You ask AI to help you write a LinkedIn post.
The result is okay. It's well structured, professional and easy to read. But it doesn't quite sound like you, so you explain who your clients are, what makes your approach different and how you want to communicate. You add a few examples, correct the positioning and ask for another version.
Much better.
A few days later, you open a new conversation to work on your marketing strategy. Within seconds, AI starts suggesting approaches that don't fit your business. It recommends channels you've already tried and messaging that could belong to almost any company.
So you explain everything again.
Who you serve. What you offer. What makes you different. What you've already tried.
I have a name for this: The Amnesia Tax.
And it may be costing you more than you realise.
The Amnesia Tax is the time and opportunity cost of repeatedly introducing your business to an AI assistant that doesn't have enough relevant context available.
It happens in small moments throughout the working day. A few minutes explaining your target audience. Another few minutes correcting the tone of an email. Then more time rewriting a recommendation because AI suggested something you've already tried.
Individually, these moments don't seem significant. Together, they add up.
Imagine you brief AI three times a day, spending six minutes each time. That's 18 minutes a day, or 90 minutes over a five-day working week.
Over 52 weeks, that's approximately 78 hours a year.
At an hourly value of €120, you're looking at €9,360 worth of your time.
These are illustrative figures, of course. But they reveal something worth considering: you might be using AI to save time while quietly spending hours helping it understand information you've already provided.
And there's another cost. When AI lacks your business context, its recommendations can sound convincing without being particularly relevant. You spend time correcting them, reconsidering decisions or creating content that doesn't reflect your positioning, which leads to missed opportunities.
The difference isn't simply whether AI remembers you. It's whether the right information is organised, current and available when you need it.
I learned this through my own work.
Signature AI grew out of frustration.
Back in 2024, when I was using AI to attract clients for my marketing and business coaching services, I already had a decent setup with relevant business context. AI understood quite a bit about my work, and the content it produced was already tailored to my business and written in my tone of voice.
It worked well, but I still spent more time correcting and refining the output than I wanted. Sometimes I had to repeat information, clarify decisions we'd already discussed or make several rounds of edits before the result was right. I knew AI was capable of more, and I wanted to spend less time correcting its work and more time building my business.
Then I started working inside a team of a much larger organisation.
I was leading the marketing team for an online education platform with approximately 140,000 paying users. We worked across the customer journey, email automations, weekly newsletters and the many decisions involved in attracting, engaging and retaining customers.
At that scale, everything is connected.
A newsletter is part of a customer journey. An email automation needs to reflect the audience, the offer and what customers have already experienced. Marketing decisions need to build on previous campaigns, customer insights and the organisation's priorities.
I wanted AI to help me connect those dots, but I kept having to explain the background before it could contribute meaningfully.
So I started building what I thought of as a second brain.
I organised the business knowledge, customer insights, priorities and strategic context that AI needed to work with. My goal was to create something that felt like having a knowledgeable colleague sitting next to me. Someone I could share an idea with and immediately begin exploring it, because the important background was already there.
That approach eventually became the foundation for my Signature AI, a digital thinking partner inside ChatGPT designed to challenge ideas and support business decisions.
It also became part of how I worked as a marketing leader. Instead of treating newsletters, automations and customer journeys as isolated tasks, I could use the same business knowledge to help think across them.
During my work with the platform, our marketing efforts generated an additional 15,000 paying customers. This structured approach to working with AI contributed to that result, alongside the wider marketing strategy and the team's execution.
That experience convinced me there was something valuable here, especially for entrepreneurs who need to make important decisions without a large team around them.
You don't need hundreds of documents or an elaborate technical setup to start improving your AI conversations.
Begin with five essentials.
1. Your clients. Who do you serve, what challenges do they face and what are they trying to achieve? Include the problems they actually talk about, rather than relying only on demographic descriptions.
2. Your offer. What do you provide, how do you work with clients and what outcomes do you help them achieve? AI needs to understand the value of your services before it can help you communicate that value.
3. Your positioning. Why do clients choose you? What makes your approach different? Include your perspective, experience and the beliefs that shape how you work.
4. Your proof. What results have you helped clients achieve? Add real examples, client stories and relevant experience. These give AI something concrete to work with when developing content or sales messages.
5. Your priorities. What are you trying to achieve over the next 90 days? Perhaps you want to attract more B2B clients, improve your positioning or become more visible on LinkedIn. Clear priorities help you evaluate ideas instead of pursuing everything.
Together, these five elements give AI a much clearer picture of your business. It starts to understand who your clients are, what you offer, why people choose you, what you've achieved and where you want to go. That context helps AI move beyond generic suggestions and offer ideas that are more relevant to your situation. Whether you're refining your positioning, creating content or exploring new opportunities, you have a better starting point for making decisions.
An experienced freelance marketer who has managed campaigns for a wide range of online platforms, from small businesses to major industry players. The budgets combined were into the millions. This marketer joined my 4-week Signature AI Course.
He had substantial experience, but his positioning had become a limitation. His niche was too narrow, restricting the kinds of opportunities he could pursue. He wanted to grow and work on more complex campaigns that would make better use of his expertise.
Using the Principal Strategist, he began exploring his positioning from a different perspective.
Rather than asking how to attract more clients within his existing niche, he examined where else his expertise could create value. He challenged assumptions about his market, explored other possibilities and began looking more seriously at B2B opportunities.
That changed his direction.
He started attracting more complex campaigns, the kind of work he genuinely enjoyed, and his broader positioning contributed to increased revenue.
He also became more active on LinkedIn and through newsletters. With clearer positioning, he could communicate his expertise more deliberately and reach businesses that might not previously have considered working with him.
But one of the most interesting changes happened in his discovery calls.
Together with his Signature AI, he developed better questions to understand prospective clients' businesses, challenges and priorities. He learned more about their situations, while the questions themselves made potential clients more curious and engaged.
His sales conversations became more valuable for both sides.
What I like about this example is how the improvements connected. A shift in positioning influenced his marketing, the opportunities he pursued and the conversations he had with prospective clients.
He wasn't simply using AI to write more content. He was using it to think through how his business could grow.
Don't just use AI. Think with it.
Spend 15 minutes completing the following template. You don't need polished language. Specific, accurate information is much more useful.
Your AI Business Brief
My business:
I help [type of clients] with [service or expertise].
My ideal clients:
They are [description] and typically struggle with [main challenges].
My positioning:
Clients choose me because [experience, approach or distinctive value].
My proof:
Examples of results I've helped clients achieve include [two or three real examples].
My current goal:
Over the next 90 days, I want to [specific business objective].
My constraints:
My available time, resources or important limitations are [details].
Now open the AI assistant you already use and paste your completed brief into a new conversation. Then add this prompt.
The next time you open your AI tool such as ChatGPT or Claude, consider what you actually need from the conversation. You might be exploring an unfamiliar topic, looking for fresh ideas or trying to solve a problem you've been thinking about for weeks. Each situation calls for a slightly different approach.
Sometimes brainstorming is exactly what you need. Exploring possibilities can reveal opportunities you'd otherwise miss, particularly when you're entering unfamiliar territory or looking for a different perspective. There's real value in discovering something you hadn't considered before.
But if you've been thinking about the same business challenge for weeks, another collection of suggestions may simply give you more things to evaluate. You may already have enough possibilities. What you need is a clearer understanding of which ones make sense, what assumptions you're making and where to focus your attention.
Start your next conversation with this question:
"What decision do I want to be clearer about when this conversation ends?"
Then give AI the context it needs to help you work through that decision. Explain what you're trying to achieve, what you've already considered and what matters most to you. Ask it to challenge your reasoning where appropriate, and make sure you finish with a practical next step.
It's a small change in how you approach AI, but it can make a meaningful difference in what you get from it. Instead of judging a conversation by how many ideas it produces, you begin judging it by whether you're clearer about your situation, your options and what to do next.
Because the value of AI isn't measured by how many answers it gives you. It's measured by what those answers help you understand, decide and do.
Here is the prompt:
"Use my AI Business Brief as context for this conversation.
I want you to act as my strategic thinking partner. Before making recommendations, ask questions where important information is missing. Challenge my assumptions, evaluate opportunities against my goals and help me make clear business decisions.
My first challenge is [describe your current business decision].
Help me examine my options, understand the trade-offs and identify where I should focus."
***
Apply the above prompt with a real decision.
Perhaps you're considering a new target market, struggling to attract the right clients or deciding which marketing activities deserve your attention. With your Business Brief available, AI has a better starting point for discussing those choices.
It can still make mistakes, and you're responsible for evaluating its recommendations. But you'll have a more relevant conversation than if you'd simply asked for ten marketing ideas.
Save your brief somewhere you can easily find it. Update it when your business changes, and check that your AI has access to the latest version.
A short weekly review is a useful habit. Your goals evolve, your positioning becomes clearer and you collect new client insights. Keeping that knowledge current helps prevent the Amnesia Tax from creeping back in.
Don't feel like typing everything out? Speaking is roughly three times faster than typing. Simply click the microphone button in your AI assistant and start talking. ChatGPT has a good built-in dictation feature. If your AI tool doesn't have a reliable microphone feature, I recommend Wispr Flow. It lets you dictate text instead of typing it.
Your AI Business Brief is a good starting point. Even a little more structure and context can make your conversations with AI noticeably more useful.
If you'd like to take this further, I cover it step by step in my upcoming Online AI Masterclass.
It's a practical, hands-on session where we build your first working version of a Principal Strategist together, using your own business as the starting point.
You'll learn how to give AI the right context and instructions, so you can use it to explore ideas, challenge your thinking and make clearer business decisions.
If you live in the Netherlands, you can also join the same masterclass, but in person in Almere.
For those who want to develop a more complete AI system, including content and sales, there's Signature AI: The 28-Day Build, with the next opportunity to join at the end of October and another in 2027.
Ready to put your business knowledge to work with AI?
Explore the AI Masterclass