AI for Solopreneurs: Beyond the Unicorn Hype

According to the AI hype machine, there’s a new race afoot. It was memorialized in a recent article of The Economist titled, “The Rise of the Solopreneur: How AI Could Create the First One-Person Unicorn.”

For those keeping score at home, a “Unicorn” is Silicon Valley parlance for a privately held startup company valued at $1 billion. The warped thinking of the hype machine goes like this: With the ubiquitous rise of semi-autonomous AI “agents,” will come the rise of the first solopreneur to reach the lofty heights of unicorndom.

But don’t hold your breath.

I just heard Ryan Levesque point to a 2025 MIT study titled “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025” which found that 95% of generative-AI pilot projects in enterprises fail to deliver a measurable return on investment, despite the billions pumped into attempts to integrate AI into existing workflows, in plug-and-play fashion.

It turns out it’s not that easy.

Leveraging AI requires forethought because (big surprise) human work is based on effective coordination, communication, and collaboration between teams of (ahem) humans. Looks like you can’t send a droid to do a human’s job after all.

The MIT study forces us to rethink our approach to using AI tools. As Levesque suggests, it’s not about replacing our work, but about using the technology to let us do our best work, and give the world more of what each of us can uniquely provide.

So if you’re a solopreneur, disregard the hype. Don’t buy into narrative that there can be such a thing as a one-person unicorn. Instead, focus on being the rare business owner who integrates AI soberly, knowing its strengths and weaknesses, its pros and its massive cons, and doing all that without losing yourself or your clients’ trust in the process.

Here are a few suggestions on how to use AI more productively as a solopreneur:

1. Use AI as a research assistant, not a CEO

Too many entrepreneurs expect AI to hand them a turnkey solution (just press start). That’s not how it works. AI can scan thousands of documents, summarize case studies, and synthesize market reports in seconds. But you’ll still need to interpret the results. Your intellect, values and strengths are the filter required to make meaning from the information and to turn it into productive action. You set the pace for the machine, not the other way around.

Consider a small cleaning service company targeting Airbnb hosts. Such a company might use AI to scrape and cluster reviews in Miami; the pattern may show that “timeliness” and “communication” matter more to potential customers than price. That insight is valuable—but it’s worthless unless you build a service promise and operations around it.

You, the human, are the indispensable key to the success of your collaboration with AI.

2. Automate the repetitive but never (ever) your soul

AI excels at repetitive tasks—scheduling, drafting boilerplate documents, transcribing notes. Reclaiming those hours is valuable. But the temptation is to over-delegate and outsource your voice to a language model. The result is bland copy that could’ve been written by anyone. Keep the heart work—your story, your values, your tone—as uniquely human as possible. If you’re besieged by repetitive, low-level tasks, consider eliminating them altogether by redesigning your work. If you can’t, then consider handing them off to the machine.

3. Prototype fast, but don’t rush

AI makes it stupid cheap to spin up logos, landing pages, mockups, etc (though you may often find the quality of those deliverables lacking). But that rapid prototyping means nothing until customers engage with it, and that’s a leader’s job to handle and can’t be rushed. You can use AI to accelerate v. 0.9 of your offering; but it will take plenty of human engagement and feedback to shape v. 1.0. Use AI to help you iterate with customers, don't use AI in a vacuum.

4. Personalize at human scale

Look, you don’t need Amazon-grade personalization. You might use AI to help you draft personalized outreach, segment by interests, and track details that matter. A dog-walking solopreneur in Brickell can log that one client’s golden retriever is thunder-shy while another’s Frenchie needs extra water breaks. That remembered detail can lead to customer loyalty so why not put AI to help you with those details?

5. AI is a tool, not a strategy

Tools can change frequently but strategy has a longer half-life. If your strategy is “reliable, high-quality turnover cleans with excellent communication for Airbnb super hosts,” then AI is just support for the tactics—automated scheduling, proactive messages, streamlined invoices. The trust and communication remain human. Always.

6. Choose the “AI stack” that’s right for you

Copying someone else’s stack or engaging with AI like others do is a trap. Think in terms of the jobs-I-personally-need-to-be-done. A sane starter stack might look like this:

• A writing assistant for rough drafts or editing.
• Transcription for calls and site visits.
• A lightweight analytics helper to summarize sales and support threads.
• A simple chatbot or scripted FAQ for common questions.

That’s it. Simple, affordable, sustainable, useful. Use the tools that make sense to you. Leave the FOMO to others.

7. Beware the “one-person unicorn” mirage

The media may love to propagate the myth but the real world runs on teams, on contractors, on collaborators, and on communities. Even “solo” stars have an invisible bench. Because no one can do it alone. Chasing that myth often leads to isolation and burnout. And worse yet, you open the door to being dependent on the mega corporations who (let’s be honest) don’t give whit about you or me. The more you rely on them, the more they got you where they want you. The smarter play is to build a people-powered ecosystem. Build resilience through your relationships. Use AI to extend your reach but work with people to bolster resilience.

8. Beware the surveillance state: protect your data, privacy, client trust, and IP

I would be hugely remiss if I didn’t mention this oft-ignored point: AI companies are spying on you. As a result, if we want to collaborate with these tools we need to do so with the utmost care. As I wrote last week in my discussion about Karen Hao’s new book, Empire of AI, the creators of these technologies are of dubious moral character and the tools they create are not our friends. Be extremely mindful about what you share with an AI model. Treat confidentiality—yours and your customers’—with the utmost respect.

Some thoughts for more advanced users include the following :

Minimize and mask. Don’t paste raw personal or client docs or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) into LLM chat boxes, or give agents access to such information. Change or redact names, addresses, financials, etc; use placeholders instead. Summarize sensitive sections before asking an AI to help. Don't nakedly share all your ideas.

Choose the right mode. If you must, use vendors’ no-training/zero-retention settings or enterprise accounts for sensitive work. For the most sensitive material, use local or self-hosted tools instead.

Lock down access. Never put API keys from AI models in prompts or code repositories. Use the principle of least privilege (minimum level of access) and rotate (i.e. periodically replace) API keys, passwords and other credentials.

Own your terms. If applicable, consider updating contracts and proposals with an AI clause: what data you will/won’t share, how it’s protected, and client consent for any AI-assisted processing. Include a Data Processing Agreement (DPA) when appropriate.

Control the outputs. Set chat/export retention rules. Separate drafts from source documents. Keep a versioned content repository so original IP isn’t lost in model-generated blends.

Don’t blindly trust outputs. AI models and agents make mistakes, quite frequently in fact. They may seem brilliant but often produce incredibly sloppy work. Keep that in mind and review AI outputs carefully.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Don't trust AI. Verify veracity.

9. The real promise: freedom, not valuation

Most solopreneurs—like yours truly—don’t actually want a billion-dollar valuation. Because it's lunacy.

What we want is freedom: meaningful work, sane hours, the space to live (really live!) and to make a very handsome living. AI is a tool that can possibly help—by shaving busywork, helping you surfacing insights, and letting you scale just enough. But if you fall for the hype, if you let the algorithm designed by the Tech Bros dictate your days, you’re cooked. You’ll have traded one boss for another.

The takeaway is simple.

The hype will keep coming. And fast! Every week, a new headline declares the dawn of AI-powered everything while others declare our impending destruction at the hands of a super artificial general intelligence. It’s all B.S.

The truth is more grounded. And all too human.

Bottom line: AI is no panacea. No miracle. It’s just the fast bicycle Steve Jobs used to talk about. It helps you go further, faster—but only if you know where you’re going and protect the trust that keeps customers coming back.

As solopreneurs, our real power is being small, nimble, and deeply human. In a world of machine-generated noise, our authenticity, our humanity, and our caring leadership will become ever scarcer resources. And that’s what customers will increasingly pay for.

So use AI, wisely. Learn what it can and can’t do well. Go ahead and try to strip away the busywork. Illuminate customer needs. Prototype ideas quickly. But all the while, guard your clients’ data like it’s your own. Then step back, go into the arena and do the one thing AI can never do: BE YOU.

Who cares about becoming the first one-person unicorn? Not us. But building a thriving, profitable, purpose-driven, trusted solo business? Yes, please! That’s well within reach for anyone who puts AI in its rightful place—as a tool, not a master.