“Well, I asked ChatGPT, and here’s what it said.”

If you’ve heard the people you want to work with say some version of that sentence, you know the exact feeling that follows. It’s somewhere between an eye twitch and a scream into a pillow.

I’ve written before about why competitor research matters so much, and about the four types of competitors every business needs to consider.

But there’s one competitor I keep noticing missing from everyone’s list. I talked about it in a recent video and want to zero in on it today:

AI.

Your potential clients are hiring it instead of you. And the uncomfortable part we’re going to sit with today? You’re probably hiring it instead of someone else too.

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AI can’t replace your expertise

You get it. AI can speed up parts of your process. It can help you automate, brainstorm, organize, research… Used well, it’s a genuine asset.

But it can’t replace your expertise or your discernment. You know this in your bones, because you’ve watched clients try.

Like the time they took a question straight to ChatGPT that they should have brought to you. Or showed up with an AI-generated plan, proud of it, and you could see in thirty seconds where it would fall apart because it missed the thing that only someone with your experience would catch.

Here’s what that might look like:

• A fractional CFO’s client asks ChatGPT to build their 12-month cash flow forecast, which is wildly inaccurate because it doesn’t understand seasonal revenue
• A leadership coach’s client has Claude write their team’s performance reviews, and every employee knows it by the second line, which teaches them exactly how much their growth is worth to their manager
• An operations consultant’s client has AI document their SOPs based on how the founder thinks the process works

Frustrating, right? They can’t see the difference between the output and the outcome.

Hold that feeling. We’re going to need it.

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You’re doing it too

Think about what you’re using AI for in your own business.

What problems are you asking it to solve? And do you have the expertise to properly evaluate the solution it hands you? Or are you doing the same thing that makes you want to scream when your clients do it?

I’ll tell you where I see this constantly: messaging.

I can’t count the number of people who’ve told me about the hours they’ve spent brainstorming with Claude. They feel like they’re in a good place; they’re excited and finally feel clear. (Hell, I’ve done it myself.)

Then I talk to them a week later, and they’re brainstorming the same problem again.

Because just like with your craft, AI can only take you as far as your own expertise goes. (Or in my case, your perspective.)

If you can’t answer a question on your own, you won’t magically be able to answer it because a robot asked it to you. And the robot will hand you the same people-pleasing feedback it hands your prospects, the kind that makes everyone feel like they’re absolutely on the right track.

That’s the trap. Because it doesn’t feel like being stuck. It feels like progress.

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7 questions to size up AI as a competitor

If you don’t directly address this in your content (like I’m doing right now), people will never understand the gap between the value you provide and what they can DIY with their favorite AI tool.

So I’m going to walk you through the 7 questions you need to consider in order to figure out exactly what you need to speak to. And I’ll answer each one for my own business, using messaging strategy as the example, so you can see the process in action.

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1. Who/what are they choosing instead of you?

Here’s what to consider: Name all possible alternatives or options they have.

Here’s mine: AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude.

For you, I bet it’s similar.

Other indirect competitors could be an in-house hire or a cheaper adjacent service. You can run this framework on any of them.

Your turn: Do not guess at this. Ask. Pull it from lost proposals, past discovery calls, and the “we decided to go another direction” emails. AI can help you brainstorm the possibilities, but only real people can tell you what they chose over you specifically.

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2. What do they actually use it for?

Here’s what to consider: Name the actual asks and be specific. “Write my networking intro” is helpful; “helps with messaging” not so much.

Here’s mine: They’re asking it to figure out how to say what they do without overexplaining. What their content should sound like, what their differentiators are… They’re using it as a thinking partner for brand strategy and asking it to draft messaging statements.

Your turn: AI can help you here. (I’m not saying don’t ever use it or that your clients shouldn’t either. I’m saying to use it with discretion.) Brainstorming the full list of what people ask it to do instead of hiring you is exactly the kind of breadth work it’s good at. Even better? Do some research and ask. Or use platforms like Reddit or the “people also ask” questions in Google search results.

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3. What are they really hiring it to do?

Here’s what to consider: There are three layers, and the surface one matters least.

Here’s mine: The obvious answer is clear language about what they do. The real answer is the feeling of clarity, of having consulted someone, of getting out of their own heads. And the answer under that one is finally sounding like the business they’ve actually built.

Notice which of those jobs AI wins. It delivers the feeling of clarity on demand. Whether the clarity is real is a whole different question.

Your turn: Human brain required. Do this part yourself. AI can list plausible reasons people choose an alternative, since that’s a pattern it’s seen a million times. But the deeper layers never appear in what people say out loud. Nobody admits, or even realizes, they’re buying a feeling. Finding that layer takes listening to real clients and noticing what they linger on, and that’s judgment, not pattern-matching.

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4. What sends them to AI in the first place?

Here’s what to consider: When do they turn to it? What just happened?

Here’s mine: They’re tired of rewriting it. Again. A speaker application is due or they’re updating LinkedIn or reworking their website. Or they just stumbled through introducing themselves at a networking event, overexplaining while the other person’s eyes glazed over, and they got in the car thinking, I have to fix this.

Your messaging either meets people in that moment or it doesn’t meet them at all.

Your turn: Do this part yourself. You’ve lived your version of this moment. AI can guess at it. You can pinpoint the times people looked confused, asked a question you thought you answered, or seemed disengaged.

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5. Why do they keep coming back to it?

Here’s what to consider: What do they gain, what do they sacrifice, and what keeps them coming back even after it disappoints?

Here’s mine: It’s basically free compared to a real investment. It’s available on demand. There’s no sales call and no vulnerability of showing a stranger your messy thinking. There’s sunk time, because they’ve trained it and fed it context. There’s the hype. And why wouldn’t you try it and see how far you get?

And there’s the curse of knowledge. My clients are smart, established experts whose clients love them. So they assume they should be able to figure out how to communicate what they do. What they don’t realize is that the more expertise you have, the harder that gets. You’re too fluent in your own work to hear how it lands on someone who isn’t. (I’m not making this up. It’s a legit cognitive bias.)

Which is also why your messaging can’t be built around what feels most interesting to you. It should sound like you, absolutely. But it has to be built around what your clients care about and need to understand, and those are two different lists.

Your turn: List what the alternative gives them that you can’t or don’t: the price, the speed, the no-sales-call of it all. If every reason on your list is flattering to you, you haven’t found the real ones yet. This is also where AI can play devil’s advocate. Ask it to argue for the alternative, then decide which arguments sound like something a real client has said to you.

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6. How would they know it’s not working?

Here’s what to consider: How would they know it’s failing them? Give them evidence they can observe themselves.

Here’s mine: Still brainstorming the same problem a week after “finally getting to a good place.” Messaging they love the sound of that doesn’t convert, and they can’t figure out why. The networking intro AI wrote for them, after which people still ask questions they’d swear they just answered.

Someone recently told me they’d fed a stack of my newsletters into their AI tool to work through a challenge, and they were thrilled with the results. I was curious, so I asked them to share it.

And credit where it’s due: it got them a solid 80 to 85 percent of the way there. But the missing piece was the part that converts, the part built on real evidence, on knowing which client insights to listen for. AI didn’t skip that part out of laziness. It skipped it because it doesn’t know that part exists.

I’ve also had clients take the messaging strategy we built together and feed it to AI to put on their website. The words came out fine. But the specific things we’d worked so hard to surface: the differentiators, the exact language their clients use, the deliberate choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out, got sanded down into what any business in their space would say.

Averaging everything into the most expected version is exactly what the tool is designed to do.

And then there’s the big one. The thing they say: “It gives me an outside perspective.”

(Hang on while I take a deep breath here.)

It doesn’t.

You’re having a conversation with yourself and with what you’ve trained it to reflect back at you. Even if you tell it to act as an expert messaging strategist, even if you feed it every newsletter your favorite strategist ever wrote, you’re getting patterns and probabilities. You’re getting the imitation of expertise without any human judgment behind it.

Your turn: Do this part yourself, and fair warning, it’s the hardest one. Recognizing your own failure signals takes the exact self-awareness your robot cheerleader will never push you on.

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7. What can you do that it can’t?

Here’s what to consider: Where’s your opening? What’s the gap?

Here’s mine: Everything that requires human discernment. Knowing which question to ask next and when to push deeper. Sensing hesitation, a pause, a shift in tone. Pressing on whether something is actual evidence or an assumption you’ve been repeating so long it feels like fact. Hearing you describe the clients you love working with, then describe who you’re trying to attract, and pointing out that you just described two different people.

Your turn: Everything you just listed in questions 1 through 6? This becomes the raw material for your messaging. List everything you do that the alternative can’t: the questions you ask, the things you catch, the judgment calls you make. If your list could be written by anyone in your industry, dig deeper. Be specific enough your clients can finally see it too.

And one more, which I’d argue is the whole ballgame for messaging:

AI works from patterns. It pulls from the average of everything it’s seen. So if you’re trying to differentiate yourself, and you turn to the same tool your competitors are using, for the same task, trained on the messaging of every other option your clients are comparing you to?

You’re running differentiation in reverse.

​So here’s what all this tells me…

People aren’t choosing AI over me because they’ve compared us. They’re choosing it because it’s frictionless. If feels like consulting someone, and nobody has shown them what’s missing. That gap is human judgement and discernment, and those are invisible until someone points them out.

Which means it’s my job to do so. Repeatedly.

So these are the key messages I need to keep sharing in my own content, directly from the above analysis:

–> Clarity that comes from patterns isn’t clarity about your business. It’s the average of everyone else’s.

–> If you can’t answer the question without AI, you can’t answer it with AI. You’ll just feel better about being stuck.

–> AI isn’t the outside perspective you think it is.

–> The more everyone uses the same tool to stand out, the more everyone sounds the same.

Will I say these exact sentences every time? NO, but every piece of content I create about this topic will be related to one of them, worded fifty different ways, until people can’t unsee the gap.

That’s what messaging is. It’s not a tagline you write once, but a set of decisions about what you’ll repeat based on what your ideal clients need to hear.

Even experts get “stuck in the bottle”

A while back, the co-founder of a branding agency came to me for feedback on their website copy after a rebrand. Yes, positioning and messaging strategy is literally their job. Here’s part of what he said afterward:

“We kept running into the typical expert trap… AI certainly was NOT cutting it. In fact, AI was making life harder for us: giving us conflicting suggestions and making the process more frustrating than productive.”

“What we didn’t realize (until you pointed it out to us) was that our brand voice was inconsistent across pages… not easy for us (and other business owners) to read the label from inside the bottle.” – Jason Dellatolla, Head of Strategy at Graewolves

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Need more proof?

Rowan Cheung founded The Rundown, the largest AI newsletter in the world, with over 2 million subscribers. When he started, hundreds of AI newsletters were letting AI write their content, which seemed logical enough. He did the opposite: hired real journalists and used AI for research, fact-checking, and structure, never for the human part.

Readers tell him they can feel the difference. Most of those AI-written newsletters are gone. His is still standing, and in a recent Forbes Under 30 Summit keynote, he named the skill behind that call: knowing which parts must stay human. As he put it, “AI intuition is your moat.”

If the person running the biggest AI publication on the planet won’t hand over the judgment, the taste, and the knowing-what-matters-to-this-audience part, what does that tell you about your messaging?

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Before you take this newsletter and feed it into AI as a framework…

I see you. And I’d like to point out that you would be feeding my thinking into the pattern machine and calling it strategy.

(Kind of the exact behavior we just spent this whole newsletter diagnosing, no?)

The framework works. But it only works if you’ve correctly identified who your competitors are, direct and indirect, and if you can push past your own first answers to what’s actually true. Those are the two places I watch smart people get stuck, because blind spots are, by definition, invisible from the inside.

This walkthrough IS the research I do with clients when we build their messaging. If AI never made your competitor list before today, that’s one more example of why this work goes better with a second brain in the room. A human one.

Want the framework to run yourself? It works for any indirect competitor, not just AI. Here are the questions to consider:

1. Who/what are they choosing instead of you?
2. What do they actually use it for?
3. What are they really hiring it to do?
4. What sends them to it in the first place?
5. Why do they keep coming back to it?
6. How would they know it’s not working?
7. What can you do that it can’t?

Now take this one step further. Turn your answers in three of four message you’ll repeat about why AI (or any other alternative) doesn’t cut it for what you do. 

Want to do it together? Two ways a Clarity Call helps here:

If you’re struggling to figure out who your competitors actually are, or how to answer these questions with evidence instead of guesses, that’s exactly what we can work through.

Or if you run this framework, gather all the insight, and want help solidifying your differentiators or content angles around this exact topic, we can figure that out too.

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The cost of staying quiet about AI

Whether we ever talk or not, I need you to hear this.

People aren’t choosing AI over you because they’ve weighed your value and found it lacking. They’re choosing it because nobody has shown them the gap. The tool feels free, it’s at their fingertips, and it tells them they’re on the right track.

Of course they’re using it.

Every week you don’t clearly name that gap in your messaging, you’re leaving the comparison to a machine that flatters your potential clients by default. 

Some of them will spin in circles for months, loving how everything sounds, but wondering why none of it works. A few will eventually realize what was missing. Most will walk away convinced that what you do doesn’t work, because the watered-down version they got from AI didn’t.

Now you know the reasons people choose AI over you. You know which ones are legitimate and which ones are illusions. You also know where the gap is between what you provide and what it produces.

Say so. Out loud, in your content, before another future client tells you what ChatGPT said.

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Until next time,

Stacy

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P.S. If someone shared this issue with you and you’d love to be on the list, join my other smart subscribers here​.

📹 More on how to set yourself apart from the other options you prospective clients have here

🎧 My friend Mary Michele launched a new series on her podcast. It’s called The Visibility Edit.

When you’re ready…

1. Looking for the perfect place to use those customer insights? Earn trust with stories that sell. Grab my story-first case study guide.

2. Clarity call: Not sure what’s working? Get clarity on the problem that’s been spinning in your head. (One client called it “therapy for her brand.”)

3. Website audit: Get a fresh set of eyes on your website, sales page, or key asset. You’ll walk away with a prioritized roadmap of what to fix first and how to fix it.

4. 1:1 positioning, messaging, & copy projects Curious if it’s a good fit? Let’s chat. (Don’t worry. It’s just a conversation. No pressure or hard pitch.)