Is AI Good for Salons? My Honest Answer

Everyone went a bit mad for AI, and now a lot of people are quietly falling out of love with it. And I think I know why. It's because they're using it for the one thing that it's actually not very good at. Hello, hello, hello my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the internet again with another dose of my Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. I'm not going to comment on anything in the news. I'm not going to comment on anything to do with the weather, because I'm not in the country. I'm recording this ahead, so should hopefully be in a sunny, sunny Spain. So, I don't know, what can we talk about? Well, do you like my blue background? I've not done blue before. Anyway, today I'm going to give you my honest answer to a question that I think is being bounced around an awful lot, and that is, is AI any good for salons? Is it any good for the salon industry? And I think I'm in a pretty good position to answer it, because I use AI every single working day. This podcast is put together with AI in the background. I've built tools around it, software around it. I'm not a skeptic having a pop at AI. I'm someone who is, I hope, telling you where it can genuinely help and where it lets you down. And I think my honest answer is that AI is brilliant for your business, but it is rubbish at being you. And if you get that distinction right, it can be the best assistant that you've ever had. If you don't, you're going to get the kind of disappointment that I think lots of people are feeling with AI right now. Let me start with actually what's happening out there. So if we cast our minds back a couple of years ago, everybody was losing their minds over AI and they were using it for as much as they possibly could to write all the social media posts and their blog posts and fill your emails and try and fill your diary while you put your feet up. And we hit a bit of peak excitement about it. And I think there's quite a few people that are now cooling on AI. They are a bit underwhelmed. I think the magic's worn off. And I think there's a very strong reason for that. And I don't think it's because AI has got worse. AI has got better and better and better. I think it's because they're sat there chatting to it, prompting, re-prompting, copying and pasting in the same way as they always did.

And they're getting generic crap back. And we call it, there's an industry term for it now called AI slop. It might look polished. It might be grammatically perfect and keyword friendly, but it's slop. It's completely soulless. And sometimes the salon owner has gone that little bit further and trained AI to be their voice. And it can't quite seem to get it right. And I think that's where things are going wrong. I think there's a lot of content that's made by AI and a lot of content that's made by your competitors, which feels tired. It feels like recycled content. And I think it's because even if you train it on your voice, it becomes static. It becomes stagnant because you train it on your voice, but your voice changes. What's interesting to you. I'll take myself as an example. What's interesting to me this week. What's going on in my business this week shifts week by week, minute by minute, day by day, month by month. And if you've locked your brand voice into AI over time, it starts to feel stale. It feels like you've created the same content, the same post for the last six months. And you can try and fix it. So we end up jumping back in and saying to chat GPT, make it funnier, make it warmer, make it sound more human. And actually what ends up happening is it sounds more generic, not less because it's pulling from an average of what the Internet thinks is funny or the average of what the Internet thinks is human. And it's not quirky anymore. It's not freaky like you are, my darling. You're trying to chase your own freaky little voice and it's running away with you each time you try and revise a post. And I think that's why people are getting disillusioned. It's not because AI is failing. It's not because the models are getting worse. They're getting stronger and stronger and better and better all the time. It's because they're pointed at the one job that I think AI is actually really crap at, which is sounding like you. But I love AI. I think it's absolutely the future. And if you're an ignorant salon owner, and I see this again and again in Facebook groups where people say things like, I will never let AI into my business.

Well, frankly, I hope you enjoy your early retirement because, OK, AI is not going to replace you as a beauty therapist or a massage therapist or a holistic therapist or an esthetician or a hairdresser just yet. Yet. I get that. But it will replace you. You will be replaced by a hairdresser who understands AI. You will be replaced by a beauty therapist who understands AI because they're moving quicker. They're moving smarter. They're getting their businesses streamlined. They're getting their businesses more profitable. And that's where we need to be leaning in because where AI is fantastic is in your business, in the engine room, in the back office, not in the shop window. I've got a few examples of my own, of course. I told you a few episodes. I built an app called Gifty Poo, which is available at giftypoo.com. If you want to sign up, you can still get the founder's rate. It's a wish list tool for salon clients built by coding with AI. It took me a few weeks to build and polish and refine and test. I built my own invoice creator. I built a scheduler, which helps scheduling for my retreats. I can't write a line of code. And a few years ago, the idea of building that kind of thing would have been laughable. It would have taken me months, six months. In fact, the last coding I did took the whole of lockdown and it still wasn't finished. And AI has made it genuinely possible to do that in just a few weeks. That's not hype. That's the truth. But notice what all of those things are. They're systems. They're the plumbing. They're devices that make my business life easier and make my business stronger. None of them is taking my voice. None of them is my voice talking to my clients. And I think that's the pattern. If you think of your salon like a restaurant, your skill, your artistry, the relationships, the food, the experience, all of that has to be yours. But we need the machine in the background helping with the stock ordering, the bookkeeping. So let's move AI to the back of house where it can earn its keep and master those skills. But keep it out of the shop window. The shop window is your brand, your quirky freakishness. Don't put generic stuff all over your brilliant business. So what can we actually use it for? Well, drafting those long, boring emails.

Yeah, of course, but then rewrite it in your own freaky little way. Get your head around the numbers, pasting the figures, ask it to explain what's going on and then build yourself a little dashboard that you understand that helps you make sense of your own business. You are so unique, my little monsters, and I want you to build your business around that, not the generic AI slop. When it comes to your planning, your quarter, your marketing calendar, AI gets involved. But please use it for your policies, your procedures, your contracts, all in the background. We want AI all over that stuff, even building simple tools like I did. If you've ever sat there and gone, gosh, I wish there was an app for that, you can build it and you can do it really quickly and really easily. Anything that doesn't need your voice, I think AI can really help with. There is an exception for this, though, and I'm calling it the marketing exception. And that's where AI is the new word of mouth. There's one place where the voice and the business actually meet, and it's where your clients are starting to use AI like a search engine. They're not always going to search for a salon near me in Google. Well, they are, but not all the time. They're also asking those questions to chat GPT. Find me someone for fine curly hair who's open on a Saturday and getting AI to do the research. Well, how does AI decide who to suggest? It reads the web. It reads your service descriptions, your reviews, your team bios, your site. So the irony is that if your website's stuffed with slop, you've actually made it harder for AI to recommend because you sound like everybody else. But if your site is rich with your actual voice, your specifics, your freaky way of doing things, then you're teaching AI exactly who to send your way, which is the whole point. So write it in your own voice. Even if the machines need to understand you better. So get the machines to sense check what you've written, but you write it in your funny little way. My last honest observation. You notice that when a new AI model used to come out, it was news. It was everywhere. When there was a new model from Anthropic, when there was a new model from OpenAI, from Gemini have just done this. It was massive. It was huge. Now it's maybe a fuss for a few days. Maybe a new model lands and everyone kind of goes, meh. And so that's why I'm excited because I'm excited about what AI is going to bring next for the business. And it's only going to bring more brilliant stuff if we lean into what AI is good for.

We don't need any new models. AI is good as it needs to be for our businesses. What we've got to do is figure out what's on your list that AI can actually help with. So that plateau in terms of progress with AI is not disappointing for us. It looks like the tools are maturing. It's stabilizing. So now we can get them and use them in a way that's actually contributing to our business. So my honest answer boiled down, stop asking AI to be you. It can't. And every time you try, you generate more slop and you're going to fall further and further out of love with AI. Instead, point AI at your business, the admin, the numbers, the planning, the tools, the bit that makes you want to go and do something else. Let's get AI doing those things and keep your voice for yourself. Because your freaky little voice is the one thing that AI will never convincingly copy. So what do you think? Why not reach out and let me know? If AI is something that's overwhelming for you, head over to philjackson.coach because my AI by your side program is there. This is not a huge pitch. It's where I show small business owners just like you how to put AI to work in their own businesses without getting overwhelmed. And let me know how you're using AI in your business. Phil at buildyoursalon.com is my email address. I'd love to get some people on talking about how they're using AI in businesses. I'd really like to get some experts in and some salon owners, too. So reach out and let me know if I can interview you on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. If you're listening on Apple podcast, by the way, please take two minutes to give me a review. You're falling behind Spotify. A little bit of competition between Spotify and Apple. Apple needs more reviews. Please give me a five star review. It is the very best way to make my day. And until we speak again, my darlings, please take care.