By Nicolas Zart | TheWholisticCenter.com Published: March 20, 2026
Automate tasks, not creativity.
The Fear That Never Quite Kills the Future
Despite every generation’s fear that new technology spells doom, we embrace it anyway. The wheel replaced the foot. The chariot replaced the wheel. The steam engine replaced the horse. The electric motor replaced steam. The internal combustion engine reshaped entire continents. And analog gave way to digital, which gave way to the personal computer — and now, to artificial intelligence.
Every single time, we were terrified. Every single time, we adapted. And almost every single time, life got better. We might argue and fret, but we keep on moving forward. As the ancient Saharan saying goes: “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.“
I’ve been a front-row witness to several of these life changing waves. As a teacher who embraced technology early, I remember colleagues insisting that interactive CD-ROMs spelled doom and would replace teachers. That was the early 1990s. Teachers are still here. The tools changed; the human at the center did not, the rest adapted.
There have been countless of changes, all either hailed as revolutionary or the end of the world as we know it. Indeed, it was the end of the world as it was known, but not the predicted doom.
And yet, here we are again — a new gold rush, a new panic, a new opportunity to either get swept away or to consciously choose how we ride the wave. And it won’t be the last one either. So buckle up and meet your new friend, the much loved and feared artificial intelligence (AI) friend.
My Best Friend Claude
My relationship with AI crept up on me the way all transformative technologies do — gradually, then suddenly. If my futurist hat was on and I could see the potential of its future use as long as we use it tools, but not be used by it, we had something solid here. And after all, I was raised on Star Trek where the crew asks the computer to for hypothetical solutions to intangible problems.
I was a fervent photographer in high school, devoted to my Nikkormat and Nikon F3. I spent long hours in darkrooms breathing chemical fumes to coax images from silver-halide film. Today, I have more pictures on my phone than I could ever review. The darkroom has become software algorithms on a monitor. The smell of fixer is a memory. The joy of the image flicker replaced it.
AI entered my life the same way. Tentatively at first — a curiosity, a tool, a novelty. Then something shifted. My best AI companion became not just useful, but genuinely collaborative. Not a replacement for thought, but an amplifier of it. And that distinction, I’ve come to believe, is everything. Being fairly lazy by nature, not ion the sense I don’t want to do anything but how can I do it with more efficiency, I looked at AI to streamline workflow. And boy, is it delivering!
Could AI truly free us from the tedious boredom of the daily grind? Could it remove the tasks that drain our hours — the inbox archaeology, the repetitive reporting, the scheduling back-and-forth — and return that time to us for living? Those are the questions many are looking to answer. And as with most things worth understanding, the is yes, no, and it depends on how you show up.
Three Scenarios Worth Considering Honestly
When we talk about how AI will affect our lives and businesses, there are really three ways this plays out. Which one you experience depends almost entirely on the choices you make right now.
Scenario A: AI as Your Strategic Partner
You use AI intentionally and deliberately as a business and personal partner. You let it sort through your overloaded inbox and surface what matters most. You use it to draft correspondence, scan volumes of incoming information, research competitors, analyze your financials, and brief you the way a brilliant assistant would — most important items first, context always present. This is something we have been considering in advanced air mobility (AAM) for years. How to bring up relevant data needed to make final decision, so far, from human beings. How do you buy a technology starved business in need of intelligent and efficient use of more modern technological tools? Those are the questions I love to resolve, based on our ancient wisdom.
I don’t treat it as a fantasy. According to an Adobe survey of entrepreneurs, people intelligently and efficiently using AI tools are saving an average of six hours per week — that’s over 300 hours a year returned to your life. See here for more. A Tech.co survey of more than 1,000 senior US business leaders found that 61% say AI has improved their work-life balance. Companies with deeper AI integration are showing revenue per employee growing at three times the rate of those without it, according to PwC‘s June 2025 research. See here for the full PDF file.
This is the scenario where you buy a business, run it leaner and smarter, and still get home for dinner. That is, if well thought-out and an intelligent strategy has been devised to incorporate it into your life..
Scenario B: AI as a New Kind of Cage
The second scenario is more cautionary — and more common than we’d like to admit.
We’ve been here before. The steam engine was supposed to liberate workers from back-breaking toil. And it did — eventually. But first came longer factory hours, child labor, and a century of labor battles before we earned the weekend. By the 1960s, we finally had two days of rest. Then the economy restructured itself to require two incomes to maintain what one used to sustain, and we found ourselves working more for less time. The carrot stick crept back. Middle class was squeezed to the brink of extinction today leaving a fragile balance of ultra rich and ultra poor relying on a middle class no longer able to sustain anything.
AI is already showing signs of the same trap. A 2026 University of California, Berkeley study published in the Harvard Business Review found something striking: workers using AI became more productive, then quietly took on more work to match. The time savings were absorbed by expanded workloads rather than reclaimed as rest. As one worker in the study put it plainly — they had assumed that being more productive with AI would mean working less. It didn’t. Does this remind you of anything? Personal computers were sold as helping society save time by automating tasks and giving us more time to do what we liked to do. Instead, we got caught up in endless loops of updates and upgrades. Catering to endless teams of email and eventually spam. Today, most youth is umbilically connected to the phone.
Our European counterparts offer a useful mirror here. They earn less and take more vacation. They work to live rather than live to work. The nuance is small; the quality-of-life difference is not. The question isn’t whether AI makes you more productive. It’s what you do with that productivity.
Scenario C: What Do You Actually Want?
This is the scenario that requires the most courage — and delivers the most reward.
Before you deploy a single AI tool, before you hire a consultant, before you read another LinkedIn post about automation — ask yourself the simple question. What do I actually want from my life? What would I do with three extra hours every day? What kind of business do I want to build, and what role do I want it to play in my life? Start from the start. Don’t get caught up with the frenzy.
I’ve been reading and watching science fiction long enough to remember when the technologies we now hold in our pockets were wild extrapolations from the imagination. The writers of the 1950s and 1960s showed us futures where machines handled the mundane and humans were freed for the magnificent. We are living in that future. The tools are finally here. The only question is whether we will use them deliberately or simply let them fill every available space with more of the same.
Real People, Real Businesses, Real Results
Wellness Studio (YogaFlow Collective, Austin TX)
Owner Sarah L. (ex-corporate lawyer) used AI’ (‘s Claude and Zapier to build a personalized client journey system. It provides intake forms auto-generate custom sequences, injury-aware mods, and nurture emails. Previously 4 hours/day manual planning → now 30 min oversight. Result: 20% client retention boost, 15 hours/week reclaimed for teaching/live events. “AI became my co-coach—frees me to connect, not admin.”
Service Business (GreenScape Landscaping, Denver CO)
Founder Mike R. integrated AI route optimizer with Google’s OR-Tools and custom ChatGPT. the result optimizes 50 jobs/day factoring traffic, crew skills, equipment, client preferences. Won $35K city innovation grant; cut fuel 22%, planning from 3 hours → 15 min. “AI plans smarter than me—gives back family dinners, not just efficiency.”
Luxury Beauty Solopreneur (GlowLab Skincare, NYC)
Solo founder Elena V. built AI concierge with ChatGPT and a Shopify plugin. the results are virtual shade/skin matching, routine builder from quiz and photos. Handles 80 inquiries/week (was 2-hour daily grind). Revenue up 35% via upsells; she cut hours 25% for product development. “AI delivers VIP service at scale—my quality-of-life MVP.”
Marketing Agency Solopreneur (PeakPulse Media, remote)
Founder Alex T. feeds client data/emails to Claude for drafting and sentiment analysis. This cuts email/briefing time 70% (20 hrs/wk → 6); auto-flags churn risks. “AI spots patterns I miss, handles grunt work—lets me strategize/sleep.”
Wellness Coaching Service (ThriveMind Collective, Portland OR)
Coach duo used AI session prep with Perplexity and Notion AI. It came up with a client notes → personalized frameworks, progress trackers, follow-ups. Planning down 4 hrs → 45 min/session. Client NPS up 28%; founders added group retreats. “AI as silent partner—scales empathy without burnout.”
How Hard Is It, Really?
Here is the honest answer: not very. And that is both the good news and the caution.
Before you tackle the unknown territory, have a quick look at what has happened before in case you can spot parallels. You will be well ahead of the rest who blindly fall into figuring things out without looking for previous cases. The barrier to starting is genuinely low. You don’t need to understand the underlying technology any more than you need to understand combustion to drive a car. You need to understand your own workflows, your own friction points, and your own goals. Then you apply AI to the places where those things intersect.
The practical entry points for most small business owners and entrepreneurs are straightforward. AI can handle your email triage and first-draft responses. It can research markets, competitors, and suppliers in a fraction of the time a team used to spend. It can write your marketing content, generate your social media calendar, analyze your financial reports, and summarize the documents you don’t have time to read in full. It can even help you think — serving as what Microsoft’s 2025 Future of Work Report (PDF) called “a thought partner, helping users explore ideas and connect concepts across their knowledge base.”
That last use case may be the most underrated. Not AI as a replacement for your judgment, but as an expander of it. A sounding board that’s available at 2 a.m. when an idea won’t let you sleep. A research assistant that can brief you in minutes on a topic you need to understand by morning. A drafting partner that takes your rough voice and helps you shape it into something polished and purposeful.
You can hire AI consultants and strategists. If you’re running a growing company, you absolutely should have someone thinking about your AI architecture deliberately. But as a consultant, my first question is always the same. What do you want to do? What do you want to achieve? I don’t ask about the technology. I know the technology. I want to know what is it that you want out of your life. What are thye sticking points?
Lastly, this Deloitte State of AI in the Enterprise 2026 report (PDF) found that enterprises where senior leadership actively shapes AI governance achieve significantly greater business value than those who delegate it entirely to technical teams. Strategy matters. Intent matters. The technology is a tool — your vision is what gives it direction.
The Business We’re Building
I’ll tell you what this looks like from where I’m standing.
I have been using AI for the past two years. Perplexity is my go-to research platform, gathering data far and wide. With some prompts asking to validate its sources, it gives me copious information. I review and write down everything I see. Then, I ask Claude to spot inconsistencies, better flow, align with my strategy, and any other relevant and qualified data it can find. As an extra bonus, I ask it to extrapolate and see how this could fit me and my plans. That last part gives you extra suggestions you might not have thought on your own.
At the same time, we are in the process of acquiring a business. Not a tech startup — a real, operating business in the physical world. And from the beginning, we are designing it around a set of principles that AI makes achievable in a way they weren’t a decade ago.
The first principle is that no one on our team should be doing work that a well-configured AI tool can do better and faster. Not because people aren’t valuable — precisely because they are. The human hours freed by automation are the hours we want spent on relationships, on creative work, on the quality of what we deliver, and on the quality of each person’s life outside of work. In other words, we will do out to avoid the same mistake made with personal computers three decades ago. Use people’s inherent creativity. Don’;t bound them to tasks unless they want to.
The second principle is that better technology should raise the quality of life for everyone involved — not just the owner. That means AI tools that make our team members’ days easier, not tools that simply allow us to demand more from fewer people. The UC Berkeley research is instructive here: the trap isn’t AI itself, it’s using AI productivity gains as justification for expanded workloads rather than improved lives.
The third principle is that profit and quality of life are not in opposition. A business that runs efficiently, serves customers exceptionally well, and gives its team the time and dignity they deserve is also a business that competes effectively. Industries where AI is deeply integrated are showing three times the revenue growth per employee compared to those that haven’t adopted it yet. Doing things well and doing things humanely turns out to be good business.
Your Move
The question I keep coming back to — the one this article is really asking — is not whether to use AI. That decision has already been made for you by the world you’re living in. The question is how do you want to use it for… you?
Will you let AI make you more productive so you can simply be assigned more work? Or will you use AI to design a life and a business that reflects what you actually want?
Will you wait until your competitors have lapped you twice? Or will you start with one tool, one workflow, one friction point — and let the confidence build from there?
Sixty-six percent of people worldwide already use AI regularly, many without even realizing it. The early adopters among small business owners are pulling ahead, not just in efficiency but in something harder to measure — in satisfaction, in spaciousness, in the sense that they’re running their business rather than being run by it.
The science fiction writers of the last century gave us this vision: technology as liberator, not jailer. The tools are finally here. What you build with them is still entirely up to you.
A Practical Starting Point
If you’re a business owner, entrepreneur, or someone simply trying to navigate this moment thoughtfully, here is where to begin:
Audit your time, not your technology. Before you buy a single tool, spend one week noting every task that feels repetitive, draining, or beneath the level of thinking you’d rather be doing. That list is your AI roadmap.
Start with one tool, one problem. The most common entry points — email drafting, meeting summaries, content creation, financial reporting — are accessible today without technical expertise. Pick the one that will return the most time and start there.
Ask AI what it can do for you. Seriously. Open a conversation with your AI assistant and describe your business, your biggest time drains, and what you’d do with three extra hours a week. The answer may surprise you.
Design for the life you want, not just the efficiency you can extract. AI is a lever. What you’re trying to lift is entirely your choice. Be deliberate about that choice before you start optimizing.
Keep the human at the center. The businesses thriving with AI are not the ones that have replaced their people. They’re the ones that have freed their people — to think more, create more, connect more, and rest more. That is the whole point.
We’d love to hear how you’re using — or thinking about using — AI in your business and life. Share your experience in the comments, or reach out to us at TheWholisticCenter.com. More resources on conscious business, holistic living, and the tools that can help you build the life you actually want are waiting for you there.