Where to Use AI in Content Creation

We’ve heard two things more than anything lately:

Them: This is great. Can we use AI to make more better faster?

Me: We can use AI to make more faster.

Them: I feel like we missed the mark here.

Me: Yeah.

I think everyone who is asking “how can we leverage AI for this” is asking the wrong question. (Also, can we stop saying leverage). 

Here is the better question: “Is there a part of the process that is holding us up?”

Sometimes things are held up because of a complicated task. Or because of a long setup phase. Maybe they have to be project managed, shared, signed off on, and all that. Maybe they’re just generally unpleasant things to do.

But if we’re just asking, “Where can we use AI?” We’re chasing buzzwords in pursuit of slop. And look, if that’s what you want to do, buzz buzz, oink oink. We love pollinators, and we love pigs. Few insects and animals do more for land fertility and undergrowth management. But bees don’t have enough body weight to use your laptop, and pig hooves will destroy it.

The Best Place to Use AI Is the Best Place You Will Use AI

Let’s put AI to work on something that it excels at: Removing the shittiest part of your day.

At Chatter, we call our AI litmus test, “AI, do the dishes.” 

If you had to define one part of your workday as doing the dishes, taking the trash out, folding laundry, or (insert least favorite chore), what would it be? Here are some prompts I use with my clients (and myself). 

• Where are you deficient?
• Where are you hitting walls?
• What part of your job sucks?
• When is your blood pressure up?
• What task smells the most like burnout?

Where are you deficient?

I’m a killer writer. Don’t believe me, see the land management AI crossover sentence above. It’s a mixture of folksy language, technical software experience, and whimsical imagery.

I love writing, but I’m a terrible project manager. To me, project management sounds like this:

“Dude, check Gusto. Have you even looked in Slack, bro? It’s in Dropbox, or maybe Box box. I put it in Notion on Monday and then moved it to Monday on Tuesday.”

But I write for corporate America, so I have to project manage. It’s just part of the deal.

I also love solving puzzles. So I found a puzzle (the SaaS bingo) and used Claude to build a solution. Or rather, I used Claude to teach me how to use Claude to build a solution.

Where are you hitting walls?

Research is where this shows up most. I second-guess myself constantly. Not the writing so much, it’s the citations that bog me down. If I’m second-guessing myself every step of the way, I’m spending more time chasing down facts from sources than I do writing.

AI is my safety net there. (Not my fact-checker. Outsourcing that gets you into actual legal trouble.)

Here’s how I do it:

1. I catalogue the brief in my AI agent.
2. I read through every piece of research linked in my brief, and catalogue those as well.
3. I ask my agent for other, similar sources the brief writer may have overlooked.
4. With all of that in my head, I can write the structure of the article, fill it with anecdotes and humanity, while leaving notes along the way for my agent to fill in or double-check.
5. Claude surfaces the sources, flags where my numbers don’t match, and points at data I hadn’t connected. I decide what holds up.

For instance, I might freewrite a piece about SaaS security without switching between documents:

“While virtually all startups report a focus on security, ambition doesn’t always correlate with compliance. Among responding CTOs, only (17?)% reported contracting pentesting services, and even fewer (2 out of __) keep a security firm on retainer. In fact, a surprising ___ reported that security and pentesting are within the purview of their internal IT teams.”

Then my agent goes and finds what belongs in those blanks, with the receipts, and I decide what survives.

What part of your job sucks?

We had a recent client whose job was to organize marketing materials for new campaigns. They were the bridge between the corporate request and the creative department’s execution. Which sounds cool until you look at the tedious forms they spent most of their days filling out. 

This wasn’t the part where they decided on strategy and deliverables. It wasn’t the part where they came up with the idea. It’s the in between. 

So we automated the form-fills, and in doing so automated away 8-16 hours of weekly busy-work. 

Gone is the unnecessary cognitive load, making room for the work they’re actually best equipped to do (and valued/paid for).

When is your blood pressure up?

Not every blood-pressure-increasing task can be handed off. Sometimes you still have to walk into the room, write the email, or make the call yourself.

But you can lower the stakes going in. Before a tense client call, I’ll have my agent run through every past exchange with that client and flag the pattern: what they’ve pushed back on before, what language sets them off, what’s actually worked. I’m not outsourcing the conversation. I’m walking in with a cheat sheet instead of a guess.

Same deal with a nerve-wracking pitch deck. I still write the heart of it, but I’ll ask Claude to read it in the persona of the most skeptical person in the room and tell me where it falls apart. Better to find the holes at my desk than in front of the client.

Or sometimes I work really hard on a piece of content, and then the client sends me notes that make me mad. Instead of reacting, I just have my agent break down some possible solutions while I take a quick walk around the block to clear my head.

You can’t automate your way out of a stressful moment. But you can walk in better prepared, and that’s most of what blood pressure actually responds to.

What task smells the most like burnout?

Burnout rarely comes from one bad task. It comes from doing the same small thing so many times your brain checks out halfway through.

For me, that’s late-stage revisions. Not the first pass, that’s where the writing gets sharper, and I’m all there for it. It’s round four, making the same style-guide fix across twelve near-identical product pages, or writing the fifth version of a meta description that all say the same thing in slightly different words.

That’s not a task I want to hand off entirely. It’s a task where I want AI to do the boring 80% so I can spend my attention on the 20% that actually needs a human brain. Feed Claude the style guide once and point it at all twelve pages — capitalization, banned words, sentence length. Then I do the pass that actually requires me: reading it out loud and asking if it sounds like a person said it.

Own the Problem Solving

One caveat, because I’d be lying otherwise. Everything above is a chore. Chores are the easy case—you already know they’re chores, you already resent them, and pointing AI at them is a relief. The blank page is not a chore. Nobody resents having a good idea. So when I say find the dishes, I mean find the dishes, not the part of your job you’d actually miss if it went away.

Every one of these questions points to the same test: not “where can AI go,” but “where does the dishwater get cold and gross if nobody deals with it.” Find that spot. Point AI at it. Skip the buzzwords.

If a task feels more like a checklist than a valuable part of your time, that’s usually a sign the checklist should be automated. Not you.

The undercover benefit of working this way is the lane it builds for you. When the next executive hands down an efficiency mandate, you’re not the person scrambling to sound compliant. You’re the person who already knows where the time goes and can prove it. That’s not a productivity win. That’s standing.

Which would you rather be? The guy telling everyone, “I’m using the company’s AI tokens to have Claude build an AI content space ship that will use even more tokens,” or the coworker who says, “I can help you cut half the time it takes to put together your stressful Monday morning report. And maybe even make it look better.”

The blank page isn’t a chore. It’s still the hardest part.

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