In our rush to embrace AI tools and automation, small business owners are discovering a surprising truth: The most powerful competitive advantages can’t be coded, programmed, or generated by algorithms. While AI excels at efficiency and speed, the heart of sustainable business growth still beats with distinctly human skills.
As we navigate this AI-saturated landscape, it’s time to realign with what makes us irreplaceable. Understanding what AI can’t do for your business in terms of human connection, creativity, and commitment will help you create value that no machine can replicate.
Here are five essential areas where your humanity isn’t just helpful—it’s your greatest asset.
The Art of Placebinding: What AI Can’t Do for Community Building
I first said this in our article about discoverability in the age of AI, and I’ll say it again here:
Most community-based businesses would be better served by getting off the internet and into a real-life room.
Some people call that networking, but despite having started my business as a trainer and director for what was then the world’s largest networking organization, I’m uncomfortable with that word. It reminds me of old-school business thought leaders telling their followers that it’s not “net sit” or “net eat”—it’s “net work.”
The implication? You have a job to do whenever you’re relationship building, and that job is creating a referral engine as predictable and inhuman as a manufacturing line.
But this isn’t about old-school “networking” with its cold, calculating approach to building community. Instead, consider something both novel and ancient: Placebinding™.
What Placebinding™ Really Means
Placebinding™ is the intentional art of rooting into the place where you are and the people who have chosen to be there with you. This involves:
- Physical care for the ecosystem and your impact on it
- Social care for the community shaped by unique intersections of history and environment
- Future care through both remembering and innovation
Why AI Can't Replace Physical Presence
Placebinding™ requires intentionally being where you are, with whoever else is there, in relationship with a community that cannot be adequately replicated online.
It demands both physicality and intention, two things that no algorithm can provide.
Too many of us have allowed our placebinding skills to grow rusty from disuse. It’s emotionally safer to stay online than to show up in person with new people, in real bodies, with all our beauties and inadequacies.
But in our AI-saturated world, one of the most valuable skills we can develop is the ability to be with people IRL, both in groups and one-on-one.
Giving Quality Feedback: What AI Can't Do for Creative Work
Much has been written about AI’s usefulness for evaluating work quality. But effective feedback, particularly on creative work, remains inherently human. AI might eventually replicate it, but today it simply doesn’t—at least not nearly as well as many believe.
Why AI Feedback Falls Short
Constructive feedback is both empathetic and action-oriented. AI feedback is problematic, especially for creative work, because what a current LLM generates is only as good as its training data. It isn’t very good at predicting the future from the prompts most users are capable of entering.
Beyond those limitations, mimicking empathy is not the same as showing it, as anyone who has ever had a review with a problematic middle manager at a corporate job can tell you.
AI can tell you if your grammar is correct or if your design follows established principles. But it can’t tell you if your message will resonate with your particular audience in that moment, or when breaking a rule might be exactly what your brand needs.
Two Essential Tips for Human-Centered Feedback
-
Lead with curiosity, not correction.
Ask questions about the creator's intent instead of immediately pointing out what's wrong. "What were you hoping to achieve with this approach?" This opens dialogue rather than shutting it down. -
Balance the specific with the strategic.
Good feedback addresses both the immediate ("This headline could be stronger") and the bigger picture ("This doesn't align with your brand's conversational tone"). AI often misses this balance entirely.
Strengths Building: What AI Can’t Do for Your Professional Development
Deep learning and maintaining creative skills require cognitive strain. If we’re not careful, what helps us in the short run (freeing up cognitive load with AI tools) can hurt us in the long run.
Cal Newport, author of Slow Productivity and Deep Work, explains this dilemma well: “In a learning environment, the feeling of strain is often a by-product of getting smarter. To minimize this strain is like using an electric scooter to make the marches easier in military boot camp; it will accomplish this goal in the short term, but it defeats the long-term conditioning purposes of the marches.”
It’s crucial to make thoughtful choices about where the trade-off of short-term ease for long-term skill development is worth it, and where it’s best avoided entirely.
When to Choose Struggle Over Shortcuts
Before integrating an AI tool, ask yourself: How much does your work rely on that particular skill?
The newer you are in your career or the less you know about something, the more hazardous it becomes to rely on AI for support. This is especially true in areas where you need or want expertise.
Consider these examples of how I’ve used (or consciously chosen not to use) AI in my business:
Where I Avoid Using AI
Strategic thinking and storytelling are my most important skills when it comes to making the impact I want to make and earning a decent living. Therefore, it would be extremely hazardous to let those skills atrophy by relying too heavily on AI.
Where I Use AI Support
I’m finally getting serious about developing my almost nonexistent graphic design skills. I’m using AI tools to help design a learning journey, but I’m doing the early heavy lifting of composition myself. AI could do it faster and better, but I can’t reach a higher level of understanding without putting in the reps.
Remember this formula: Natural Ability + Practice = Strength
When I am weighing the pros and cons of using AI for a task, I think of it like training in the gym: We only get the gains we work for, and we only keep the gains we practice with.
This formula is inspired by Don Clifton’s theory of how we develop our individual strengths Without practice (deep learning, putting in the reps), we lose what we’ve built.
The key is being intentional about where you choose struggle over shortcuts. Where are the skills that define your unique value? Where do you need to maintain your competitive edge through human capability rather than artificial assistance?
The Discipline of Finishing: What AI Can't Do for Long-Term Success
Today’s AI tools make starting things easier than ever. ChatGPT can help writers get from blank pages to rough drafts. But here’s what no algorithm can do for you: the discipline of finishing.
What AI Can and Cannot Do for Your Business
AI can generate your outline, suggest your next steps, and even write your first draft. But it cannot:
- Make you sit down day after day to do the hard work of edits and revisions
- Push through your resistance when the project gets hard
- Feel the satisfaction of typing "The End" or sending that final invoice
Understanding the Natural Cycles Between Rest and Action
We all move through natural cycles of action and rest, of learning and finishing. Just as there are seasons for rest and reflection (such as Winter), there are seasons where movement and completion become the natural order of things (such as Fall). The finishing part of the cycle is designed for wrapping up what we started when projects felt full of endless possibilities.
If you’re currently in a season of momentum and action, this is the time to harness that energy for completion. The discipline of finishing (of following through on commitments, pushing past the messy middle, choosing completion over perfection) is entirely human territory.
Your Assignment, Should You Choose to Accept It
Take some time this coming week to choose ONE priority project. (Note: this word was never meant to be pluralized.) Choose something you’re committed to finishing and plot out a plan to get it done.
If you need it, you have full permission to use Claude or ChatGPT to help you make that plan if you’re stuck. Let AI handle the logistics, the scheduling, and even the motivation techniques. But remember: the actual finishing? That’s up to you.
The tools can start it. Only you can complete it.
Relationship Building: What AI Can’t Do for Human Connection
Study after study shows that digital-first relationships make us less happy and aren’t as fulfilling as face-to-face connections. Despite being more connected than ever, we’re in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, and AI tools only exacerbate the problem that is affecting our personal and professional lives.
The solution is simple, if not easy: get face-to-face with other humans in real-world environments, not just across a screen.
The Real ROI of Human Connection in Business
Social media hasn’t been the most effective way to build relationships or market a small business in at least five years. Yet every single day, I still talk to new business owners and solopreneurs who spend most of their precious sales and marketing time (and sometimes free time, too) feeding the Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook machine.
I’m not saying digital media isn’t useful or important. But when we have very limited resources, are brand new, and especially when running a community-based business, the most efficient use of our time is almost always IRL relationship building.
Here’s my hot take: If you can generate it using AI, it’s not contributing to relationship building.
What AI Cannot Replace
AI can write your social media captions, craft your emails, and even suggest conversation starters. But it cannot…
- Show up to the coffee meet-up
- Remember that someone's daughter just started college
- Offer a genuine smile or supportive presence when someone shares their struggles
The most connective and essential skill might just be sitting with another human and giving them that most precious and rare resource: your full and undivided attention.
There is no adequate AI substitute when you’re building something new.
No algorithm can replicate you. No chatbot can substitute for your presence. And no amount of digital connection can replace the irreplaceable experience of being truly seen and heard by another person.
As we’ve explored what AI can’t do for your business, it’s clear that your humanity isn’t a limitation—it’s your greatest competitive advantage.
As a business founder, you’re building something entirely new, and this act of creation is fundamentally human. The communities you build, the strengths you develop, and the relationships you nurture all stem from your unique capacity to create.
The future belongs to founders who understand where to leverage AI’s efficiency while doubling down on the distinctly human act of building something with a lasting impact.
Next steps
Exercise your relationship-building chops with our VIP Scorecard.
It’s easy to get out of practice building community in-person. And it’s hard to tell if those “networking” events are really making an impact on your business growth. See measurable results (and have a little fun) with our most popular relationship-building tool.
