By 2026, the artificial intelligence landscape facing business owners has settled from its early chaos into something more legible. The flood of novelty chatbots has given way to a clearer set of tools built for specific jobs. For Dr. Connor Robertson, an entrepreneur and strategic advisor based in Pittsburgh, the more useful question is no longer which tool is newest, but how a handful of them can be assembled into a system that works together.
Robertson’s central argument is that business owners often focus on the wrong question. Rather than asking which single tool is best, he suggests they start with the jobs they actually need done, then choose tools that connect into a coherent stack. In his view, the value of AI for a growing service business comes less from any one product than from how well a small set of them work together.
He tends to organize that thinking around a few core functions rather than around brand names. The first is content and communication. For drafting, editing, and long-form work, Robertson relies on large language models, and he uses more than one because they have different strengths. In his experience, some handle nuanced, context-heavy writing and complicated instructions more gracefully, while others are quicker for structured, templated output. Instead of committing to a single model, he routes each task to whichever tool suits it, treating them as complementary rather than interchangeable.
A second function is automation, which he describes as the connective tissue that moves information between systems without anyone touching it. Here, he points to workflow automation platforms, noting that simpler setups are quick to build while more involved operational workflows benefit from tools that offer granular control and lower costs at higher volume. His advice is to begin with one or two straightforward automations and to expand only as the operation genuinely demands it, rather than trying to automate everything at once.
Meeting intelligence is a third. For service businesses where conversations drive follow-up work, Robertson values tools that transcribe meetings automatically, surface action items, and sync summaries into the customer database. He considers that the documentation step is one of the most persistent bottlenecks in service work. Automating it, in his view, frees a team to act on what was said rather than spending its energy trying to capture it.
Research and synthesis is a fourth. For competitive intelligence, market research, and due diligence on prospects, Robertson favors AI research tools that pull current information from the web and cite their sources, because verifiability matters when real decisions rest on the findings. Being able to see where each claim came from, he argues, is what separates useful research from confident guesswork, and it is the reason he treats sourcing as a requirement rather than a nicety.
The fifth function is customer relationship management and pipeline. Robertson leans toward platforms that combine automation, communication, and pipeline management in a single system priced for growing businesses rather than large enterprises. Such tools are not always the simplest to learn, he acknowledges, but for a service business trying to automate its client-facing operations, the completeness can be worth the initial learning curve.
What ties his approach together is the idea of the stack rather than the tool. In Robertson’s framing, the most effective setup is a connected set in which content generation, automation, customer management, meeting intelligence, and research feed one another and behave as a single system. Any one of these tools in isolation, he suggests, delivers only a fraction of the value it does once it is wired into the others. The tools he happens to use, including large language models for writing, automation platforms for workflow, and an all-in-one system for pipeline and communication, matter less than the fact that they are connected.
That perspective also shapes the advice he gives owners who feel overwhelmed by the pace of new releases. Rather than chasing every tool that trends, he encourages them to identify the functions their business truly depends on, adopt one capable tool for each, and then invest the real effort in connecting them. The speed of AI, in his telling, rewards a clear system far more than a large collection of disconnected subscriptions.
For business owners navigating a field that still produces new tools every week, that may be the most durable takeaway. The advantage is unlikely to come from owning the newest tool. It is far more likely to come from building a connected stack that quietly does the work, and then leaving it to run.
About the Author
Dr. Connor Robertson is an entrepreneur, author, and strategic advisor based in Pittsburgh. He is the founder of Elixir Consulting Group and host of The Prospecting Show. More about his work is available at drconnorrobertson.com.
