AI as your intern | Weekly Insight #4
May 20, 2026
At a recent conference, the keynote speaker asked everyone in the room to put their hand up if they were using AI in their business.
Three-quarters of the room raised their hands.
"Keep your hand up if you pay for AI."
Half went down.
"Keep your hand up if you're paying for the top tier —the $200 a month level."
Twenty hands remained in a room of five hundred.
For the next 30 minutes, Craig Scroogie from NextDC spoke to the room about what AI transformation is capable of — and what businesses are leaving on the table by not leveraging it fully. He held the room the entire time.
Until that point, we had been AI skeptics. We wanted to protect the human parts of our consulting work. The relationships, in-market cultural competency, and nuance in building export relationships only come with experience.
We were concerned that AI would flatten all of that into generic noise.
So we avoided it.
But avoidance isn’t a strong risk strategy.
Not because AI replaces any of those things. It doesn't. But because the businesses that are experimenting — testing what's possible, finding where it genuinely helps and where it falls short — are learning faster than the ones standing still. In a competitive export environment, where businesses are looking to serve clients better and retain loyalty, that gap compounds quickly.
AI as your intern
What changed for us wasn't the technology. It was the framing.
AI is not a replacement for customer service support, not a replacement for your marketing, and not a replacement for experience. But an intern.
One who works around the clock, can research anything, synthesize fast, and is only as strong as the briefing you give them.
Like any intern, you get out what you invest. Hand them a vague task, and you'll get a vague result. Give them context, structure, and clear guardrails — and suddenly you have capacity you didn't have before.
We've been testing this seriously across our own business over the past few months. In research, administration tasks, market preparation, and grant writing, we've found that AI with proper context and clear direction compresses weeks into days.
You won't know what impact new interns of AI will give you until you experiment with the tools intentionally.
What we've learned
Experimenting with AI as our ‘intern’ taught us two things quickly.
The first is that the AI tools amplify the knowledge and skills you already possess. Your strategy, your relationships, and your experience can be expanded by having a new injection of capacity and capability.
Your capabilities and capacities can be expanded by determining which area AI tools can bring the most value. This can be creating a new inventory management system that integrates with the current Excel system, or developing a webpage to promote a short-term offer.
Your pain points and capacity bottlenecks can be expanded with AI tools. AI will still involve clear briefs, tweaks, feedback, and reviews (just like an intern), but it can transform your capacity and capability.
When you use AI to extend your current capabilities and capacities, you are able to use your team's experience and skills to be the reviewers and the managers of the output.
Where it can get you into trouble is when work, projects, and systems aren’t reviewed. Like when a tourism business lets AI write its articles for its travel website, and the AI makes up fake locations to visit. Tourists were caught in Tasmania’s north-east looking for hot springs that don’t exist.
Businesses using AI to do what they don't know how to do themselves will produce work that shows it — and the people on the other end of that work, whether grant assessors, clients, or buyers, will notice. This is where the guardrails you put in place for AI will protect you.
The second is that the time AI saves is best reinvested in the parts of your business that only humans can do. This makes you more competitive and strengthens customer loyalty. The relationships. The cultural judgment. The trust was built across a table in a market on the other side of the world. This can be as simple as picking up the phone to call a key client and say thank you for the business.
Through this trial, we’ve asked ourselves what part of the business we want to keep AI out of.
Our soon-to-be-launched book, How to Begin Exporting, has not had a single word, sentence, or concept put through an AI tool.
It’s a book for business owners and leaders to learn the whole landscape of exporting, and to hear how others have succeeded and failed through the process. We wanted to ensure that each lesson came from real life – not from a language model.
We have a disclaimer on the first page of the book that none of it is written or crafted from generative AI. It is written entirely from our experience in export markets around the world.
Across the rest of the business — our administration, marketing, operational tools, and research — we've been deliberate about where AI can take on the load. What that's given us isn't just efficiency.
It's prompted a more important question: where can we now bring a stronger, deeper human touch to our clients? Where does the time saved become an investment in the work that only we can do?
That's the question every business should ask itself.
Not just "How do I use AI?" but "What does AI free me up to do better?"
Not just "How do I use AI?" but "What does AI free me up to do better?"
Our challenge to you this week
Commit to one month on a paid AI tier and experiment. Not just asking it questions — but giving it context, building it a brief, testing what it produces when it has something real to work with.
The businesses that are navigating the AI shift well aren't the ones that adopted it fastest. They're the ones who stayed curious, kept experimenting, and got clear on what AI does well — so they could protect the time and energy for what only humans can do.
AI doesn't replace the relationships that make exporting work. It gives you more time to invest in them.
