If you’ve ever spent forty-five minutes “fixing” something AI wrote in four seconds, wondering how anyone could think this was the frontier of efficiency, this is for you.
We’re told AI is an “intern” that frees up our time, yet many advice firm owners I know find trying toi make it work akin to being stuck in a relentless editing loop.
You spend more energy correcting the “efficiency” than it would have taken to just do the work yourself. It’s a productivity drain disguised as a breakthrough.
The “AI Intern” fallacy
The mistake is treating AI like a person who understands nuance, your brand voice, and the specific regulatory baggage of the Australian advice landscape.
When you give a vague prompt like “write a summary of this meeting,” the AI guesses. And because it’s designed to please, it fills the gaps with generic fluff.
High-performing firms have figured out that the “AI Intern” is a myth.
They don’t use AI for “everything.” They build micro-workflows for one specific thing at a time.
They stop asking for “content” and start building repeatable logic.
The move from guessing to logic
If you want a 40% profit margin, you can’t have senior staff—including yourself—acting as full-time editors for mediocre AI output.
To break the loop, you need two things that sound technical but are actually just good management: few-shot prompting and Chain of Thought reasoning.
Time for a jargon breakdown
- Few-shot prompting: A fancy way of saying “give it examples.” Don’t tell it to be professional; give it three emails you’ve actually sent. AI is a world-class mimic, but a terrible mind-reader.
- Chain of Thought: Ask the AI to “plan its response step-by-step before writing.” Forcing the tool to show its “workings”—like a student in a maths exam—dramatically reduces the hallucinations and generic tone that lead to the editing loop.
The discipline of the micro-workflow
The goal isn’t to have an AI that can write a whole Statement of Advice from scratch. The goal is a micro-workflow that does one thing perfectly: perhaps turning raw transcript notes into a specific, three-bullet-point action list that fits your exact CRM format. No editing required.
When you embed these narrow, high-quality prompts into your daily habits, the “internal project deferral” stops.
You stop pushing back the business improvements because the friction of “doing the work” has actually vanished, rather than just being replaced by the chore of editing.
We’ve been building these specific, advice-centric workflows into CoachAI and the aidere Platform to help firms move past the novelty stage of AI and into actual execution.
It’s about building a system where the output is “done” the moment it’s generated.
Related: It’s Not a Discipline Problem: The Real Reason Strategic Projects Stall Inside