You've been hearing about AI over the past few years, and you've probably been curious about how to use it to grow your team.
You've seen the posts. You've sat through the team call where someone demonstrated an AI tool and everyone made impressed noises. Maybe you opened one of them yourself, typed something in, looked at what came back, and closed the tab. And then you went back to work, because you had actual work to do, and the whole thing filed itself under someday.
A few years of somedays is a long time. But I want to say something before we go any further, because it matters for everything that follows: the reason you've put this off isn't that you're lazy or behind or bad with technology. In almost every case I've seen, it's one of three things, and all three are reasonable.
The first is that it doesn't feel authentic.
You built whatever you've built by talking to people. Real conversations, real relationships, showing up when you said you would. That's the craft. And now here is a machine offering to write the message for you, and something in your gut says that isn't the same thing, and I didn't sign up to be the person who fakes it. If that's what has been stopping you, I want you to know that instinct isn't a bug. It's the most valuable thing you have, and Chapter 2 is entirely about it.
The second is that it feels technical.
Not hard, exactly — technical. Like there's a body of knowledge you were supposed to acquire at some point and didn't, and now everyone else has a head start and you would have to admit you don't know what a prompt is. This one is easier to solve than it feels. There's no body of knowledge. Chapter 3 will take about ten minutes of your life and you'll be done with the technical part forever.
The third is that the people talking loudest about AI are insufferable.
I'm not going to pretend otherwise. This subject attracted a particular kind of voice early — the exponential-growth voice, the if you're not using this you're already obsolete voice — and if your only exposure has been that, then avoiding it was good judgment. You weren't resisting a tool. You were resisting a sales pitch, and you were right to.
So none of those are character flaws. They're three sensible reactions to a genuinely confusing few years.
Here is what they cost you.
What waiting actually costs
I'm going to skip the part where I tell you the competition is passing you by. I don't know if it is, you don't know if it is, and that kind of talk is exactly what has made this subject so tiresome.
The real cost is quieter and easier to measure.
Think about last week. Not the highlight reel — the actual week. Somewhere in there you wrote a follow-up message to a recruiting prospect and spent twenty minutes staring at it before you sent it. You rewrote the same explanation of your product for the fourth time this month, from scratch, because you couldn't find the version you liked. You sat down to post something, couldn't think of an angle, and posted nothing. You had a conversation you should have followed up on and you didn't, because by the time you got to it you couldn't remember enough of the context to write something that sounded like you had been paying attention.
Add those up for your own week and see what you get. When I've done it, and when I've asked other people to, the number tends to land somewhere in the several-hours range — and it isn't hours of hard work. It's hours of friction. The gap between knowing what you want to say and having it written down.
That gap is the entire thing AI is good at closing. Not the relationship. Not the trust. Not the judgment about who to call and what they need. The friction between intention and execution.
Nobody is going to hand you those hours back with a compliment. You either take them or you keep paying them.
The problem isn't usually you
There's a version of this where you didn't put it off at all, and it still didn't work. That one is worth telling, because the reason surprised me.
A friend I had worked with in this business for years — Sue, who lives in Australia — got in touch with me after a long silence. She knew I had deep expertise in AI technology, so when she got stuck she reached out to me.
She hadn't been avoiding using AI. That's the part to notice. She had been trying for weeks: the YouTube videos, the threads, the groups. She had collected an enormous amount of information about AI and she was getting nowhere with it, and she couldn't work out why.
When I asked her what she had actually been doing, the problem became obvious. Every single thing she had found assumed she already understood AI. They all started from the middle: which AI tool is better than which, how to structure a prompt, what to automate. None of that means anything to someone who hasn't yet had a single genuinely useful conversation with one of these tools.
She wasn't failing at AI. She was drowning in material written for people who were already past the part she was stuck on.
So I asked her to do something that sounded too simple to be worth doing.
I asked her to send me a short email listing the things she actually wanted to get done in her business. Not what she thought AI could do. Not what she had read that it could do. Just her goals — what she wanted to achieve, and when.
She sent it. I thanked her, and told her to do one thing with it: open ChatGPT, paste in exactly what she had just sent me, and ask it to turn that into an easy step-by-step plan she could follow.
That was the entire intervention. I didn't teach her anything about the technology.
Four days later she wrote again, and she was elated. For the first time she was getting real results out of it — and she had done it in a fraction of the time she had been pouring into research that had gone nowhere.
Nothing about the AI tools changed between those two emails. What changed is that she stopped trying to learn AI and started telling it what she wanted.
That's most of this book in one story, and we'll come back to it properly in Chapter 5.
What this book is
Thirteen chapters. Each one is an obstacle, answered honestly.
I've put them in the order people actually hit them. You'll notice that the early ones are emotional and the later ones are practical, and that isn't an accident — nobody who is still worried about sounding fake is ready to hear about which tool to open.
A few of the obstacles turn out to be legitimate. Chapter 7 is about a real problem that will bite you if nobody warns you about it, and Chapter 8 is about a genuine risk in a profession that's more regulated than most people realize. I'm not going to talk you out of those. I'm going to tell you exactly what to do about them.
What you won't find here is a catalog. There are somewhere north of forty AI tools with a plausible claim on your attention right now, and a list of all of them would be useless to you and out of date by spring. You need one tool and three uses. The reading is an afternoon; the doing is about an hour a week for a month, and the plan at the back sets it out.
What this book isn't
It isn't a promise that AI will grow your business. It might free up the time that lets you grow your business, which is a different sentence and an honest one.
It isn't a claim that you're running out of time. I've no way of knowing what your window looks like, and neither has anybody selling you urgency. What I can tell you is that the people who started two years ago got a two-year head start on writing captions faster. That's worth something, and it's worth considerably less than the breathless version suggests.
And it isn't neutral about how you use this. There's a version of AI adoption in this profession that I think is genuinely bad — the fully automated, blast-it-to-everyone, nobody-is-home version. I'm against it, I'll say so more than once, and Chapter 13 is where I make the case properly.
Who this isn't for
I would rather lose you here than waste your afternoon, so let me be clear about who should put this down.
If you're already using AI daily and want to go deeper, this isn't your book. You know the basics and you'll find the first half slow. The longer book is where the depth is — twenty chapters, a hundred prompts, the full operating manual. It's called AI for Network Marketers, and there's a link to it at the back.
If you're looking for automation, this is the wrong book and I'm probably the wrong author. There's a whole genre about setting up systems that contact hundreds of people without you. I think most of it's bad for this profession and I make that argument more than once. If that's what you came for, you'll find me tiresome by Chapter 4.
If you want to be told this will change your life, I'm not going to do that either. What I think is that it hands you back a meaningful chunk of your week and leaves you the choice of what to do with it. That's genuinely valuable and it isn't a transformation. What you also get is an understanding that travels — none of this is a network marketing skill, and once you have it you'll find uses for it in the rest of your working life, and outside it.
If you've decided AI is unethical in principle, I'm not going to argue you out of a considered position. I'll say that Chapter 2 draws a line between using it to say a true thing more clearly and using it to fake something, and if that line is one you could accept, the rest may be worth your time.
Who it's for: the person who has been circling this for a while, has some real reservations, and would like someone to take those reservations seriously instead of telling them to get with the program.
The only thing I'm asking
Read Chapter 2 before you decide anything.
If you're still carrying the this doesn't feel authentic worry, everything after it will slide off you. You'll read the practical chapters at arm's length, nodding, and do nothing — because underneath, some part of you has already decided this isn't for people like you.
So we deal with that first, and we deal with it honestly, which means I'm not going to tell you the worry is silly. It isn't silly. It's pointing at something real. It's just pointing at a version of this that you don't have to choose.