What AI Absolutely Cannot Do For You

Let me start by saying that I’m not an AI-hater. I’m all for tools that help small business owners do their work with more ease.

However, I’m also a realist.

I’ve seen what distraction does to us, and the important things that suffer when our attention is captured by vapid AI slop instead of the beautiful and complex world around us.

I know what happens when too much power is in the hands of tech leaders who aren’t willing to wield it with care. Just look at AI’s ongoing legal and ethical problems.

I recognize what gets lost when we outsource the “hard stuff” to AI. The hard stuff that makes our work interesting and creative. The stuff that makes it human.

But AI tools are here to stay. When it makes sense, we should use them. Solo small business owners need all the help we can get.

So we must differentiate between the things AI is truly competent at, and the things it just seems like it can do.

It’s up to us to know the difference between helpful AI output, and banal AI garbage that misleads us and flattens the humanity of our work.

With that in mind, I’m sharing four things AI simply cannot do for us—but humans can.

AI can’t help us learn about ourselves

AI tools require us to enter a prompt to tell the AI what to do. If we’re looking for a specific output, our prompt must be precise. We need to know exactly what we want, so we can tell the machine exactly what to do.

This is fine, until we don’t know what we need. AI can’t help us see gaps in our knowledge when its outputs are dependent on our inputs. When we’re dealing with a complex challenge that we don’t fully understand, AI isn’t much help.

I’ve seen people using AI tools in place of a therapist or coach. I’m wary of that because I believe professional care requires the objective eye of an expert. Someone who can see our strengths and our growth opportunities, even the ones we don’t see yet.

Maybe AI can teach us how to edit videos or write a job description, but it can’t tell us something we don’t know about ourselves.

AI can’t understand how our mental state impacts our lives

Sometimes the things we need the most help with are the ones that make us most uncomfortable. For problems like this, we usually know what we’re supposed to do. It’s just that we can’t seem to bring ourselves to actually do it. Being told, “just do this!” doesn’t help.

Whether it’s anxiety, executive dysfunction, or a freeze response, internal roadblocks can come up when we’re facing a difficult challenge. They may be invisible to outside observers, but they’re very real and need to be approached with personalized support.

AI can offer platitudes and generic advice. AI might be able to tell us what to do in a specific situation. But AI can’t provide the individualized care and empathy that a fellow human can.

AI can’t provide real accountability

From following traffic laws to shopping for groceries, much of what we do each day happens because we feel accountable to other people and ourselves. This sense of human-to-human accountability is a big part of what holds our society together, motivating us to take care of ourselves and each other.

Many of us even use external accountability to reach our goals. Doing a 100-day drawing challenge publicly on Instagram, telling a friend that this is the week we’re going to launch that new product, or signing up for an in-person marketing class.

Technology doesn’t motivate us in this way. Yes, there are productivity apps with all sorts of goal planning features, but breaking our word to a little app robot doesn’t sting in the same way as failing to keep a promise to someone we know personally.

If you’ve ever swiped away an app reminder and then immediately forgotten about it, or ignored an update notification on your phone or laptop for weeks, you know AI or other tech can’t create accountability like a fellow human can.

AI can’t comprehend our humanity

Because AI isn’t human, it can’t understand our humanity and the complexity that comes along with it. AI doesn’t truly know what it means to have a good work/life balance, how it feels to enforce a boundary, or what it’s like to be excited or bored or paralyzed with anxiety.

AI has no experience; it has no body or brain. It cannot see us for who we are, relate to us as fellow humans, or understand us in the context of all of the other people it’s met.

We all have all sorts of quirks, preferences, traits, and motivations that drive our behavior. A good advisor or supporter instinctively understands this and tailors their approach to the person in front of them. AI doesn’t do this.

Like I said at the beginning, I’m not advocating for a full refusal of AI tools. We’re going to see them integrated into our lives more and more, whether we like it or not. And there are plenty of tasks AI can do sufficiently or questions it can answer quickly for us.

But it lacks empathy, creativity, and experience. If that’s what you need, look to a human for help.