Choosing the right tool: AI, automation, or human?

Welcome to the Differently Aligned podcast for neurodivergent business owners. I'm Adina Levy. I'm an Autistic AuDHDer, business coach, speech therapist, AI fiend, and I run Differently Aligned Business Coaching, and my other business, Play Learn Chat, where I wear my speech therapist and professional educator hat. I support neurodivergent business owners like you, whose businesses have grown into a fabulous, sometimes overwhelming, tangled mess that doesn't quite fit what you need.

I guide, teach, coach, and build alongside you, using AI, automations, systematising things to help you untangle your strategy, your business alignment, and your operations. I'm obsessed with helping you make your business finally work better for you. Everyone is welcome here, no matter your neurotype, your gender, your race, your size, your orientation, and all the other identities that make you you. This podcast is recorded on the Aboriginal lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people the traditional custodians of the lands on which I live, work, and play.

I acknowledge any First Nations people listening in. Hey, folks. Today, I am gonna be sharing with you some of my thoughts and examples and experiences with choosing what is the right tool to do the job, whether we're talking about a human brain as a tool, or whether we're talking about using AI as a tool, or automation. There are lots of ways to get things done, and the risk these days is that AI, takes care of it all.

But, mm, maybe it doesn't, and maybe it shouldn't. Now, I'm a massive fan of using AI for the right jobs, and that is the whole point of what I'm sharing with you today. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. You don't have to do every job fully with AI or with human or with automation.

It's really important that you start to think clearly about what is the best tool for the job in this moment, and recognising, of course, that the world of AI is changing oh so quickly. So pretty much by the time I record this, things have shifted. Maybe your awareness of platforms has shifted, or the platforms themselves have changed. And now perhaps AI is better suited to doing a particular job.

So I'll just say, to date this really, I'm recording this on the 13th of May, 2026, so who knows how things will go, especially when I share the specific examples for how I'm using different tools. This may change. Also, your skills, your knowledge, your awareness of how to use different platforms whether it's AI or other, is going to change and shift. So that might also impact on what is the best tool for the job in this moment.

I'm gonna talk about three main areas. Thinking, so where is it worth using your human brain to continue to do the job, to do the thinking and the processing? I'm also gonna be talking about- Connecting. Where is it important to use your human heart to actually connect with other people?

And then I'm gonna talk about costs. So really going a whole other direction, thinking about the costs of different AI platforms and usages different apps and so on. And before I head into it, I wanna extend a very warm invitation to you. If you are listening before the 31st of May, 2026, I hope you'll join me for a free webinar that I'm running on the 31st of May/the 1st of June, it depends on your time zone, From Inbox Chaos to Inbox Zero: the AI Method for Neurodivergent Business Owners.

I am so excited to bring this to you I'll talk a little bit about my journey with inbox management and using AI to help me here, in this episode. So you'll hear a little bit about it, but I definitely hope that if you find you struggle with managing your inbox, whether you avoid it, you hate it, it takes too much time whatever that is, I really hope that you'll join me for that free webinar. It's live, and I really, really encourage you to come live. I will also be recording it and share that with you for about, mm, nine days afterwards.

Head over to the link in the show notes, and you can check out the webinar. If you're listening after that has happened, go there anyway and you'll see what I've got available to help you. Today I hopped on to record this podcast. I'm trying something new, not my first time, but fresh, is actually doing video podcasts.

So if you do like video and you're listening in your ears, you can go and check this out on YouTube and have a look and watch my face. I'll do a little picture description for those of you who want that. I am a white woman. I've got kind of a longish shoulder-length hair.

I have pink at the front of my hair and brown hair. I have a white background behind me. You can see a little bit of my kitchen because my comfy home office that works for me is actually my dining table I have a very colorful floral jumper and a very colorful floral mug, which I almost forgot to drink from, so I'm just gonna sip my coffee now to keep me going. As I hopped on to record this podcast, I thought, "You know what?

I think it's time for a new podcast intro." And in doing that, I was about to sit there and get completely stuck and go, "Oh, I better write it out." But no, I don't get stuck anymore. I don't allow myself to get stuck.

The moment that I notice there's friction or hesitation or avoidance on something that I need to do, I think, "How can AI help me?" What I was never going to do is say, "Hey, AI, write me an intro for my podcast for neurodivergent business owners," and go and read that out. That's just never gonna happen. It wouldn't be my voice, my perspective, and so on.

So what I did do was ask my Notion AI... I use Notion a lot. You'll probably hear me talk about it a lot. So I was chatting with Notion AI, where it had my talking points, oh, what I wanna chat about today, just my, like, kind of top level topics that I wrote from my brain to make sure I share with you what I've been thinking.

I then said to go and find my last podcast transcript, so it would easily get the previous version of my intro. If I had gone to click and find it and search for it, I would've gone on 50 side quests. It would've taken me a lot longer, and I would've probably forgotten to do this anyway. So that's the first thing.

I was getting AI to go find a thing that it had already that was already me and my voice. So it found the previous version of my intro. I then- gave it a few prompts and I said, "This is my new focus," or you know, "This is what I wanna dial up talking about." And I asked it to draft the next version.

Now this again is how I keep thinking about continuing to think. I don't want to lose my brain. I don't want to hand over my opinions or my discernment or my personality to AI. I wanna keep that because that's what you're here for I assume, and that's why I'm me.

That's why I'm in business. That's why anyone listens to me or buys from me, I believe. So, I could be wrong, but I'm not an AI clone. Like, I'm here right now with my real voice, my real thoughts coming out, and I don't want to lose that.

And that could be a real risk if we defer too much to AI. We start to lose ourselves, and gosh, we'll all end up sounding exactly the same, and I don't want that for the world. I don't want that for your brain. So using AI here was the right tool for fetching the data it already had.

It was the right tool to give me a draft. It was the right tool to take what I already had with a few of my other thoughts just kind of blurted out, and it put it together, and then we went back and forth. And that iterative process is where I continue to use my brain and my discernment and share myself. But what it did was take away all the friction that would've caused me to not even show up today on the podcast.

So that is an example of, like, a collaboration you could think of between me and AI that continues my thinking brain going. It continues bringing you actual thoughts and words and perspectives from me, but with the assistance of AI to take the friction away. So I'm really curious to know at any point if you wanna respond and send me a DM on Instagram. I am @ differently.

aligned. I would love to hear how you're using or thinking about, where do you and AI interface, where do you use it to help you and be a collaborator perhaps or does this spark anything for you? Please do get in touch. Now the next piece about how we can consider choosing the right tool for the right job is in how we connect with other people.

Whatever your business is, I know many of you are in service-based businesses where you are the connector between you and your clients, you and your customers, you and your team perhaps. I don't want you to lose that You don't wanna lose that. That's probably why you got into business in the first place, is so you can do that connection. But again, you don't have to do every single moment of every single piece of connecting with your, I'll say clients here.

When it comes to emails, I've traditionally hated doing emails. I've hated the fact that I hated doing emails. It was always the biggest piece of my business where I wasn't meeting my own expectations. I really want excellent customer service and support.

I wanna be responsive to within one to two business days. That was always my dream. And even when I had a VA who was really helping me with a lot of inbox stuff, I kept becoming the blocker. I kept having these sort of drafts or questions thrown at me, and it was still back to me to respond.

And my inbox would continually for each business be above 30 to 50, sometimes completely unruly near 100. And when I say inbox, to me what is in my inbox is something that needs an action. Usually it needs a reply or something saved or something checked and then replied or, you know, there's all kinds of versions of what that looks like. But these are like unclosed loops, and it was always a source of stress and guilt for me.

Now, I first had a dream when I was hearing about the capabilities of getting AI to help with an inbox. I thought, "Wow, I'm just gonna get AI to like fire off responses and you know, just deal with it all and sweep the inbox and done." No. I don't recommend that.

That's going like way so far that way. And what I wanna share briefly now, but I share a heck of a lot more in the upcoming webinar, From Inbox Chaos to Inbox Zero. Link in the show notes, go and register free. Where I'm at now is getting AI to help with so, so many pieces of that executive function nightmare, thousand different tasks, inbox management.

I use Notion and Notion AI, like I said, and some of the big pieces that help my inbox AI work is I have an operations manual that outlines how we do things what do we do when somebody hasn't received the PDF that they asked for, or how do we respond to a particular customer service question? So it's all there inside Notion and also I have a templates database. Again, all there inside Notion and I have other pieces which I will be sharing in the webinar. I don't actually let my Inbox AI reply on my behalf.

It doesn't do replies. What it does is drafts replies if it can. So when it sees an email, it will go through its instructions of what it should be doing with that kind of email and in some cases it might be I need to go, me personally need to go into a different platform to check something and then tell it what I found, then it can draft the reply. And if that happens, it's the most helpful thing because I've trained it that, well, if you need me to go to that platform, you're gonna give me the clearest instructions and you're gonna say to me like AI, say to Adina, " Go to this link, click it and then put in this email address and tell me what you find in that box."

So even when the action that springs from an email in my inbox is something that needs 100 steps, the AI is there to be my executive function. It's holding all the admin-y bits, the procedural bits that my brain doesn't need to try and grasp onto anymore and it's guiding me through. It's literally my assistant there. It's saying, "Okay, remember we need to do this and that step."

It then will tell me what I need to do, the human piece that it can't do or I haven't asked it to do yet. And the big point here is on the connecting side of things the AI will draft my emails and I will then go in and finish it. Whether it's updating what the greeting is, whether it's personalising it a little more, whatever that is, it always has my human eye over it. I can't guarantee that will always be the case.

For some of the more procedural really straightforward things I may one day allow the AI to actually send the emails on my behalf. I'm not there yet and I don't know that I will be because once I've taken away all that admin friction there is- enough space for me to actually not even mind doing emails anymore. I can just pop into my emails and go, " Okay, that's drafted. I know it's gonna be a three-minute job maximum for me to go and make this a human thing now."

So the AI's done a- you know, the 85% and I come in and do the last 15%. How's my maths? And that has completely changed my experience for me. I hope to help you find your way to using AI to help your inbox get tamed.

It doesn't have to be the way I've done it, but I've got so much to teach and share, so please, please come and join the free webinar from Inbox Chaos to Inbox Zero. And now I'm gonna share the other side of things, the costs. So I'm gonna talk to you about how to think about picking the right tool for the job based on how much stuff is gonna cost you. Now, when I'm talking about costs of things, we have to think not just the financial cost, but also the time cost.

Very often solo business owners might forget to account for our own time and kind of not feel that we should be paid for all the time we're working and, and I don't want you to do that. So do think about your time cost or even the time of team and so on. And there is also opportunity cost. So in the time it takes to do one thing, say manually, what are you not able to do because of that?

And similarly financial opportunity cost. If you spend lots and lots of money on a particular AI platform that you think might automate the heck out of everything, and it might, but what is it not permitting you to do? Or the other way around. If you're spending money paying an assistant to support you in your business, what is the cost of that compared to what else could you do with that money?

And I'm not saying any of these are right or wrong decisions. It's just about a way of thinking about what else does that mean if you choose to spend time or money or energy on a particular way of doing things. So you could think about a bit of a continuum Of different tools, to get things done. There's manual , like copy, paste Click add to calendar, write, type, copy, paste, send, all that manual kind of work for all those various steps of, you know, handling data or making appointments or chasing up invoices, whatever that step is in your business.

There's automation, there is, I think it still exists, a platform which was my first introduction to this whole concept years ago called If This Then That, and that was an awesome name for the platform, and it literally was like a recipe. If X happens on my digital tool, then Y will happen on this other digital tool. For example, if I make a sale and Stripe knows that I've just made a sale, then send me a message to say, "Hooray, you've made a sale." That's a really simple version of, you know, how we can use this kind of automation.

It's absolutely limitless for what you can connect up. There is a whole world of learning about how to do that and how to think about that, and I have a lot of resources about this, but I'm not gonna dive down that pathway right now. I was always massively into automation and setting up automations, and I can kind of think and dream in automation well before AI. And the moment AI popped up and became, quite accessible to use, I then have shifted my thinking into kind of understanding where in my processes does it make most sense to actually have AI do a piece or all of that process, and where does it make sense to actually just set up a little automation that says, "If this happens, then do that"?

Now, generally speaking, automations are cheaper than AI. It's a very general comment, but basically any time you're getting AI to do something, it costs tokens. Tokens are a fairly abstract concept. and all the platforms or the AI platforms, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude, Notion AI, et cetera, anywhere that is processing your data and coming back to you or creating images or having a conversation with you, there's tokens which is like, little AI blips, data going to AI and from AI.

And the more complex that processing is, the more tokens it uses. That's the kind of abstractness. It's like the more the merrier or whatever. It's very hard to pinpoint, you know, how many tokens will it cost if I send this message to AI.

So the thing to notice is that it can get very, very expensive or you can get yourself like temporarily locked if you use all your tokens and your quota for a particular amount of time. And then it can get expensive to level up your subscription and have to pay for more so you can access more. And I say have to pay it's never a problem to pay for a tool that is genuinely going to help you. I'm all for that, but I want you to be thinking and not just going, "Oh, I've been paying, say, 20 US dollars a month for Claude, but now I've hit my limit and now I need to pay 200 US dollars."

Maybe that's the right call for you and your business, but maybe not. Maybe the first thing is to check how efficient is your usage of it. Are you using it in the ways that make sense for the platform and how it's structured and how the costs work? You know, there's so many factors and it can be quite complicated and quite confusing, but hey, the cool thing is AI can help you think through this stuff too.

So, you know, you can chat with it or even chat with ChatGPT and say, "My Claude usage is going up too quickly. Help me figure it out," or, you know, whatever. But what I wanna share is that concept of just thinking. For each part of what you're trying to achieve, there are probably different ways to get there.

You can do it yourself. You can ask a virtual assistant to do it. You can automate it. The platforms I use are make.

com and Zapier predominantly for automation. Now my... Most of my business like my CRM, my client management, all the payments, they go through HighLevel. I've got workflows or automations inside HighLevel and also within Notion.

So Notion is like my business brain. All the information, all the processing, my task, my project management that lives inside Notion, and I have automations inside Notion as well. Notion has AI inbuilt, and I can set something up as an automation or I can ask the AI to do something, and both ways have different outcomes. The AI can deal with the more complex processing and steps that would be very, very hard but...

probably not impossible to set up with pure automation. I've recently moved my email platform where I collect email addresses consensually and share and email things out. I was using Kit, and it's a great platform. I totally recommend it.

Again, check your costs. It became too expensive for me for the ways that I was using it and the size of my list as well, and given that I was doing this whole big move into HighLevel, it made sense that I would shift my email list over to HighLevel. Now, I do have two big email lists, one for each business. One is around 20,000 emails, and one is around 6,000 emails.

I had considered setting up an automation that would be something like I would turn on a tag in Kit, and that email address would then be, like, moved over to HighLevel, and setting up the automation for me would've taken about five to 10 minutes because I know how to do it, and I've done very similar things before. This was my first thought, "Oh, I can get 26,000 email addresses from here to there." I was going to do that, but then I thought, "Hmm, the cost of that verse I also could do a few more clicks for this one-off process."

It's not something I'm doing every day. It's not repetitive, and it's not urgent either. People don't need this done immediately. It's all an internal process.

I went into Kit. I sorted my list. I export to CSV, very old school. Like, it's literally just giving me a spreadsheet, and then I go into HighLevel, and I upload it and add the right tags.

I almost felt like that was too easy. It's the cheapest way to do it. For that particular job, it was, like, a big chunk of data that literally could just go in a spreadsheet, and I had to do the clicking. It was a one-off thing as well, which made me think, " It's not something I'm repeating a lot.

I don't need to turn this into a beautiful system. I, the human, can manage this." And so that was the best way to do that part of the process. Now, the other piece I haven't talked about a lot is AI agents.

I think of them as like little AI robots where you give your instructions and rather than just have it sitting there waiting for you to chat and do something, you can set them off on a mission. You can combine it with automation. They can do things on their own in the background and, you know, work away like little worker bees while you're doing your other stuff. It's an incredibly useful, awesome, powerful way of using AI in your business and in your life too.

But it can get expensive. Now, the cool thing is Notion had about two months of free use when they first introduced AI agents. Unfortunately, it's not free anymore, which is what really caused me to stop and think about, well, how much would this cost me in dollars if I was actually going to be keeping it running as it is? I spent those two months really, really working on my email handling and my processing, and I learnt a lot about what would use a lot of tokens, what would basically cost money and a lot of money once the charges came in.

And what I learnt was a ton, which is what I'm sharing in my upcoming webinar. It got me really thinking about what are my friction points with this particular admin process, in this case, email handling, but it could apply to anything. I had to figure out what was my personal friction point. What do I need done?

Like, do I really need the draft email happening the moment that the email pops into my inbox? Does it need a draft on it right then when I'm only gonna check it like, you know, in the afternoon a bit later? No, because even then, I'm still not gonna send it off immediately. I'm gonna have my human eye look at it and check and decide or think or, you know, amend it, whatever.

This is very specific to Notion AI, but the concept will be there across many different platforms. When I just chat with Notion AI within the Notion platform, it doesn't cost me any extra. It probably does cost Notion something, I have to acknowledge. You know, somebody's paying for this AI usage.

I can pick, by the way, which model and which platform I'm chatting with. I can pick between Claude and ChatGPT, and Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT have a few of their different versions or models I can pick as well. So, that's cool. It doesn't cost me any extra.

It's built into the cost of me using Notion at all. However, the Notion AI agents that then go off and do their own thing I had it set up that every email that came in- The agent would run and it would go, "Ooh, what do I do with this one?" And it would figure it out and take an action or you know, put a note for me or whatever it needed to do. That was getting expensive in that hypothetical of wait a minute, when the costs come in, how much will I pay?

It was starting to look like around 10 to 15 US dollars a day for my Notion email agent to run, and I will say that is not a massive cost. Now compare that to the cost of not providing customer service at all, or compare that to the cost of paying an assistant to go and do a very similar job. Again, I'm not saying you shouldn't have an assistant. These are all just things to be considering.

What I found was that, yes, it's not a giant cost, but it's also not a cost I need urgently and what I've now done is on my front page, so where I go into Notion all the time, I've got it open there. It's called Adina's Tasks, and I've got at the top I now have a few buttons. I'll tell you about them in a moment. I also have my current projects that I'm focusing on, and I've got my task list for what I wanna do today or this week.

And on the top of that page are two buttons, now, the reason I've put buttons there is literally just to remind me to chat to Notion AI sometimes when I see it to go and get my inbox processed. Now, this is that very specific Notion difference. Having a Notion AI agent, do this whether the trigger is do it at 2:00 PM every day or whether the trigger is do it every time a new email comes in, whatever the AI agent does costs extra money and email processing can be quite a token-heavy activity 'cause it's gotta look and process and, check against the rules and all that sort of thing.

So what I now have is I open up my AI chatbot on the side, which doesn't cost me any extra. I click my button and it gives me, "Hey AI, activate," and then it links to a page, "Run inbox skill." Now, this is something I'm gonna demonstrate and show much more, in the Inbox Chaos to Inbox Zero webinar, I just copy it. I paste it.

Now, I don't love doing a copy-paste, but knowing that me doing that once or twice a day- prevents me paying 15 US dollars a day, I think, "Oh, how much does it cost me?" Like, if someone paid me 15 US dollars a day to do one single copy-paste, I'm like, "I can manage that. That's okay." I'm not saying this is the way I'll always do it.

This is where I've landed at the moment, and this is what got me thinking really carefully about just make sure that whatever you're doing, you're balancing out the cost, the time cost, the energy cost, the human cost, the frustration cost, or the cost of inaction if you're not even moving forward, and the financial cost. And just keep an eye on what you're choosing to use your AI tools for, and which parts of processes or which parts of your business are you getting AI help with.

There is no one right answer. It's gonna change. It's dynamic. It's very individualized.

But the big idea is start with thinking, like, where are you struggling? Where is the friction? Where are you stuck? Go and get some help.

Go and get an automation, or go and ask someone to automate, or ask AI to teach you how to set up an automation, or get AI to help you with that thing, whatever the stuck thing is. Don't stay stuck. Use AI to help you do all the things that you can, want to, and should do, like the thinking, like the connecting. And it's just so cool to notice all these ways that my business has become way more effective and efficient and friction reduced.

I won't say friction-free. It still happens all the time. There is friction. I'm not gonna pretend it's gonna go away overnight.

But if you would like some support to add in these layers of systems, operations, automations, these ways of thinking about your business and where is it working for you and where is it not working for you, I would love to connect with you in the Neurodivergent Business Collective. The doors are gonna open on the 1st of June, and the new updated version is so flippin' exciting. I can't wait to share with you. I'll probably talk more about it in next week's podcast.

But for now, I want you to go and sign up for the free webinar From Inbox Chaos to Inbox Zero, And I will teach you my AI method for handling emails the neurodivergent brain-friendly way. So please go and check in there, and I hope that we can keep connected. Come and find me on Instagram. I am @differently.

aligned, and all the links you need are in the show notes. Thank you for being here, and thank you for looking after yourself and your brain and looking for your path to a more aligned business. Have a fabulous day.