Why I Didn't Build an AI Course for NDs

Part 1 of 3: building AI that actually works for the business side of your practice.

“I think you need to build, like, an ND course.”

An ND I work with said that to me last week, about twenty minutes into a call that was supposed to be about her website. She'd just had AI rebrand her old course decks and flag the research she needed to add, and she was a little giddy about it. “This would have been weeks, like literally weeks of work.”

Then she told me about the AI course she was taking. It showed her everything AI could do and almost none of how. In her words: “It's what you can do but not how to do it.”

I've heard some version of that from almost every practitioner who's started using AI. And I've spent the last six months building the “how” for my own agency, so it landed.

I didn't build a course, though. Here's why, and what I've been building instead.

What's the most frustrating part of using AI for the business side of your practice?

For me, the hardest part has been getting it to remember.

You tell it a client doesn't use a certain word. It says “got it.” Three posts later, there's the word. You explain how you like a caption to open, it nails it once, and the next week you're explaining it again. If you've used AI for more than a month, you've had some version of “why don't you remember that?”

I write content for 12 to 15 naturopathic doctors every month. Each one has her own words, her own no's and her own way of explaining the same physiology. So for me, memory wasn't a small annoyance. It was the whole job.

The other one I hear constantly is “it doesn't sound like me.” Or worse, it sounds like AI. That's a beef I have too. You can ban every word on the list and it still gives itself away in the rhythm, the run of short fragments and the tidy little twist at the end of every paragraph. Your readers are getting very good at spotting it.

I've come to think both frustrations have the same root. When AI has nowhere to keep what you've taught it, it falls back on what the internet sounds like.

How do you make AI remember, and sound like you?

Most AI tools remember in one of three ways, and each one only gets you partway.

A chat forgets when it ends. A project in Claude or ChatGPT remembers, but only inside that project. That's good for keeping things private, and frustrating when the same lesson matters in three places. Skills, the saved instructions you reuse, are great until you learn something new. Then every skill that touches it needs updating, by you, one at a time.

What I've built works from three principles instead.

One source of truth for each doctor. Her voice, her beliefs and her no's live in one place, and every step reads from it. A correction I make once reaches the planning, the captions and the final check, and it never leaks into another doctor's work. I'm not updating five places by hand.

That source of truth is built from her, not from a template. Before we write a single post, we map what she says and how she says it: the positions she'd defend in a room full of colleagues, the analogies she reaches for, the stories she tells, and the judgement calls she makes that another ND wouldn't. That becomes her library. So when it's time to plan a month, the ideas are pulled from her library first, and the content sounds like her because it started with her.

Every correction becomes a rule, and every rule gets used. When I edit a draft, the reason gets written down and added to her file. Then I make sure the part of the system that writes the posts actually reads it. A rule nothing reads may as well not exist.

A record of everything that's gone out. We log what's been published, month over month, for every doctor. So the system knows which topics she's covered, which hooks she's used and what's resting, and next month doesn't quietly repeat last month.

At fifteen doctors, that's what remembering takes: a memory with some structure to it.

Why does AI get better the longer you use it?

My client put it better than I could: “Level one is like you use it instead of Google. But then once you actually create, like, your brain... it's crazy.”

That matches what I've seen. The first few weeks are the most editing you'll ever do. Every correction is information, and once it has somewhere to live, the next draft sounds more like you. When someone tells me they're not impressed by AI, I usually think they just haven't done enough with it yet.

And if you're not using AI at all right now, that's okay. You haven't missed anything. Most of what I've learned came from getting it wrong first.

What I don't want to be

I'll be honest about one thing. I don't want to be an AI consultant. I don't want to debate whether it's taking over the world. I want to talk about how you set it up in your practice so it gives you time back, between patients and over a Tuesday lunch, not on your weekends.

I'm also wary of how many people are selling AI systems they haven't used long enough to know if they work. Everything I've described here has been running my agency every day for months, with real clients, real edits and real mistakes along the way.

Why didn't I just build a course?

Here's the funny part. I didn't want to build a course.

The thing I hear most from NDs and functional medicine practitioners, usually with a little laugh, is some version of “I know I should be blogging, and posting more, and writing my newsletter. I'm just not.”

Nobody who says that needs another lesson on why blogging matters. They already know. What's missing is the hours.

A course is one more thing for you to do, and you already have enough things to do. I think we've all done lots of courses and lots of coaching that were genuinely great. Then you close the laptop, and the strategy is still sitting there. Actually doing it is a whole other set of hours, usually more than the course took.

So I wanted to build the thing that does the work. That way, while you're learning to do something, it's already getting done.

If you'd like to hear when I've packaged it up for NDs, send me a DM and I'll make sure you're first to know.

So, yes. I'm making something for NDs. Just not a course.

This is part one of three. Next, I'll walk through how it actually works, and what happens when you say “build my month.”