The most dangerous hire you’ll ever make costs £20 a month

There’s a sentence I hear from owners more than any other at the moment, and I’ve said it myself. I pay twenty quid a month for ChatGPT, and it runs my business.

It’s true, and it isn’t a complaint. For the price of a takeaway you get something that drafts the proposal, builds the forecast, suggests the price and tidies the contract. Most of the things owners of ten to thirty person businesses never had the time, or the training, to do properly.

But think about it as a hire. If someone offered you a finance director for £20 a month, you’d want to know the catch. Here it is. You’ve taken on someone who has read everything, works all night, has never run a business and never once says “I don’t know”.

That last part is the one that matters. A wrong answer is survivable when it arrives with a warning. The trouble with this hire is that the warning never comes from them. It comes later, and from somewhere else: the client who quietly didn’t renew, the campaign that didn’t land, the customer who turns out to cost more than they pay. By then the answer has been in use for months.

None of that makes the tool the problem. Every growing business already has gaps like these. The tool just writes them up beautifully and hands them back.

Turn it round and it’s a different hire altogether. If you know why you really lost that client, which customers are worth having and what your price is actually for, the same £20 becomes the cleverest colleague you’ve ever had. It takes what you know and gets it done at a pace nobody could match two years ago. That’s owned judgement, and it’s what separates you from every other business producing the same polished output from the same tool.

A quick test for this week. Pick one decision you made with AI’s help in the last month. Without opening the chat, could you explain why the answer holds up, what it assumed and what would change your mind? If you can, you’re directing it. If you can’t, you’ve handed that problem to someone who can’t see it.

The diagnostic shows you where that’s most likely to be happening. Twenty-eight statements, about fifteen minutes, and I read every answer myself.