How to make your business AI-ready in six steps.
Most businesses are already using AI in some way.
They're using ChatGPT to write emails, create social media content, research ideas, prepare documents or help with everyday tasks.
But there's a difference between using AI and being AI-ready.
Think about what happens when you employ a new assistant.
You wouldn't expect them to understand your customers, know your services, follow your brand guidelines or make decisions the way you do without first introducing them to your business.
You'd explain how things work, give them access to the right information, define their responsibilities and show them what a good result looks like.
Yet that's often exactly what we expect from AI.
We open ChatGPT, give it a task and hope for the best.
When the result isn't quite right, we rewrite it, correct it or spend more time explaining what we wanted.
Why AI-Ready Business at Social Media Photographers?
You might know me primarily as a photographer, but photography has always been just one part of what I do.
For more than a decade, I've helped businesses develop their brands, create social media strategies, plan and produce content, and communicate consistently with their customers.
That work has involved everything from brand photography and graphic design to content planning, marketing strategy and teaching business owners how to manage their own marketing.
Regardless of the project, the starting point has always been understanding the business, its customers, its brand and what it's trying to achieve.
Now I'm applying those same skills to AI.
Because creating good content isn't just about knowing how to use the tools. It's about understanding the business behind it.
The same applies to AI.
Before an AI Assistant can create on-brand content, communicate with customers or support a team, it needs the right business knowledge, clear instructions and training.
AI-Ready Business is a natural extension of the brand, marketing and content work I've been doing for years.
Instead of only using that knowledge to develop marketing strategies and create content, I'm now structuring it so AI Assistants can understand the business and support the people working in it.
Introducing the AI-Ready Business Framework
I've been developing and testing a practical approach to helping small and medium businesses get more value from AI.
The idea is simple: before expecting AI to do useful work, teach it how your business actually works.
The AI-Ready Business Framework has three stages and six steps.
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Stage 1: Build the Foundation
1. Set the Rules
Just like a new employee, AI needs clear boundaries.
Before introducing AI into a business, establish what information can be shared, which tools are approved and who is responsible for reviewing its work.
AI can produce inaccurate or unexpected results, so human oversight remains essential.
2. Teach AI the Business
This is where we capture the knowledge that makes your business work.Your customers, services, brand, communication style, processes, standards and ways of working.
It's also an opportunity to uncover information that might only exist in the business owner's head.
What do you repeatedly explain to employees? What questions keep coming back to you? What does your team need to know to do their jobs well?
These are often the things AI needs to understand too.
3. Build the Foundation
Once that knowledge has been captured, it needs to be organised into a format AI can understand and use.
This becomes your AI-Ready Business Foundation.
Think of it as a central source of business knowledge that can support multiple AI Assistants.It also helps identify gaps.
Perhaps your brand voice has never been documented, or an important process exists only in someone's head.
Not every gap needs to be solved immediately, but knowing what's missing is a valuable starting point.
Stage 2: Launch Your AI Assistant
4. Give AI a Job
Rather than asking what AI could do for your business, start by looking at the work your people are already doing.
Where are they spending too much time? What work is repetitive? What regularly requires the same knowledge or explanations?
Then give AI a clearly defined job.
For example, a marketing manager might benefit from an AI Assistant trained to prepare content drafts using the business's brand guidelines, content strategy and approved examples.
The important distinction is that we're not simply giving AI random tasks.
We're defining a job and assigning an AI Assistant to support a human role.
And there's one principle I believe every business should follow:
Every AI Assistant needs a human manager.
Someone who reviews its work, provides feedback, identifies when its knowledge needs updating and remains accountable for approving its outputs.
I particularly like the idea of recognising a hardworking employee by giving them their own AI Assistant.
It's a way of supporting your people and increasing their capacity, rather than expecting them to continually do more with the same resources.
5. Onboard & Train
Now the AI Assistant needs to learn its job.
That means providing clear instructions, relevant business knowledge, examples of good work, boundaries and opportunities to practise.
Just like training a new employee, the process involves testing real work, reviewing the results, correcting mistakes and improving performance.
But onboarding works both ways.
The human manager and relevant team members also need to understand how to work with their new assistant, what information to provide, how to review its outputs and when human judgement is required.
Train AI to work with your people. Train your people to work with AI.
Stage 3: Keep It Current
6. Review & Improve
A business doesn't stand still.Customers change.
Services evolve. New employees join. Processes improve. Brand messaging changes.
Your AI Assistants need to keep up.
Regular reviews provide an opportunity to update the business knowledge, assess how well each assistant is performing, identify recurring corrections and provide further training.
It's also an opportunity to ask another question:
Who else in the business could benefit from an AI Assistant?
Because once you've established the Foundation, you don't need to start from scratch every time you introduce another assistant.
You can build on the business knowledge you've already captured.
What I've learned from testing this approach
My first implementation involved training a LinkedIn AI Assistant for an Australian insurance business.
The business owner wanted help producing regular LinkedIn content without spending hours writing it himself.
Rather than simply generating posts, we trained the assistant using information about the business, its customers, services, brand, content strategy and personal communication style.
During testing, the owner rated how well the content matched the business's voice and his personal style 5 out of 5.
He was able to create a month's LinkedIn content in less than 10 minutes, with only minor editing required.
That was encouraging, but the bigger learning was about the business knowledge we'd captured.
Much of it wasn't specific to LinkedIn.
It could also be useful for future assistants supporting client communications, proposals, internal knowledge or other recurring work.
That insight has helped shape the AI-Ready Business Framework.
Where could AI make the biggest difference in your business?
Here's a question worth considering:
If you could give one person in your business their own assistant tomorrow, who would you give it to, and what would you want that assistant to take off their plate?
It might be your marketing manager, administration team, practice manager or even yourself.
The answer could be a useful starting point for identifying where AI could genuinely support your business.
The goal isn't to introduce AI everywhere.
It's to give the right AI Assistant a useful job, the business knowledge it needs and a human manager who can help it perform well.
Become an AI-Ready Business
I'm currently looking for three Australian small and medium businesses to help test and refine this approach through my Foundation Client program.
We'll capture and structure your business knowledge, identify the most valuable first job for AI and build and train an AI Assistant to support your business.