What Did We Ever Do Without It?

When I graduated high school, my mom gave me one piece of career advice. "Go into computers. They're going to be the next big thing."

This coming from a woman who grew up before telephones and indoor plumbing were common.

I took her advice, though not in a straight line. Computer science out of high school, until I needed a full-time paycheck more than credits. A math-heavy associate degree. Electrical engineering, where one of my professors had helped build ARPANET, the network that grew into the internet. A few classes from finishing, my son was on the way, and school went on the back burner. Years later I turned all those credits into my computer science degree. By then my mom's prediction had come true several times over.

Personal computers became mass-marketed in 1981. The World Wide Web went public in 1991. Cell phones twice, first the bricks of the eighties, then the computers in our pockets. Google in 1998. Each time, the same arc. Skepticism, then scramble, then "what did we ever do without it?"

AI is running the same play, and it is older than people think. The field got its start in 1956. Nearly seventy years later, in late 2022, ChatGPT launched. It reached an estimated 100 million active users in two months. This made it the fastest-growing consumer app in history. I started using it myself in 2023.

Here is why that history matters to you.

The tool was never the hard part.

Every "next big thing" I have lived through rewarded the same businesses. Not the ones with the most gadgets. The ones that knew themselves well enough to put the new thing to work to their advantage.

AI is the purest version of that pattern yet, because AI runs on knowledge. Hand it a vague request and it hands you back generic fluff, no matter which tool you bought. It does not know your voice, your process, your standards, or what you would never say to a client.

Until it does, every output will read like it was written for someone else's business. Because it wasn’t written for no one.

What this looked like in our business.

This year we started wiring AI through Cool Fire, the digital platform company we have run for 21 years. We did not start with software, and we did not figure it out alone. We began with great prompts from a fabulous teacher, Ange Quinn, and that head start mattered. Then we started interviewing ourselves. Questions like:

How do we scope a project? What do we promise, and what do we refuse to promise? How do we write, and what words would never come out of our mouths?

We turned those answers into instruction pages AI can follow, the same pages we would hand a new hire. More than a hundred so far, and they are not one giant document. They live in folders by department, one page per task. When AI helps with a proposal, it reads the sales pages, not the whole company. The right page beats all the pages, every time.

The same AI that gave us bland filler before now sounds like us, because it finally knows who we are, and it is part of the team now.

Three steps to start this week.

1. Pick one task you repeat every week and write down how you do it, the way you would train a new hire. One page is plenty.
2. Give that page to an AI along with the task. When the output misses, correct it the way you would coach a new employee, and have your AI add that correction to the page.
3. Put the finished page in a folder for that department of your business, one page per task. When the task comes around again, have AI refer to that page, and the work starts at 80 percent done instead of zero.

Having context always beats not having it. When the output you receive isn’t quite right, treat it as an edit, not a verdict, and update your context. And when you are tempted to blame the tool, ask one question first. Could a smart new hire do this task with the instructions I gave? When the answer is no, the fix is the instructions, not the software.

The question answers itself.

A few years from now, you will catch yourself saying it again. "What did we ever do without it?"

The founders who get there first will not be the ones who bought the most subscriptions. They will be the ones whose businesses know themselves the best.

When AI makes it onto your list this year, I would love to hear which task you would hand it first.