Your line

Every owner using AI has a line between what it does and what they do. A lot of us drew it by accident, with whatever we tried first, minus whatever felt weird. I'd rather draw mine on purpose, and you can draw yours the same way this afternoon.

This is for small-business owners who already use AI a little and want a clear rule for the rest. It covers how to sort your work, what I assign, what I keep, and how to hand something off well.

By the end, you'll know:

• how to list the work you could hand off
• the 1 question that tells you what to keep
• a 3-part way to brief AI on what you do hand off

1. List what you touch in a week

Write down everything you write, send or decide in a normal week. Emails, proposals, meeting notes, social posts, invoices, replies to reviews. Don't sort it yet.

You may not even realize how much of it you're doing, because you've always done it that way. Seeing it all in one place makes the sorting easier.

2. Hand off what you can check

My rule: if I know what good looks like, AI can take the first pass.

That covers my meeting notes, first-draft decks, reports and every version of the same file I used to email back and forth. AI drafts, I check. A first-draft deck saves me the blank page, and the call on what goes in is still mine.

3. Keep what carries your name or your relationships

Ask this about everything left on the list: would the person on the other end feel differently if they knew AI wrote it?

If the answer is yes, keep it. For me that's:

• My opinion. AI knows what already happened. What I think about it is mine.
• Replies to people I know. If we've had coffee, you get me.
• Complaints, a no and the hard conversations. Those carry my relationships, so they come from me.

4. Brief AI with 1 goal

Once something is on the hand-off side, keep the instructions short. Ruben Hassid's How to AI newsletter put it well this week: skip the giant instruction box. Give the AI the goal, the context and what good looks like, then ask it to restate the goal and ask you questions before it starts.

For example, instead of a page of rules about tone, length, fonts and formatting pasted in every time, try this:

"Goal: a 1-page summary of this week's sales calls for the team. Context: the call notes are attached. Good looks like 3 bullets per call, plus the next step and who owns it. Before you start, tell me the goal in your own words and ask me anything you need."

The questions it asks back show you what it misunderstood, before it writes a word.

Where's your line?

Your list will look different from mine, and I'd like to see it. Tell me 1 thing you'd hand to AI tomorrow and 1 thing you never will.

Next week I'm showing you the HQ I run my business from, and I've got something free for you. If you want help drawing your line across the whole business before then, grab a time with me.

Source: How to AI (Ruben Hassid), "One Claude", Oct 23, 2026.