Do you need an AI consultant, or can you use ChatGPT yourself?
Often you can do it yourself. Where it pays to bring someone in is when the job has to run every week without you, connect your apps, or follow rules nobody wrote down.
The short answer
For a lot of jobs, you can do it yourself. Drafting an email, summarising a long document, rewording a letter or brainstorming a name: a ChatGPT or Claude subscription and a bit of practice will do those well, and you don’t need us.
It’s worth bringing someone in when the job has to run every week without you sitting there, when it has to pass information between the apps you already use, or when it has to follow your business’s own rules every time.
What you can do yourself
- One-off writing. Letters, emails, job adverts, social posts. Give it your own examples and it will match your tone.
- Reading and summarising. Paste in a long contract or a set of minutes and ask what matters.
- Thinking out loud. Talk a problem through before you decide.
If that’s what you need, a morning learning to use one well is worth more than any build. That’s part of what our advice and training is for: we come to you, sit down with your team and work through one real job together.
Where doing it yourself runs out
- It has to happen without you. A chat window does nothing until you open it. Chasing a quote that’s gone quiet or filing receipts as they arrive needs a routine that runs by itself.
- It has to touch your other apps. Copying from ChatGPT into Xero, your calendar or a spreadsheet is still copying. A routine passes it along for you.
- It has to follow your rules every time. A rota with 294 shifts and a list of rules about rest, hours and contracts can’t be left to a chat that might forget one. That’s a tool, and it checks its own answer before you see it. The delivery rota case shows one.
- It has to answer from your own files, privately. Answers from your own documents, with the page each answer came from, and each person seeing only the files they’re allowed to open, is a set-up job, not a prompt. See ask your own documents.
How to tell which you’ve got
Ask two questions. Does this job come round every day or every week? And would you have to explain rules to a new starter for them to do it right? If the answer to both is yes, it’s probably worth building. If not, start with the subscription.