Where I land on artificial intelligence, small businesses, and the nonprofits doing the most with the least

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There are two loud positions on artificial intelligence right now, and I don’t hold either one.

The first says replace everyone. Cut the team, run it lean, let the software do the work. The second says refuse it entirely, wait it out, hope this passes like every other trend. One is careless with people. The other is careless with the organizations that need help the most.

I’m completely against using artificial intelligence to replace a workforce. I’m completely for using it to give the small fish in the pond a real path to success. Those two things aren’t in tension. They’re the same position, held honestly.

What leverage actually looks like

For most of my career, real operational leverage was something you had to buy. If you wanted faster turnaround on your processes, cleaner data, better conversions, and deliverables that looked like they came from a firm three times your size, you hired for it. That meant salaries, benefits, and a payroll number you had to clear in profit before you could even think about making the offer.

Small organizations sat that out. Not because they lacked the ideas, but because they couldn’t afford the depth.

That gate is open now, and I don’t think enough people have noticed.

When I say leverage, I don’t mean typing a prompt and pasting the answer. I mean the operational spine underneath a business: a client relationship system that actually tracks the relationship, online booking that stops the back and forth, automations that move work forward without anyone remembering to move it, tasks and projects with reminders and real accountability attached, reports that arrive on their own, and oversight into what matters most from a few clicks.

That’s what changes an organization’s ceiling.

The stack I actually run on

I’m not going to write about tools I don’t use. Here’s what runs my own business and my client work.

ClickUp holds everything. Client projects, my own day to day, content, and production for whatever I’m responsible for that week. It’s the room where the work lives, and I’m in it daily.

Flodesk sends the email. What changed isn’t the sending, it’s what goes into it. Data that used to take hours to pull, or a paid research resource to surface, now takes seconds. So the newsletter is more concise, more interesting, and more useful, and it costs a fraction of what that same depth would have cost me even a few years ago.

17hats runs the pipeline from the very first touch. Someone inquires, the automated response goes out, and the workflow carries them into quoting, invoicing, and contracts without a gap where I have to remember something. I run it alongside ThriveCart for checkout, Zapier for the connections, and Showit for the site.

Here’s the part I want you to sit with. Before I ever needed an assistant, client inquiry, onboarding, and delivery were all automated. In the old model, that capability was a hire. Thousands of dollars I would have had to earn first, and clear, before I could bring someone on. Instead I built it, and it ran.

And now Claude connects across those tools, which gives me another layer of execution and thinking that I didn’t have access to before. Not replacing my judgment. Extending how far my judgment can reach in a day.

This is the gap between me and most of my competitors, and I’ll say it plainly: a lot of them are still on level one of delivery.

The example I keep coming back to

I worked with a nonprofit running on three people. Three. They needed intake for hundreds of participants across the year, and they were doing it the way small nonprofits always do it, which is heroically and by hand.

I built them an eight board intake system. Full pipeline, structured, automated, built to hold the volume.

It cost the organization zero dollars, because Monday.com donates ten free seats to eligible nonprofits, and a three person team fits inside that with room to grow.

The build was free. The thinking wasn’t, and that’s the actual point. What they got was access to a level of design and automation they would otherwise have had to hire for, at a salary a three person nonprofit is never going to carry. They didn’t have to choose between their mission and their operations. They got both.

That’s the case for human involvement in this work. Not against it.

Somebody has to steer

Here’s what I believe about all of this.

You need someone who knows what they’re doing at the wheel. Artificial intelligence isn’t a strategy. It’s capacity. Capacity pointed in the wrong direction just gets you to the wrong place faster, and small organizations don’t have the runway to absorb that kind of mistake.

You also need someone with enough ethics not to cross the line. There’s a real difference between building a system so a three person team can serve three hundred people, and building a system so a team of ten becomes a team of four. I know which work I do. I’ve turned down the other kind, and I’ll keep turning it down.

Small businesses and nonprofits have to reconcile with the fact that this isn’t leaving. The new way of working is already here, and pretending otherwise isn’t a principled stand, it’s just a slower decline.

But reconciling with it doesn’t mean surrendering to it. We can adopt these tools and still hold a position on what they mean for the workforce every one of us is part of. Those aren’t opposing choices.

We get to determine how far this reaches and within what limits. We get to say yes, and we get to say no.

I intend to keep doing both.

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If your systems are holding your organization back and you’re trying to figure out where these tools actually fit, that’s the conversation I have every week. Let’s have it!