The AI Pragmatist approach: When a robot makes a surprisingly better editor than a human
Marita, a small business owner specializing in clinical counselling, came to us with a website that wasn’t converting as many referrals as she hoped. She had a practical budget constraint to work within.
Here’s where Chaime saw AI helping her… and where she still 100% needed a human.
Marita Poll is a clinical counsellor who specializes in helping people navigate cancer, grief and palliative caregiving. When Chaime first helped her develop her website several years ago, we did it the “old fashioned way”… no AI whatsoever.
At Chaime, we often have clients who come to us imagining that technology is the why (“I need a website” or “I need SEO”). We like to flip that around and ask them the right questions so that we might understand their real “why and then identify how technology can be part of a creative solution to help them achieve their vision.
When we began to transition into a new phase of ongoing maintenance support for Marita in 2026, we took an AI pragmatist approach. Chaime’s advice was grounded in the strategic vision we had helped her develop around her bigger goals as a business owner, her desire for range of support, and her comfort with technology.
The AI pragmatist approach
Marita identified that she missed the push back we would give her on her content to help it align with her goals from when we were first building the site out together. We suggested instead of engaging us to help with the full content review cycle, an AI review of the content before sending it to ask for development changes to be made might be helpful.
An AI enthusiast approach might have been to help her learn to use AI to make changes to the website herself. For Marita, this wasn’t the right choice. She’s confident drafting the content herself. And although she’s open to learning new things, she’s not interested in spending her time on making the changes on the site. That’s the part she wants to delegate! She trusts Chaime’s preferred partner, Laura Cooper, to make the changes and deal with the technical pieces. For a more technical person who was struggling to craft their value proposition, the opposite would probably have been true: handle the tech changes yourself, but let’s get you a skilled person to help you craft the content.
An AI avoidant approach would have been totally ok here too: either continuing to offer this strategic feedback to her at an hourly rate, or finding another person who is interested and available to help her with this. Many Chaime clients are more comfortable with this approach, and have the budget or business goals to support this path.
However, knowing her budget and that she is in a steady state in her business, starting to wind slowly down into retirement, budget-wise this may not be the best outcome. Often this took several rounds of detailed edits to get somewhere she was happy with. That would have been a pretty expensive proposition for the actual potential payoff client-wise.
Why AI and not a content editor?
Could this feedback have been provided by a content writer/editor? 100%. Can AI do it all for her? Nope, that’s not the suggestion here.
What Chaime saw was that, Marita as a very small, semi-retired business owner didn’t have the budget to pay for both a content editor and a developer as separate vendors. She actually didn’t even know what to call the services we were providing to her until they went away! She just thought it was part of the package of getting website changes made.
Our theory at Chaime is that there’s a psychological trick AI content review seems to provide: it’s not personal in the same way that review from a human is.
The ego part just hits different when a robot tells you than when a human being does. Even though it’s not true, we imagine that AI is “neutral” somehow… and that it doesn’t have an agenda. It’s easier to dismiss the parts you don’t agree with as “pffft, AI being stupid” and take in the things that are hard to hear in a way that isn’t the same when a human says them.
This is particularly useful for small business owners and founders, when attachment to their idea and business is inherently personal and often hard to articulate fully.
AI is also particularly well-trained on this kind of content challenge. All it’s doing behind the scenes is matching on a statistical level how close of a match things are… looking at the difference between your prompt and what it would make to match that, and your existing content. It’s not magic. It’s just math!
In Marita’s case, her goal as a counsellor is so incredibly human-centered. AI was able to point out a mismatch between her home page and the rest of her site, and suggest small word choice changes without changing the meaning.
She was then able to tweak those suggestions to stay within her authentic tone of voice. Because it was starting with her own well thought out and crafted content, the suggestions it made weren’t generic or off-brand.
The Outcome
A few weeks later Marita reported back with a self-deprecating laugh:
“Thank you for the suggestion of getting AI to review the content. It told me I need to talk less about myself and more about what they would get from me.”
The AI had told her:
I think this could realistically become a 9.5/10 website with editing rather than a complete rewrite.
Overall, my impression is that your website reflects who you are as a clinician: experienced, thoughtful, grounded, and deeply committed to your work. That comes through clearly. However, I also think your website significantly undersells you. If I didn’t already know your background, I would not realize that you’ve spent almost 20 years counselling at BC Cancer and have developed a rare level of expertise in serious illness, grief, caregiving, and clinical supervision. I think you could attract considerably more of the clients you most enjoy working with by changing how you present yourself rather than changing who you are.
The biggest issue: your website is written primarily from your perspective rather than the visitor’s.
So, she changed her landing page.
Before:
My name is Marita Poll and I am a Registered Clinical Counsellor and an Approved Clinical Supervisor with the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors practicing in Victoria, BC. I provide individual counselling either in-person, by telephone, or virtually.
After:
Whether you are living with cancer, grieving someone you love, caring for someone living with a serious health issue, or navigating a significant life transition, you do not have to face it alone. These experiences can leave us feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, disconnected from ourselves, or unsure how to move forward.
Counselling offers a place to slow down, understand the complexity of what is happening, and discover new ways of coping while reconnecting with yourself. For over 20 years, I have had the privilege of counselling people living with cancer and their families through diagnosis, treatment, survivorship, recurrence, advanced illness, and grief.
My name is Marita Poll. I am a Registered Clinical Counsellor and an Approved Clinical Supervisor with the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors, practicing in Victoria, B.C. I provide individual counselling for adults either in-person, by telephone, or virtually.
Still her own experience. Still her own writing. Still her authentic voice. Much more centered on her clients’ needs first.
🛎️
Chaime didn’t help Marita by writing the AI prompt, doing the AI review, or making the website changes… although we would have if that was what we identified she needed!
Chaime helped Marita identify that the right move for her specific context and budget was to do that for herself. In doing so, we saved her thousands over the next few years.
This kind of strategic visioning support starts at $500 CAD. If you’re looking for this kind of support, we’d be happy to chat.