business strategy into Claude, draft content, plan launches, build systems. I do it with my training toggles turned off, my settings managed, and my eyes wide open. Because I did the math. The data was already out there. The only thing I’d gain by avoiding AI is falling behind.

For a lot of people, “privacy” is not actually the issue. It’s the reason they give, and it sounds responsible and informed. Nobody argues with someone who says they’re concerned about data privacy. But underneath that concern, the real thing happening is fear. Fear of the technology itself or fear of finding out how far behind they already are. And privacy becomes the permission slip to not engage, because it feels safe and it sounds smart.

I can’t even count how many times I’ve had this exact conversation. Someone tells me they’re worried about their data. I ask what phone they use. iPhone. Do they have location services on? Yes. Do they use social media? Yes. Have they ever filed taxes online? Obviously. So I ask, genuinely, what specifically about AI feels like the bigger risk? Because faced with all of that they don’t actually have an answer. Because it was never actually about the data.

The idea that AI is the thing putting your privacy at risk is like worrying about someone reading your diary after you’ve already published it on Substack.

So What Do You Actually Do?

The next part is for you if you feel a bit paralyzed but you know AI matters and that you need to learn it.

Go into ChatGPT. Settings, Data Controls, turn off “Improve the model for everyone.” In Claude, find “Help improve Claude” and toggle it off. In Gemini, look for “Gemini Apps Activity.” Takes about two minutes across all three. Do it once and move on.

Don’t paste client Social Security numbers or bank account details into AI prompts. That’s common sense, the same common sense you’d apply to any tool. And here’s the thing, your Social Security number is actually readily available to anyone that really wants it, but I wouldn’t be typing it online into ANY website if you are really concerned about data protection.

If you run a business, consider the paid or enterprise tiers. They have stronger data governance controls and typically don’t use your inputs for training. Frequently review what your AI tools have stored in their memory settings and clean out anything you don’t want there.

Those are smart, practical steps that take a few minutes. Do them and then get to work.

Because the cost of ignoring AI is compounding. The person next to you who started learning six months ago is producing in two hours what takes you eight. And that gap doesn’t stay the same. It gets wider every single month.

The people who will look back on this time and regret something? It won’t be that they used AI. It’ll be the months they spent deciding whether or not to start.

Two weeks ago, the internet decided Benjamin Netanyahu was dead.

It started during the second week of the Iran war. Iran claimed its missiles had struck Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem. An AI-generated image circulated showing a man resembling the prime minister lying injured on rubble. Claims spread that his home had been bombed and his brother killed. Then Netanyahu went quiet. For days, no video appeared on his official channels. Only text statements. Tasnim News Agency, run by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps built their case on the gaps: no video for days, tightened security around his residence, and diplomatic visits that got quietly postponed. The conclusion was obvious (to the internet, at least): he was dead.

When Netanyahu finally resurfaced in a televised address on March 15, it should have ended the speculation. Instead, it made everything worse. A freeze-frame from the video appeared to show six fingers on his right hand, which is a common tell of an AI-generated video. Within hours, the theory shifted: Israel was faking his appearances using deepfakes.

He posted a video of himself getting coffee at a cafe in Jerusalem, joking about the rumors, spreading both hands to show five fingers on each. People analyzed the coffee level in his cup, scrutinized his ring, and claimed the receipt in the video was dated 2024. Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok was asked whether the video was real and declared it “100% deepfake,” calling it “a classic example of fake image manipulation.”

The video was real. A deepfake detection company GetReal Security, co-founded by UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid, performed a multimodal analysis of the audio, video, and facial and vocal biometrics. They found no signs of synthetic content or manipulation. The cafe confirmed he was there and the receipt people claimed was from 2024 simply looked that way in low-quality footage.

A real video of a living person, verified by the cafe’s own security cameras, was declared fake by the AI tool built to catch fakes. And millions of people had already made up their minds based on screenshots and speculation before anyone verified anything. This is the world we are currently living in.

The line between real and fabricated has collapsed. And nobody, not even the AI tools built to police that line, can reliably tell you what you’re looking at. It’s gotten insane out there.

Your Eyes Are No Longer Enough

This isn’t a political story.

What your eyes see on a screen can no longer be trusted as evidence of reality.

We have spent our entire lives operating on the assumption that video is proof. That if you watch someone say something on camera, they said it. That assumption is gone.

Pro-regime accounts have circulated AI-generated clips showing missile strikes flattening cities that never happened. People are cloning synthetic voices from a few minutes of audio sample. Entire social media personas are being constructed around people who don’t exist, with AI-generated faces, fabricated backstories, and real followings. One disinformation network generated material that received 145 million views in just two weeks, and almost all of it fabricated.

And the detection tools? The same AI chatbot that called Netanyahu’s real video “100% deepfake” turned around and told users that obviously fake footage of missile strikes was real. It got it wrong both ways, on the same platform, in the same week.

It Gets Me Too

I get caught ALL the time.

I’ve been studying AI obsessively for three years, using it every day in my business and teaching other people how to use it. And I still find myself looking at something online and genuinely not knowing if it’s real.

My actual process at this point looks like this: I see something that seems off, or seems too perfect, or triggers a reaction that feels engineered. I screenshot it and bring it to Claude with the question, “Is this real? Can you verify this?” Sometimes that works and Claude can identify the source, check the claim, and point me toward the original.

And sometimes it can’t and the AI doesn’t know either, or the tools flat out contradict each other (exactly like Grok calling a verified real video “100% deepfake”). So then I send it to my husband. He has great discernment and a completely different lens than I do, which means he catches things I miss.

When that’s still not enough, when my eyes can’t tell me and the tools can’t tell me and the people I trust are unsure, it goes to the Holy Spirit. For real. That is my actual workflow. I start with what I can see, move to the tools, bring in the people I trust, and when all of that fails (which it does more often than people realize), I go to the one source of discernment that doesn’t depend on any of it.

I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to think the answer is just “get better at spotting fakes.” I’m good at spotting fakes and I still miss them.

The Content We’re Creating

There’s another side of this that most people skip entirely. We talk about being deceived BY AI content, but almost nobody is asking the harder question: what about the content we’re putting out ourselves? If you’re using AI to write your posts, script your videos, or draft your emails, there’s a version of the same problem happening in your own workflow. Did you actually think it through, or did you just accept what the machine generated because it sounded good and credible and close enough?

I’ve had to confront this in my own work. There are times when AI produces something so clean that I almost let it go. It sounds smart and credible but when I read it again, I realize it isn’t really saying anything at all. People are putting out AI-generated content every day and passing it off as their own thinking. Their audience trusts them and has no idea the person behind it isn’t really behind it anymore.

Proverbs puts it plainly: “The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps.” That applies to what we consume AND what we create. Whether it’s a deepfake video you’re about to repost or a draft AI just wrote for you that you’re about to put your name on.

Discernment Is Older Than AI

The secular approach to this problem has value. Media literacy and fact-checking sites and detection software all have a place.

But they’re reactive. They respond to deception after it’s been created.

Discernment works differently. Discernment is a posture you carry into everything you consume and create. It’s the habit of testing what you encounter BEFORE you accept it.

John wrote to the early church: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.” That instruction wasn’t about AI. But the principle underneath it is exactly what this moment demands. Test what you’re seeing, reading, or listening to and don’t assume something is true because it looks credible or sounds familiar.

The world has always been full of things that sound true and aren’t. False prophets in the first century didn’t have deepfake software, but they did have charisma, confidence, and proximity to truth. They sounded close enough to the truth that people followed them. The false prophets of today still have charisma, confidence, and proximity to truth but they are more dangerous because AI and technology have also given them the tools to become viral and reach millions of people.

Living in It

I’m not going to hand you a five-step framework for spotting deepfakes. Anything I gave you today would be outdated in six months.

I’ve slowed my consumption waaaaaay down. Not because I’m disciplined (LOL) but because I’ve been burned enough times to know that when something provokes a strong emotional reaction, that’s exactly when I’m most likely to get fooled. The Netanyahu story spread as fast as it did because it was emotionally charged and arrived during a war. People reacted before they verified. I’ve caught myself doing the same thing, and the only thing that stopped me was the two-second pause where I thought, “Wait. Let me check this first.”

That pause is everything. And it’s not a sophisticated skill...just the willingness to not react IMMEDIATELY.

I’ve also learned that verification isn’t final. I go to the original source and look for statements on actual platforms, verified accounts, and official websites. If something only exists as a clip being shared out of context, I treat it as suspect. But I also know my verification tools can be wrong. So even after I check, I hold it loosely. That’s a weird place to live, but it’s the honest one.

And I protect my own output. Every piece of content I create with AI goes through my own review. Not just for accuracy, but for the deeper question: “Is this actually what I think, or is this just what sounded good?” My name goes on it and my credibility is attached to it, so that part doesn’t get delegated.

What Still Works

What AI cannot do is give you the ability to recognize what’s true. That comes from somewhere else entirely.

The people who have spent years in Scripture, learning to test what they hear against what God has actually said, have been training for exactly this moment without knowing it. They’ve been practicing a discipline that’s thousands of years old, and it’s never been more relevant than it is right now.

And that’s the good news in all of this. You don’t need a degree in computer science or a subscription to every detection tool on the market. You need the willingness to slow down, check what you’re seeing before you spread it, and protect the integrity of what you put out into the world. When everything else fails, go to God. He’s been the source of discernment long before any of this technology existed, and He’s not going anywhere.

I intend to keep practicing that. Imperfectly. Every day. I’d love for you to join me.

If this kind of thinking matters to you, subscribe. I write about AI, discernment, and building with integrity twice a week.

Subscribe now

I launched my Pinterest account and my Substack on December 21st, 2025. As of today, just over 90 days later, here are the numbers:

343,700 impressions. 14,500 engagements. 3,300 saves. 186,600 total audience. 10,700 engaged audience. 141 outbound clicks. And 419 Substack subscribers being fed partly by this pipeline.

(While writing this article I had to update these numbers four times because they kept growing by significant amounts day to day. That’s what compounding on Pinterest looks like in real time.)

The whole point of this Pinterest account is to drive people here to Substack. Every pin, every board, every keyword is designed to bring the right audience to these articles, to my digital products, to my digital products and courses, and eventually to AI consulting. Pinterest is the distribution engine. Substack is the destination. They work as an ecosystem, and the strategy I’m about to share is how I connected them.

I built the entire strategy with AI. The keyword research, the pin descriptions, the content themes, the board structure, the CTA rotation, and the daily pin scheduling system. I create all the content here in Claude and my VA schedules and publishes it using a strategy document I created. I’m currently working on automating the content creation piece through Claude Cowork, which will make the whole pipeline even faster.

About 30 days in, one of my video pins hit 60,000 impressions. It’s now sitting at 131,700. Shortly after that, one of my authority pins went viral (a simple quote graphic with no link) it now sits at 83,500 impressions. Those two pins put my account on the map. And the thing is, I almost changed the strategy before they hit. Pinterest doesn’t work like other social media. There’s no instant gratification. You post and wait and check analytics and wonder if any of it is working... for weeks. I’m used to seeing results fast. Sitting in a 90-day plan and trusting the process when nothing was visibly moving yet was one of the hardest parts of this whole build.

I’ve been promising this kind of behind-the-scenes content to my paid subscribers, so let’s get into it.

How This Started

I didn’t come to Pinterest with a background in Pinterest marketing. I came to it because I needed a distribution channel for my Substack content that wasn’t dependent on social media algorithms I don’t control. Content on Facebook and Instagram dies in 24 hours. Pinterest is a search engine where pins live for months, sometimes years, and keep compounding the whole time.

I spent about a week researching Pinterest strategy before I posted anything. I used PinClicks for keyword validation, Claude for strategy development and content creation, Gemini for research, Grok for additional data points, and Brave Search to cross-reference what I was finding. I also studied Simple Pin Media and Tailwind’s published research on what works in 2026.

The research phase was critical. Most people skip it and go straight to posting. And that’s why most Pinterest accounts don’t grow.

The Core Formula

Pinterest indexes keywords it recognizes. “Business,” “personal branding,” “leadership,” “make money online,” and “content creation” all have massive search volume on Pinterest. Most people in the AI space don’t realize that AI-specific terms have ZERO search volume on Pinterest. “AI income,” “AI business automation,” “ethical AI,” “AI business strategy,” none of these register in Pinterest’s search index.

So if I built my Pinterest strategy around AI keywords, nobody would ever find my content. The algorithm would have nothing to index.

The formula I developed solves this: Pinterest keyword + AI differentiator = search volume + brand positioning.

A pin titled “Build Your Personal Brand Using AI” indexes for “personal branding” at 76,000 monthly searches. The algorithm distributes it because it recognizes the keyword, and the person scrolling the feed immediately sees that this is AI-focused content. One title serves both.

I validated every keyword through PinClicks with real Pinterest monthly search volume data before I used it. I built a three-tier keyword bank. The heavy hitters (10,000+ monthly volume) like “leadership” at 99,000 searches, “personal branding” at 76,000, and “online business ideas” at 57,000 get front-loaded across the most pins. Mid-range keywords between 2,000 and 10,000 like “small business tips” and “content creation ideas” rotate in titles and descriptions. And a third tier of niche keywords under 2,000 provides supporting depth.

Every keyword in my bank was validated with real data. If PinClicks can’t confirm the volume, the keyword doesn’t go in the bank.

Read more

Somebody is going to take your money this year for an AI course. The question is whether what they teach you will be worth it.

The AI education space right now is flooded. Everyone with a ChatGPT subscription and a Canva template is selling a course, a masterclass, a coaching program, or a “system” that promises to teach you how to make money with AI. Most of them are recycled free content repackaged with a price tag and a countdown timer.

I’ve spent a lot of money on AI education and evaluated dozens of offers. And I’ve watched people in my audience buy courses that taught them nothing they couldn’t have learned from a YouTube video. The reality is that difference between a good AI course and a waste of money is not always obvious from the sales page.

I’ve been in two AI mentorships over the last year. The hard truth is that everything I learned in both of them I could have learned for free on YouTube. The people running them did a good job of marketing and I liked them and their personalities. But when it came down to brass tacks, the substance wasn’t there. I stayed in one for a full year hoping it would get better, but replays didn’t get posted in a timely manner and I ended up paying a lot of money for content I barely used. The other one I clocked sooner and exited as soon as I realized it was overhyped and underdelivered.

Having said that, I’ve also purchased some $47 and $97 offers that were easily worth 10x what I paid for them. So the price tag alone tells you nothing. The filters I’m about to share with you are what I wish I’d had before I spent that money.

These experiences are also why I’m committed to creating and promoting offers that truly deliver value. I already publish two articles a week here for free. And for my paid subscribers, I’m making the full recordings from my 7-day AI in Action LIVE training available inside Substack. Seven days of structured AI training as part of your subscription.

But even with my own offers, I’d tell you the same thing. Before you hand over money to anyone for AI education, including me, run it through these filters.

Are They Actually Using AI in Their Own Business?

This sounds obvious but it eliminates about half the field immediately. A lot of AI educators are teaching AI as a topic. They’ve researched it, they understand the concepts, and they can explain the tools clearly. But they’re not running a business on AI systems. They’re not dealing with the reality of what happens when AI gets it wrong on a Tuesday night when you’re tired and the content needs to go out tomorrow. If their entire presence is AI education content and nothing else, ask yourself what they’re actually building with AI besides the course they’re selling you.

What Do They Say When AI Falls Short?

This is the fastest filter I know.

I produce rubbish drafts from Claude on a regular basis. Even with 98 documented guardrails loaded into every project. I talk about it publicly because pretending AI works perfectly would be a lie. If all you’re seeing from an educator is clean demos and smooth workflows, they’re hiding the messy parts to keep you buying.

The consequence of learning from someone who hides the limitations is that you have NO framework for what to do when AI gives you something wrong. And it will. You’ll publish content with errors, miss patterns that make your writing sound generic, or trust an output that damages your credibility. The educators who are honest about the real limitations of AI and who show you their own failures are the ones preparing you to handle yours.

The Framework Test

Prompt packs are everywhere. “100 ChatGPT Prompts for Your Business.” “The Ultimate AI Prompt Library.” These sell well because they feel actionable. You pay, you get a list, and you feel like you have something concrete. (You don’t, but it feels that way for about a week.)

The problem is that prompts without a system or a framework underneath them are like recipes without understanding how to use a knife or a stove. You end up buying the next prompt pack instead of understanding how to think about AI and build your own approach.

The courses worth paying for teach you how to build your own systems. That’s what separates education from a subscription to someone else’s shortcuts.

Are They Teaching Ethics or Ignoring Them?

AI raises real ethical questions. About authorship, about transparency, and about what should be automated and what should stay human.

If an AI educator never mentions ethics, boundaries, or discernment around responsible use, they’re giving you half the picture. And the missing half is the part that protects your credibility. That catches up with people eventually, usually in the form of lost trust, embarrassing corrections, or an audience that quietly stops engaging because something feels off about the content.

Follow the Money

I’m going to spend some time on this because I’ve been in business for over 30 years and online business since 2016. I know how incentive structures shape what people sell you.

When the course IS the business, the entire operation is built around launching and selling that course. The landing page will be immaculate and the email sequence will be dialed in. Testimonials curated, urgency manufactured (countdown timers, limited spots, bonuses expiring). And the actual content inside the course doesn’t have to be good for the business to make money. The revenue comes from getting you to buy. Once you’ve paid, the transaction is done whether the course delivers or not.

I’ve seen this model up close. I ran a multiple seven-figure coaching business. I know exactly how these launches work because I built them. The marketing machine can be so polished that the buyer assumes the product must be equally polished. That assumption is what the launch model is designed to create.

The other model looks different. Some AI educators make money USING AI in their actual business, and the education is an extension of what they do every day. The course exists because the system works and they’re teaching what they built. If their system doesn’t work, their business doesn’t work. They have skin in the game beyond the sale and that changes what you get.

I want to be fair here. Some course-first businesses are genuinely excellent. The model alone doesn’t make the education bad. But it does mean you need to look harder at what’s inside before you assume the sales experience reflects the learning experience. The shinier the launch, the more carefully I examine the curriculum.

How I Vetted AI Revolution Secrets (And Why It Passed)

I don’t put my name behind things lightly. AI Revolution Secrets by Miguel Carrasco is the one AI course I recommend, and I want to show you exactly why by walking through my own vetting process.

Filter 1: Is he actually using AI in his own business?

Miguel built and operates Captivation Hub, an all-in-one AI-integrated software solution for business operations that I’ve been using for three years. He also runs a company that integrates AI into HVAC businesses, and has several other ventures that all use AI as core infrastructure. He created AI Revolution Secrets to share how he uses AI to make money across all of his businesses. He teaches from what he built and continues to operate daily. When I looked at his content across platforms, I could see the systems in action.

He’s also offering a limited-time opportunity to white label his AI software, which is something nobody else in the AI education space is doing. That alone tells you how much he’s invested in the ecosystem beyond just selling a course.

Filter 2: Does he talk about limitations?

Yes. The training covers what AI can and can’t do. He doesn’t frame AI as a magic solution that runs itself. The 10-day micro-business blueprint is structured around implementation, which means you’re dealing with the real friction of building something from scratch.

Filter 3: Framework or prompts?

The course teaches AI cloning, seven income streams, and a complete micro-business system. These are frameworks you adapt to your situation. He’s not handing you a list of prompts and sending you on your way. The structure is designed to build capability. I could see that from the webinar alone before I ever paid for anything.

Filter 4: Does he address ethics?

The training teaches responsible use alongside the tactical implementation. This was important to me. I won’t recommend someone who teaches AI without addressing what it should and shouldn’t touch. Miguel’s approach includes human oversight and quality control at every stage of the system he teaches.

Filter 5: Where does the money come from?

This is where it got interesting for me. Miguel’s revenue doesn’t come exclusively from selling the course. He sells Captivation Genius, his AI software, alongside AI Revolution Secrets. So the success of the software IS dependent on how good the course is. If the training doesn’t deliver, people don’t use the software. If they don’t use the software, that revenue disappears. His business model forces the course to be good. That’s the kind of incentive structure I trust.

The one thing that surprised me:

The webinar is free. I went in expecting a pitch disguised as education (that’s how most webinars work). What I got was actual teaching. Substantive, specific, and useful even if you never bought the course. Miguel gives you enough to start building before you ever spend a dollar. That’s rare.

That was the moment I decided to put my name on it.

Register for the free AI Revolution Secrets webinar

What I’d Tell You Over Coffee

I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve bought courses that were complete trash. I’ve also built and sold courses that generated millions. I know what a launch machine looks like from the inside.

The filters in this article exist because I’ve been burned and because I’ve watched other people get burned. AI education is going to be a massive industry for the next several years and most of what gets sold will not be worth the price. That’s just the reality of any gold rush.

Protect your money and your time. And protect your trust, because once your audience figures out you learned from someone careless, that reflects on you.

If you’re a paid subscriber, the full AI in Action LIVE recordings (all 7 days) are available inside your subscription. If you’re not subscribed yet, that alone is worth it.

Paid subscribers also get access to AI with Leah: Unfiltered, a weekly podcast where I go deeper on the topics I write about here.

Subscribe now

And if you’re ready to learn AI from someone who passes every filter on this list, register for the next AI Revolution Secrets webinar. It’s free and you can evaluate the teaching before you spend a dollar.

Register for the free AI Revolution Secrets webinar

I have over 120,000 words written across two books I never published. My brain processes things too fast and has a hard time sitting down to focus long enough to get anything into a finished format. I’ve had this problem my entire life. Ideas, frameworks, content, all of it lives in my head fully formed. Getting it onto a page in an organized, publishable way? That’s where it all falls apart.

What That Actually Cost Me (And What It Didn’t)

When I was in New Age I had a wealth consciousness framework that I just knew was going to change the world. People paid me a lot of money to walk them through it and it genuinely worked. So many of my client’s financial lives were changed. I tried to write it into a book three separate times. I ended up with chapters upon chapters of writing but no finished product.

The cost was years of thinking I could produce something valuable and watching myself fail to do it over and over. Feeling like I wasn’t disciplined enough or that I “just wasn’t a writer”.

But here’s the thing... God actually works in the most mysterious and wonderful ways. Today I’m actually so happy that work was never published. I was deep in New Age and the occult at the time. The frameworks were built on a worldview I’ve since walked away from completely. If those books had been published, I’d be spending my energy right now trying to walk them back. And even though it may have given people short-term success, I know now that the long-term consequences of favor and benefit received from the wrong Kingdom is a price that NOBODY wants to pay.

So the years of not finishing? Looking back, that was divine design. God kept those drafts in the drawer for a reason. And the experience of NOT being able to put work out, of understanding intimately why it didn’t happen, is exactly what’s helping me bring the books I’m working on now to fruition. I know the obstacle now, and I know exactly how to get around it. And this time the content is anchored in truth.

Why This Happens

Ideas come fast. Connections form constantly. I can see a framework in my head, explain it out loud to someone in ten minutes, and have them walk away understanding it completely. But the second I sit down to write it in long form, something breaks. My brain is already three ideas ahead of the paragraph I’m trying to finish. I lose patience with the slow, linear process of building an argument sentence by sentence when the whole thing already exists in my head fully formed.

I spent years thinking this was a discipline issue. That I just needed to try harder, sit longer, and force myself through the discomfort of finishing. I bought courses on writing. I tried outlines, timers, and accountability. None of it worked. The methods weren’t bad. My brain just processes information faster than the traditional writing format can keep up with, and no amount of discipline was going to change that. And I know I’m not the only one.

If This Sounds Familiar

If you’ve ever had someone tell you that you’re full of great ideas but you never follow through on them, this is probably why. The traditional tools for getting ideas out of your head and into a finished format are too slow for how your brain works.

You can talk about your business for an hour and sound like an expert. But writing a single blog post about it takes you three days and you still hate it when you’re done. You’ve started a lead magnet, a course outline, an email sequence, and a content calendar, and abandoned all of them somewhere between 40% and 80% finished. Take it from someone who has been there and has hired teams of people to make up for my perceived shortcomings. Your ideas, your brain, YOU were never the problem.

What Changed

Claude changed it.

I didn’t expect that. I came to AI for business efficiency. I wanted to speed up content production and reduce overhead. I wasn’t looking for a solution to a problem I’d been carrying since my twenties.

The first time I sat down with Claude and explained a concept the way I’d explain it to a friend, and got back a structured draft that actually captured what I was trying to say, I just stared at the screen. I sat there reading it thinking “this is what was in my head.” It wasn’t perfect. Some of the phrasing was off and the structure needed reworking. But the thinking was there. On the page. Organized. And in a format I could actually edit and finish.

I think I edited that first draft for two hours. Not because it needed two hours of work but because I kept reading it and adding to it and realizing I could KEEP GOING. The thing that always broke, the momentum, the thread, the ability to stay with a piece of writing long enough to see it through, it held. Because Claude had taken my ideas and organized them into a structured draft. My job was editing, and editing is a completely different cognitive task than creating from scratch. My brain can do that all day.

That first article was rough. I look back at it now and cringe at some of the phrasing I let through. But it was finished. Published. Out in the world. After years of nothing making it past a draft folder, I had a finished piece of content with my name on it.

51 articles later, I publish multiple times a week. The process has gotten waaaaaay faster as Claude has learned my style and my guardrails have tightened. But that first one mattered more than any of them.

This Isn’t About Laziness

The internet loves to frame AI writing assistance as laziness. “Just sit down and write.” “Real writers don’t need AI.” “If you can’t write it yourself, you don’t have anything worth saying.”

That’s all complete rubbish. And it makes me angry.

Because I spent YEARS feeling ashamed that I couldn’t do something that seemed to come naturally to other people. I watched people with half the experience and a fraction of the expertise publish books, build content libraries, and grow audiences while I sat on a pile of unfinished work and told myself I was the problem.

I wasn’t the problem. My brain processes things faster than the traditional writing format can handle, and I spent years punishing myself for that mismatch instead of finding a tool that could keep up.

Ministry leaders who teach with power on Sunday morning but can’t translate that into written content during the week know exactly what I’m talking about. Business owners who can sell in person all day but freeze when they open a blank document know too. AI closes that gap by keeping up with you.

The Tuesday Night Version

Last Tuesday night I sat down at 9pm to draft this week’s article. I was tired. In a previous life that would have meant staring at a blank page for forty-five minutes, writing three mediocre paragraphs, getting frustrated, and closing the laptop. The article would have gone unwritten and I would have spent the next day annoyed at myself.

Instead I opened Claude, told it what I wanted to say and who I was saying it for, and had a working draft in ten minutes. It needed work. Some of the sections were too polished (Claude defaults to that) and the opening didn’t sound like me. But there was something on the page. The thread existed. I spent another 30 minutes editing, pushing back on phrases that didn’t land, adding the personal details only I know, and cutting the AI patterns my guardrails are built to catch.

By 9:40 I had a finished article. On a Tuesday night. Tired. That would have been impossible for me two years ago.

Writer, Not Yet Author

I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. I write allllll the time. Long form social media posts, notebooks full of notes and ideas, and texts to friends that turn into full essays. The writing has always been constant. Finishing anything was the part that never happened.

But there’s a difference between writer and author. I won’t call myself an author until the first book is published. And for the first time in my life, I actually believe that’s going to happen.

I have a prophetic mother’s devotional book I’m working on. And a series of supernatural biblical fiction books that are a newer development but already taking shape. The difference between now and every other time I’ve tried to write a book is that I finally have a process my brain doesn’t fight. The frameworks, the guardrails, and the system I built for 51 Substack articles, all of it applies to long form.

The unfinished manuscripts from my old life are staying in the drawer. They belong there. But the new ones? Those are coming.

Who This Is Actually For

This article isn’t for everyone. If you sit down and write beautifully from a blank page, you don’t need this. Keep doing what works.

This is for the person who KNOWS they have something to say but has never been able to get it into a finished, publishable format. The person with the notebooks full of ideas. The person who can teach and talk and explain but cannot for the life of them write a blog post without wanting to throw their laptop out the window.

If you’ve been sitting on expertise, knowledge, and frameworks that never go anywhere because you can’t get past the blank page, the tool exists. You don’t have to fight your brain anymore. You just have to learn how to work with AI in a way that matches how you actually think.

51 articles. A devotional book in progress. Fiction on the way. After years of finishing nothing. You can do this too!

Everything I described in this article, the 51 articles that actually sound like me, the guardrails that catch AI patterns before they make it into a published piece, the system that taught Claude how I think and write, that’s all built on my AI Writing Guardrails. It’s the system that sits inside every Claude project I use and it’s the reason my content doesn’t read like AI wrote it. 98 patterns to avoid, voice rules, a guided builder for creating your own custom rules, and a 5-pass editing process.

Because “make it sound more human” was never going to work.

Self-Guided | Custom Build

guardrails.aiwithleah.com/info

Last Tuesday I woke up, made coffee, opened my laptop, and realized that in the last 24 hours, eleven Pinterest pins had gone live, a Substack article I wrote on Monday was already formatted for Facebook and Instagram, and my VA had flagged two things for my review with a note that said “everything else is scheduled through Friday.”

It was 8am. I hadn’t done anything yet. And the business was already running.

I have one VA who works 20 hours a week. That’s it. One person besides me. A year ago, that workload would have required a content writer, a social media manager, a graphic designer, a Pinterest strategist, and probably a project manager to keep them all talking to each other. I know because I’ve run businesses with teams that size before. I know what the overhead feels like and how much time gets eaten by communication alone.

This article is the behind the scenes of how it actually runs. Not the highlight reel version. The operational reality, including where it breaks.

What the Setup Actually Looks Like

I have three AI tools that run the core of my business. Claude for writing and content creation. Google Gemini for research and keyword discovery. Higgsfield for visual content and video. Those three do the heavy daily work. I also use HeyGen, Pomelli by Google Labs, and other tools as needs come up, but the foundation is those three. Everything else rotates in and out depending on the project.

Claude is where most of the heavy lifting happens. I draft articles, build training scripts, create email sequences, write social posts, and develop product content inside Claude. But I’m not just typing “write me a blog post” and copying what comes out. I’ve built a system around it with voice samples, project-level context that carries across sessions, and a guardrails document with 98 specific patterns Claude knows to avoid. The output is close to finished when it comes out.

Gemini handles research. When I need to validate a keyword strategy, find what people are actually searching for, or dig into a topic before I write about it, that’s where I go.

Higgsfield is the visual layer. Video content, AI avatars, graphics. The stuff that used to require either being on camera every day or hiring a designer.

My VA takes what these systems produce and moves it through the pipeline. Pinterest scheduling, content formatting across platforms, and managing the posting calendar. She handles the operational pieces that need a human but don’t need to be me, and the strategy documents I’ve built tell her exactly how to execute without guessing.

That’s the tidy version. Here’s what it actually took to get there.

What the Clean Version Leaves Out

The math IS concrete. I co-write my Substack articles with Claude. That article gets repurposed into Facebook and Instagram posts. My VA generates Pinterest pins from the core ideas. A content calendar that used to take a full team now takes me about three to five focused hours of creation time (depending on what we’re building and how many articles I’m writing that week) and my VA’s 20 hours of execution time. For real. I’ve tracked it.

But those numbers only tell you what it looks like AFTER the systems are built. They don’t tell you about the weeks I spent building a Pinterest keyword bank from scratch because nobody had done it for my niche. They don’t tell you about the guardrails document that started as a list of five things I hated about AI output and is now 98 documented patterns across eight categories. They don’t tell you I rebuilt my Claude project structure three times before it held context properly across sessions.

Every “look how efficient my AI workflow is” post on social media is showing you the after. I’m telling you the during was tedious, frustrating, and slow. I documented AI failure patterns for two years while the normal people were bingeing Netflix. That’s what built this.

The writing is where the real story is. I wasn’t writing blogs before AI. I would have never done it. My brain processes things too fast and has a hard time sitting down to focus long enough to get a long-form piece finished. I have hundreds of thousands of words written across years of work but no ability to sit down, focus, and put it all together into something publishable. Books I started and never finished. Entire frameworks mapped out in my head that never made it onto a page in any organized way.

When I realized what Claude could do, I knew I could finally start a blog. It started out slow. Claude had to learn my style, the editing process was long and tedious, and the early drafts needed heavy reworking. Now, 51 articles later, it takes no time at all. The system learned me. And I learned how to work with it. The thinking hasn’t been outsourced. The mechanical labor of getting words onto a page, formatting them for six different platforms, and scheduling them across a month? That part has (and good riddance).

Where It Breaks Down

AI still produces rubbish regularly. Even with my guardrails loaded, even with voice samples, and even with detailed context. Some days the output misses and I spend more time fixing it than I would have spent writing from scratch. (Last week Claude gave me a draft with four mirrored contrast phrases in a row. FOUR. After loading a document that specifically says never do that.)

The system works BECAUSE of the investment I made building it. Someone downloading a prompt template off the internet is not going to get these results. The “just use AI” crowd makes it sound like the tool does the work. The tool does what you’ve trained it to do. If you haven’t trained it, you get what everyone else gets.

Spiritual content, pastoral counsel, and anything that requires discernment about what God is doing in someone’s life, that’s a hard line. AI doesn’t touch it. I don’t even ask it to draft in that space. Some things require human presence and human responsibility, full stop.

And my VA still needs me. The systems reduce the number of decisions she has to make, but they don’t eliminate them entirely. She flags things, asks questions, and catches issues the system missed. The 20 hours works because she’s sharp and because the systems are well-built. If either of those factors wasn’t there, it would fall apart.

What It Costs (And What It Replaced)

I pay for Claude Pro at $100 a month, Gemini Pro at $32 a month (covers both me and my VA through our company Gmail accounts), and Higgsfield runs $150 to $250 depending on how many videos we’re producing that month. So the AI tools cost me roughly $280 to $380 a month. I’m also onboarding an autonomous AI agent right now that will hopefully help with a lot of the content production and enable us to put out even more. Getting her trained up is running $500 to $1,000 a month on its own. My VA’s compensation is on top of all of that.

Business still requires overhead in an AI economy. Anyone telling you differently isn’t doing things at scale.

But...compare that to what a content writer, social media manager, and graphic designer would cost, even part-time. We’re talking thousands per month minimum. I’ve written those checks before in previous businesses. The overhead wasn’t just financial. It was the meetings, the revisions, the miscommunication, and the management load that ate into the hours I was supposed to be spending on actual strategy.

That’s gone now. And I don’t miss it.

The Part That Actually Bothers Me

I see “I replaced my whole team with AI” content all over social media. Reels with clean desk setups and captions about making $10K a month with ChatGPT. And almost none of them are telling you what it actually took to get there.

Nobody talks about the months of building. The hours spent writing down every rule, every workflow, every pattern so that someone other than you can execute it. The failed systems you have to tear down and rebuild. The fact that AI without infrastructure produces the same mediocre content flooding every platform right now. Posting that content and calling it a business is like buying a hammer and calling yourself a contractor.

The structure took me months to build, test, break, and rebuild. I’m not complaining. I’d just rather you know what this actually requires going in than find out the hard way after you’ve wasted three months copying what some guy said worked in a 60-second reel.

What I Didn’t Expect This to Teach Me

Building AI systems forced me to look at how I ran my previous businesses. And what I saw wasn’t pretty.

I was a control freak. Everything had to be perfect, and that perfectionism slowed down my entire team from doing their jobs. I held things too tightly, revised too many times, and left so much money on the table because I couldn’t let go of the reins long enough to let other people execute. I’ve grown since then. A lot. But working with AI accelerated that growth in a way I didn’t anticipate.

Using AI requires you to loosen up. You have to accept that the first draft won’t be perfect, that the system will miss things, and that excellent is the standard now, not perfect. I’m working toward excellent every single day. And when I get on one of my perfectionist kicks and need to tear a draft apart, I don’t hurt Claude’s feelings when I tell him what he wrote is dumb. (LOL)

That might sound like a small thing. But for someone who used to agonize over every word and slow down an entire operation because of it, the ability to move fast, edit without guilt, and let good enough be good enough on Tuesday so that great can happen by Thursday? That changed how I work more than any tool ever could.

If You’re Building Something

If you’re running a small business, a side hustle alongside your full-time job, a ministry, or any kind of operation where you’re doing too many things yourself, AI can help. That part isn’t a question anymore. The real question is whether you’re willing to take the time and make the investment to build something that actually works with it.

I have capacity I haven’t had in years. Real capacity. Time with my family (we are heading to Cambodia for a four day vacation next week), time in Scripture, time to actually think about where this business is going instead of just grinding to keep it moving.

That’s what well-built AI systems buy you. Room to breathe.

The rest of this article is for paid subscribers. I’m breaking down the actual role-by-role system: what AI handles, what my VA handles, what only I can do, and the exact workflows connecting all three. If you want to see how this operates at the task level, this is it.

Read more

Everybody has an opinion about AI right now. Your pastor mentioned it in a sermon. That one friend who’s always early on everything won’t stop talking about ChatGPT. And the person next to you at work is either quietly using it or quietly pretending it doesn’t exist.

What I’ve noticed after spending the last few years deep in this and building my entire business around it is that the technology itself is almost secondary. How people are responding to it tells you everything about where they’ll be in two years.

And right now, almost everyone falls into one of seven camps. Most people don’t know which one they’re in. But it matters. Because we are at a threshold, and the people who recognize this moment for what it is and act accordingly will have a kind of freedom in the future that the people who don’t, won’t.

The Dabbler

This is the person who’s excited about AI and genuinely trying. They’ve subscribed to newsletters, downloaded apps, and experimented with prompts. They’re putting in effort. Real effort. And the problem is they’re drowning.

There are SO many tools, so many “you need to try this” posts, so many conflicting opinions about what to use and when. The Dabbler is collecting tools the way some people collect cookbooks. Lots of resources, but no meals are actually getting made.

I’ve been in this camp. When I first started with AI, I was everywhere. Trying everything. And I was exhausted without having anything real to show for it. What got me out was a framework. One clear system that told me what to use, when, and why. Once I had that, everything else fell into place.

If you’re a Dabbler, the issue isn’t effort or intelligence. It’s that nobody gave you the structure. The good news is that structure is an easy fix.

The Ostrich

This person thinks AI is going to blow over. They’ve seen trends come and go. NFTs. The Metaverse. Clubhouse. They’re smart enough to know that not everything that gets hyped actually sticks. And they’ve built something that works, whether it’s a business, a career, or a way of doing things that’s been reliable for years. The cost of learning something new feels higher than the cost of waiting.

I understand this one too. But AI isn’t Clubhouse. It’s not going away, and the gap between people who understand it and people who don’t is widening every single month. I watched it happen at a global AI conference in Singapore last year. The people building at the highest levels of this technology are not speculating about whether it will stick. They’re building infrastructure for decades.

The Ostrich isn’t dumb. They’re just making a bet, and the odds are not in their favor.

The Fearful

This camp is bigger than anyone admits.

These are the people reading every headline about AI replacing jobs. They see the articles about automation and about companies laying off entire teams and replacing them with AI tools. And every single one of those articles confirms the thing they’re most afraid of: that there won’t be a place for them in what’s coming.

The fear isn’t irrational. The shift IS real. AI is changing the economics of work in ways that compound month after month.

But fear is a terrible operating system. The Fearful person is so consumed by what might happen that they can’t take action on what’s happening right now. And staying frozen is the thing that actually puts them in the position they’re afraid of.

I haven’t felt this fear. Not because I’m smarter or braver or further ahead on some imaginary timeline. But because in September of last year, God started speaking to me about the Kingdom of Heaven needing to take back territory in the online space, in the technology field, and specifically in AI. I was put on assignment. And if you’re a believer who understands commissioning, you’ll know that this assignment hasn’t been easy. I’ve wanted to quit and throw in the towel more times than I’d care to admit. It has also come with a significant amount of warfare.

The point I’m making is that I haven’t been afraid because I was prepared. When you understand the moment as a spiritual assignment rather than a professional threat, the fear doesn’t land the same way. What I feel is urgency. Not the manufactured kind that marketers use to make you buy something before midnight. Real urgency. The kind that comes from recognizing that this technology is a threshold, and people on the other side of it, people who learn to use it and steward it well, are going to have a freedom that the people who stayed frozen won’t.

This space has been the enemy’s domain. The online world, the technology landscape, the systems that shape how people think, buy, and communicate. And until the people who carry discernment and conviction step into it, that doesn’t change. Blanket avoidance has never taken back territory.

If you’re in the Fearful camp, the fear might be keeping you out of the exact space where you’re needed. (Fear sells. Always has.) The headlines are designed to paralyze. Move anyway. God didn’t give us a spirit of fear. 2 Timothy 1:7 (KJV) states: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind”.

The End Times Crowd

There are people in my world who believe AI is connected to end times prophecy. They see the mark of the beast in systems that centralize control over buying, selling, and identity. Some have concluded this is antichrist-adjacent technology that believers should refuse on spiritual principal.

Some of these concerns come from people who have studied Scripture deeply and are genuinely wrestling with what the rapid advancement of AI means in light of what the Bible says about the last days.

But I will say this. Technology has never been inherently demonic. Fire wasn’t. Neither was the printing press, and neither was the internet. Every tool in human history has been used for both good and evil, and AI is no different. The question was never whether a powerful technology should exist. It’s always been about who’s using it and how.

The biblical response to a powerful tool has always been wisdom, discernment, and stewardship. Use it for good and refuse to use it for evil. Build guardrails. Stay under the authority of the Holy Spirit. That’s the framework I operate from, and I think it’s a far more grounded response than blanket avoidance dressed up as righteousness.

Some people in this camp are operating from genuine conviction. Others are using theology to avoid examining a fear they haven’t named. I’m going to treat both camps the same way, with honesty.

The Resistor

These are the people who’ve made “anti-AI” part of their identity. Writers with downloadable logos declaring their work AI-free. Creators calling for platform bans. The moral high ground crowd. (I wrote about this camp in depth recently if you want the full take.)

Short version: choosing not to use AI is a legitimate personal choice. Turning that choice into a gatekeeping campaign against everyone who made a different one is not.

The All-In Bros

The opposite extreme. This person has automated everything and published everything and reviewed nothing. They treat AI like it replaces thinking, discernment, and editorial standards. They’re the ones flooding every platform with polished, soulless content that says absolutely nothing.

When someone hears “AI content” and pictures generic slop, this is the crowd they’re picturing.

If your entire content strategy is “type prompt, copy output, hit publish,” you are the problem. (And the rest of us are cleaning up after you.)

The Quiet Adopters

This might be the biggest camp of all, and nobody talks about it.

The Quiet Adopter is using AI and getting real results. But they’re not saying a word about it because the climate has become so hostile that admitting you use AI feels like putting a target on your back.

They’ve watched the Resistor crowd attack people for being transparent about using AI. They’ve seen the All-In Bro crowd give every AI user a bad name with their slop. And they’ve decided the safest move is to keep their heads down, use the tools, and never mention it.

The self-preservation instinct makes sense. But it comes at a cost. The people in the middle, the ones with actual standards and actual systems, stay invisible while the loudest voices on both extremes define what “AI user” means.

If you’re a Quiet Adopter, I get it. The transparency question is yours to answer. But the conversation needs more people in it who know what they’re doing, and fewer people yelling from the edges. Just something to sit with.

The Camp I’m In

I’m a Pioneer Explorer. But that label only tells you the method. The reason underneath it is what actually matters.

I mentioned the assignment the Lord gave me. That’s why I do this work. AI is exciting, and there’s money in it, but neither of those is the reason. Someone who carries discernment has to be in this space. And I’d rather it be me than not.

So I use AI every day. I study it obsessively. I’ve built a 92-point guardrails document and a voice training process that makes sure my content sounds like me and not like a machine. (This article went through that process. Every article does.) I’m still figuring things out. The terrain shifts constantly. New tools, new capabilities, new ethical questions that didn’t exist six months ago.

But I have an assignment, and the posture that comes with it. Learn before you automate. Your guardrails need to exist before you scale. And keep moving forward with intention, even when you can’t see what’s around the next bend.

I’m not going to be the person who saw this coming, had the tools and the framework to help people navigate it, and said nothing because the conversation was uncomfortable.

This is the camp I’m inviting you into. We need more people moving for good.

If you want a responsible on-ramp into understanding AI and learning how to use it without losing your voice, your integrity, or your discernment, the AI Revolution Secrets training is free and it’s where I’d point you.

And if you’re already using AI but want your content to actually sound like you, the AI Writing Guardrails system is the exact framework behind everything I publish. Over 80 patterns to avoid, a voice sample template, example prompts, and a full walkthrough of how I set this up.

P.S. I’ve been in at least four of these camps at different points over the last three years. (I’ll let you guess which ones.)

It was 2016. I was sitting in Jason Sisneros’s office, crying. Full-on ugly crying. Jason was someone I really respected in business. We didn’t know each other that well at the time, but when my world started falling apart he was the person I called. My business had collapsed. Everything I’d built was in pieces around me, and I was convinced the whole world was watching me fail.

Jason waited. He let me get it all out. Then he looked at me and said, “Are you done now?” (LOL.) “I’m going to tell you something that you need to remember, Leah. Nobody cares. Everybody is too busy worrying about the shit going on in their own lives. Nobody really cares about what is going on in yours.”

I sat with that for a minute. And then my whole viewpoint shifted and I was able to get on with cleaning up the mess and starting over.

He was right. The audience I’d imagined watching my failure? They weren’t watching. They were dealing with their own life and their own problems. The people I was sure would think I was done? They hadn’t even noticed. Or if they had, it was a passing thought or a passing conversation that didn’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things. The catastrophe I’d built in my head was a one-woman show with no audience.

That conversation changed how I approached everything after it. Jason went on to become a trusted friend and mentor. But that day in his office, he gave me the most valuable piece of business advice I’ve ever received.

The Fear Nobody Names

Most people I talk to who are sitting on the sidelines of building an online business, who haven’t posted the content, who haven’t launched the offer, who haven’t started using AI even though they know they need to, are not stuck because of a skills gap.

They’re stuck because they’re terrified of being seen.

They don’t see it that way. They say they need to learn more first. They’re waiting for the right strategy, the right timing, or the right moment that never actually comes. And they keep on waiting because it never comes. But underneath all of that, the actual thing stopping them is the fear that someone they know will see them try something new and judge them for it.

A former coworker might see their content and think they’ve lost it. A family member might roll their eyes. Someone from church might question why they’re suddenly talking about AI or online business or content creation.

And so they do nothing. They sign up for another course. They watch more tutorials. They save more posts. They tell themselves they’re “getting ready.” But getting ready has become their permanent state because actually doing something means being visible. And being visible means being judged.

The Excuse That Just Expired

Here’s what’s different now. Two years ago, you could tell yourself the reason you hadn’t started was because you didn’t know how to write content, didn’t know how to build a funnel, didn’t understand personal branding, or couldn’t figure out the tech.

AI eliminated ALL of those excuses.

You can sit down with Claude or ChatGPT right now and draft a week of content in an afternoon. You can build a content creation strategy with AI walking you through it step by step. You can use AI to help you clarify your offer, write your emails, structure your online business, and plan your growth. The tools exist. They’re accessible. And many of them are free.

So what’s left?

The fear. That’s it. The skill barrier is gone. The tech barrier is effectively gone. The cost barrier is lower than it has ever been. The only thing standing between most people and actually building something is the story they’re telling themselves about what other people will think.

And Jason already gave you the answer to that one.

What This Actually Costs You

The fear of being seen has a real cost, and it compounds.

Every month you spend consuming instead of creating, someone with half your expertise is building an audience because they weren’t afraid to start. Every week you spend “getting ready,” the people who started six months ago are getting further ahead and building proof you could have had too.

I’ve watched it happen over and over in my own community. Good, smart, capable people who know more than most of the creators they follow, sitting silent because they’re afraid of what someone might think.

Meanwhile, the person who posted the imperfect reel, who launched the messy first version of their offer, who started the content and figured it out as they went? They’re six months into building something real. Their personal branding is developing. Their business growth is compounding. And the people watching them aren’t judging. They’re buying.

Nobody was watching you NOT start. And nobody is going to judge you for starting. They’re too busy worrying about their own life. Jason was right.

The Part That Actually Matters

AI removed the skill excuse. And in doing so, it exposed the real one.

Before AI, you could hide behind “I don’t know how.” Now that AI can help you draft content, research your niche, structure your offer, build your systems, and get your first version out the door, the hiding place is gone. The only question left is whether you’re going to do something with what’s available to you.

And I get it. I sat in Jason’s office covered in tears and snot, convinced the world was cataloguing my failures. The fear felt enormous. But it was a lie. Nobody was keeping score except me.

Your fear of what people will think is not protecting you. It’s costing you. Every day it keeps you from starting an online business, from posting content, from building something that could create real provision for your family, it takes a little more from you. Not dramatically. Quietly. The kind of cost you don’t notice until you look up one day and realize you’ve been “getting ready” for two years.

What I’d Tell You Right Now

Start before you feel ready. Use AI to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Post the content that scares you a little. Build the offer even though it won’t be perfect. Let the first version be rough.

Nobody is watching as closely as you think they are. And the few who are? They’re probably more impressed that you started than they’d ever be critical of how you did it.

The tools are here. The excuse is gone. The only thing left is the decision.

AI in Action starts Monday.

Seven days. Seven live sessions with me. One hour a day. We build real systems together, not theory, not “here are some prompts,” actual builds you walk away with and use.

Day 1 you map the three places in your business where you’re doing labor AI should be doing instead. Day 2 we extract and document your voice fingerprint live so AI stops making you sound like everyone else. By Day 7 you’ve built a personal AI governance document and a 90-day action plan that outlasts the challenge.

It’s free. Replays go into the private community.

If that conversation with Jason landed for you the way it landed for me, this is your next move. Stop getting ready. Come build something.

Register for AI in Action LIVE

PS. Jack asked me this morning what I was talking about on my stories. I told him I was trying to help people stop being scared. He said, “Of what?” And honestly? That’s the whole point. Most of the things we’re afraid of don’t make sense when an eleven-year-old asks you to explain them.

First call:

Sunday, March 8 at 6pm PT / 9pm ET (AU/NZ: Monday March 9 at 9am AWST / 12pm AEDT)

[Save your seat here — it’s free → https://aia.aiwithleah.com/info]

Why I built this

I’ve been watching something happen across my community and across the whole online space. Good people, thoughtful people who care about doing things right, and they’re either dismissing AI entirely because it feels complicated and overwhelming, or throwing themselves at every new tool without any framework for what they’re actually building.

Dismissing AI has a quiet cost. It accumulates. One day you look up and realize the gap between where you are and where the people around you are operating has gotten a lot wider than you noticed while it was happening.

Going in without a framework is a faster kind of damage. Generic content, a lost voice, and a stack full of tools producing output that doesn’t sound like you and isn’t converting.

This week is the third option.

What we’re building

Day 1: The Architect Mindset. Most people direct AI the way they Google things. We map the three places in your business where you’re doing work AI should be doing instead, and build a workflow blueprint around it.

Day 2: Your Voice Is the Asset. AI makes everyone sound the same. That’s the real threat nobody’s talking about. We extract and document your voice fingerprint live so there’s a reference document protecting your authorship in every AI interaction going forward.

Day 3: Prompting from Principle. Not prompt tricks. A framework for getting output that actually reflects your values and your standard. Five core prompts tailored to your actual business, built live. Yours to keep.

Day 4: The Discernment Filter. New AI tools launch every single day. We run three of them through a live evaluation framework together so you walk away knowing what belongs in your stack and what to cut.

Day 5: Content Without Compromise. One idea in, a full week of content out, built live using AI as infrastructure rather than a ghostwriter. Content that sounds like you and is ready to publish.

Day 6: Leverage Over Labor. Doing more work faster is still labor. We pick one recurring task and build the automation logic around it live so it runs without you in the room.

Day 7: The Long Game. What to protect, what to build, and what to watch. A personal AI governance document and a 90-day action plan to close out the week.

Who this is for

Coaches, creators, ministry leaders, and online business owners who know AI matters but want to use it on their own terms. If you’ve tried the tools and the output sounds like everyone else’s and you can’t figure out why, this week fixes that.

If you want a shortcut that removes the need to think, this isn’t it. There are plenty of those available.

It’s free. The work is done live and the replays go in the community.

[Register here → https://aia.aiwithleah.com/info]

First call in a few days. See you there!

Leah

PS. Jack asked me this morning if my “internet class” is like school. I told him it’s better because nobody has to sit still. He seemed unconvinced. (He has a point.)

I keep a list of words that are not allowed in anything I publish. They are words that AI defaults to that I don’t say in normal conversation or in my writing. And they are the words that are the dead giveaway that AI wrote your content, not you.

The list started small. AI kept using “straightforward” in my drafts. I NEVER say straightforward. I say “simple” or “clear” or sometimes just “obvious.” So I wrote it down.

Then I noticed “delve.” Then “crucial.” Then “moreover” and “furthermore.” The list grew. At last count it sits at over 40 words and phrases, and I’m still catching new ones. (I found two more this week.)

How I Built the List

Every time I read an AI draft and something made me pause, I paid attention. Not to whether the sentence was technically correct but to whether those words would actually come out of my mouth if I were talking to a friend over coffee.

In every draft AI was choosing words I would never choose. They felt too formal and too polished. And also measured and careful in a way I never am. It was writing like AI, not like me, and I was putting my name on it. And that felt inauthentic. So every cringe word became a rule. “That doesn’t sound like me” went straight into what eventually became my guardrails document. I’m still building it. The document is a living thing because AI keeps finding new ways to sound like AI.

Skip this step and you’ll publish content for months thinking it sounds fine. Then one day you’ll read your own posts back to back and realize none of it sounds like you wrote it. Ask me how I know.

The Patterns

Once you see the patterns, you can spot AI writing in about 2 seconds.

Em dashes are everywhere in AI writing. AI uses them as its default connector for everything. “She wanted to start a business — but she didn’t know where to begin.” I strip every single one. If the sentence needs a pause, use a period, a comma, or start a new sentence. For better or worse and much to the chagrin of seasoned writers who love a good em dash and have used them for years, em dashes are one of the fastest ways to spot AI content in the wild.

Mirrored contrast is the other dead giveaway. AI loves the “it’s not X, it’s Y” construction. “It’s not about perfection, it’s about progress.” It sounds profound but says almost nothing. Once you notice this pattern you will see it in every AI draft and in half the content on the internet right now.

Formality markers are the most obvious. “Utilize” instead of “use.” “Facilitate” instead of “help.” AI defaults to the fancier version of every word because it was trained on formal text. Real people don’t talk that way. They just don’t.

I caught one last week. AI wrote: “This is a crucial consideration for anyone producing content at scale.” I changed it to: “This matters if you’re making content and want people to actually read it.” The point didn’t change. But read those two sentences back to back and tell me which one sounds like a human being wrote it.

Then there’s the hedging. “Somewhat,” “arguably,” “it could be said that.” AI hedges constantly because it’s trained to be safe. And it makes everything sound uncertain, like you’re not sure you believe your own argument.

Connector words nobody actually says out loud. “Moreover.” “Furthermore.” These are academic writing patterns and they make everything feel like a term paper.

And the artificial enthusiasm might be the worst offender. “Exciting,” “game-changing.” If your idea is actually good, you don’t need to announce it. The reader knows.

So What Do You Replace Them With?

Knowing what to cut is only half the problem. If you don’t know what YOUR words actually are, you just end up staring at a draft full of holes with nothing to fill them with. The ban list is useless without knowing your own voice well enough to write the replacement.

My replacements come from how I actually talk. I recorded myself telling a story for about ten minutes, transcribed it, and studied the words I gravitate toward when I’m not thinking about writing. That ten minutes taught me more about my actual voice than I expected.

I say “rubbish” where AI would say “subpar.” “For real” instead of “genuinely.” Fragments are fine with me. Starting sentences with “And” and “So” is how I actually communicate. AI writes in complete, grammatically perfect sentences every single time, and that’s exactly the problem.

Your list will look different from mine. The words AI keeps inserting that you would NEVER use? Those are the ones to catch. And you’ll probably be surprised how many there are once you start paying attention.

The Real Cost

AI generates the most average version of whatever you asked for. It pulls from everything it’s been trained on and produces the most common words and the most common structures. That’s how the technology works. And the most common version of anything is GENERIC.

So every word AI chooses that you wouldn’t choose is your voice disappearing. One word won’t kill you. But forty of them scattered across a 1,000 word article? Your readers aren’t hearing you anymore.

They might not think “this was written by AI.” But they’ll scroll past without engaging and the connection just won’t be there. I watched this creator I respect have a crazy drop in engagement over about a six week period. She didn’t change her topics or her posting schedule. The only thing that changed was she started publishing AI drafts without editing for voice. Her audience couldn’t name what was different, they just stopped responding. People do that when they can feel something is off but they just can’t put their finger on it. And she’s smart. She’s good at what she does. That’s what makes this so frustrating. She started using AI to save time and it ended up stripping the personality out of everything she posted.

A banned word list sounds like a small thing. It is. But small catches, done consistently, are what keep your voice in your content. Skip them and AI replaces you one word at a time.

I know because I’ve done it to myself. Published an entire Substack article I thought was one of my better ones, then read it back a week later and realized the voice was gone. The words were right but none of it sounded like me.

Speaking of the platform we’re on right now, Substack is one of the few places where voice matters more than polish. People subscribe here because they want to hear from a real person. Which makes this the worst possible place to let AI make you sound like everyone else.

Since I’m talking about this, I should tell you. This article you just read? AI drafted it. Then I ran it through my guardrails system, caught the patterns, made the replacements, and edited until it sounded like me. That’s the process. You just experienced the output.

The banned word list is one piece of a much larger system. I put together everything I use to keep my AI content sounding like me into one resource. AI Writing Guardrails: Because “make it sound more human” was never going to work includes my complete 92-rule guardrails framework, a guided guardrails builder that helps you create your own custom system, a voice sample template with instructions, the 5-pass editing process I use on every piece of content, a quick start guide, and an annotated case study showing exactly how I built mine.

If you’re tired of reading your own AI drafts and thinking “this doesn’t sound like me,” this is how you get it sorted.

Click here to get the AI Writing Guardrails

Substack is having a moment. And not the fun kind.

Over the past few months, a full-blown moral panic has erupted over AI-assisted writing on this platform. Writers are launching campaigns with downloadable anti-AI logos for their profiles. Opinion pieces have declared the platform officially “enshittified” by AI slop. And there’s a whole genre of investigative posts now documenting how top Substacks rack up thousands of likes with what one writer called “surface profundity” while hand-crafting writers struggle to break fifty.

On the other side, self-published authors are giving interviews titled “I Write With AI. Deal With It.” Nearly half of Substack writers in a 2025 survey admitted they use AI for writing assistance. And a whole lot of people are quietly using these tools every single day and saying nothing about it because the climate has become so hostile that admitting you use AI feels like confessing to a crime.

I’m not doing that. I use AI, I’m not ashamed of it, and I have some things to say about this whole circus.

The Binary That’s Breaking Everything

The debate has collapsed into two camps, and honestly, both of them are the problem. But the camps aren’t equal, and they’re not broken in the same way.

You’ve got the purist crowd who say AI writing is cheating. Full stop. If a machine touched it, it’s not real writing. They’re calling for platform-wide bans, shaming anyone who admits to using AI content creation tools, and positioning themselves as the last guardians of authentic human expression. They’ve turned “I write everything by hand” into a whole moral identity. Complete with logos you can download and put on your profile. (I wish I were joking.)

Then there’s the crowd on the opposite end who treat AI like a content vending machine. Open ChatGPT, type a prompt, copy what comes out, maybe change a word or two, hit publish. No voice. No editorial process. And some of them are getting THOUSANDS of likes for content that says absolutely nothing. That part is genuinely maddening for anyone who takes writing seriously, whether they use AI or not.

The people in the middle, the ones using AI with intention and actual standards, are getting drowned out. And that’s where I am, so let me just say what I think.

My Actual Process (Since I’m Not Interested in Being Vague)

I’ve got skin in the game on this one. I use AI every single day for content creation and I’ve been transparent about that from the start.

I have a voice sample that I created by recording myself talking naturally for about ten minutes, then transcribing it. Just me talking the way I actually talk, with the fragments and the “And” at the beginning of sentences and the way I circle back when I’m working through an idea. AI gets that sample before it writes anything for me.

Then there’s the guardrails document. Over 90 specific patterns that AI must avoid. Mirrored contrast phrases, stacked rhetorical questions, performed vulnerability, perfect parallel structures, and dozens of other tells that make content sound like a robot cosplaying as a human. (Yes, I have literally catalogued the ways AI sounds fake. Like a lunatic. For months.)

When I sit down to write, I give AI context about who I’m writing for, what I’m trying to say, and what I want the reader to walk away understanding. Then I iterate. The first draft is NEVER final. I read it out loud and notice where it doesn’t sound like something I’d actually say. I push back on specific phrases and reject entire drafts when they miss the mark. Sometimes I reject five in a row before something clicks.

Nothing publishes without my review. Nothing gets to you that I haven’t read, edited, and approved.

The idea that this process makes me less of a writer than someone who spent four hours hand-crafting a post is, frankly, rubbish. I’m still the one deciding what gets said, how it gets said, who it’s for, and whether it meets my standards. AI handles first drafts. The thinking, the editing, the quality control, and the final call are all mine.

That’s AI-assisted writing. It looks nothing like what most people picture when they hear the term.

What the Purist Crowd Isn’t Saying Out Loud

I have respect for writers who choose to write everything by hand. Legitimate choice and I’m not here to take it from anyone.

But turning that personal choice into a moral position and then using it to gatekeep an entire platform? That’s where I check out.

The purist crowd already knows AI won’t produce better writing than they can. What actually scares them is that AI will help other people produce good writing faster, and that changes the economics of content creation in ways that feel deeply unfair to someone who spent years building their skill the traditional way.

I get that. For real. Change is disorienting when it feels like the rules you played by suddenly don’t apply anymore. But gatekeeping Substack like it’s some kind of literary institution with admission requirements is not the answer. Substack is a platform. The whole point of a platform is that anyone can show up and build something. Readers are smart enough to sort the good from the bad, and they always have been. Trust them.

The Slop Problem Is Real and I’m Not Going to Pretend Otherwise

I’ve seen the posts. The ones that sound polished and say absolutely nothing. Content with perfect structure and zero substance that could have been written about any topic by anyone because there’s no human fingerprint anywhere on it.

These are the posts where someone opened ChatGPT, typed “write me a Substack post about productivity,” and published whatever came back without reading it twice. No voice training, no guardrails and definitely no human input. It’s obvious there was zero editorial review or actual thinking about whether it was even worth saying.

And yes, some of those posts are outperforming real writers. The algorithm doesn’t care about substance. It rewards engagement metrics, and polished-sounding content can generate engagement even when there’s nothing real underneath it.

This is the crowd giving AI-assisted writing a bad name. When someone hears “AI writing” and pictures soulless, generic, forgettable content, THIS is what they’re picturing. And they’re not wrong to be frustrated.

Banning AI from Substack won’t fix that problem. Standards will. So will transparency, and so will readers making informed choices about what they actually subscribe to.

What Would Actually Move This Forward

Content creation tools have always evolved. Every tool that made writing faster also made it easier to produce bad writing at scale. That’s always been the trade-off. And nobody fixed it by banning the tool. The bar got raised. Readers figured out what was worth their time.

What would actually help is transparency. If you use AI in your process, say so. Not with shame, and not buried in fine print. Just say it plainly and let your readers know how you work. Some of them won’t care AT ALL because they’re there for the ideas, the perspective, and the value. Others will care a lot, and they’ll seek out the hand-crafted writers they prefer. That’s their right, and the marketplace is big enough for everyone.

What I can’t get behind is one group of writers trying to delegitimize another group’s process while standing on moral high ground they constructed for themselves.

The Part That Gets Missed

Good content has always required clear thinking. And I don’t mean that in a theoretical way. I mean when I sit down with fuzzy thinking and expected AI to sort it out for me, and the output is rubbish. Every single time. AI reflects back whatever you bring to it. On days when I do the thinking first, the drafts are close. But when I haven’t? I get the same slop everyone’s complaining about. I’ve experienced that more times than I’d like to admit, sometimes in the same week.

The people producing great AI-assisted content did the thinking first. That’s the actual problem worth talking about. Whether someone brought anything real to the table before they started matters infinitely more than which tools they used to get it written.

Where I Stand

I use AI. Every day. I have a system with guardrails, voice training, and editorial review that I’ve been building and refining for a long time now. Every piece of content that goes out under my name has been through my hands, my judgment, and my standards before it reaches you.

I’m not apologizing for that. And I’m not going to be the person who stays quiet while people who’ve never examined their own process tell me mine isn’t legitimate.

I’m also not going to pretend the slop problem doesn’t exist. It does. People publishing raw AI output without editing or thinking, people with no investment in what they’re putting into the world, are degrading content quality everywhere, not just on Substack.

But the answer is better standards, more transparency, and trusting readers to be the intelligent adults they are. Not bans. Not shame campaigns with downloadable logos.

Substack is big enough for hand-crafted essayists, AI-assisted creators, and everyone in between. The only thing it shouldn’t have room for is the idea that one group of writers gets to decide who belongs.

Write well. Be honest about how you do it.

The work will speak for itself.

If you want to see what a rigorous AI-assisted writing process actually looks like in practice, the AI Writing Guardrails system is the exact framework behind everything I publish. It includes over 80 specific patterns to avoid and use, a voice sample template with instructions, example prompts that work with the system, and a video walkthrough of exactly how I set this up.

Get the AI Writing Guardrails here

And if you’re ready to go deeper into how AI is reshaping content creation, online business, and personal branding, the AI Revolution Secrets training walks you through the full picture. Free, practical, and built by someone who’s been doing this for years.

P.S. I asked Jack if he knew what my job was the other day and he said “making AI Videos to make money for the family and talking to robots” and honestly, that’s the most accurate job description I’ve ever been given.

I need to tell you something that’s going to go against every piece of advice you’re getting right now. Stop building your audience and build a SYSTEM first.

Every online marketing “guru” and every viral thread is telling you the same thing - post more, be consistent, show up every day, and get visible. And then, once you have enough followers, figure out how to make money. That order is backwards. And it’s the reason so many people are searching for online business ideas, doing everything they’re told, and still not making money.

I know this because I’ve done it both ways.

The Audience Lie

There’s this unspoken belief in the online business space that audience size determines income potential. That if you just get enough followers, enough views, and enough engagement, that the money will follow.

I’ve watched people with 10,000 followers struggle to make a single sale. Meanwhile, someone with 300 email subscribers is generating consistent monthly income from a list most people would call tiny. The only variable that changed between those two scenarios was infrastructure. The person with 300 subscribers had built a system underneath the content. Email capture, a clear offer, a follow-up sequence. The person with 10,000 followers had none of that.

When you don’t have a system, attention has nowhere to go. Someone finds your content, likes it, maybe follows you, and then what? They scroll past your next post. They forget your name by Thursday. There’s no mechanism to capture that interest, nurture it, or move it anywhere useful.

That sucks. Especially when you’re the one showing up every single day doing the work.

The “grow first, monetize later” advice sounds reasonable until you realize that later never comes for most people. They keep posting, keep grinding. They consume every piece of content about how to make money online and apply none of it because there’s no structure to apply it to. Ten thousand followers becomes twenty thousand. Twenty becomes fifty. And still nothing built to catch any of it. Just more content going out into the void.

What a System Actually Looks Like

I think people hear “business systems” and immediately picture something they need a degree to build. You don’t. An online business system has four parts. Something to sell. A way to capture interest. A method for delivering value. And a follow-up process. That’s it. Most people are missing at least two of those four and wondering why nothing converts.

Say you’re a health coach. You have about 300 followers on Instagram. You’ve been posting tips and recipes for months. People like it, leave comments. Nobody buys anything because there’s nothing to buy and nowhere for them to go after they double-tap.

The offer is a $47 meal planning template. Four weeks of dinners, grocery lists, and prep instructions for busy parents who don’t have two hours to cook every night but still want their family eating real food. You know exactly who this is for because you’ve coached dozens of them.

The lead magnet is a free PDF called “5 Weeknight Dinners Under 20 Minutes.” It’s good enough to be useful on its own, and it’s directly connected to the paid offer. Someone who downloads the freebie is exactly the person who would want the full template. You build this in Canva. AI drafts the recipes based on your parameters and dietary framework, you edit for accuracy and voice, and the whole thing takes an afternoon.

The email capture is a simple opt-in page. Link in bio points there. Every piece of content you post ends with “grab the free dinner guide, link in bio.” That’s it. You’re asking them to give you their email in exchange for something useful. Now they’re on YOUR list, not Instagram’s.

The delivery is automated. They sign up, the PDF lands in their inbox, and a 5-email welcome sequence begins. AI drafted the sequence. You edited it for tone and made sure it sounds like you, not like a robot pretending to be a nutritionist. (That editing process is its own skill, by the way. Telling AI to “make it sound more human” doesn’t work. I built a whole product around this called AI Writing Guardrails because the gap between generic AI output and content that actually sounds like a real person is where most people lose their audience’s trust. It launches this week for $97 if you want to get that piece right from the start.) The first email delivers the freebie. The second shares your story and why you care about this. Third, a quick win. Fourth, the $47 template gets introduced with what’s in it and who it’s for. The last email is a direct, no-pressure invitation to buy.

The follow-up runs without you touching it. Every new subscriber gets the same sequence. You’re not in your DMs every night chasing people. The system does that work while you’re batch-cooking dinner or putting your kids to bed.

Now look at what happened. The same 300 followers are seeing the same content. Nothing changed about the audience. What changed is that the content now points somewhere. People give you their email. They get something useful. And a percentage of them buy because the system moved them from “that’s a cool post” to “I need this.”

That’s the whole thing. Four pieces connected, built by one person. AI handled the drafting and the automation while the coach’s expertise and voice stayed human throughout.

The first version of this system probably won’t work perfectly. The email sequence might need rewriting after the first fifty subscribers because the open rates tell you something isn’t landing. The lead magnet might get downloads but no sales, which means the connection between the freebie and the paid offer isn’t clear enough yet. That’s normal and it’s also the part nobody warns you about because it doesn’t look good on a sales page. You only get to something that works by building something that doesn’t and then figuring out what’s broken and fixing that thing. Most people never start because they’re afraid of that part. But for real, a broken system you can actually diagnose and fix is SO much closer to revenue than an audience with nowhere to go.

And this works whether you’re a coach, a network marketer, a ministry leader, or a creator selling digital products. The specifics change but the structure is the same.

Where AI Fits (and Where It Doesn’t)

Building a system like that used to require either hiring a team, investing real money in tools and services, or spending months doing everything manually. For someone just exploring online business ideas on a limited budget, the overhead alone was enough to stall the whole thing before it even got started.

AI collapsed that barrier. One person with free tools can now build what used to require a team. That’s the actual story of AI for small business. A solopreneur with clear thinking and the right tools building infrastructure that actually translates into real dollars.

I run my entire content operation on three AI tools. Claude handles content creation and writing. I use Google Gemini for research and finding trending topics, and Higgsfield for visual content and AI avatars. All three have free tiers. (I wrote a whole breakdown of the only 3 AI tools you need if you want the details.) The cost barrier between having an idea and having an operational business is functionally gone. I mean that literally.

But if you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know I will go ON AND ON about this part. AI drafts. You decide. The repetitive operational work like email sequences, content repurposing, and lead magnet formatting? AI can handle all of that. But the thinking, the voice, the discernment about what’s true and what’s worth saying stays with you. Those lines matter and I watch people cross them every day without realizing what they’re giving up.

The system is buildable now. By you. Without a team, without a huge budget, and without waiting until your audience hits some magic number. That excuse is no longer valid.

The Small Business Tips Nobody Gives You

Most small business tips you’ll find online sound good but miss the point because they’re disconnected from how money actually moves.

“Post consistently” is fine advice, but consistency without a capture mechanism is just free entertainment for strangers. The actual move is building a content system that feeds your email list. Every piece of content should connect to something. A lead magnet, an opt-in, a clear next step. If it doesn’t, you’re producing content for the sake of producing content. I’ve been that person. It’s a hard cycle to see when you’re in it.

“Engage with your audience” gets repeated constantly. And yes, replying to comments is important, but relying on comment sections as your primary conversion strategy is exhausting and doesn’t work. Build a follow-up process that converts interest into action. An email sequence does the same work at scale without requiring you to be online every hour of the day.

“Find your niche” keeps people stuck in research mode for months. Build one offer that solves one specific problem and create the infrastructure to deliver it. You can refine your niche with real data after you have a system running. Without a system there’s nothing to test and nothing to refine.

And “diversify your income streams” is a scaling strategy that every guru sells as a starting strategy. Pick ONE income path and build the full system around it before adding anything else. One solid system generating consistent income will always outperform five half-built ideas generating nothing. Always.

What Happens Without a System

I’ve watched this cycle play out dozens of times. Person posts every day. Spends hours creating content. Engages, shows up, does the work. And at the end of the month, the income is either zero or so inconsistent they can’t plan around it.

Then one day they look up and realize someone who started after them, someone with waaaaaay fewer followers, is making real money. The only difference? That person had built the four pieces. An offer, an email capture, a delivery method, and a follow-up sequence.

Person buys another course. Learns another framework, tries a different tactic. And the cycle repeats because none of those courses said to build the system FIRST. They all said grow your audience, be visible, and post every day. And the person did all of that without the infrastructure to make any of it count.

If this sounds familiar, I need you to hear this. You can post every single day for a year and have nothing to show for it when there’s no system underneath the content. I’m not going to be the one who didn’t tell you that.

Build the System

The online business ideas that actually work right now come down to building something structured, repeatable, and sustainable. Something that works even when you’re not online and serves people well without requiring you to hustle harder every single month until you burn out and quit.

AI makes that buildable by one person. But the AI is only useful if you know what you’re building. That part is hard for me to even lay out fully in a Substack article, which is why I created a monetization map that goes deep on all of it so you can see the full picture.

If you want to figure out which income path fits your actual life before you build anything, The AI Monetization Map will help you identify your best starting point in about ten minutes. No guesswork. Just a clear decision based on your real constraints, your real skills, and your real time available.

Go build the thing. Your audience will thank you for it.

P.S. My son Josiah is in town from the USA so after editing this article I’m headed out (on a Monday) to spend the rest of the day with my family. I get to do that because I have these types of systems in place that keep working for me even when I’m offline. Go build your system so you can spend more time doing the things that really matter!

I’ve made a lot of money online. Some of it nearly destroyed my life. So when I tell you that the internet is lying to you about how this works, I’m not guessing. I’ve been on both sides of it.

I ran a multiple seven-figure coaching business. From the outside it looked like the dream. Big launches, sold-out programs, and income screenshots that would make your jaw drop. And behind all of it, my marriage was falling apart, my health was failing, and I was spiritually bankrupt. I was making money online and I was completely miserable doing it.

When I walked away from that and rebuilt from nothing, I learned what actually works. The version that doesn’t look good on a sales page or go viral on Instagram. What honestly and sustainably works.

And it’s boring. That’s what nobody tells you.

The Gap Between the Promise and the Process

The internet sells you a version of making money online that looks like this: find a hot niche, build a funnel, run some ads or post some content, and watch the money roll in. Maybe throw AI into the mix and it happens even faster. It promises you four-hour work weeks and passive income while you sleep.

And some version of that can be true, eventually, for some people. After a LOT of work that nobody shows you.

The actual process looks more like this: spend weeks getting clear on what you’re even offering. Struggle to explain who it’s for. Post content that gets three likes from people who are probably just being nice. Rewrite your offer four times. Wonder if you picked the wrong niche entirely. Keep going anyway. Start to see small signs of traction after a month or two. Build on those. Keep showing up. And slowly... VERY slowly, it starts to work.

That’s the truth. And nobody’s making a viral reel about it because it doesn’t sell anything because humans want instant gratification and to get rich quick. Nobody wants to work hard and be disciplined.

The Boring Stuff That Actually Matters

I know what you want to hear. You want the exact strategy and the exact system that will make it all magically work. And systems matter. I teach them and I believe in them.

But underneath every working system is a set of boring decisions that most people refuse to make. I STILL have to make these decisions. Every time I build something new, every time I develop an offer or shift direction, I’m back in this same unsexy process. It doesn’t go away because you’ve done it before. You just get faster at it.

You have to pick ONE offer. One clear thing you’re selling to one specific group of people who have one specific problem. I know you have five ideas you’re excited about. Pick one anyway. That sounds simple and it is the hardest thing most people do in this entire process. Because picking one means saying no to everything else, and saying no feels like leaving money on the table.

Getting specific about who you’re talking to matters just as much. “Entrepreneurs” and “women who want freedom” aren’t specific enough. You need a real person with a real problem who would pay actual money for a solution. If you sell digital products, you need to know whether you’re talking to the person who already tried selling a course and it flopped, or the person who has knowledge worth packaging but has never built anything online. Completely different problems. Talk to ONE of them.

And then there’s the hardest part. Showing up when nobody is watching. You’re going to spend months posting content that barely gets engagement while your email list grows by two people a week and every guru on the internet seems to be doing better than you. That stretch kills most online businesses for real. The people who push through it are the ones who eventually make money online. Everyone else quits and blames the algorithm.

Why Most People Quit

They quit because it was slower than anyone told them it would be. The timeline the internet sells you is a fantasy. “I made $10K in my first month” stories are either outliers, exaggerations, or backed by an audience that took years to build. For most people starting from zero, the first meaningful income takes 60 to 120 days of consistent, focused effort. And “meaningful” might mean $500, not $5,000.

$500 is still a foundation, even though it doesn’t feel like one when you’re watching someone else post their income screenshot while you’re still trying to figure out why nobody’s opening your emails. The comparison trap is real and it kills more online businesses than bad strategy ever will. That part sucks. I’m not going to sugarcoat it.

People also quit because nobody warned them how repetitive it gets. Making money online, once you figure out what works, is mostly doing the same things over and over. Creating content around the same core topics and sending emails to your list. Refining your offer based on what people actually respond to. Promoting the same thing consistently instead of launching something new every month.

None of that is glamorous. And discipline is the thing the internet forgot to mention between the income screenshots and the beach photos.

What Consistency Actually Looks Like

Consistency isn’t posting every day. I want to be clear about that because the hustle culture version of consistency will burn you out in six weeks.

The reason most people are inconsistent with their online business isn’t laziness. It’s that they wake up every day and have to figure out from scratch what to create, what to say, and where to put it. That decision fatigue is what burns people out, not the actual work. So the fix isn’t “try harder” or “be more disciplined.” The fix is to build a system that makes the decisions for you in advance. When you sit down to create, the thinking is already done. You just execute.

I’ll tell you what this looks like for me right now. I use AI every single day to research, draft, develop, and produce content. I’ve spent the last three years buried in AI tools, testing everything I can get my hands on, and I’ve built systems that let me create in a fraction of the time it used to take. This week alone, AI helped me produce a full article, develop video content, and build out pin descriptions for Pinterest. That kind of output used to require a team. Now it’s just me and three tools (I wrote a whole article about which three, go read that one here).

What AI Can Actually Do For You

AI is the reason I can produce the volume I just described without a team. It handles the repetitive execution that used to eat up entire days, everything from drafting to research to repurposing.

That’s where it belongs. On the execution side.

The problems I described earlier in this article, picking one offer, getting specific about who you’re talking to, deciding what your content is actually for, AI can’t sort any of that out for you. I’ve watched people try. They hand AI everything and end up with a business that looks polished on the outside and has nothing underneath it. Really efficient rubbish.

The line you have to figure out is which parts of your business are execution and which parts are judgment. AI gets the first category. You keep the second. And if you’re not sure which is which, that’s a sign you need more clarity before you need more tools.

What the People Actually Making Money Are Doing

I pay attention to this. I watch the ones quietly building businesses that sustain their families year after year, the ones who never post income screenshots. The patterns are waaaaaay more boring than you’d expect.

They chose one income path and stuck with it long enough for it to work. Services, digital products, coaching, or affiliate marketing, whatever the model. They committed to it for more than 30 days and let it mature instead of jumping ship the second it felt slow. They systematized the repetitive parts so they could focus on what requires human judgment. AI handles the drafting and the research and the formatting, but the strategy and the relationships and the quality control stay with them.

They serve the audience they already have instead of constantly hunting for a bigger one. A small, engaged list of people who trust you is worth more than 50,000 followers who scroll past your content. Every time.

And the credibility piece? They refused to make promises they couldn’t keep. No income guarantees. No “this will change your life in 30 days.” Just consistent proof that they know what they’re talking about, delivered over time. That’s it. That’s the whole secret. (I know. Anticlimactic.)

Now You Know

Making money online is real. AI makes it faster and more accessible than it’s ever been. But the foundation hasn’t changed. You still need clarity about what you offer and who you serve. You still need consistency that outlasts the dopamine of a good launch day, and the willingness to do boring work long enough for it to compound into something meaningful.

The people who will still be here in two years are the ones who built on that foundation. Everyone else will have moved on to the next trending thing, still looking for the shortcut that doesn’t exist.

I’m not going to be the one who let you believe the fantasy version. A system, a clear offer, and enough patience to let it work. That’s what gets you there.

If you want to build this the right way, with a real framework and not hype, the AI Revolution Secrets training walks you through how to set up AI-powered income systems that actually work. It’s free, it’s practical, and we cover everything from tools to strategy to long-term sustainability.

Register for the free AI Revolution Secrets training here

If you want to figure out which income path fits your life right now, the AI Monetization Map gives you a decision matrix, 7 realistic paths, and a 30-day action plan. Clarity without the hype.

Get the AI Monetization Map here

I need to tell you something that’s going to save you a lot of money and a lot of frustration.

I use a handful of AI tools but three of them are the ones I open every single day. THREE. That’s my daily stack. And those three tools handle everything I need to create content, build offers, serve my audience, and generate income.

I know this because I was the person with too many subscriptions. I’ve tested over 40 AI tools in the last three years like a maniac. Signed up for free trials, paid for monthly plans, watched every tutorial, and joined every waitlist. And you know what most of that got me? A bunch of logins I couldn’t keep track of and a credit card statement that made me want to cry.

Maybe you’re in the same place right now. Your upline told you to use this tool, some course told you to use that tool, you saw someone on TikTok swearing by three more, and now you’ve got subscriptions bleeding out of your bank account and you’re STILL not sure what to post tomorrow. Or maybe you’re a coach or creator who keeps hearing you need an expensive AI stack to stay competitive and you’re wondering if that’s actually true. Or maybe you just searched “AI tools to make money” and got hit with a wall of lists that all recommend different things.

Wherever you’re coming from, the answer is the same. You need three tools. That’s it. The rest is noise.

Why Most “Best AI Tools for Creators” Lists Are Rubbish

I’m going to be straight with you about something. Most of those “Top 20 AI Tools You NEED” posts? They’re affiliate dumps. The person writing the list gets paid every time you click through and subscribe. So of course the list is long. Every tool on that list is a potential commission for them.

I have ZERO affiliate relationships with the three tools I’m about to recommend. None. I make nothing if you sign up for any of them. I’m telling you about them because I use them every single day and they work. That’s it.

The other problem with those giant tool lists is what they actually do to you. More tools means more logins, more subscriptions, more learning curves, more things pulling at your attention when you should be building your business. I’ve watched people (and been the person) spending more time managing software than actually creating anything. You end up with thirty AI subscriptions and no clear offer. You’re just spending money to feel productive.

For real. Simplicity is the actual productivity tool here. Fewer subscriptions and less complexity means you actually execute. That’s what generates income.

The 3-Tool Stack: Everything You Need, Nothing You Don’t

These three tools cover my full workflow from thinking to creating to producing visual content. They work together without overlap. And the combined cost starts under $50 a month at entry-level paid tiers. All three have free versions powerful enough to test before you spend anything.

This works whether you’re brand new to AI or you’ve been building online for years. The tools scale with you.

Tool #1: Claude by Anthropic

Claude is where I do my thinking. All of it. Strategy, content, articles, emails, brainstorming, editing, and offer development. If it involves words or ideas, it happens in Claude.

I switched to Claude from ChatGPT and I’m not even a little bit sorry about it. The difference in output quality was IMMEDIATE. Claude writes closer to how I actually think and communicate. The reasoning is deeper and the writing doesn’t sound like a machine tried to be casual. And when I push back on something or ask for revisions, it adjusts intelligently instead of just rearranging the same words into a different order (if you’ve used ChatGPT for writing, you know exactly what I’m talking about).

This matters because the whole point of using AI for content is that it needs to sound like YOU. If you’re spending an hour editing every single piece of AI content to strip out the robot voice, your tool is failing you. I was doing that constantly with ChatGPT. With Claude, I barely edit.

Day to day, Claude handles my content strategy and planning. I use it to brainstorm topics, develop outlines, and create first drafts that are close enough to my voice that editing takes minutes instead of hours. It writes email sequences and social media content. It helps me think through business decisions by surfacing things I might miss.

Pricing: There’s a free tier that’s genuinely useful for getting started. The Pro plan is $20 a month and that’s what most people will need. There’s also a Max plan at $100 a month for heavy users, but Pro is more than enough for most creators and entrepreneurs.

I’m not saying ChatGPT is bad. Millions of people use it well. But I tested both extensively and for my workflow, Claude won. That’s where I landed and I haven’t looked back.

Tool #2: Higgsfield

This is the one most people haven’t heard of yet and honestly it’s the one I’m most excited about.

Higgsfield is an all-in-one AI visual studio. Image generation, video creation, AI avatars, and cinematic video. All in one platform. You don’t need a separate image tool AND a separate video tool AND a separate avatar tool. Higgsfield does all of it.

If you’re building anything online, visual content is not optional. You need images for social media and digital products. You need video for short-form content and audience building. And if you’re running a faceless brand or you just don’t want to be on camera every single day (I get it), AI avatars let you show up without actually showing up.

Higgsfield lets you create an avatar that looks like you and delivers your content with your presence, without you filming anything. I know that sounds like a gimmick. It’s not. I use it in my actual business for people who value their privacy or who simply cannot be on camera five days a week. Some of you are juggling businesses and families and about fourteen other things. Being camera-ready every day is not realistic and it doesn’t have to be.

I use Higgsfield for all my visual content. For image generation, I use Nano Banana Pro inside the platform, and for video I use Grok Imagine almost exclusively now. Plus it has face animation, lip sync, and the ability to change the visual style of your content (think turning a regular video into animation or a completely different aesthetic). Every time I log in there’s something new.

Pricing: There’s a free tier with limited credits so you can test it. Higgsfield runs on a credit-based system with paid plans starting at $9 a month for 150 credits. The Pro plan at around $17 a month gives you 600 credits, which is enough to get real work done. Most people starting out will land somewhere in the $9 to $29 range. I’m on a higher tier because I generate at volume, but you don’t need to start where I am.

The whole point is consolidation. Instead of paying for an image generator AND a video creator AND an avatar tool separately, it’s all under one roof. Less to manage, less to pay for, and your visual content stays consistent.

Tool #3: Google Gemini

Gemini is my research engine. When I need to go deep on a topic, understand what’s happening in a market, or gather real information before creating content, Gemini is where I go.

The deep research feature is what sets it apart. It doesn’t just give you a surface-level answer. It pulls from current sources, synthesizes information, and produces research that would take me hours to compile manually. If you’re creating educational content or making business decisions based on actual data (not vibes), this matters.

I occasionally use Gemini for image generation too, but it’s not a main use. Most of my image work happens inside Higgsfield with Nano Banana Pro. Gemini is there if I need a quick visual or a different style, but research is the reason it earns its spot in the stack.

In my business, Gemini handles market research for new content and offer development. It helps me understand what people are actually searching for, what questions they’re asking, and where the gaps are in content that already exists. When I’m building something educational, the deep research lets me verify information and find supporting evidence fast.

Pricing: Free tier with access to good models. The Google AI Pro plan is $19.99 a month and includes the most advanced models, deep research, image generation, and integration with Gmail, Docs, and Drive. It also comes with 2TB of Google storage. If you’re already in Google’s ecosystem, this is exceptional value.

How All Three Work Together (My Actual Workflow)

This is how I actually use these tools. This is what my week looks like.

I start in Gemini to research a topic. I’m looking for what people are actually searching for, what questions nobody is answering well, and what’s moving in the market right now. Gemini gives me the raw material and strategic direction.

That research goes straight into Claude where I build the actual content. Articles, emails, scripts, and whatever the project needs. Claude helps me develop the ideas, structure everything, and produce drafts that sound like me. This is where I create the real output.

Then Higgsfield handles the visual side. I’ll create images for the article, repurpose the written content into video, and build avatar videos for platforms where video performs better. The whole thing moves from idea to published content in three tools.

Real example: this article you’re reading right now. I used Gemini to research what people are actually searching for around AI tools and income. I used Claude to draft and develop the entire piece. And the visual assets? Higgsfield. That’s the whole process for one published article.

What You Can Skip

People ask me about these ALL THE TIME so let me save you the subscriptions.

You don’t need a separate AI writing tool if you have Claude. Jasper, Copy.ai... they do variations of the same thing and none of them come close to Claude’s reasoning or writing quality. Save your money for real.

You don’t need five image generators. Higgsfield covers it. Adding Midjourney and DALL-E on top of that is waaaaaay too many subscriptions for the same function.

You don’t need a separate AI scheduling tool yet. I see people subscribe to distribution tools before they have content worth distributing. Build the engine first.

You don’t need a course for every tool either. Most of these have free tutorials and documentation. Start using it. Learn by doing. You’ll sort out 80% of what you need in the first week just by experimenting.

And here’s the thing about a minimalist stack. You can’t blame your tools when you only have three of them. There’s nowhere to hide. You just have to do the work.

Where to Start If Budget Is Tight

Do NOT buy all three at once. Here’s the order.

Start with Claude. If you can only afford one AI subscription, this is the one. The free tier is capable enough to begin, and Pro at $20 a month covers most of your content creation and business thinking needs.

Add Gemini when you need deeper research. If you’re creating educational content or building offers, the research capabilities become worth it. The free tier gives you a real taste of what’s possible before you commit.

Add Higgsfield when you’re ready for visual content. Once your written content is working and your offers are sorted, visual content amplifies everything. $9 a month gets you in the door, and you can scale up as your needs grow.

All three at entry-level paid tiers: under $50 a month. That’s less than most people spend on a single AI tool they barely use.

Simpler Than You Think

I’m not going to be the one who watched you waste money on twelve AI subscriptions when I could have just told you what actually works. So I’m telling you. Three tools. Used with intention and a clear strategy underneath them. That’s what works. Everything else is a distraction.

Pick your tools. Learn them well. Build something real with them.

These three tools are my daily stack. They cover the core of everything I do. For niche development and structured offer building, I also use Captivation Genius, which I’m an affiliate for and genuinely recommend. It’s not something I open every day the way I open Claude or Gemini or Higgsfield, but when I’m building out a new offer or helping someone find their niche, it’s where I go.

If you want to see how all of these tools fit together, the full system behind how I use AI to build income, including the strategy, the workflows, and the frameworks that make it all productive, join me for the AI Revolution Secrets training. It’s free, it’s practical, and we walk through the complete ecosystem including Captivation Genius and how it fits alongside the daily stack.

Register for the free AI Revolution Secrets training here

If you want a complete roadmap for choosing your best income path with AI, download the AI Monetization Map. It includes the decision matrix, 7 realistic income paths, and a 30-day action plan to get you from “I don’t know where to start” to first revenue.

Download the AI Monetization Map

PS: Someone’s going to say “but what about [insert tool]?” and the answer is the same every time. If it’s not in this article or the training, I don’t use it. Fight me. (LOL don’t actually fight me, just try them.)

I’ve spent the last two weeks writing about why the AI shift matters and what happens if you wait. Now it’s time to talk about what to actually do.

If you’ve been reading along, you know what the compounding gap is. If you’re new, here’s the short version.

The Compounding Gap

Most people think the distance between someone using AI and someone not using AI is a straight line. Like the person who started is just a little further ahead and you can catch up whenever you decide to start.

That’s not how it works. AT ALL.

The gap compounds. I’ve been deep in AI for three years now, obsessively for the last 18 months. This week I used AI to build out an entire content system that would have taken me two full weeks six months ago. I did it in an afternoon. The only reason that’s possible is because every week of learning stacked on top of the last one.

And if you haven’t started? You’re not just “a little behind.” You’re starting from zero while the tools changed, the learning curve got steeper, and the people who started earlier sorted out their mistakes when the stakes were low. That gap doesn’t close just by working harder.

That’s the hard truth. And the gap closes the same way it opens. One week at a time. You can start stacking today.

I want to give you three things you can actually do this week. Not theory. Actual moves.

Pick One Workflow and Use AI For It This Week

Not everything. One thing.

Most people either avoid AI entirely or try to use it for everything at once. Both approaches fail. Avoidance keeps you stuck. Overload overwhelms you and then you produce absolute trash (ask me how I know).

Pick one task you already do regularly. Something that eats your time but doesn’t require your deepest judgment. Something like content drafts, follow-up emails, or the research for your next post.

Then use AI to help you do that one thing faster. Let it assist you.

Example: If you spend two hours writing your weekly email to your list, try drafting it with AI first. Give it context about who you’re writing to and what you want to say. Take what it gives you and rewrite it in your voice. Time yourself. See what happens.

The goal isn’t to automate your whole business in a week. It’s to feel what it’s like when AI actually helps instead of just being another thing on the list of stuff you should learn.

Pick one workflow and start there this week.

Decide What AI Will Never Touch

This is the part nobody else is teaching, and it matters more than any prompt trick you’ll find on the internet.

AI can do a lot. That doesn’t mean it should do everything. Some things require human judgment, human presence, and human responsibility. If you hand those things to a machine, you will get bad output AND lose the trust of your audience. Your authority will take a hit and that doesn’t come back easily.

I have hard lines. AI never handles spiritual counsel or discernment in my world. Nothing gets published without my review and revision. I don’t let it make decisions for me or speak into situations that require wisdom I haven’t given it. Those are mine to steward.

Your lines will be different. But they need to exist.

Sit down and write out what AI will never do in your business. The areas where you stay fully human no matter how good the tools get.

If you’re not sure where to draw the line, ask yourself these questions:

Does this task require me to know something about this specific person that AI doesn’t have access to? Does a wrong answer here damage trust in a way that’s hard to repair? Is this something people come to me for specifically because it’s ME? Would I be uncomfortable if the person on the other end knew AI wrote this?

If the answer to any of those is yes, keep it human.

The people who lose credibility with AI are the ones who automated the wrong things. The ones who build trust figured out where the line was BEFORE they crossed it.

Draw your line before you need it.

Get Clear Before You Prompt

I see this constantly: someone opens ChatGPT, types a vague request, gets vague output, and decides AI doesn’t work for them.

The tool works fine. They just didn’t know what they were trying to say before they started.

AI can only work with what you give it. If you’re unclear on your offer, your audience, or your point of view, AI will reflect that confusion back at you in polished word-salad sentences that don’t make sense, and have no real value or substance so they won’t land with your audience.

Before you prompt anything, answer three questions: Who specifically is this for? What’s the one thing I want them to understand? And what do I want them to do after?

Get specific on all three.

If you can answer those clearly, your AI session will be focused and your output will be useful. Can’t answer them? Stop. Do the thinking first. AI will still be there when you’re ready.

Clarity before tools. Always.

The Compound Effect

These three actions are simple on purpose.

The compounding gap doesn’t close by learning every tool or mastering every prompt. It closes by starting. Build one workflow that saves you time. Protect what matters. Get clear enough that AI actually helps instead of just generating noise.

The people who are way ahead right now didn’t start with some secret system. They started with one task. One boundary. One clear thought. Then they did it again. And again. Every week stacking on the last one.

You can start that stack today. For real.

Go Deeper

If you missed the masterclass: I taught a full session on the compounding gap, what happened in AI in January, and how to build a framework for what to automate versus what to protect. The replay is $29.

Get the Acceleration Window Replay

If you want the full foundation: AI Revolution Secrets is my free training on how AI is reshaping work and income and how to start using it without losing yourself in the process. If you’re new to all of this, start here.

Register for AI Revolution Secrets

I’m not going to be the person who had this information and didn’t make it practical enough for people to act on. The window is open.

Most people think the distance between someone using AI and someone not using AI is a straight line. Like the person who started is just a little further ahead and you can catch up whenever you decide to start.

That’s not how it works. AT ALL.

The gap compounds.

In the beginning, the difference is barely noticeable. The person who started first saves a few hours a week. Their content gets out the door a little faster. Nothing dramatic.

But six months later? That person has built entire systems. They’ve developed intuition for what AI does well and what it doesn’t. They’ve made their mistakes early, when the stakes were low, and sorted them out. They’re operating in a fundamentally different reality. And you, the person who waited six months to start? You’re not six months behind. You’re starting from zero while everything around you already moved forward. The tools changed. The learning curve got steeper. And the people who started earlier have a compounding head start that you cannot close just by working harder.

I know this because I’ve lived it. I’ve been deep in AI for three years now. And the last 18 months I have been close to obsessively learning and implementing. And this week alone, I used AI to build out an entire content system and restructure a workflow that would have taken me two full weeks even six months ago. I did it in an afternoon. And the only reason I could do that is because I’ve been compounding for three years and every single week of that learning stacked on top of the last one.

That’s the compounding gap. And the uncomfortable truth is that every week you wait, the gap gets harder to close. Not impossible. But harder. For real.

Why I’m Telling You This Right Now

My last article about what happened in AI in January was the most-read piece I’ve published on Substack. I had more people subscribe from that article than any other article I’ve written. Here’s what that told me - you feel the shift. You know something changed.

But here’s what I also noticed. A lot of people read it, agreed with it, felt the weight of it, and then did nothing.

So instead of writing another article about how fast AI is moving (you already know that if you read the last one), I want to do something different. I want to show you what I’m actually going to walk through in this weekend’s masterclass. And I don’t mean some vague “you’ll learn frameworks and strategies” description. I mean the real thinking. Because I think once you see what I’m going to share, you’ll know whether this is for you.

The way I see it, there are two mistakes people make right now. The first is doing nothing, which feels safe but isn’t. The second is rushing in without a framework, handing things to AI that should never be handed over, and breaking trust in the process. This weekend’s masterclass is built around the path between those two mistakes. Here’s what I’m covering.

I’m going to walk through what happened in January in a lot more detail than the article covered. The actual developments, the timelines, and what all of it means for people building online. I want you to see the pattern, not just the headlines. Because the pattern is what tells you where this is going next.

The compounding gap gets a full breakdown. I gave you the concept above, but in the session I’m going to show you exactly where you likely sit on that curve, what the realistic timeline looks like for closing the gap from YOUR starting point, and the specific first moves that give you the most leverage for the time you invest. There’s a part of this I genuinely cannot do justice in a Substack article. I could talk about the compounding gap alone for an hour (and I will on Friday...LOL). Which is exactly why I’m hosting a whole masterclass about it.

The discernment framework is the part I care about most. What to hand to AI right now, what to NEVER hand over, and where the line sits between leverage and abdication. Most AI educators don’t touch this because it’s not sexy and it doesn’t sell courses. But I think it’s the most important part of this entire conversation, and I’m going to go there.

The last piece is what the next six months likely looks like based on what’s already in development, what the companies are signaling, and what the current pace tells us. Not predictions. Pattern recognition. So you can make decisions based on trajectory instead of last week’s news cycle.

I Could Have Kept All of This Behind the Paywall

That’s what most people do. Tease the content, create curiosity, hope the mystery drives registrations.

I don’t operate that way. I’d rather you know exactly what you’re walking into and make a clear decision about whether it’s worth your time and your $29.

The people who showed up for my last live training told me afterward that the thing they valued most wasn’t any single tactic. It was the framework. It was finally having a way to think about all of this that made sense. That’s what I’m building Friday’s session around. A strategic session designed to give you understanding you can act on IMMEDIATELY.

What This Session Is (and What It Isn’t)

I want to be direct about this because the internet is full of $29 webinars that are really just 90-minute sales pitches with fifteen minutes of content sprinkled in. And that’s rubbish.

This is a live, grounded briefing on what changed in AI in January and what it means for anyone building income online.

Will I share what’s available next for people who want to go deeper? Yes, briefly and honestly. But the masterclass is designed to stand on its own. You will walk away with clarity and a framework you can act on regardless of whether you ever purchase anything else from me.

The Discernment Question Nobody Else Is Asking

Every AI educator out there is telling you what to automate. Almost nobody is telling you what NOT to automate. And that question is where the real stakes are.

I have hard lines. AI never handles spiritual counsel or discernment in my world. Nothing gets published without my review and revision. Those lines exist because some things require human judgment, human presence, and human responsibility. You hand those things to a machine and the consequences aren’t just bad content. Trust erodes. Your authority takes a hit. And that stuff doesn’t come back easy.

In the masterclass, I’m going to walk you through how to build your own version of these lines. Not mine. Yours. Based on your business, your values, and the specific areas where AI helps versus where it starts replacing the thing that actually makes you valuable. Most people don’t think about this until the damage is done. We’re going to think about it before you start building.

The Real Reason It’s $29

Honestly, I could have done this for free. But I’ve learned something over years of running trainings. When something is free, people sign up and don’t show. When there’s even a small cost attached, the room fills with people who take notes and implement. Even at $29, the energy shifts completely because everyone there has skin in the game (even if it’s only $29 worth of skin).

I priced it at $29 because I want every person who needs this to be able to afford it. And I want every person in that room to be there because they intend to DO something with what they learn.

That’s the whole calculation. No hidden upsell math. No loss-leader strategy.

Here’s What You Get

The full 90-minute live masterclass with a complete breakdown of what happened in January and what it means for online income. The compounding gap framework and a clear next-step decision model. An AI content and automation playbook. An event workbook that becomes your personal roadmap from clarity to action. Full replay access. And first access to upcoming AI education, tools, and resources as they launch.

If you show up, I want you to leave thinking that was worth way more than $29.

The Deets

The Acceleration Window: What Changed in AI Last Week That Will Decide Who Makes Money Online.

Friday, February 6th. 5PM Pacific. 7PM Central. 8PM Eastern.

Saturday, February 7th. 9AM Bali. 12PM Sydney. 2PM Auckland.

Same live session, two time zones. Full replay provided if you can’t make either one. But I’d encourage you to show up live. The energy in the room matters, the questions people ask always take it somewhere I didn’t plan, and honestly, prioritizing showing up is part of the shift I’m asking you to make.

$29. One-time investment. All bonuses included.

Secure your seat here.

One More Thing

I’m not going to be the person who had this information and didn’t share it clearly enough for people to act on it. I refuse to do that. I’ve watched too many people I care about tell themselves they’ll figure this out later while the distance between where they are and where they could be gets wider every month. And the cost of that is always quiet. It doesn’t announce itself. It just accumulates until one day you wake up and realize someone you used to be neck and neck with is suddenly waaaaaay ahead of you. And you can’t figure out when that happened.

And the distance between “I should learn this” and “I wish I had started sooner” closes faster than you think.

I’ll see you this weekend.

Register for The Acceleration Window

P.S. This article has taken me multiple drafts and three days to write, which is not like me. That’s how much I wanted to get this right. Come to the masterclass. Let me show you what I see. I promise it will be worth your time.