Pros and Cons of AI for Small Business: 6 Real Stories

The Pros and Cons of AI for Small Business: What One Crazy Week Taught Me

A hammer is just a piece of steel shaped a certain way. In the hands of a thief it breaks a window or a jewelry case, and in the hands of a good carpenter it builds a mansion! The hammer is still just the hammer, and that's the simplest way I know to talk about the pros and cons of AI for small business, because AI works exactly the same way!

Now, some people email me and say, "Rob, stop talking about AI. I hate it." That's your choice, but AI is here, it isn't going away, and it's already running in your everyday life in ways you have no idea about. So on Episode 19 of Renegade Breakthroughs I walked you through one week of my own life, the good side and the bad side, so you can make your own decision with your eyes open!

The Good Side: AI Showed Me Another Way

After a year of hunting, I found a never-used 500-pound mower for my tractor at about half price. On the first afternoon its drive shaft kept falling off, so I kept climbing down, lifting it and putting it back on. At two in the morning I woke up and couldn't move my arm!

It was my mouse hand, so I couldn't work Monday, Tuesday was worse, and Tuesday night I asked Grok what they do for top athletes with this kind of injury.

It gave me the standard answer first, cold compresses every two hours, which I was already doing. Then it told me something I'd never heard, that some doctors believe the inflammation is the body sending extra blood and nutrients to fix the problem, and that cold may actually slow the healing down.

So I tried heat instead, the shower and then a heating pad, cycle after cycle overnight. By morning my arm was 50 or 60 percent better, and by Thursday it was nearly back to normal.

I'm not a doctor and this isn't medical advice, so talk to yours! The real lesson is that AI handed me a different way of looking at a problem that I never would have found on my own, and that's one of the biggest pros of AI for any business owner.

The Bad Side: Scams Are Getting Faster and Smarter

Here's the other side of the coin, and it's the biggest of the cons of AI for small business. AI makes it cheaper and easier for the bad guys too, and small businesses are right in the line of fire!

Card testing on a client's store

One of my clients called me because fake orders kept hitting their website every couple of hours. Every one used 123 Main Street and the phone number 555-1212, the one you hear on television. In other words, these were people holding stolen credit card numbers, and they place a small order to see if the card still works, and once they get "Thank you for your order," they know they've got a live number they can sell.

The email that looks exactly like your password manager

I use 1Password, and I get emails that say someone in New York just logged into my account, complete with an IP address and all the details. 

Click that link and you land on a page that looks exactly like 1Password, and the moment you type in your login they have every password you own, about 400 in my case. Remember when you could spot a scam by the bad English? Those days are gone.

 A bot in Singapore ran up my podcast bill

Last month I went to upload an episode and saw over 550,000 downloads of one video in three days. Someone had grabbed the file's address and fed it to a bot in Singapore that downloaded it thousands of times an hour, and I was paying for all that bandwidth, about $350 worth! 

Amazon was great about it, wiping out the charges and blocking Singapore, and now I have an alert that texts and emails me the moment anything like that happens again.

How to Protect Your Business Right Now

Simply put, you have to use a lot of discernment, and here's what I do and tell my clients to do:

- **Use an authenticator app or passkeys, NOT text messages.** Texts can be hijacked with a SIM swap, and you'd never know your code went to someone else's phone.

- **Never click the login link in an email.** Even if it looks legitimate, type the address into your browser or open your password manager, and if the account really has a message for you, it'll be waiting there.

- **Set usage and billing alerts** on your hosting and payment accounts, so a problem shows up in minutes instead of at the end of the month.

- **Watch your orders for patterns** like fake addresses and 555 phone numbers, and ask your payment processor what fraud screening it offers.

- **Let AI check an offer before you buy.** When a sales page looks amazing, I paste the address into Grok or Claude and ask if it's legit, and it checks who's behind it and what the review sites say. Again and again it tells me it's all hype, and it has saved me a lot of money!

Why I Believe AI Will Make the Internet Safer

When the internet was built back in the 1970s, the whole focus was moving data from one computer to another over phone lines. Security was never the priority, and your email can pass through a dozen or more servers on its way to me on a system that was never designed to be private. Text messaging is about as weak, and we've had 50 years to solve that!

Here's the good news, AI is really quick at finding problems! Another client had shoppers getting hijacked in the middle of checkout and sent to a fake payment page, and the only clue was the wrong domain in the address bar. 

We asked AI how they were doing it, and it told us the hack was hitting a lot of Shopify stores, went through every app we had installed, and found the buggy one. We updated it and the problem stopped. I believe we're in the chaos right before the change, and on the other side of it things get a lot more secure.

AI Is Taking Over My Skills, and I'm Giddy About It

I've been building websites since 1993, and Photoshop used to be open on my computer every single day, so I got really good at it, along with Dreamweaver and WordPress. Now I open Photoshop maybe once every other week, and when my Adobe contract is up in January I'm not renewing.

Here's a real example. ClickFunnels now connects with Claude, so last week I told Claude I wanted a Halloween flash sale on my Power Session. It wrote four emails for the week, loaded them into ClickFunnels with the links, updated the page and the pricing, and set the price to switch back on its own when the sale ends.

It even suggested better ways to handle those emails than I'd been using for years, and the whole thing took about 15 or 20 minutes in plain English, NOT tech speak!

So a lot of the skills people used to pay me for aren't needed anymore. But what doesn't go away is my experience, my wisdom and my intuition, because AI runs on systems and I do things sometimes that don't fit in a system. A job keeps us on the treadmill paying bills, and if AI takes over more of that treadmill, I believe your creativity is going to bloom.

Optimist vs. Pessimist: Who Wins?

This week I watched a video where Tony Robbins asked an audience who does better in life, the optimist or the pessimist. Everyone says the optimist, and then he added a twist. The pessimist is always more accurate!

Why? Because when the pessimist says "it's not going to work," they don't even try, so of course it doesn't work. The optimist tries, misses, changes something and tries again, and they're wrong more often but far more successful in the long run!

For a while I was hanging out with pessimists and didn't even realize it. Every conversation was about why things wouldn't work, and it felt good because we all agreed, but none of us were producing anything. Jim Rohn taught that you become the five people you spend the most time with, so I went and found new people with bigger visions, and sure enough, things started rolling again.

That's what my clients pay me for, to be their optimist! I'll tell them where the pitfalls are, but I'll never make them feel pessimistic about their idea. A coach doesn't walk the path for you, a coach walks beside you holding the flashlight so you can see the way forward.

Key Takeaways

- AI is a tool like a hammer, and the hands decide whether it builds or breaks.
- Scams are getting smarter. Use an authenticator app or passkeys, never click login links in email, and set billing alerts.
- Use AI to vet offers and find the holes in your website before the bad guys do.
- AI will replace a lot of skills, but it can't replace your experience, judgment or intuition.
- The pessimist is more accurate and the optimist is more successful. Choose your circle carefully.

Your Next Step

Now you've seen the pros and cons of AI for small business up close, and here's what I've learned after three decades of doing this. Most business owners don't have a tactics problem. 

They have a strategy problem they're too close to see, and from the outside it jumps out within minutes. Book a private one-on-one Power Session with me at renegade.club/powersession and let's find what's really holding your business back! New to AI? Grab my free short guide on winning with AI without losing your mind on the home page at RobertImbriale.com, and listen to the full episode at RobertImbriale.com/listen.

Keep your head up, stay flexible, and go find yourself an optimist this week!

This is for you if you're an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who:

- Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day
- Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn't cracked how
- Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do - not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch

 
If that's you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now!

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