Okay so here's the thing about AI right now: most of us are using it like a glorified Google search. We type something in, copy what comes out, and slap it onto our business. And honestly? I was doing the same thing. Then I sat down with Marnie Wills, and she completely shifted how I think about this technology.
Marnie isn't just another AI guru throwing buzzwords around. She ran two brick-and-mortar businesses, used AI to transform both of them, exited one by selling her digital assets, and now she teaches entrepreneurs how to do the same thing. When she says AI made her feel "superhuman," she means she went from wearing every hat in her business to actually keeping up with people who had full teams. That got my attention.
Here's the part that really got me.
Stop Using AI Like a Lazy Search Engine
Marnie dropped a truth bomb that I haven't been able to shake. She said most of us are "lazy users of AI", not because we're bad at it, but because nobody taught us to use it strategically. And the consequences go further than you'd think.
"What happens is we ask generative AI to create something for us. And then we just put it out there to the world without adding our human domain expertise, our knowledge, our experience, and our perspective. And because we don't add that, the AI is learning off the AI content, which is known as synthetic data."
Let that sink in. AI was originally trained on human-created content. But now that we're flooding the internet with unedited AI output, the machine is eating its own cooking. And Marnie has an eight-year-old and a four-year-old who will have AI tutors by 2030. She does not want them learning from a dumbed-down copy of a copy.
Now, I pushed back a little here because I think "lazy" is harsh. Maybe we're just adding ease into our lives. Marnie actually loved that reframe, she said she's changing the word. You're welcome, Marnie. But her core point stands: if you're not adding your own perspective, your own stories, your own expertise to what AI produces, you're not using it. It's using you.
The mindset shift she recommends? Stop thinking of AI as something that does things for you. Start thinking of it as something that does things with you. It's a collaborator, not a replacement.
Customise Your AI Like It's Your Smartest Business Partner
This is where Marnie's teaching background really shows up. She breaks AI integration into three levels, and each one builds on the last.
Level one: customisation. Most people don't even know you can give ChatGPT custom instructions. You can tell it about your business, your values, how you like information presented, even that you prefer UK English. Then you create projects, think of them as specialised workspaces, where you upload knowledge bases and set specific instructions for each client or initiative.
"You're saying: here's a generative AI chat, but I'm going to give it a second brain. I'm going to give it as much information about my client and what I'm doing for them as possible. And then I'm going to give it custom instructions and say, you're my expert business partner that helps me deliver XYZ for this customer."
Level two: the customer journey. Marnie uses AI across attraction, lead generation, and sales. Her own AI Accelerator program gets marketed differently to different segments, one audience gets an AI maturity quiz, another gets a podcast episode created with AI, another gets an interactive app. Same product, different entry points. That used to require a team. Now it requires strategy and the right AI setup.
Level three: product delivery. She told me about an interior designer whose students were dropping off mid-course. They built an AI assistant inside the course that quizzed students, filled knowledge gaps, and sped up completion. The designer got better results and created an upsell on the back end. That's not lazy AI use. That's brilliant.
And here's the controversial bit, Marnie still believes in keeping a human in the loop. She has AI draft her email replies, but she checks every single one before hitting send. She's not anti-automation, but she thinks we're in the infancy of this technology and the training still matters.
Quick Takeaways
- Treat AI as a collaborator, not a shortcut. The goal is to amplify your intelligence, not outsource your thinking.
- Customise before you create. Give your AI custom instructions, a knowledge base about your business, and specific roles for each project or client.
- Stay in the loop. Review what AI produces and add your perspective, stories, and expertise before publishing anything.
- Map AI to your customer journey. Use it for lead magnets, market segmentation, course delivery, and product creation, not just content writing.
- Talk to it like a person. Marnie and I both agree: speaking to AI out loud instead of typing gives you better results and feels more natural.
I asked Marnie my sign-off question, what you don't change, you choose, and her answer was patience. Patience with herself for needing to see constant progress. Patience with an industry where everyone is at a different stage of their AI journey. Her mindset coach tells her: "Just keep being the lighthouse." I think that's exactly right. And if you're still copying and pasting AI output without adding a single sentence of your own? That's a choice too. Want to see how strategy powers real growth? Explore the Amplify Partnership.
"What happens is we ask generative AI to create something for us. And then we just put it out there to the world without adding our human domain expertise."
