When the Algorithm Comes for Your Business

Thirty-two years ago, when we ran the watersports centre in Bala, North Wales, I remember my dad sitting down with a small pile of paper cutouts, all with handwritten writing. These would then be placed in the correct positions on an A4 sheet and stuck down with Pritt Stick glue, along with the photos and cut-out images from magazines. That was how we made brochures back in the day.

This draft was then taken to the local Prontaprint, where they would flesh out the idea and print it.

If you wanted to, you could simply hand over the entire project to them, and they would handle it.

My claim to fame: The back page of the brochure was a stunning CorelDRAW! production with a tinted gradient. I thought it was awesome, but probably not so much these days! The whole file had to be uploaded to a real-world printer that specialised in converting CorelDRAW! files after they had been uploaded by modem. No internet back then.

If Phillip (our designer) saw it, he’d probably hide himself in a dark room for a few days!

When I first heard someone say that AI would “revolutionise everything”, my immediate reaction was eye-rolling scepticism.

For those of us who built our businesses when the internet was still a novelty and “smartphones” sounded like science fiction, the pace of technological change isn’t just fast - it’s genuinely terrifying. And that fear is making us react in exactly the wrong way.

Comparing that painstaking process to today’s instant digital creation highlights just how much has changed - and perhaps, what I think we’ve lost in the process. Some blindly click buttons, while others think and create.

The Headlines That Keep Me Awake at Night

I want to be honest about what’s really bothering me. It’s not just the technology - it’s what the headlines are telling us about our future relevance.

China’s population is shrinking. We are already asking the question Is this peak humanity? China’s infamous one-child policy has created an irreversible demographic decline - projections suggest a drop from 1.4 billion people to just 1 billion by 2100. And it’s not just China, the global birthrate is decreasing worldwide.

Tesla owner and rocket man Elon Musk seems to be on a mission to reverse all this single-handedly with 14 children and counting.

Climate change is real, we are already well on the path to self-destruction. We appoint idiots to run our governments. Who can equate building another runway at Heathrow with the goal of reducing carbon emissions?

The digital world doesn’t pause for our existential crises. I’ve watched us transition from building static HTML websites with blinking GIFs to grappling with artificial intelligence that can write, design, and code better than 99% of humans. Maybe not the writing, but the coding, definitely yes.

Not long ago, coding was a skill that I learned over years of dedicated practice. Programmers were the logical thinkers, the problem solvers, the architects of the digital world. Now? AI can create solid code in seconds that would take a human days.

And it’s not just that machines can create code. They do it cold-bloodedly, logically, precisely. They look up the correct code libraries, and they know how your desktop development environment should be set up. They don’t sleep. They don’t get tired.

The Brutal Reality: Everything I Thought I Knew Was Wrong

Here’s what I don’t think enough people are talking about: watching AI effortlessly handle work that I once charged handsomely for creates a slow, creeping erosion of purpose. But that’s not the real problem.

The real problem is how I responded to it.

Not long ago, I would have told you that building a comprehensive business application required months of planning, coding expertise, and substantial investment. Today, that maxim has been completely turned on its head.

For a long time, I’ve had an idea for a digital SEO audit tool - something that could automatically analyse websites, identify problems, generate professional reports, and track client progress. It’s not an “audit tool” per se. It’s a driver and copilot to show you where you can improve the most, in the fastest time, picking all the low-hanging fruit as you zoom past on your way to an inevitable utopia.

Before I built the tool, I knew virtually nothing about Python or Django development tools.

Today, that business growth tool is alive. It processes hundreds of web pages, it integrates with Google Sheets, it manages client relationships through a sophisticated admin interface, and it delivers professional-grade reports that would have cost thousands to develop just a few years ago.

I’ve developed an app in Python and Django and it authorises against Google Sheets using my API credentials. The AI figured out where I was headed because that path has been trodden before: now I need to install a full stack development environment and start working with React.js to produce a complete SaaS tool. Want me to scaffold that for you? Are you still with me?

I stared at the screen incredulously. What is going on? In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, I had transitioned from awkwardly developing a flaky scraping app to overseeing a full-stack development SaaS project.

Now, of course, there is a caveat. I have to know what is going on under the hood. I have to understand code version control so that when the AI messes up (which it does frequently) I can go back to the last known good configuration. I need project management skills, and I need to document all my code so that I understand what each function does. This is the key point: I don’t need to understand the Python function, I need to understand what the Python function does and what it is used for.

I became the conductor of a vast orchestra within my field of expertise. And the conducting is how I learn - you can’t discover anything if you don’t build anything.

The Real Problem: Existential Dread Disguised as Business Strategy

The real pain I’m feeling isn’t about slow websites or outdated software. It’s about three fundamental fears:

My AI Awakening: Understanding How to Prompt

I spent months avoiding AI tools because I was convinced they were designed to replace me. Every article about AI automation felt like a personal attack on my livelihood. Sound familiar?

But working with AI to build that audit tool didn’t feel like being replaced - it felt like being amplified and liberated.

The AI couldn’t conceive of the business problem. It couldn’t understand why store owners struggle with SEO, or what kind of reporting would actually drive action, or how to structure the user experience for maximum business impact. But what AI could do was translate my business expertise into working code at lightning speed.

Where once I would have needed to hire developers, project managers, and designers, I could now directly translate my understanding of what businesses need into functioning software. The barrier wasn’t my inability to think logically about problems - it was my inability to prompt correctly. Once I understood how to prompt, everything fell into place.

This is exactly what I teach in my guide on how to set up AI projects that actually deliver results. The key is understanding that Claude Code can accelerate web development 10x faster when you know how to orchestrate it properly.

AI became my translator. And suddenly, I wasn’t obsolete - I was unstoppable.

The Choice I Was Avoiding

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about the demographic collapse, digital overload, and erosion of human connection: they’re not inevitable outcomes of AI adoption. They’re the result of how we choose to engage with these tools. My audit tool succeeds not because it’s automated, but because it solves real human problems that I understand intimately, having worked with struggling businesses for years. The AI handles the technical implementation, but the business logic, the user experience, and the strategic direction all come from my expertise.

This is why I created a Claude Code development approach where AI-powered tools handle what they do best whilst I orchestrate the strategy. When I combined that with building an AI marketing strategy that actually generates revenue, I got amplification without replacement.

I see business owners getting this wrong all the time. They’re either:

What the Teenagers Understand That I Didn’t

Teenagers are rejecting digital overload because they instinctively understand something I’d forgotten: technology without human purpose is meaningless.

But technology with purpose - technology that serves human flourishing rather than replacing it - that’s transformative.

The question isn’t whether AI will change everything. It already has and it will continue to do so, picking up pace. The question is whether you’ll use it strategically or let it use you.

The Path Forward

I won’t pretend this is easy, but I’ll give you the truth: the future belongs to business owners who learn to orchestrate the AI choir, not fight it or surrender to it.

Here’s what that actually looks like:

I had to stop hiding behind “AI isn’t relevant to my business.” Every business will be affected. You can be proactive or reactive - but you can’t be invisible.

I started with my expertise, not the technology. What problems do I solve better than anyone? I used AI to amplify that advantage, not replace it. I cover this exact approach in Python, Django and React.js development with AI.

I focused on human connection, not automation. The more automated everything becomes, the more valuable genuine human insight becomes. This is the core principle behind my AI content strategy that maintains authenticity whilst scaling output.

I learned the basics now. You don’t need to become a programmer, but you need to understand what’s possible. Start with small business growth made easy and build from there.

The Choice Is Yours

The businesses that will thrive in the next decade aren’t the ones that resist change or surrender to it completely. They’re the ones who use AI strategically to amplify their human advantages.

Competitive advantages don’t last forever. While you’re deciding whether AI is relevant to your business, your competitors are already using it to serve your customers better. Understanding the marketing harsh truth about AI adoption is critical for survival.

The choice is still yours. You can view AI as the end of human relevance, or you can see it as the ultimate amplifier of human insight and creativity.

But you need to choose. And you need to choose now.

Because if there’s one thing I know after 25+ years of building businesses, it’s this: the human element never goes out of style. It just finds new ways to matter.

The question is: will you be the one showing it how?