Anyone Can Use AI. The Art Is Situating It.

Everyone has AI now. Your competitors have it. Your clients have it. The teenager down the road has it on their phone. The playing field didn’t just level - it dissolved.

So here’s the question worth asking: if everyone has the same tool, why does so much of the output look like generic slop?

The Session Musician Problem

When a session musician walks into a studio for the first time, they can play. They’ve got technique, they’ve got chops, they’ve read the chart. They hit every note.

But it doesn’t sound right.

It doesn’t sound right because they don’t know the song yet. Not really. They don’t know that the bridge needs to breathe. They don’t know the singer’s voice cracks on the high G and that’s the best part, so leave space for it. They don’t know the producer wants it to feel like Muscle Shoals, not Nashville. They don’t know the drummer rushes on the chorus and the whole band leans into it because that’s their sound.

They’re playing the notes. They haven’t found the song.

What Situating Actually Means

Situating isn’t prompting. Prompting is asking a question. Situating is giving the AI somewhere to stand before it answers.

It’s the difference between asking a stranger for directions and asking someone who lives on your street. The stranger gives you a technically correct answer that might work. The neighbour says “don’t go that way, the road’s up - cut through the park.”

The gap between those two outputs isn’t prompt engineering. It’s context. It’s accumulated understanding. It’s the AI knowing where it stands in your world.

The Pub Test

I think about it like this. You walk into a pub and someone you’ve never met asks you about your business. You give them the elevator pitch. They nod politely, say something generic about “the digital space” and you both move on.

Now imagine the same conversation with someone who’s worked alongside you for six months. They know your clients. They’ve seen your spreadsheets. They know you lost sleep over that invoice in November and that you won’t work with anyone who treats their customers badly. When they say something about your business, it lands differently - because it comes from understanding, not assumption.

The Moat Nobody Sees

Here’s what’s interesting about this. Everyone is looking for the AI moat - the thing that gives you an advantage that others can’t easily copy. They’re looking at model selection, fine-tuning, API integrations, custom agents.

The moat is much simpler than that. And much harder to replicate.

An AI model is commodity. Everyone gets the same one. But the context you wrap around it - that’s yours. And it took you your whole career to build it.

The teenager down the road has the same AI. They don’t have your twenty years.

How to Start

This isn’t complicated. But it does require a shift in thinking. Stop chatting with AI and start building with it. Give it context before you give it tasks.

Three things to situate first:

1. Who you are - not your LinkedIn bio. Your actual voice, your values, the things you refuse to compromise on. The AI needs to know what you sound like when you’re being honest.

2. What you know - your methodology, your hard-won insights, the things you’ve learned that aren’t in any textbook. The stuff that took you years to figure out and that you could explain over a pint but have never written down.

3. Who you serve - your clients, their industries, their problems, what you’ve built for them, what worked and what didn’t. The AI needs to understand the table it’s serving.

Do that and the AI stops being a clever stranger. It becomes a collaborator that understands the song.

The Art

I said “art” deliberately. Because situating AI isn’t a technical exercise. You don’t need to learn a framework or master prompt engineering or take a course.

You need to know yourself well enough to explain yourself clearly. You need to know your business well enough to describe what makes it yours. You need to have done enough work that there’s something real to situate.

That’s why twenty-six years matters. Not because experience makes you better at typing questions into a box. Because experience gives you something worth situating. Every client you’ve served, every project you’ve shipped, every mistake you’ve made - that’s the context. That’s the raw material.

The AI is the same for everyone. What you bring to it isn’t.

Anyone can use AI. Situating it - giving it your context, your history, your taste - that’s the craft.