I used AI to help market my bagel shop. Then the one-star reviews came in. - Business Insider
PushButton AI Team ·
I used AI to help market my bagel shop. Then the one-star reviews came in. - Business Insider
A bagel shop owner used AI for social media. Got one-star reviews. Had to pull it all.
Not because AI is bad. Because the tool didn't know the shop's voice, and nobody caught it before customers did.
A bagel shop owner used AI for social media. Got one-star reviews. Had to pull it all.
Not because AI is bad. Because the tool didn't know the shop's voice, and nobody caught it before customers did.
Sound familiar? You've probably seen the "just plug in AI and watch it go" pitch. Maybe you even tried it. And the result was content that felt off, or a subscription that quietly became a line item nobody defends anymore.
You're not tech-stupid. You hired based on a promise that didn't hold up. That's a vendor problem, not a you problem.
Here's what the bagel shop story actually teaches us: AI fails when it runs without a human checkpoint. Not because the technology is broken, but because no tool knows your business better than you do.
The businesses winning with AI right now aren't automating everything. They're automating one specific, low-risk task and keeping a human in the loop for anything customer-facing.
Start there. Pick one internal task — a weekly report, a first draft, a scheduling headache. Test it for 30 days. Measure it. Then decide what's next.
That's how one win turns into a real strategy.
What's the one AI tool you tried that nobody on your team actually uses?
