Should women business owners use AI?
Here's my honest take.
I was at a networking event when the room split into three groups. What happened next changed how I talk about this.
I want to tell you about a moment at a recent networking event that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
The room was a cute little mix... brand new business owners right at the beginning of their journey, and seasoned entrepreneurs who had built, scaled, and sold multiple companies. Different seasons of business, same room. And the conversation kept circling back to the same topic: AI.
What I noticed was that the room quietly divided itself into three distinct groups... and the split revealed something important about where we are as women in business right now.
Group one: All in
Using AI across operations, client work, content, and strategy. Running leaner, moving faster.
Group two: Surface level
Using it for meal planning or simple searches — things a basic Google search would have handled before.
Group three: Opting out
Not using it at all. Worried about jobs, the environment, or simply not knowing where to start.
And here is the part I want to talk about — because it is the part most people skip over.
Is it okay to be afraid of AI as a business owner?
Yes — and those fears often come from a place of genuine empathy. But fear alone is not a strategy.
When I listened to the women in group three, I heard real concerns: jobs being eliminated, the environmental cost of data centers, distrust of the technology. Those are not small things. Those are the concerns of people who are paying attention to the world around them.
I am not here to dismiss any of that. What I am here to say is this:
Our brains are better off inside the machine than outside of it.
The people currently shaping how AI thinks, grows, and makes decisions are largely not us. The gap between who is building this technology and who is benefiting from it is real and documented. Women who opt out because it feels uncomfortable or scary are the exact voices that need to be shaping it — not absent from it.
You opting out does not slow it down. It just means the table gets set without you.
How are successful business owners actually using AI in 2026?
The most effective business owners are using AI to 10x their workflow ,not replace their thinking, but remove the bottleneck between having an idea and executing it.
I have been using AI tools — specifically Chat and Claude — for about two and a half years, since it first became available to the public. And I want to be transparent: I am still learning. Every week I carve out time to get better at it, because the gap between where I am and where this technology is going is something I refuse to let widen.
Here is how it shows up in my actual client work at:
During the brand strategy phase, I use transcripts from the client along with Claude to help build out a client's brand voice, their core message, and their positioning. Then I set it up as their permanent home base — a foundation they come back to every time they create content, write copy, or brief a contractor.
The result? They are no longer staring at a blank screen. They are no longer stuck trying to articulate what they do and who they do it for. What used to take weeks of back-and-forth now happens in a fraction of the time — and the output is sharper, more consistent, and more them than anything they were producing before.
We have genuinely 10x'd workflow time on brand projects. Not by cutting corners — by removing the friction that was never adding value in the first place.
What is the difference between businesses using AI and businesses that aren't?
Capacity, speed, and consistency. Businesses using AI strategically are producing more, faster, with fewer resources/cost and compounding that advantage every month.
This is not theoretical. The gap between businesses that have integrated AI into their operations and those that have not is widening every quarter. The question is not whether AI will affect your industry. It already has. The question is whether you are going to be on the side that benefits from it.
The women I saw at that networking event who were running their businesses most efficiently? They were not the ones with the most experience or the biggest budgets. They were the ones who had stopped treating AI as a threat and started treating it as infrastructure.
Where should a business owner start with AI?
DIRECT ANSWER
Start with one tool, one use case, and one hour. Claude is a strong starting point — Anthropic offers free learning resources specifically designed for people who are new to AI.
I recommend Claude's free learning resources (anthropic.com/learn) as a genuine starting point — not because it is the only tool, but because it is the one I use daily in my business and with my clients, and the learning materials are actually good.
Block an hour. Let yourself be a beginner. The discomfort of not knowing something new is temporary. The cost of not learning it is compounding.
The bottom line
Your concerns about AI are valid. Your empathy for the people it affects is one of the things that makes you a great business owner. And that empathy is exactly why your voice needs to be in the room — not sitting this one out.
The brands that are going to win over the next five years are not the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They are the ones that learned to move faster, communicate more clearly, and show up more consistently — because they stopped letting friction and fear make those decisions for them.
That disconnect between your real-world expertise and your online presence? AI helps close it. But only if you let it.
