The best brands, people, foods, anything are nuanced.

And nuance doesn’t necessarily mean complicated. Or fancy. Or unrelatable.

It just means that there are layers, and that not everything is seen and felt and understood at first glance.

And more than anything, there’s intention.

And while sort-of-useful free masterclasses for thousands of people or a list of somewhat insightful ChatGPT prompts can get you started, they’re really not enough for you to make anything special. Or memorable. Or true-to-you and your perfect-fit people.

I’ve said it many times before, but I’m a total AI noob. And while I’m not squarely against AI (and I fully realize it’s here to stay), I’ve rarely used it for myself. But I’m confident it can only get us so far.

ChatGPT (or Claude AI or your platform of choice) just doesn’t do nuance well enough. Not yet at least.

Plus, it’s the prompts that matter most.

So when I work with deep-thinking, multi-passionate people and their most common feedback to me is “I’ve never thought of that before,” I know that I’m not competing with AI to produce the MOST amount of ideas or copy or content.

Because I hold space and offer perspective and empathetically see and imagine my clients’ visions and values, often in ways they don’t even experience themselves.

And definitely in ways they don’t feel equipped to articulate by themselves.

So yes, you can totally use ChatGPT as a baseline “thought partner” or idea organizer. It’s good enough for generic, for sure.

But please don’t stop at generic.

Bring those ideas to a human. Someone with the same (or strategically different) point of view as you.

Or do the inverse: collaborate with a human to do the heavy mental and emotional lifting, then use ChatGPT to refine and repurpose. Essentially, have it stretch all the deeply human thinking and creating you’ve done.

Example:

I was on a Quick Win Consulting Call once with a client who was using ChatGPT as a 3rd “brain” on our call. We were working on her ideal customer avatar and her website copy. She was dropping ideas into ChatGPT in real time. She flagged what she liked, and I was translating it to human-speak and injecting heart/empathy/her own flair as we went.

Here’s another example of AI doing some legwork, but you needing to use your own life experience and human eye to refine:

My client and long-time business friend Erika posted about this 2024 LinkedIn Rewind in her Co-Impact Collective and I thought it was such a fun idea. (You might have seen these posts floating around, especially if you hang out in the halls of LinkedIn.)

(Psst: Erika is ALL about meaningful community and collaboration—check out our interview together on the podcast.)

If you’re curious, here’s my summary graphic. ↴ I’d love to see yours!

The AI-created text synopsis that came with the graphic (too long to share here) was also sort of cool, if not totally accurate. (For example, I did welcome a child into the world, but not my first…)

Just like human outside perspective is SO valuable, AI-generated overviews like this can be useful to get us out of the weeds and take a look at our overarching vibe, vocabulary, and themes. It can’t capture the nuance, but it can be a useful gauge of how well our intention matches with our perception.

So if you have momentum in your business….

Or moving pieces that don’t seem to come together cohesively…

Or a great idea you want to bring to life…

But you have this feeling that you need to bring out the nuance in order to make things really click—for you, for your perfect-fit people, for the brand you envision—then let’s chat.

Book a free Alignment Call. (Don’t worry, your AI notetaker is welcome to the party. 😉)

This is an excerpt from Toward Purpose & Progress, my newsletter where I share business tips, good news, shoutouts to Founder Friends, and other juicy snippets. Subscribe here for more rants, reflections, and resources.