A look back, written in 2026. In 2023 every other conversation turned into an AI conversation, usually starting with “can it just write our blog” and ending somewhere more useful.
Most of what was proposed that year is gone. A few things stayed, and they were not the exciting ones.
What disappeared
Generated blog posts at volume. They ranked briefly, read like nothing, and made the rest of the site look cheaper by association. Google's policies moved against it, but honestly the bigger problem was that nobody wanted to read them, including the client.
Chatbots bolted onto sites with no access to anything specific. A bot that cannot see your prices, your availability or your policies has nothing to say, and every one I saw in the wild ended up handing over to a contact form — which is what people wanted in the first place.
The “replace a role” pitch. Nobody I work with replaced anyone. The work moved.
What stayed
Reading and sorting. Taking a pile of inbound messages, documents or enquiries, and classifying, extracting and summarising them. Unglamorous, easy to check, and it saves real hours.
Drafting where a human is definitely going to edit. A reply, a summary, a first version of a page. The value is in getting past a blank screen, not in the final text.
Making sense of a mess: a spreadsheet nobody understands, a decade of files, a backlog of transcripts. This is where the technology is genuinely better than the alternatives.
The thing every working system has
An approval step. A person who sees what is about to go out, and clicks. Not because the model is stupid, but because the cost of being wrong is carried by the business, and a professional firm cannot say “the system sent it”.
Design the review screen first. If nobody can tell what the system did and why, it does not matter how good the output is — it will not be trusted, and it will quietly stop being used.
What it means for a small firm now
Start with a task you do every week that you would happily explain to a new starter. That is the shape of thing that works: repeatable, checkable, low drama.
Do not start with the website copy, the brand voice, or anything a client would be embarrassed to be told was generated. The wins are in the back office, not the shop window.
Three years in, the firms getting real value are not the ones that adopted the most. They are the ones that picked one job, did it properly, and left the rest alone.
