By Sara Mannix
Artificial Intelligence can make your business more efficient, smarter, and more productive, giving greater value to your customers. At Mannix, we started small and progressed through clear, manageable stages..
Stage 1: Search Engine AI | Ask, Learn, Act
Skip Google and use AI. ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini have become our go-to tools for quick answers and deeper research. Instead of searching, we now ask AI-specific, actionable questions like:
“Act as a marketing expert and research the fitness app industry. Identify five leading companies, analyze their products, and summarize the unique selling propositions, pricing structures, and provide web links.”
“We currently use [X product] for analytics, but we’re looking for a tool that can also do [Z feature]. What are five alternatives, and what makes them superior to our current tool?”
“We’re considering a patent for [X]. What are the steps we need to take, and what should we be aware of in the process?”
Instead of spending 15 minutes reading through websites, we get the answer in 15 seconds. This is search engine AI. It’s the easiest entry point and results in time savings.
If you haven’t used AI yet… start with this: Replace some of your Google searches this week with an AI prompt. If you don’t get the right answer immediately, provide more detail, as if you were talking to an assistant.
Stage 2: Content Helper | From Manual to AI‑Assisted
As our team embraced AI for quick answers, the next challenge was leveraging AI to help speed up content creation.
We manage LakeGeorge.com and Saratoga.com. Creating high-quality, accurate articles takes a lot of time. We needed a better system, but couldn’t risk publishing incorrect information or losing our human voice.
We trained a custom AI on our local data, which includes decades of articles and facts about the regions we cover. Our in-house AI specialist created rules and trained the model to generate outlines for articles based on structured facts. Then our editorial team human-edits them, adding voice, research, and creativity, along with our unique perspective.
The result? We publish content in half the time while maintaining accuracy.
Try this: Use AI to help you generate an article draft or social captions. Then polish it by adding quotes, unique insights, and perspectives.
Stage 3: Data Assistant | Insights in Seconds
Next, we turned to our data. Sifting through spreadsheets can be overwhelming and time-consuming; this is where AI excels. We upload spreadsheets and documents into AI and ask questions like:
“Take this spreadsheet, analyze the data to create the following five graphs for a presentation.”
“Analyze our support requests, output average turnaround time, organize activities by service type, and share where we spend the most amount of time on customer service tasks.”
“Summarize customer feedback from the last 90 days.”
I use AI is for contract comparisons. I’ll upload the original agreement and the revised version from the client, then ask: “What changed between these two contracts? Are there any red flags? While this doesn’t replace my lawyer, it saves a significant amount on legal fees as I enter that conversation more prepared.
Try this: Upload one dataset or PDFs to ChatGPT (with file upload enabled) or a spreadsheet AI tool and ask it to summarize patterns or opportunities or create visual reports. It’s like having a data analyst on demand.
Stage 4: Task Audit | Where Are You Losing Time?
Once we saw what AI could do with data, we realized something deeper: we needed to audit how we spend our time.
We looked across our agency and asked:
What tasks are repetitive? And how much time can we save by automating these tasks. Narrow the list as the list is long to the most impactful automations.
Knowing what tasks took the most time helped us enter stage 5 with a plan.
Try this: List the top 5 tasks your team does repeatedly. Ask: Could AI help us do this faster or better? Even small improvements can make a big impact.
Stage 5: Agentic AI | AI That Does the Work for You
This is where the transformation gets exciting—and technical. We now build AI Agents for our own team and clients that can complete multi-step workflows across various tools. For example:
A form submission leads to a personalized response, CRM update, task assignment, and internal notification—all handled by AI.
We use AI to help qualify leads, generate reports, and even draft monthly updates for clients.
It took time and planning, but now we’re more efficient, more accurate, and can offer more affordable services to clients because we’ve lowered our overhead on repeat tasks.
Try this: If you’re ready, work with an agency to build your first agentic workflow.
Final Thoughts: Move One Stage at a Time
Every business is different. Some will start by asking AI to help write an email. Others will jump into automation. The point isn’t to do everything overnight—it’s to keep moving forward. Start simple and gradually move to automation and AI Agents.
We’ve seen the results in our agency. You can too.
Mannix Marketing specializes in SEO, web design, and AI agentic solutions for small businesses.