How To Use AI To Get Ahead
There's a lot of anxiety around AI taking people's jobs – but are we looking at it the wrong way?
I think we have the story backwards. The fear assumes AI replaces people, when what it replaces is the cost of getting things made. It behaves like a very fast, very literal junior hire who will do anything you ask and has no idea what is worth doing and deciding what is worth doing has always been the valuable part of any job. The roles under real pressure are the ones that were a stack of repeatable tasks with nobody making decisions. Everything else gets more interesting, because the admin that used to eat your week now takes an afternoon and what's left is the judgement only you have. For women who spent years building expertise and then watched it disappear under logistics, this is the first time the balance has tipped back in your favour.
If you have lots of experience, why might that be more valuable in this age of AI?
AI has read everything, which means it produces the average of everything. Left without direction, it hands you the middle of the road and the direction is exactly where your experience goes in. Every instruction you give it carries what you know about your world, and someone new to your industry simply has nothing to put in. Then experience tells you when the thing in front of you is wrong. I can look at what's come back and know instantly that it won't land and I couldn't fully write down the rule I just applied. Everyone now has access to the same tool. Knowing what to ask it and what to throw away when it answers is the only thing that separates one woman's work from another's.
You talk a lot about using expertise as an "unfair advantage" with AI. What does that mean?
It means you're carrying two things AI will never have, which are taste and context. Taste is knowing what good looks like and feeling instantly when something isn't it and that took you years to build, even if you've never called it a skill. Context is everything you know about the world you move in that nobody wrote down. What your friends want as opposed to what they say they want. And why the obvious solution keeps failing.
AI can generate a hundred versions of anything in a minute but it cannot tell you which one is right. You can tell in a second, and you'll be right, and you won't be able to explain why. That instinct is now the most valuable thing in the room, because it's the only part of the process that can't be automated.
What's the biggest misconception you hear from people about AI?
That you have to understand how it works before you're allowed to use it. Women tell me they're waiting until they know more and there is genuinely nothing to know in advance. It responds to plain English. If you can describe what you want to a friend, you can describe it to Claude, and the describing is the whole skill. The other half of it is thinking your ideas aren't technical enough to count. The most interesting things being built right now come from women who noticed something missing and were annoyed enough about it to make it. Nobody needed permission or a qualification. They just knew what should exist and made it so.
So people shouldn’t be worried if they think they know nothing about AI?
Somebody who knows AI inside out but nothing about your industry can build absolutely anything and at the same time has no idea what to build, so they build something impressive that nobody needed. If you’ve been working in the same industry for a long time, you have the opposite problem and it's by far the better one to have, because you know precisely which frustration people would pay to make go away. That was always the hard half. The technical half is the part that just became available to everybody.
What if you've never thought of yourself as an entrepreneur – could AI change what's possible for you?
Most women I meet don't have an idea problem, they have an execution cost problem. The idea was always there but building it meant finding a developer, spending months and spending money you'd rather put somewhere safer, so it stayed an idea. That cost has collapsed almost entirely. You can have a working version of your idea by Sunday night for the price of a subscription. When trying gets that cheap, you don't need to decide you're an entrepreneur first. You just start and find out, and the finding out takes a weekend rather than a year of your life.
How could someone use AI to test whether an idea is actually worth pursuing, before spending months or lots of money on it?
Start by using it against yourself. Tell it exactly what you're planning and ask for the three strongest reasons this fails, plus who's already doing it better. It has no interest in protecting your feelings, which at that stage is precisely what you need from it.
If the idea survives that, build the smallest working version and put it in front of ten real people. Not a survey, not a poll on Stories, something they can use. And ignore everything you've been told about scrappy first versions, because AI will make it look genuinely good from the start and that matters more than founders like to admit. People decide how they feel about an idea from how it looks long before they work out whether they need it. Then you watch what those ten people do, and if any of them come back a second time without being asked, you're onto something.
Is there a danger that women will use AI to make themselves more efficient but miss the bigger opportunity to create something new?
Yes, and it's the thing I worry about most. Efficiency is the safe version of this and it's where almost everyone stops. You use AI to clear the inbox faster, the work quietly expands to fill the time you saved, and a year later nothing has changed except your admin is tidier.
The question I want women to ask isn't what can I delegate, it's what could I build? What problem in your world have you watched people struggle with for years, and what would you make if you had a developer sitting beside you with unlimited time and no invoice at the end of it? That used to be a fantasy. It's now a planning question and the gap between the women who ask it and the women who don't will be enormous within three years.
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So how can AI help someone turn their knowledge into a business, product or service?
Start with the thing you wish existed – the app you keep looking for and can't find, the tool you've cobbled together out of three spreadsheets, the thing you've said out loud a dozen times should exist by now. The way in is much smaller than people imagine. You describe it the way you'd brief a developer: who it's for, what they should be able to do, how it should feel and look. It builds you a working version you can click through within minutes. You look at it, tell it what's off and go again. Ten rounds of that and you have something real enough to put in front of people.
From there it becomes a business the ordinary way. Some people charge for it. Some give it away and it brings exactly the right people to them. Some make it for a community they're already part of and discover a few thousand other people wanted the same thing. What's changed isn't the business model, it's that the making used to require major investment and months of your time.
What about people who are already successful at what they do? How can they use AI to make the next stage bigger rather than just their current workload easier?
The temptation when you're already doing well is to use AI to make things go faster and that's a waste of the moment. There's always a next level to anything you've achieved, and this is how you get to it. You've built something successful. That means you're sitting on rich context about why and that's the one thing AI can never generate on its own. Give it that foundation and it can amplify what you've already made to a level you couldn't have reached alone.
Start by handing it everything you know about your own business, then ask it what it sees. It will spot patterns you're far too close to notice. Then ask it the bigger question. What would you do with this if you were building it ten times the size and what would you stop doing to get there? You'll get an answer you already half knew and had never said out loud, because the ceiling you've been working under was set by what you could personally get done in a week and that ceiling has moved.
What are the biggest mistakes people make when they start using AI?
Treating it like a search engine, so one line in, one line out and a lot of disappointment. Also, starting from scratch every single time. It doesn't know you, your taste or what you're trying to make unless you tell it and if you find yourself explaining all that again at the top of every conversation, something has gone wrong. AI is only worth anything once it already knows who you are.
Don’t accept the first version, which is only ever the rough cut. Tell it what's wrong and ask again, because the second and third rounds are where everything good happens. This is the one that separates people, and it's nothing more than being willing to say that isn't it, try again. Finally, the most expensive one – using it to sound like everybody else. If you publish what it hands you, you'll sound exactly like the thousands of other people who did the same thing that morning.
If you had one afternoon to help someone use AI to their advantage, what would you do?
The unlock is realising you can use AI to work out what to tell the AI. You don't have to arrive with the answers, you can ask it to draw them out of you. I use Claude, so in my case, that means spending the first hour setting up a Project, which is a folder holding everything it knows about me. Instead of writing those instructions myself, I ask it to interview me and write them. It asks what I do, what I'm drawn to, how I talk, what I'm trying to make this year and then turns that into proper instructions I can correct.
Answering it out loud is the part that changes everything because your voice carries far more than your typing ever will. When you type, you edit yourself into something tidy, professional and a bit flat. When you talk, you ramble, you go off on the thing that really matters to you, you say the aside you'd never have written down and all of that richness gets added. The instructions that come back sound like you because you were being yourself while you made them. Do the same thing to find what to create. Ask it to question you about what frustrates you, what you keep wishing existed, the problems you watch people around you struggle with. It'll surface something you stopped noticing years ago, and that's what you're making today.
Then spend the rest of the afternoon building it. Describe what you want, look at what comes back, tell it what's wrong, go again. Every step works the same way, and that's the thing worth taking from all of this. You never have to get it right the first time. You only have to react to what's in front of you.
Finally, if you could give every woman one piece of advice about AI, what would it be?
Trust your taste and stop waiting. There's no course you need to finish, no qualification coming and nobody is going to hand you permission. Pick one real thing this week that genuinely matters to your business and do it with AI sitting next to you, and you'll learn more in that hour than in a month of reading about it. The women who are ahead in two years won't be the most technical ones. They'll be the ones who knew what was worth building and started while everyone else was still deciding whether they were allowed to.
Chloé Watts is the co-founder and CEO of Coreli, an AI-powered link-in-bio platform that turns a creator's Instagram into an editorial-style landing page in minutes.
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