In this YouTube video, Elliott Botterill, co‑owner and CMO of Entrepreneur Circle (a business generating roughly £1 million per month), argues that most AI usage in small‑to‑medium businesses is a "scam" because the abundance of AI‑generated content erodes its market value. He opens with a dramatic claim that AI tools are being mis‑applied, then explains a universal law of scarcity: anything abundant loses value. Using a historical anecdote about aluminium’s shift from rare luxury to cheap foil, he illustrates how AI’s easy, cheap output devalues marketing assets, leading to audience fatigue (e.g., LinkedIn’s AI‑slop reports). He contrasts this with a counter‑trend: as AI‑produced material floods the market, genuinely human‑crafted content becomes scarce and therefore more valuable. Botterill shares a concrete case study from his own company: after months of AI‑scripted Meta ads, performance dropped; switching to unscripted, off‑the‑cuff, selfie‑style videos dramatically improved results. He then provides a practical framework for using AI correctly: 1) identify the current business constraint (demand vs capacity), 2) map detailed workflows before automating, 3) measure AI spend against incremental revenue, and 4) avoid bright‑shiny‑object syndrome by only deploying AI where it solves the identified constraint. Throughout, he emphasizes preserving the “human brand” and authenticity while leveraging AI for efficiency, not for replacing human creativity. The video ends with a call for viewers to comment on their own AI experiences.
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AI might just be one of the biggest scams in a generation for business owners. In this video, I'm gonna show you exactly why most business owners are wasting their time faffing around with AI in the wrong way, and how we, a business that currently does around £1 million every single month, are using AI to properly grow us. So strap in, might get some hate for this one, but somebody needs to say it. Hello, welcome back to the YouTube channel. My name is Elliot. Co-owner and chief marketing officer here at Entrepreneur Circle, where we currently do around a million pounds every month. Obligatory display of my ad tracking software. Quick refresh just so you can see I'm not totally full of crap. Revenue yesterday thirty four k last thirty days. Do do do do do around one two seven nine. Okay, so what's prompted me to make this video is. Seeing how many freaking people are doing so much stuff with AI. And I put out a reel on my Instagram talking about why AI is a scam. And look, it's a bit tongue-in-cheek, it's a bit clickbaity, but the point here is very valid and very true. Most people are using it in a truly terrible way, and most AI is a freaking waste of time, and most AI actually is a scam for the reasons I'm going to outline now. Artificial intelligence burst on the scene a few years ago and was truly transformative. And I, as a marketer— I ran an advertising agency at the time— jumped on it so quick, an early user of ChatGPT. And it blew my little mind, the stuff that we were able to create in those early days. All of a sudden, creating ads, emails, speccing out landing pages, all stuff that took a lot of time to learn how to do properly and then actually sit there and write, we can now do at the click of our fingers. And this was magnificent. And for a time, there was a real value shift because we could output so much more. I did a whole presentation to a whole freaking auditorium of agency owners in London talking about how this has changed the agency business model because our potential revenue per employee has now gone through the freaking roof because AI can enable one person to do the job of like 5 to 10 people. And whilst many of that is very good logic and remains true, the reality right now is a little bit different. So let me try and explain. So to understand why most AI is a scam, you must first understand the universal law that governs the world and reality in which we operate in. And the universal law states, anything that is abundant is inherently not valuable, whereas anything that is scarce inherently is valuable. valuable. And this is really important. Dramatic pause. You see, I love this story of Napoleon in the 1800s. This was around the time they discovered aluminium. And at the time, aluminium was very hard to get and refine. It's very difficult. And as a result, it was perceived as rarer and more valuable than gold because it was more scarce. And so Napoleon, at his dinner parties, would give his most esteemed and prestigious guests Aluminium cutlery, whereas all of the rest of his guests who were less important, less valued, they would have to make do with gold. Okay, how funny is that? Then some clever chap came along and invented electrolysis, and all of a sudden the process of refining aluminium became an absolute piece of piss. And so what do we do with aluminium these days? We freaking wrap our sandwiches with it. Foil. Because it became so abundant, its value absolutely plummeted. And this is the problem with most AI tools, and it's why most AI is a scam. Because just because you now have tools at your disposal that can write your emails, that can post all of your social content, create all of your graphics, and do everything incredibly easy, that does not make it valuable. And actually, the reason good adverts, good emails, good landing pages, good marketing campaigns, good videos, good pieces of content like used to be valuable is because they were hard to produce. They required a lot of mental energy and physical energy to actually create. And you could only normally create this stuff if you had put in the time and effort into developing the skills and gathering the experience to actually speak about the thing. So in a world where anybody can now just press a button and produce these assets for their business in next to no time, for next to no effort, with next to no cost, Do we think the value holds? The answer is no, not as the market at large begins to use it. So when everybody's creating all of this stuff, all of a sudden the value starts to plummet. And we're seeing this already. You've seen this on LinkedIn. LinkedIn now has a freaking AI slop report button on all the posts because ChatGPT and LinkedIn tools destroyed the value of the feed because it was just flooded with all this bollocks that everybody knows nobody has fucking written. So trust has diminished and now it's just a pain in the ass. It's an eyesore. Okay, the complete value of LinkedIn in many cases plummeted as a result of that. And we've seen this in adverts as well— AI-generated content, AI-generated videos, all of this stuff that's flooding the platforms that used to get tremendous results. These concepts, if you made them manually, now less effective generally. And so the primary reason most AI tools are now a scam is that they make you produce stuff in a way that is actually no longer valuable to the market. Because anything that enables you to produce things really easily, that is made so accessible to so many people, the inherent value of that stuff starts to diminish. Um, and all of the value starts to flow to the very small number of people that are doing things a different way, that are doing things a harder way. This is a good example of power laws. Power laws again govern the world in which we operate with. And what it shows us is that all the rewards in any given market are not equally distributed. You have the vast majority that are gonna share a very small proportion, and then you're gonna get a very small number that effectively reap all the rewards. And so my primary argument here is that most AI tools enable you to play around in this little pond here where you're doing the same stuff as everybody else, and that's bad. Now, is there a place for AI tools? Yes, I use loads of AI and I'll show you how I think about it and how we use it. So this brings me to the human value shift, the next thing that you need to understand. And this is the idea that in a world where robots are now producing everything, the value is swinging back to the stuff that is produced by humans. It's almost a classic supply and demand curve here. And as the supply of AI driven stuff goes through the freaking roof, the demand for human-created stuff actually starts to increase. It's a counterintuitive paradox. And this almost ties into our need as humans to want what is rare, to seek the things that are inherently scarce, because we know that is where the value lies, almost within us. And so the AI tools that strip people of their soul, that strip people of their humanity, of their authenticity, are the tools that are causing harm. And it is my belief that as a business owner, your human brand needs to be the beating heart and soul of your enterprise, of the way that you show up in the world. And artificial intelligence has made it far too easy to outsource all of our thinking, all of our strategy, and all of our production to these robots to do it in the way that they predict is best. And as a result, the people that challenge that and are actually creating stuff manually with their own humanity are the ones that I truly believe stand to gain. And we've seen this ourselves. So we, we've used loads of AI. This comes from someone who is super AI person. And so for example, in our marketing team, we would produce a large volume of ads. We spend about $100 grand a month on Meta ads right now. And we would script the Meta ads using AI, using some quite complex prompt sequences. And we would then film videos of these scripts and publish them at decent, again, decent, decent volumes. And about 8 months ago, we noticed our AI-generated ads started to really go down in performance. And I thought this was really strange. And so we started freestyling some proper, uh, what I'd kind of describe as organic, off-the-cuff ads where no scripts, just ideas. We go outside and very humanly speak them, and they started to absolutely rip, and they started to massively outperform all of our AI-generated stuff. And that was my first sense that, hold on a second, people are getting used to these AI-generated patterns. And when you use AI, even in advanced ways, your chance of slightly losing your soul and slipping into these patterns that people are slowly becoming numb to starts to increase. And actually, one of the greatest things you can do is just be a real human. And it's why nearly all of our top-performing ads in the last 12 months are actually selfie-style videos of us Walking along outside talking. It's why I try and do videos like this, like raw talk where no script, try and do it in one take with my little setup here and just talk. Is it as dialed in as it could be? No. Could I optimize my speech and points for better retention? Yeah, I definitely could. But I'm presenting, I'm showing up in the most human form under the belief that actually there is some place for that in this market. Comment below. What do you think? Am I going mad? Or do you agree? So with all that said and done, here's how to actually use AI properly. Because despite it being a scam, despite there being so many tools that you don't need, you do, you do need AI. And I don't see any reasonable scenario where a business survives without properly embedding it in their organization. But the keyword is properly, okay? Properly. So we use AI for efficiency, but we never lose our soul. That's the fundamental And so how do we do this in practice? Well, number one, as the business owner, your job is to understand what is the constraint right now. Do you have a demand constraint, i.e., not enough customers, or do you have a capacity constraint, i.e., you can't fulfill for the volume of customers right now? It's one of the two. And then let's go a level deeper. What's causing that? That is your fundamental job role as the business owner. Find the constraint and allocate resource towards it, because the biggest problem with AI is it taps into Bright shiny object syndrome, which is actually point number four. Just because you can doesn't mean you fucking should. Just because you can set up an AI tool that does all this stuff doesn't mean you should. And I've lost count of the amount of conversations with business owners where they are producing and launching all of these freaking agents. And guess what? They're making approximately zero extra dollars because they're building all this shit because they can. Not because it solves the constraint. And that is the biggest risk with AI for so many people. Find out what the constraint is first and then use AI to help you solve it. I also believe now in workflow mapping, something I heard, uh, Hormozi and his team talk a lot about, especially when I was at one of their workshops a few weeks ago. When you have a need for a person or a role within a business, first begin by mapping out the workflows that we want created. So, you know, the literal step-by-step actions they would do to produce certain end results. This is really key because if you don't understand the work that you actually want doing, then again, your use of AI to improve your business is going to suck because you're going to do whatever the AI can do rather than what's actually helpful for the business. So you want to get very good at visually mapping all the workflows, and then you can use your knowledge and experiment with AI tools to help enhance these steps. We can see, can AI help us do it faster or can it help us do it better? And these are really great ways to actually embed it and use it. But it starts by having a visual of the work that we want doing, all of the steps, and indeed the output. Then you've got to measure. The crudest measurement of a business is how much do you spend on AI, all of your tools, subscriptions, token usage, and how much additional revenue are you generating. 'Cause if your AI bills are going up and your revenue is staying flat or going down, you're probably working on the wrong stuff. But aside from that, we have to constantly evaluate how are the tools we are using actually growing our business. So every tool, every place within its workflow, we should be able to measure and look at, is this helping? Has this made us faster? Has this made stuff better or not? 'Cause sometimes, and we've had this, we use AI in a workflow and actually performance decreases. It makes things worse. We've had this a few times, but then we've also had it where it's made things amazingly better and it has genuinely helped us enhance the result. And so we're happy to keep investing. And so that's our ethos for how we look at AI within our business. And I don't get jealous. There's a lot of businesses out there who are so AI and they're trying to do so many AI things and their businesses are not growing at all. And I think when I reflect, we've been quite well placed. We're nowhere near as AI as we could be, but our business has grown a lot. And it's grown because we've used AI in the right ways and we've been very critical. And part of that is just because we don't have AI people and our leaders within our business, uh, we are kind of constrained with our time. And so we only use AI to help us tackle very difficult problems. So it's not like we've been some grand masterminds from the outset, um, but it has led us to a place where we use AI relatively sparingly, incredibly well thought through, and only in ways that measurably grow the business. So do you believe AI is a scam? Do you disagree with me? How are you using AI in your business? I wanna know. Drop a comment down below and thank you for tuning in. I'll see you on the next episode. Peace and love.
