It feels like there’s a new AI tool launching every week, each one promising to write your emails, design your graphics, or run your business for you. For faith-driven entrepreneurs and authors, that can bring up a real tension: these tools can genuinely save time, but there’s also a nagging question underneath it—how much of this should actually be me?
We don’t think AI is something to avoid or something to hand your whole business over to. It’s a tool, and like any tool, it’s only as good as the judgment behind it. Here’s how we think about using AI well—where it earns its place, and where it shouldn’t.
Start With What You’re Actually Trying to Solve
Before reaching for a tool, name the actual problem. Are you trying to get past a blank page? Save time on a repetitive task? Brainstorm options you hadn’t considered? AI tools are excellent at some of those problems and a poor fit for others. Naming the problem first keeps you from grabbing a tool just because it’s trending, and helps you notice when a task really calls for your own voice instead.
Where AI Tools Genuinely Help
Used well, AI tools are best at removing friction, not replacing thought, effort or care. A few places we see them shine in our own work and for our clients:
- Getting unstuck, not getting finished. Tools like ChatGPT or Claude are great for brainstorming outlines, working through a stuck sentence, or generating a first rough pass you’ll rework in your own words.
- Repetitive, low-stakes tasks. Summarizing a long document, drafting a first pass at meeting notes, or organizing scattered thoughts into a rough outline are all places AI can save real time.
- Design support, not design decisions. Tools like Canva’s AI features or Adobe Firefly can generate quick visual options or clean up an image, but the eye for what’s actually on-brand still belongs to a person.
- Transcription and organization. Tools like Otter.ai can turn a recorded conversation or podcast episode into a searchable transcript, saving hours of manual work.
- A second set of eyes. Grammarly and similar tools catch typos and awkward phrasing, which is useful as a polish step, not a replacement for your own editing judgment.
Where to Keep the Human Hand
Some things just shouldn’t be outsourced to a tool, even a good one. Your testimony, your story, and the parts of your message that come from lived experience are yours to tell. An AI tool has no idea what it actually felt like to walk through what you walked through.
The same goes for anything that requires real relationship—a personal note to a client, a sensitive email, a response to someone in crisis. Anywhere accuracy really matters, like numbers, quotes, legal or financial details, needs a human checking the work, since AI tools can sound incredibly confident while still being absolutely wrong.
Using AI With Integrity
Integrity in this area isn’t complicated, but it does take intention. Here are a few practices worth building into how you use these tools:
- Don’t misrepresent authorship. If a piece of content is substantially AI-generated, especially anything presented as personal reflection or testimony, that’s worth being honest about—even if just to yourself, as a check on what you’re putting your name behind.
- Fact-check before you publish. AI tools can state incorrect information with total confidence. Anything with a specific claim, statistic, or quote deserves a second look before it goes out under your name.
- Protect what isn’t yours to share. Be thoughtful about what client information, private conversations, or unpublished manuscript content you paste into a third-party tool. Once it’s in, you don’t fully control where it goes.
- Let it save you time, not change your voice. The goal of using AI well is to free up more of your time and energy for the parts of your work that only you can do, not to quietly hand over the parts that make your message actually yours.
A Simple Filter for Every Tool You Try
Next time you’re deciding whether to bring a new AI tool into your workflow, ask three quick questions: Is this saving me time on something that doesn’t require my personal voice? Am I still checking the output before it goes out? And would I feel comfortable being upfront about how I used it? If you can answer yes to all three, you’re probably using the tool well.
AI isn’t going anywhere, and there’s no reason to feel behind if you’re still figuring out where it fits. Start small, stay honest about how you’re using it, and let it handle the busywork so you have more room for the work that actually needs you.
Tools We’ve Added to Our Stack
Here’s a quick list of the AI tools we’ve had great success incorporating into our work:
- ChatGPT—our wordy friend: Great for creating “rinse and repeat” questionnaires or converting video transcripts into workable SOPs.
- Claude—our nerdy friend: Great for solving technical issues that stump us sometimes or comparing different softwares or platforms quickly.
- Cowork—our behind-the-scenes friend: Great for handing off multi-step projects, like pulling research together or organizing a batch of files, so we can focus on the parts of the work that need our attention.
- Gemini—our creative friend: Great for generating fresh images from a specific prompt or quickly modifying an existing photo, to remove a background or add a prop, for example.
- NotebookLM—our research friend: Great for uploading a batch of sources (documents, transcripts, links) and getting answers grounded strictly in that material, citations included.
Want to learn more about practical and ethical AI tools?
We have learned so much from one of our favorite partners, Karen Lewis of Karen Lewis Creative and strongly recommend following and learning from her. Aside from Karen, other great resources include Jonathan Mast (AI & AI Prompts for Entrepreneurs Facebook Group), Michael Hyatt (AI Business Lab), and Jeanette Stein (Stein Solutions). All of these are faith-forward entrepreneurs as well, which is an added bonus.
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