Six months into the year, here's what one afternoon of looking honestly at something old taught me about how AI actually creates value.
We're at the halfway point of the year. For most people that shows up as a flicker of guilt—a reminder of resolutions that quietly died sometime around February. I decided to use it differently.
Six months in is exactly the right time to stop and ask: Is this still working, or have I just gotten used to it?
Today I did that with Why Run Today, the trail running and endurance documentary project I've been building outside of client work.
We spent the first part of the day going back to the strategy we set in January. We pulled the analytics. Looked at what actually worked and what didn't. Checked it against the goals we set and adjusted the plan where reality didn't match the assumptions.
One thing kept surfacing as a glaring weakness: the website.
If you visit WhyRunToday.com now, it'll look completely different than it did this morning.
It hadn't been touched since March of 2020. More than six years of stock photos sitting where real content should have been. A structure built for a version of the project that didn't have a YouTube channel yet, didn't have an Instagram audience, and didn't have any of the proof of what this thing had become.
We weren't going to find that by guessing.
We found it by reviewing.
The website wasn't the lesson. The review was.
Here's the part that actually matters—and the part that reminded me why I think so many people are using AI backwards.
Once we knew the website no longer matched the business, I didn't open Claude and say, "Redesign my website." That would have produced exactly what you'd expect: a generic homepage based on whatever assumptions the AI decided to make.
Instead, I gave it the strategy we'd just spent the morning refining. The goals. The audience. The direction. Then I asked what a single-scroll homepage should look like if it reflected that strategy instead of a six-year-old version of the project.
That's a completely different question.
One asks AI to make decisions for you.
The other asks AI to help execute decisions you've already made.
That's where AI creates the most value.
The build was never the bottleneck.
From there, everything moved quickly.
The stock photos disappeared because we finally have real footage. A new homepage video went in. The structure changed. The messaging changed. The site finally reflects the project we've actually built instead of the one we imagined back in 2020.
Once the thinking was done, the rebuild itself took about two hours.
That's the part worth sitting with.
The website wasn't six years out of date because rebuilding a website takes six years.
It was six years out of date because nobody had stopped to ask whether it still matched the business.
The build took two hours.
The review took six years.
I think that's true for a lot more than websites.
Businesses rarely struggle because they can't execute. They struggle because they're still executing yesterday's plan.
Put It to Work
If you've been reading AI-Fueled Growth, I hope you've built more than a collection of prompts this year.
Maybe you've created a marketing strategy.
A customer profile.
A messaging framework.
A content plan.
Or maybe you've simply had a long conversation with AI that helped you think more clearly about where your business is headed.
Don't start over.
Go find it.
Read through it again.
Then ask AI:
"We created this strategy about six months ago. Review it with me as if you were an outside advisor. Compare what we planned to what actually happened. Which assumptions still hold up? Which ones don't? What opportunities am I missing? What should I focus on during the second half of the year?"
If you've been tracking numbers, include those too. Sales. Website traffic. Leads. Customer feedback. Give AI evidence instead of guesses.
The businesses getting the most from AI aren't constantly asking it to create something new.
They're asking it to help them review, refine, and improve the thinking they've already done.
If you're curious what today's review produced, the rebuilt site is now live at WhyRunToday.com.
Take a look.
Not because it's a perfect website, but because it's a good example of what happens when strategy comes first and AI comes second.
When's the last time you looked—really looked—at something in your business you assumed was still working?