The problem AI just made impossible to ignore

Recently, I was presenting a webinar on AI for family businesses. Halfway through, I started talking about customer personas — a tool for getting the knowledge in your head into a format AI can use effectively.

It must have struck a chord, because the chat lit up.

Afterward, an attendee emailed me to say she had taken eight pages of notes. She also had a question: she works for a family business, and she wanted to know how to build a persona for their customers.

Then, almost as an aside, she described exactly how she’d do it. She’d interview the owners. She’d interview the contractors. She’d talk to their longest-tenured clients and their newest ones. She had an HR background, so she even had some questions in mind that had worked well in that context.

She already knew how to do it. She just didn’t know she knew.

The knowledge was always there

That’s the thing about customer knowledge in a family business. You have it in abundance. It’s just never been made visible. And in many cases, it’s never been seen as uniquely valuable.

I think this is one of the reasons the customer persona struck such a chord. It speaks to a problem that predates AI by generations: the knowledge that makes a business distinctive lives in people, not systems. I wrote recently about how AI is the latest version of a test family businesses have always faced: every generation has to decide what to absorb and what to protect. The customer knowledge gap is the specific version of that test most family businesses are running into right now.

AI makes this long-standing problem urgent in a new way. When you ask an AI tool to do work that requires knowing your customer, and it produces something generic, the gap is jarring.

A customer persona document is a way to make tacit, hidden knowledge visible and usable — yes, by AI tools, but also by anyone on your team. The process of building one helps solve the root problem.

The attendee who emailed me had a strong framework already in her head:

• Interview the owners. Pull the knowledge from people who have dealt with your customers for decades. What hasn’t changed? What has? What patterns do they see, what words resonate, what objections do they hear?
• Interview long-tenured customers. Get the language your longest and best customers use to describe you. Compare it to how you want to be known. What’s aligned? What isn’t?
• Interview new customers. Why do people buy from you today? How do their reasons and language differ from those of longtime customers?

The real value is in the process

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the real value of this work isn’t the output. It’s the process of articulation.

Recently, a founder who had been unable to delegate a specific task went through this work and was able to use ChatGPT for it. The output was so good, she used it verbatim.

The win wasn’t really about AI at all. She finally had to say out loud what she’d been keeping in her head for decades. That kind of articulation is transferable to the next generation, to a new hire, to team members who’ve been trying to replicate her judgment and haven’t been able to.

One comment from the webinar chat put it well: “Knowledge transfer in any size business can be a huge issue. I previously worked in a large healthcare organization. Every June, there would be a wave of retirements, and so much of what had made us great wasn’t documented. When those with the stories aren’t there, values and culture shift.”

If you’d like a walkthrough on building a customer persona for your business, you can download our step-by-step guide to building an AI Audience Persona here.