AI can help small businesses understand their customers, personalize marketing, create content, and accomplish more with smaller teams. But as those tools become more powerful, businesses face another challenge: making sure greater efficiency doesn’t come at the expense of customer trust.
That’s particularly important for small businesses, where personal relationships and authenticity can be a competitive advantage. Customers may appreciate personalization and faster service, but they don’t necessarily want to feel as though they’re being watched — or wonder whether they’re interacting with a person at all.
So how can small businesses take advantage of AI without losing the human connection that helps build lasting customer relationships? I talked to Mary Ann O’Brien, founder and CEO of OBI Creative, about where AI belongs in marketing, where humans still matter most, and why becoming more human may actually be the key to succeeding in an AI-driven world.
Rieva Lesonsky: AI is becoming part of nearly every marketing strategy. Where do you think small businesses are getting it right, and where are they making mistakes?
Mary Ann O’Brien: Small businesses are getting it right when they use AI to remove friction and give themselves capabilities they may not otherwise have. AI can help a small team research a market, analyze customer feedback, brainstorm ideas, personalize communications, and move faster.
Where I see businesses get into trouble is when they confuse more output with better marketing. AI makes it incredibly easy to create more content, but consumers don’t need more content. They need content that is relevant, useful, and emotionally intelligent.
If you’re using AI to create 50 more posts that sound like everyone else, you’ve solved the wrong problem. Use AI to understand your customer better, not just talk to them faster.
Using AI Without Losing Your Voice
Lesonsky: Consumers say they value authenticity, yet they also expect personalized experiences. How can businesses use AI to deliver personalization without making customers feel they’re interacting with a machine?
O’Brien: Personalization should feel helpful, not creepy.
There is a big difference between saying, “We remember that you purchased this product and thought you might like this,” and making a customer wonder, “How does this company know that about me?”
Businesses should use information customers have willingly shared to make experiences more relevant, while being transparent about how that information is being used. The best AI-powered experiences should make customers feel understood, not watched.
And remember that personalization doesn’t have to eliminate the human touch. AI can identify an opportunity, but a person can determine how to act on it.
Lesonsky: Many small business owners worry that AI-generated marketing will make their brands sound like everyone else’s. How can they preserve a distinctive brand voice while taking advantage of AI?
O’Brien: This is where having a strong brand becomes incredibly important.
AI has made sophisticated marketing tools accessible to everyone. And that’s great! But it also means everyone has access to many of the same tools, prompts, and templates. If your company doesn’t have a clear point of view, AI will quickly push you into a sea of sameness.
Before asking AI to write for you, you have to know who you are. What do you believe? How do you talk? What makes your company different? What would you say that your competitor wouldn’t?
AI should help you express your brand voice more efficiently. It shouldn’t be responsible for creating your voice in the first place.
Lesonsky: Should businesses tell customers when AI is involved in creating content or communicating with them? How much transparency is enough?
O’Brien: Yes. I believe businesses should disclose when they’re using AI, especially when it directly interacts with customers or influences their experiences.
Transparency builds trust. Customers don’t necessarily expect businesses to avoid technology; they expect businesses to be honest about how they’re using it.
The goal isn’t to put an AI disclaimer on every social post. It’s about giving people enough information to understand when AI is involved, what it’s doing, and most importantly, how it benefits them.
Where Humans Still Matter
Lesonsky: What marketing tasks are ideal for AI, and which ones should always involve a human?
O’Brien: AI is fantastic for research, data analysis, audience insights, brainstorming, content iteration, personalization, optimization, and testing. It can take a tremendous amount of repetitive work off a marketing team’s plate. But I don’t want AI making the final call on a brand’s emotional core.
Foundational brand strategy, positioning, emotional storytelling, cultural nuance, and major creative decisions need human judgment. AI can generate a headline. It can’t replace the lived experience, intuition, and empathy that determine whether that headline actually means something to your customer.
AI should be the accelerator, never the author of the brand.
Lesonsky: Have you seen examples of companies using AI in ways that actually strengthened customer relationships rather than weakened them? What made those efforts successful?
O’Brien: The strongest examples tend to have one thing in common: the customer benefits first.
Think about AI helping a customer find the right product faster, answering a question immediately, remembering preferences, anticipating a need, or making a complicated process easier.
The technology isn’t what makes those experiences successful. It’s the fact that the company uses technology to solve a real customer problem.
That’s the test I would give any business. You have to ask: Are we using AI because it’s good for us, or because it’s genuinely better for the customer?
Lesonsky: What’s the biggest misconception business owners have about AI in marketing today?
O’Brien: The biggest misconception about AI is that it’s a marketing strategy. It isn’t.
Instead, you have to remember that AI is a tool — an incredibly powerful one. But you still need to know what you’re trying to accomplish, who you’re trying to reach, and why they should care.
AI can make a bad strategy faster. It can also make a great strategy more powerful. The difference is the thinking behind it.
Why Human Skills Matter More in an AI World
Lesonsky: As AI continues to evolve, what skills should marketers and business owners develop to stay competitive while building genuine customer relationships?
O’Brien: I actually think the most valuable skills are becoming more human, not less.
Curiosity. Critical thinking. Empathy. Creativity. Storytelling. Cultural awareness. The ability to ask good questions and actually listen to the answers.
As AI becomes better at producing things, the value of knowing what is worth producing increases.
Marketers also need to become comfortable working alongside technology. You don’t have to be an AI engineer, but you need to understand what these tools can do, where they fall short, and how to use them strategically.
Lesonsky: Looking ahead, what do you think successful marketing will look like five years from now? Will AI make human creativity more important or less?
O’Brien: AI will make human creativity more important. Absolutely.
Five years from now, AI will make it easier than ever to create content. That means content itself will become less valuable as a differentiator.
What will matter is the idea behind it.
The brands that stand out will have a strong point of view, a distinct personality, and a genuine understanding of their customers. They’ll use AI to move faster, personalize better, and make smarter decisions — but they’ll still need humans to create the emotional connection.
The irony is that as technology becomes more sophisticated, being unmistakably human becomes a competitive advantage.
AI isn’t a threat to thoughtful marketing. It’s a threat to lazy marketing.
Rieva Lesonsky is the founder of Small Business Currents, a content company focusing on small businesses and entrepreneurship. You can find her on Twitter @Rieva, Bluesky @Rieva.bsky.social, and LinkedIn. Or email her at Rieva@SmallBusinessCurrents.com.