Most people wonder. Very few ask.

 

If you are about to hand someone your business, it is fair to want to know whether a person is doing the thinking or a machine is. So here is the whole answer, before you have to ask for it.

 

 

What I use

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Three tools: Claude, NotebookLM, and Gemini. Claude is my first choice, and the other two do specific jobs.

 

I am not going to pretend otherwise or bury it in a policy. If you are hiring me partly because I understand this territory, you should be able to see exactly how I work inside it.

 

 

What I use them for

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Research. This is the big one. The rules, costs and requirements that shape a small business change constantly, and there is more information out there than any one person can read in a month. These tools let me cover that ground in weeks instead of months. That is not a shortcut around the work. It is the reason the work arrives when I say it will.

 

Summarising my own thinking. I dictate a great deal. I talk through what I have seen, what it points to, and what I am still unsure about, and I use these tools to bring my own scattered thinking into order.

 

Getting it onto the page. I do not type out every word myself. I have built my own writing style into how I work, so what comes back sounds like me rather than like anyone else. Then I read every line of it and change what needs changing.

 

 

What never goes in

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Your name. Your contact details. Your documents. Anything private you have shared with me.

 

Here is how that works in practice, because the promise means nothing without the method.

 

When your materials arrive, I read them myself. All of them, one at a time. As I go, I dictate my own notes about what I am seeing: what makes sense, what raises a question, how it all fits together. It is those notes I work from afterwards. Your actual documents never get uploaded anywhere.

 

When I do talk through your situation, I do not use your name. I say 'she,' 'he,' 'them,' or I describe the business by type and country and nothing more, or I describe the situation without either. Even on a busy day, even when it would be faster not to bother.

 

Training is switched off on every tool I use, and every account is under my sole control. Nothing you share with me is used to build, train or improve anything.

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The one exception is a call transcript, if you agree to one, and I have set that out under "Our calls" below. 

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What I check

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Everything.

 

If I tell you a rule applies to your business, I have read the source it came from, and you get that source alongside the finding so you can read it yourself. If a source does not hold up, it does not reach you. If I cannot confirm something, I say so plainly rather than sounding sure.

 

That last one matters more than it sounds. These tools are confident whether or not they are correct, and the whole value of what I hand you is that you can trust it. So the checking is not a formality at the end. It is most of the job.

 

 

Where my judgment sits

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There are two kinds of thing in any plan I write, and I keep them clearly apart.

 

Findings are facts about the world. What a rule requires, what something costs, what a process involves. These are sourced and cited, and you can verify every one of them without me.

 

Judgment is my view on what you should do. Which thing to tackle first. What I would choose in your position, and why. This is not research and I never dress it up as research. It is my opinion, formed from years of walking alongside business owners, and it is labelled as mine so you can weigh it as you like.

 

No tool makes the second kind. That is the work you are actually hiring me for.

 

 

Our calls

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If we have a video call, I do not record it. Not video, not audio.

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What I may do, if you are happy with it, is run a transcription tool as a backup, so I can check my handwritten notes against it if I think I have missed something. I will ask before the call starts and tell you which tool I would be using. If you would rather I did not, I will not. I take handwritten notes during every call regardless.

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No recording is created. The transcript is held under my sole control, is never shared with anyone, and is deleted on the same ninety-day schedule as everything else. The detail is in my privacy policy.

 

 

What I will not pretend

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I am not going to promise you I will do this work without AI.

 

I could say it, and it would sound reassuring, and it would not be true. Research at the depth I do it, in the time I promise it, is not something I could do by hand. If I stopped, you would wait months instead of weeks, and you would get less.

 

What I will promise is this. No tool decides anything. No tool sees your private information. Nothing reaches you that I have not read, checked and stood behind. The thinking is mine, and so is the responsibility for it.

 

 

If you would rather I worked differently

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If there is any part of your business where you would prefer I did not use these tools, tell me and I will work around it if I can. You do not need to explain why.

 

And if you have a question about any of this that I have not answered here, ask me. I would far rather have that conversation than have you wondering.

 

 

 

This is the same standard I would help you set in your own business. Clear about what the tools do, clear about what stays human, and written down so nobody has to guess.

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Warmly,

Elina