AI in Business - A conversation between a marketer and a lawyer

There is a lot of noise around AI right now. A lot of hype, a fair bit of fear, and quite a lot of confusion.

If you’ve found yourself nodding along to that sentence, this conversation is for you.

I sat down with Jenny Wade, Partner and Head of Commercial at Swinburne Maddison, to talk about AI in business. Not from a technical perspective. Not in a way that’s designed to overwhelm you. Just two people who spend a lot of time talking to business owners, hearing the same questions come up again and again, sharing what we’re actually seeing.

Between a marketing lens and a legal one, we cover a lot of ground. If you’ve got 40 minutes, the full recording is worth a listen. If you haven’t, here’s what we got into.

Using AI to get more value from your content

One of the biggest misconceptions I come across is that using AI for content means letting it do all the work. That’s where a lot of the soulless, copy-paste posts you scroll past on LinkedIn come from.

What I actually encourage my clients to do is use it as a tool to stretch what they already have. This recording is a great example. Take something like this — a real conversation with genuine insight — extract the transcript, give the AI a really clear, precise prompt, and you can turn one piece of content into a blog post, social content, or an email newsletter. The idea came from you. The value is yours. AI helps you get more mileage out of it.

The keyword there is precise. The quality of what comes out is directly linked to the quality of what you put in. Vague instructions get vague results.

What to be careful about — especially from a legal perspective

Jenny has some really valuable views on this, and it’s worth listening to her examples in full. The short version: what you put in matters enormously.

AI tools don’t know your market, your sector, your jurisdiction, or your confidential information — unless you tell them. And if you do tell them, you need to be sure you’re doing so safely. Jenny talks through a great example of a client who used AI to review a contract and ended up with a document full of recommendations based on UAE and US law. What should have been a straightforward job became a much more complex and costly one.

Her advice isn’t to avoid it. It’s to put the right parameters around it, use reputable tools, and treat it the way you’d treat any other supplier — do your due diligence before you hand over anything sensitive.

Start with the problem, not the technology

“We need to use AI, or we’ll get left behind.”

Both Jenny and I are hearing this a lot. And while the enthusiasm is great, it’s not a strategy.

The better starting point is to ask: what is the actual problem I’m trying to solve? Do I need more capacity? Better business intelligence? A more efficient content process? Start there, and then work backwards. AI might be the answer. It might not be. But at least you’re making a decision that’s right for your business, not just following the crowd.

We also talk about the importance of working with the right partners — whether that’s a technology partner, a digital transformation specialist, or someone who can help you build an AI policy that actually makes sense for how you work.

And one more thing worth knowing about

We also touched on something that doesn’t get talked about enough: bias in AI. The data that trains these tools reflects the world as it has been — not necessarily as it should be. Through my work with Women in Tech North East, I’m seeing this play out in real ways, from recruitment tools that penalise women’s football team membership on CVs, to AI assuming a user is male during a career conversation and responding accordingly.

It’s not a reason to avoid the tools. It is a reason to stay involved in the process, sense-check the outputs, and not take anything at face value.

Listen to the full conversation

If any of this resonates — or if you’ve got questions you’d love to have heard us answer — the full recording is above. We’d both love to hear from you.