How do you feel about AI? From fear of losing our jobs and worries about best practices to excitement about all the opportunities AI offers to reduce our workload and help our clients even more, we’ve seen (and felt) a whole range of responses to AI.
But, before we dive into it further, let’s clarify the main questions we should be asking ourselves as location independent therapists in regards to AI:
- How can I use AI ethically?
- What are good uses of AI for your business?
- Where are the limits?
- Does AI have any place in the therapy room?
In this 2-part series, we’ll look at these questions. In this blog post, we’ll examine how AI can help you in the backend of your business, with your admin, marketing, and other ways to streamline things.
Then, in part 2, we will look at how AI is increasingly appearing in the therapy space itself. That includes how clients are using it, how you might respond as a therapist, and how therapists themselves are using AI – e.g. for creating session notes and more.
Let’s dig into how you can use AI to reduce your workload and save time in your online therapy business. We’ll look at some practical ways you can use AI in your business and also examine some of the most common concerns people have about AI.
What AI can and cannot do
Most AI tools predict and generate text based on patterns in the information they were trained on. In practice, that means they can be useful for tasks like summarising, rephrasing, brainstorming, organising ideas, or helping you get started when you feel stuck.
For example, you could ask AI to:
- Turn a messy page of notes into a clear checklist
- Rewrite a long paragraph in simpler language
- Suggest titles for a blog post
- Or suggest ways to repurpose content into other formats.
In this way, AI can save you time and reduce the mental effort you have to put into every task. But it is important to understand the limits.
AI can be inaccurate. It can miss nuance, misunderstand context, or give generic advice that does not fit your situation. It can also reflect bias from the data it was trained on. And crucially, it does not know your clients, your values, your ethics, or the realities of your business unless you guide it carefully.
So AI should not replace your judgement. Think of it as a tool that supports your thinking, not one that does your thinking for you. You are still the one responsible for what gets used, shared, or acted on.
Using AI to save time on admin
Admin can easily take up much more time than you would expect when you factor in emails, onboarding, scheduling, invoices, forms, policies, and follow-up tasks. It all adds up.
AI can be useful because it helps you work faster, create systems, and reduce the number of small decisions you need to make each week. For example, it can help you draft templates, such as replies to common enquiries from potential clients, or onboarding emails explaining how to book and pay for a first session.
You can also use AI to review and improve the systems you already have. For example, you might paste in your onboarding process and ask where clients could get confused, where steps could be simplified, or what is missing. Or you could ask it to turn a messy list of admin tasks into a clear weekly workflow.
If you use digital tools, some AI systems can also connect with calendars, databases, or project management platforms. That means they may be able to create tasks, organise information, or update systems for you based on your instructions. But if you are connecting any tools that have access to sensitive client information, make sure you’re complying with the relevant regulations and covering all bases for data protection and client privacy.
Our co-founder, Sonia, has been experimenting with using Claude to connect with Notion, her project management tool. So far, it can do helpful things like updating tasks and adding her latest newsletter to her content database – although she’s also learning when it’s quicker and easier to do some things herself.
When using AI for your admin, the goal is not to automate everything. Instead, it’s to identify where AI can streamline and simplify, so you can spend more time on the parts of your business that only you can do.
Supporting your marketing with AI
When therapists struggle with their marketing, it’s often less about a lack of ideas and more about a lack of time, energy, or clarity. You might know what you want to say, but struggle to turn it into consistent content. AI can help bridge that gap. For example, you might use it to:
- Brainstorm blog topics based on common client struggles
- Generate ideas for newsletter themes for the next three months
- Turn one blog post into five social media captions
- Suggest SEO keywords people may search for
- Create content ideas around themes like burnout, expat stress, relationships, identity, or anxiety
- Research podcasts you could be featured on, so you can reach out to the hosts
If you work in multiple languages, AI can also help adapt content for different audiences. For example, you might write a post in English and then ask for a version suitable for German-speaking therapists or Portuguese-speaking expat clients.
It can also help with consistency. If you have ten rough ideas saved in your phone, AI can help organise them into a realistic content calendar.
That said, your voice still matters. Potential clients are not looking for polished generic content. They are looking for someone who feels real, clear, and trustworthy. AI can help shape the draft, but your perspective is what makes it connect.
The more info you give your AI tool to help you with these ideas, the better the result you will get. We recommend getting clear on your ideal client and then uploading a detailed client avatar to your AI tool so it can reference it and write with the client in mind.
Using AI to stay organised
Running an online practice usually means carrying a lot in your head.
Future ideas, half-finished projects, resources you want to create, systems you mean to improve, collaborations you have not followed up on. It can feel mentally noisy. AI can help you to create structure in your business, for example:
- A monthly admin checklist
- A recurring checklist for newsletter tasks
- Breaking a large project into weekly action steps
- Turning a vague idea for a workshop into a simple plan
- Building a quarterly business planning template
- A simple system for tracking unpaid invoices
- Organising a messy notebook page into categories and priorities
Another useful way to use AI is for time management and planning. You could take inspiration from our co-founder, Sonia, who uses Claude (her preferred AI tool) to review her week and month. Sonia tracks how much time she spends on each area of her business in Toggl (read more about Toggl and our other favourite tools for location independent therapists here). Then, she asks Claude to analyse this data and plan the upcoming weeks, all while keeping her quarterly and annual goals in mind. Using AI to do this speeds up the process, catches details she might not notice on her own, and ultimately helps her keep moving towards her goals.
Addressing some of the most common concerns about AI
AI can be a very powerful tool with many potential uses for therapist business owners. But we also hear some big concerns about AI, and wanted to address some of them here. (We’ll focus more on psychologically-based concerns in Part 2 of this series).
The Environmental Impact of AI
AI has a real environmental cost that’s shouldn’t be ignored. Large AI systems require significant computing power. That means energy use, water use for cooling data centres, and physical infrastructure such as servers and hardware.
Most of us do not see that side of AI when we open a chat window and type a prompt. But it is worth keeping in mind, especially if we care about using technology thoughtfully and responsibly. This does not mean you need to avoid AI completely. It means using it with intention, in the same way you might think carefully about travel, consumption, or other business choices.
One helpful question is whether AI is always the best tool for the task.
For example, using AI to help structure a complex article, organise a messy project, or draft a first version of a policy may be worthwhile. Using it for ten rounds of unnecessary prompts, endless rewrites, or tasks you could do in two minutes yourself may be less so.
There are also simple ways to reduce your impact.
- Use AI for higher-value tasks rather than constant casual use.
- Prepare your prompts clearly so you need fewer repeat attempts – get as specific as possible
- Keep AI chats focused rather than going back and forth unnecessarily
- Edit and refine outputs yourself instead of repeatedly asking for small rewrites.
- Use simpler digital tools when they can do the job just as well.
- Review whether a task needs AI at all or just a document template, checklist, or standard search.
Environmental impact is one part of using AI responsibly. But as mental health professionals, there is also another layer to consider: how these tools affect confidentiality, professional standards, and the trust clients place in us.
Ethical considerations when using AI in your business
We’ll consider the complex question of whether AI has any place in the therapy room in Part 2 of this series. But even when using AI for business tasks rather than therapy itself, boundaries still matter.
The most important one is confidentiality. It goes without saying that you should not paste identifiable client information into public AI tools. That includes names, personal histories, session content, email exchanges, or anything that could reasonably identify someone. Even if you are asking for help drafting a reply, it is better to anonymise heavily or rewrite the scenario in general terms.
It is also worth understanding how each tool handles data. Some tools store conversations or use data to improve future systems. Read more about maintaining client privacy while using AI here.
Other ethical questions are more subtle.
- If AI writes your website, does it still sound like you?
- If it drafts a newsletter, can people tell you’re using AI – and will it put them off?
- If your AI tool helps write some of your content, have you checked it for unconscious biases?
- If it suggests a strategy, does it align with your values?
AI can save time, but it needs to be used carefully. It’s easy to get too dependent on AI, or forget to fact-check everything when you’re running short on time. But AI hallucinations are a real thing – and even big businesses and reputable institutions can fall victim to them, like when 10 of the 15 suggested books on this summer reading list didn’t actually exist.
So, we have to be cautious with how we use AI. Ultimately, you are still responsible for your business decisions, communication, and maintaining standards.
Can people tell when you’re using AI – and does it matter?
The honest answer is yes, often people can tell if you’re using AI to write your content. There are many tell-tale signs which have become easily recognisable as AI writing is much more common nowadays. Here’s what to look out for if you use AI to help you write anything:
- Overly polished but vague language that says little in a lot of words
- Repetitive sentence structures or rhythm – such as the pattern of three
- “Not this, but that” sentence format and comparisons
- Too many lists
- Clichés and overused phrases (“unlock your potential,” “game-changer,” “dive into”)
- Forced enthusiasm or exaggerated positivity
- Impersonal or generic writing
- Lack of specific examples, stories, or lived experience
- Unnatural transitions (“furthermore,” “moreover,” “in today’s world”)
- Overuse of em dashes or filler punctuation
As for other ways of using AI, it’s not always easy to tell, as long as you’re using your due diligence. And although some people may have strong feelings against AI, most will also recognise that being able to speed up tasks has a benefit, as it allows you to do more in the time you have available. So, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that you’re using AI in your business, as long as you’re doing it consciously and carefully.
Using AI in your business – Wrap Up
AI can be useful behind the scenes, saving you time on admin, organising your work, and making marketing feel more manageable. For therapists working alone, this can ease some of the pressure of running a business.
But it is still just a tool. It works best when you use it with clear boundaries and your own judgement.
In the next part, we will look at how AI is increasingly appearing in the therapy space itself. That includes how clients are using it, how you might respond as a therapist, and how therapists themselves are using AI – e.g. for creating session notes and more.
If you’d like to explore more topics like this – getting practical tips you can put into practice in your business, but also delving deeper into the questions this brings up – join us inside LIT Community. We’re an international community of mental health professionals, providing connection with like-minded colleagues and support for both the clinical and business aspects of your online practice. Join the LIT Community here!
