Step 1 of 7 · Personal
Start with what makes you, you.
Welcome to 7 Steps of AI. I'm Nick. Seven short lessons, one a day, no sales calls. By Step 7 you'll know whether you want to hire Bearing, do it yourself, or wait. All three are valid. I'll tell you the truth about which is right for you.
Today's idea is the one the whole course turns on: every small business has a fingerprint. The way you greet a regular. The way you handle a last-minute request. The reason your Tuesday is different from every other Tuesday. Your customers come back because of those things — not because of the generic stuff every other business is also doing.
Generic AI doesn't see any of that. Today, I want you to feel it.
60-second action
Paste this into ChatGPT or Claude
The prompt
Write a welcome email for a bakery in Carmel, California. Keep it under 120 words.
What you’ll get
A generic welcome email that could have come from any bakery, any plumbing shop, any dental office. No voice. No specifics. Nothing that sounds like the owner.
That's the baseline every AI starts at. That's what's on every big-company website right now. And that's why you haven't put one on your own site yet — you could feel it was wrong.
The problem isn't AI. It's generic AI. The whole rest of this course is about fixing that, one piece at a time. Tomorrow we'll write down the things you already know that make your business different, and we'll start turning generic AI into your AI.
Tomorrow · Step 2
Your voice on paper — the first page of your AI's instructions.