The One Thing AI Still Can’t Do (And You Do Every Day)
A new essay by Eleanor Warnock at Every makes the argument that the most valuable thing left in business isn’t data — it’s tacit knowledge. It’s what we know but can’t quite verbalize well enough to type into a search bar.
That is exactly what happens in your store.
When Mrs. Henderson walks in and you already know she wants the LINNEA Crushed Mint for her daughter’s July birthday — that knowledge doesn’t live in any spreadsheet. It lives in the conversation she had with you in April, when she mentioned her daughter loves mint.
The philosopher Michael Polanyi, quoted in the essay, said: “We can know more than we can tell.” That’s your store, in five words.
AI can search. Only you can notice.
The trick is capturing what you notice before it’s gone — or your team forgets. Once a day, pull everyone together for five minutes — what did you see, what did customers say, what sold. Record it on a voice memo. Your phone will transcribe it. Paste the transcript into Claude or ChatGPT and ask what patterns are showing up this week.
That is the loop. Your team notices. The voice memo captures. AI turns the day’s conversations into a store note, a social caption, a buying call. These little bits of knowledge compound over time.
AI will help you make sense of it all and use it when you can’t remember what to write next — in an email, on IG, or on your website.
Figuring out how to capture what matters, what differentiates you — and then understanding how to use AI to help you with that data will set your store apart in ways you never realized.
xoxo,
❤️ AmyFay
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