How I use AI, and how I don't

I'm dyslexic. Before AI, writing something to the standard I want took me about half as long again as it takes most people, and for anything important it meant drafting, redrafting and a human editor. AI levels that field. So I'm not going to pretend I don't use it. Here's where it sits.

Everything you read from me starts with me. A session, a page of handwritten notes, a voice note, a thing that actually happened. AI helps me refine those first drafts into cleaner sentences, and catches the typos and grammar my brain skips over. Then I edit some more, usually more than once, until it sounds like me. Nothing goes out that I haven't written, rewritten or argued with first, and nothing goes out that isn't grounded in my own ideas and experience. I use language precisely. There's no place in my writing for slop or auto-generated platitudes.

The follow-up email you get after a session is made the same way. I speak my notes, Claude tidies them, I edit them, I send them.

Most sessions are recorded and transcribed by Wispr Flow, an AI notetaker. I'll always ask before we start, you can say no at any point, and in the transcript you're a speaker number, not a name. The recording is only ever used for your notes and my own development as a coach.

What AI never does is the coaching. It doesn't take part in our conversation. It doesn't decide what I say to you, or work out what's 'really' going on with you. It never invents a client story. The ideas are mine, the stories are real, and most of what it fixes is my spelling.

I have real reservations about the environmental cost of AI - the server farms, the power and water to run them - in the same way I have reservations about travel. I don't think the answer is to pretend the cost isn't there. It's to keep asking how to use the technology for good and to choose providers whose values hold up. Where that option exists I take it: Brevo, who run my newsletter, is a B Corp, and of the big AI companies Anthropic is the one whose public commitments I find most credible. The option isn't always there. That doesn't stop me looking.

If you'd like to know how any of this works in more detail, ask. I'll tell you. The full detail on which tools I use and how your data is handled is in my data use and privacy policy.

Last updated: 17 September 2026.