Can AI really write your book? Yes and no.
Let's cut to the chase: you've seen the spam. "AI writes your memoir in minutes!" "Upload your memories, download your legacy!" And you're wondering—quite reasonably—why you'd pay a human $75,000 to do what a computer claims it can do for fifty bucks a month.
Fair question. I wondered the same thing when ChatGPT first went viral. For about ten minutes, I seriously considered switching careers. (Alpaca farming seemed promising until I remembered I'm allergic to hay.)
But here's what I've learned after two years of watching AI memoir tools flood the market: there's a difference between generating 250 pages of words and creating a book that someone actually wants to read.
The problem with perfect efficiency
AI is spectacularly good at what it does. Feed it your career timeline, and it'll spit out 60,000 words of perfectly serviceable prose faster than you can say "disruptive innovation." The sentences will be grammatically correct. The chapters will follow a logical progression. It might even throw in some inspirational quotes about leadership.
What it won't do is notice that you got quiet when you mentioned your first layoffs. Or ask why you still keep that rejection letter from 1987 in your desk drawer. Or wonder what your wife really thought when you mortgaged the house to fund your startup.
AI works with the data you give it. But the best stories live in the spaces between the data—in the pause before you answer, the detail you almost didn't mention, the moment when your voice changes and you realize you've never told anyone this part.
The questions that matter
A client once mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that he used to practice his board presentations in his car on the way to work. Not a big deal, right? Just a throwaway detail.
Except when I asked why the car, he got quiet. Turns out his father had done the same thing—rehearsing sales calls while commuting to a job he hated. My client had spent thirty years building a company so he'd never have to practice presentations in parking lots like his dad did. But there he was, doing exactly the same thing.
That's your book right there. Not the IPO story or the acquisition tale—the human story about fathers and sons and the fears we inherit without knowing it.
AI would have filed "practices in car" under "preparation habits" and moved on. It can't get curious. It doesn't know which details matter until someone explains why they matter.
The authenticity problem
You've built something significant. You've made hard decisions, survived failures, learned lessons worth sharing. But here's the thing about wisdom: it's personal. It comes with texture, timing, your particular way of seeing the world.
AI can mimic your voice—sort of. It'll study your emails and blog posts and produce sentences that sound vaguely like you. But can it capture the way you pause before saying "frankly"? The specific reason you hate the phrase "circle back"? The story behind your weird obsession with handwritten notes?
More importantly, can it help you figure out why those details matter to someone who wasn't there?
Your future readers don't need another generic business memoir full of the same leadership platitudes they've read a dozen times. They need your version—the one that explains not just what you did, but how it felt, what it cost, and what you'd tell your younger self if you could.
What AI does well (Because I'm not a Luddite)
Look, I use AI tools. They're brilliant for transcribing interviews, generating chapter outlines, and coming up with seventeen different ways to say "we scaled rapidly" without sounding like every other tech memoir ever written.
If you want a book-shaped object for your conference booth or a rough draft to get your thoughts organized, AI can absolutely deliver. It's fast, cheap, and increasingly competent at basic narrative structure.
But if you want something that makes people miss their subway stop because they're too absorbed in your story to look up—that's still human territory.
The trust factor
Here's what I've noticed: clients aren't really buying writing services. They're buying permission to be honest about their stories. They're paying for someone to sit across from them and say, "That thing you're embarrassed about? That's actually the most interesting part."
You can't download that from an app. You can't prompt-engineer your way to the moment when someone finally admits they're terrified their success was mostly luck, or that they still dream about the company they sold too early, or that their biggest regret isn't a business decision at all.
Those conversations don't happen with algorithms. They happen when you trust someone enough to say the things you've never said out loud.
The bottom line
I'm not telling you AI is worthless. It's not. But I am telling you that the difference between a book people skim and one they remember has nothing to do with processing power.
It has to do with the questions you ask, the stories you choose to tell, and the way you tell them. It's about finding the thread that connects your grandfather's work ethic to your management style, or explaining why that failed product launch taught you more than three successful ones.
That's human work. Messy, inefficient, occasionally brilliant human work.
So by all means, try the AI route if you want. Upload your resume, answer the prompts, see what comes out. But when you're ready to write something that sounds like you—and only you—give me a call.
I'll be here, asking the questions robots don't know how to ask, helping you figure out which parts of your story are worth telling and why anyone should care.
Because in the end, that's what you're really paying for: someone who knows the difference between data and wisdom, between efficiency and truth, between generating content and creating something that matters.
Not convinced? Fair enough. But before you go the robot route, ask yourself this: would you rather have a book that could have been written by anyone, or one that could only have been written by you?