AI for Business Growth: Where It Helps and Where It Hurts

What Businesses Looking to Scale Should Consider Before Going All In On AI

Although it is already playing an instrumental role in most people’s everyday lives, it is still hard to fathom just how much of an impact Artificial Intelligence, or AI, will have on the very near future of business. Striking the perfect balance of adopting this evolving technology into daily operations varies brand by brand, but it can be the boost that takes a company from $500k a year to $5M+. Want to know more? We have the blueprint.

Many jobs, or even entire companies or sectors of industry, will certainly be replaced by purpose-prompted “bots” before we know it. But with change as impactful as Artificial Intelligence also comes new opportunities, and almost certainly new sectors of industry.

The companies that successfully weave the authenticity and familiarity of the human touch and handcrafted goods and services with the undeniable affordability and efficiency of AI-assisted business will find themselves at the forefront of whatever sector or industry they operate in.

How much of a role AI plays in scaling your brand or business will vary by your needs, but there are few–if any–businesses whose need for some form of AI-assisted tasking in that process will be zero. If increasing revenue IS the bottom line, most companies must build out more robust Operations and Marketing efforts. Traditionally, this meant hiring more part-time or full-time employees. Your Human Resources Department had to scale, too.

Things have changed, and they are going to continue to change for the foreseeable future. Any good build-out needs a solid plan. A blueprint. Despite this ongoing evolution and the complexity of Artificial Intelligence, as well as the wide array of business types and industry sectors that will be affected by it, the Do’s and Don’ts of using AI to scale your business are fairly fundamental when you have assembled a crew who knows how to use all of the tools at their disposal.

How To Scale Your Brand Or Business By Using – But Not Overusing – Artificial Intelligence, or AI

You have formed a solid foundation for a brand and business, but have reached the point where effort and desire alone can no longer get you to the next level. You need strategy. You need structure. Most of all, you need operational execution.

By implementing AI-assisted tasking and automating the simple and repetitive aspects of your necessary daily workflow, you slash or avoid redundant labor costs, freeing up staffing resources for more hands-on, personnel-powered projects.

DO: Find an expert in AI and automation, and learn how they are used to free up resources and scale business efficiency and profitability

For brands and businesses looking to scale, the opportunity to do so is now. The fear of AI in business is that it will eliminate so many jobs that hard-working humans now occupy. But you do not need to go on a hiring spree to ramp up your production or profits when, instead, you can reassign your valued staff away from the mundane and into positions of growth and mutual benefit for both employees and employer.

Brandine Strand is a lifelong entrepreneur, business architect and co-founder of Guild & Co., a collective of experts who embed fractionally inside other founder-led companies to help them scale with precision. With nearly two decades of experience in planning, building, and successfully exiting unique businesses across multiple industries, Strand has seen (and tested) what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to elevating brands to the next level.

Her main takeaway? If she had access to AI-assisted operational tasking ten years ago, that learning curve would not have been nearly as steep as the profit curve.

“AI should strengthen the business behind the brand, not replace the humanity that makes the brand worth buying from in the first place. Many underperforming businesses just need better structure to support the next level of growth. That is where implementing the right strategy, systems, and AI will set the stage for your next level.”

DON’T: Outsource your Voice or your Aesthetic to AI trends or homogenized branding & messaging

For all of its potential uses, however, Strand sees the inherent limitations of Artificial Intelligence; limitations that she believes will outlast and overshadow even future updates to AI technology–namely, the human touch.

What Strand looks for in a first impression of a brand is how that brand handles three foundational aspects found in nearly all successful companies: Structure, Aesthetic, and Voice.

Scaling a brand or business using artificial intelligence (AI) involves the strategic deployment of automated systems to enhance operational efficiency, optimize decision-making, and increase output capacity without proportionally increasing resource expenditure. AI can be applied to areas such as customer segmentation, predictive analytics, content generation, and workflow automation; however, overutilization may result in diminished authenticity, reduced differentiation, and systemic dependency on algorithmic processes. Therefore, optimal implementation requires a controlled integration framework in which AI functions as a supplemental augmentation layer rather than a primary driver, ensuring that core brand identity and adaptive human oversight remain intact.

Did that last paragraph feel a bit… off? We outsourced that one to ChatGPT, and what we got back was what you see there. It is impeccable, grammar-wise, a tidy bundling of a bunch of boardroom BS and boredom-inducing babble.

Unfortunately, it is this sort of flavorless feedback that is starting to overpopulate the World Wide Web as more companies outsource their brand-building to whatever whim they type into an AI engine. “It is the astronaut food of messaging,” says Jack Riordan, the “Wordsmith” of Guild & Co. “It has all the ingredients, it just has no flavor. In too many cases, all it achieves is coming off as an undesired blend of toneless and tone-deaf to the target audience.”

Everything from website copy to product descriptions to email campaigns to social media captions to feature-length articles, and even the darn About Us–existing only to humanize a company–is being outsourced to this voiceless technology, and consumers are catching on.

The rising popularity and use of fractional hiring, as offered by Guild & Co., offers businesses seeking to scale the opportunity to establish their authentic voice and use it in a way that makes their brand feel approachable to clients or consumers. 

Optimizing market positioning through brand language, website copy, email sequences, and sales messaging is still a handcrafted process that benefits greatly from the human touch. Everyone wrote something when they launched their brand. Now is the time to scale your voice so your value is instantly understood and acted on.

Perhaps even more important is your business Aesthetic. You’re likely pretty locked in to your branding, as far as color palette, favorite fonts, etc. These things matter, and they have gotten you this far, so to undermine that strong foundation with a purely AI-prompted makeover will likely leave you nearly indistinguishable in a sea of eerily similar attempts.

In oversaturated markets, procedurally generated logos and product packaging will get left on the shelf in favor of truly original, brand-amplifying design work – the type of work that still benefits most from the connection between the real people behind a brand and the aesthetic artisan who brings their uniquely relevant vision to the market.

David Nardone, the “Artisan” of Guild & Co., gives deeper insight into the convergence of design and touch: “Successful design is far greater than aesthetics. It solves real problems, tells a compelling story, and creates a genuine emotional connection with its audience. It’s rooted in strategy, intelligence, and human insight, and it’s the kind of depth that can be felt instantly, the kind of depth people trust.”

Again, consumers are evolving an eye for uncanny AI design work. When it comes to how many consumers actually care whether or not a brand relies on AI for messaging and visual design, the best way to capture the business of both camps is to retain the handcrafted aesthetic and voice that your brand was built on, in as many ways as possible.

Nardone adds, "AI replicates human creativity with patterns, but it cannot replicate authentic human emotion or originality, and the absence of that will certainly be noticed. This emotional intelligence will become the differentiator consumers crave most, and its why when I work with business owners that I help them use design as a strategic force for impact grounded in this human law."

When you work one-on-one with a true creative artisan, your brand’s entire architecture becomes an expression of the ethos behind the business. As competitors fall into the trap of converting their brand identity into cartoonish AI-generated imagery, your creativity becomes a competitive advantage.

Brand recognition. Brand trust. Brand growth.

All of these are essential for scaling your business, and all three are still best achieved with an authentic aesthetic and voice.

By utilizing experts in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and task automation, businesses can streamline their operations, creating stronger margins and accelerating growth. This is the Structure behind scaling a brand or company that Strand speaks of.

Co-creating new systems that utilize AI-assisted tasking on the Operations side of your business will allow you to reallocate resources into elevating your brand identity through visuals and messaging, or Aesthetic & Voice.

The ability to delegate these important aspects of branding and marketing to on-call expertise further frees up time and resources for decision makers to scale up. The flexibility of fractional hiring gives founders access to experts in services that are essential for the success of their businesses, but that may not require staffing an employee full-time, year-round to accomplish.

AI is not the enemy, and it’s not going anywhere. It is a tool that, when used correctly and in the proper circumstances, can help build the structure and the systems to allow companies and brands to scale from startup, on up.

To learn more about how fractional hiring is providing a fast-track to brand scaling, or co-creating alongside Artificial Intelligence, and the things you can build when structure, aesthetic, and voice align, visit www.guildandco.com