Treat your AI like a bright new intern

The most useful way I’ve found to think about an AI assistant is as a bright new intern. It has read everything you gave it. It writes quickly and well. And it has met none of your customers.

That last part matters more than it sounds. The value in a founder-run brand often lives in the nuances: the stockist who’d rather have a call than an email, the customer who always asks about refills, the claim you quietly stopped making last spring because you couldn’t fully stand behind it. An intern can’t know those on day one. Neither can an AI.

You wouldn’t hand a new intern your biggest wholesale account in their first week. You’d read their drafts, explain your changes and give them more as they earned it. The same pattern works for an assistant. At first it drafts and you approve everything. When the record shows you rarely change a certain kind of reply, you can choose to spot-check those instead. Only if you choose, and only for low-risk replies you almost never change, does anything run on its own, and one switch brings it all back to you.

Here’s where the comparison breaks, and it matters. A good intern learns by themselves. An AI assistant shouldn’t. When it notices a pattern in your edits, it should propose a lesson in plain words, and you decide whether it becomes a rule. Learning should change its guidance, never its permissions.

Treated like this, the assistant doesn’t replace your judgement. It carries it further: your nuance, written down, applied consistently and checked against what you actually do. That’s where the value is. Not in the number of drafts, but in the details they get right.

Hire it like an intern. Supervise it like a colleague. Give it more only when the evidence supports it and you decide to.