The '4 Levels of AI Leverage' & The One You’re Stuck On

Most people never get past Level 1 and call it "using AI".

You added AI to your business to buy your time back, and somehow you’re busier than you’ve ever been and more scattered than you can keep track of… sitting there at 11 pm re-prompting the same email for the fifth time because it still doesn’t sound like you.

Let’s be real… You are not bad at AI; you’re just stuck on the lowest rung of it and calling that “using AI”.

Super quick: I’m opening the AI Leverage Lab on August 3rd! It’s an 8-week live cohort where I walk entrepreneurs up all four levels of exactly what I’m about to teach you in this article, and the waitlist is open if you want first access. Okay, now let’s get into it. ↓

Here’s where you probably live right now, whether you’d admit it or not: You type a prompt, you get something mediocre back, so you correct it and re-prompt, then you fix the tone and re-prompt one more time. The whole way through, it feels ‘productive’. Two hours gone, and all you’ve got to show for it is a slightly better email and a to-do list that somehow got longer.

I’m just gonna say it: prompting is the new doomscrolling. It’s a loop built to keep you in the conversation, and you were the bottleneck the entire time and never clocked it, because typing into a chat box really does feel like you’re getting somewhere.

What’s the difference between using AI and leveraging it?

Okay, so here’s the distinction that really matters. Using AI means you’re still doing all the work and the AI just talks back to you. Leveraging AI means the AI actually speeds it up or does the work for you so much that you have freed up work hours from it. And most entrepreneurs have no idea they’re not leveraging it because the whole thing feels busy while it’s happening, and busy reads as progress and productivity, am I right?!

There are four ways you stay stuck here, and you’re probably doing at least two of them:

1. You stay stuck prompting, treating AI like a think-out-loud partner that just manufactures more work for you to go execute.

2. You get hit with shiny-object syndrome, because AI is a people-pleaser and it’ll hand you 15 new directions when what you needed was one sharper focus.

3. You let AI think for you, which means you’re outsourcing the one thing that was always yours… your actual judgment.

4. You let AI build your product without your brain in it, offloading the exact expertise your whole brand (and reputation) is built on.

Here’s the common thread though: not one of them makes you work less.

The 4 Levels of AI Leverage

So let me give you the actual map. There are four levels of AI leverage, and knowing which one you’re stuck on is the difference between AI buying your time back and AI just eating more of it.

Level 1 is Prompting, and it’s the floor.

This is perfect-prompting territory, and you do need to get good at it, because everything above it sits on top of it. It’s still 100% your time and effort every single time you open the box. A good prompt gets you a cleaner answer, but you’re still the one doing all the work every time, and this is where most people get stuck for years, mistaking a good prompt for a system.

Level 2 is Advisory, and this is where it starts getting good.

This is where you train AI on your actual business so it thinks like an advisor who knows you, instead of a generic chatbot pulling whatever’s floating around on the internet (seriously, it will just pull absolutely crap sometimes lol). In my business, I run a whole advisory board: a strategic advisor, a sales advisor, an operations one, a financial one, plus one for each of my income and sales platforms. Each one is trained on three things at once: the exact strategies I actually like to use, instructions for how I want it to perform and advise me, and everything inside my business- my values, my ideal client, how my monetization model really works, my goals, etc.

Without that training, AI just hands me any strategy off the web. With the training, I get advice built around my business from something that actually knows my business. Real quick though, a lot of people build one of these, and it comes out generic, and they figure the whole thing doesn’t work for them, when really they just need to refine it, because they haven’t given it enough about their business yet or told it clearly enough how they want it to respond.

Here’s an example of responses from general AI chat vs. my trusted advisor, and of course I asked it something absurd for funsies:

Much different answers!

(P.S. Inside AI Leverage Lab I teach you how to create this yourself, but also tons of plug-and-play templates and files to use)

Level 3 is Acceleration, and this is the one that saves me the most time by a mile.

This is where a task that used to eat hours gets done in a fraction of that, and you’re still in the driver’s seat the whole time. Marketing and content systems are one of my favorite places to start here.

My husband and I co-own Premer Health & Performance. He’s the Chiropractor & Functional Medicine Doctor, and I handle all the admin and marketing. So here’s a look at our Level 3 AI Content System:

1. He’ll record a 3-5 minute video on a topic, which we edit and use for Instagram.

2. I drop that transcript into the AI repurposing process I built, and it hands me back a full value-based email to our list plus 3-5 more supporting social posts, all in his voice and his words. This really matters because people aren’t buying me (the person doing the marketing); they’re buying him… the doctor, so information must come from him and his brain and knowledge and not me. The work is 90% there, and I’m just steering it home.

Same deal with my own Substack (this one you’re reading right now). One article would take me around 6 hours start to finish, and now it’s more like 2-3. I’m breaking that entire system down in its own post here ↓

The whole point of Level 3 is that I’m still making every real decision and every bit of it comes from my brain and my experience; the AI just cuts the drive time.

Level 4 is automation, and this is the one that still kind of blows my mind.

This is work that runs without you in the room at all. I have a tool that every single week researches the internet for places I should pitch for speaking gigs and podcast guest spots, and it pulls the contact info, who their audience is, the details on each one, then ranks the whole list by what’s most strategic for my business, and it keeps that list running and up to date on its own. I used to pay a VA $30 an hour for about 6 hours a month to do a worse version of that by hand, so around $180 a month. The tool runs on its own for about $100 a month, does roughly 80% of that work automatically, and outperforms a VA because it’s working the entire internet every week instead of a handful of hours. (Note that I pay that $100/month for my main AI tool and it does hundreds of things for me; this is just one of them) That’s just one of the things it does for me.

So here’s the throughline to hold onto:

• Levels 1 and 2 make your thinking sharper.

• Levels 3 and 4 are where you actually get your time back.

Which level are you actually on?

Here’s your quick gut-check, and be honest about where you actually spend your days, not where you dabbled successfully one time.

• If AI only ever talks back to you and then you go execute everything yourself, you’re on Level 1.

• If the advice you’re getting is actually shaped like your business, you’ve made it to Level 2.

• If a task that used to eat hours now takes a fraction of the time and your hands are still on the wheel, that’s Level 3.

• If something is producing real work for you while you’re asleep or out on a walk, that’s Level 4.

If you’re thinking you don’t have time to build out AI systems like this…

Okay, so right about now you’re probably thinking, cool, so now I have to go build all of this, and I don’t have time for that either. I hear you; that’s the most relatable objection there is, and it’s also exactly why you stay stuck. If you don’t have time to build systems to save you time, that’s exactly the reason you need to build systems. There are two more things worth saying here.

First, you don’t need it all, and you don’t need it all right now.

You’ll need to figure out what your specific business actually needs to run, not building a pile of tools because they’re cool to build. Some of my clients only ever build Level 2, and they’re thrilled, because that’s all their current season calls for, and they can always add Level 3 and 4 later. I did exactly that myself; I sat at Level 2 for a couple months before I built out 3 and 4, because I was shifting a bunch of stuff around in my business and Level 2 was honestly all my season called for at the time.

Second, yeah, you have to spend time to save time; and seriously, nobody wants to hear it.

Real talk, I could’ve started my Substack the normal way and spent 12 to 18 hours a week cranking out the articles I wanted to publish. I chose to spend around 18 hours up front building the systems instead, which is basically one week of work. I made it back inside two weeks, and it will pay me back every single week moving forward.

Here’s the part that actually stings:

Entrepreneurs who say they want to work less stay stuck for years because they never spend that one week it takes to give them back time. They’re “too busy working” to build the thing that would let them stop working so much, so the cycle just runs forever.

Building this stuff is way less scary than it sounds. A Level 2 advisor takes me anywhere from 30 minutes to about 3 hours, a Level 3 process is 30 minutes to 2 hours, and a Level 4 automation is around an hour.

The reason people still don’t finish on their own is they start, get pulled into the next fire, and end up with a bunch of half-built things that never actually save them anything. That’s the whole reason the AI Leverage Lab is a live cohort, and why building your Level 2 advisor is the very first thing we set up together, because it keeps you on task and building only what you actually need. This is the first live cohort I’m running, and I won’t always run them live, so if being walked up these levels in real time, live with me is what would finally get you to do it, this is the window, friend.

Here’s what I know for sure:

The people who win this next era won’t be whoever crams the most AI into their day; it’ll be whoever leverages it to actually work less and stays the most human while doing it.

Hand the robot work to the robot, and keep the human work: your voice, your judgment, your relationships.

So here’s your north star: AI should make you work less, not more. If it isn’t doing that, you’re using it, and you’re almost certainly stuck on a rung you outgrew a while ago.

Tell me in the comments: which level are you actually on right now, and which one are you most ready to build first? ↓

---

Get on the AI Leverage Lab Waitlist ↓

The AI Leverage Lab is a live, 8-week cohort where we build your custom AI system together, one level at a time, so you walk out with AI that sounds like you and runs the busywork. This is the first live round, and I won’t always run them live. Get on the waitlist, and you’re first in line when doors open August 3rd.

---