Good morning. Here’s your weekly AI briefing from The AI Playbook.

This week: the five most common AI mistakes I see business owners making — and exactly how to fix each one.

WHY MOST BUSINESSES ARE WASTING MONEY ON AI

A recent survey from the U.S. Census Bureau found that fewer than 10% of businesses are using AI in their operations. Of the ones that are, most are not getting the return they expected. The reason is almost never the technology. It is how they are using it.

Here are the five mistakes I see most often.

MISTAKE 1: PAYING FOR TOOLS YOU DO NOT USE

The pattern: You signed up for ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Jasper, Notion AI, and Grammarly Premium. You use one of them regularly. The rest sit idle.

The cost: $50 to $100 USD per month in unused subscriptions.

The fix: Audit your AI subscriptions today. Open your credit card statement and search for every AI-related charge. If you have not used a tool in the last 14 days, cancel it. You can always re-subscribe later. Most AI tools have no cancellation penalties and you keep access until the end of your billing cycle.

Pick one general-purpose AI tool — ChatGPT Plus at $20 USD per month or Claude Pro at $20 USD per month — and use it daily for 30 days before adding anything else.

MISTAKE 2: WRITING VAGUE PROMPTS

The pattern: You type “write me a marketing email” and get generic output that sounds like it was written by a robot. You conclude AI is not useful for your business.

The cost: Hours of time editing bad output or giving up on AI entirely.

The fix: Every prompt should include three things — the role (who the AI is acting as), the context (what it needs to know), and the format (what the output should look like).

Bad prompt: “Write a marketing email.”

Good prompt: “You are a marketing copywriter for a plumbing company in Calgary. Write a follow-up email to homeowners who requested a quote for furnace maintenance but did not book. The email should be 150 words or fewer, friendly but direct, and include a specific call to action to book before the end of the month.”

The difference in output quality is dramatic. Specific prompts produce specific results.

MISTAKE 3: NOT BUILDING REPEATABLE WORKFLOWS

The pattern: Every time you need AI to do something, you start from scratch. New chat, new prompt, new instructions. You are re-explaining yourself every single time.

The cost: 10 to 20 minutes of wasted time per task, multiplied by every task, every day.

The fix: Save your best prompts. Build templates. If you use ChatGPT, create a Custom GPT with your instructions baked in so you never have to repeat them. If you use Claude, save your prompts in a document you can copy from.

For tasks you do more than 3 times per week, set up an automation using Zapier or Make so the AI runs without you even opening a browser.