Every few months on UK Business Forums, a thread appears that refuses to die. The "AI does have its uses" discussion — started back in February by long-standing moderator @fisicx — has now passed 112 replies. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens when a topic is genuinely unresolved, when people feel strongly enough on both sides to keep coming back, and when the conversation keeps moving because the technology itself keeps moving.
This article is drawn from that thread and from the community it represents. No single view here is the editorial view. The value of UKBF has always been in the range of voices — and on AI, that range is wider than almost anything else we discuss.
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"AI is just another evolution of human reliance on technology"
That's what @Ozzy, founder of UKBF, wrote in the thread. It's a measured framing and it set the tone for what followed.
Because what followed was not the usual binary of "AI will save your business" versus "AI is destroying society." What UKBF members have been doing, across hundreds of posts and several months, is something more useful: working through what this technology actually means for them, in their businesses, in their day-to-day, and in the broader world they're operating in.
What emerges is a picture that looks less like a divide and more like a spectrum. Champions at one end, sceptics at the other, and a large middle ground of pragmatic, thoughtful business owners trying to make sensible decisions amid a lot of noise.
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The pragmatists: "I use it, it helps, but I'm watching it carefully"
The largest group in the thread are the pragmatists. They are using AI tools, some daily, and finding genuine value in them. But they are not uncritical adopters.
Fisicx, the thread's originator and one of the forum's most experienced moderators, has been clear throughout: AI has real uses, particularly for tasks like debugging code, but it has limitations that people underestimate. As he put it simply, it can be very good for debugging. But in the same breath, he challenged the idea that AI costs will keep falling, pointing out that current pricing structures are unsustainable and that even free tools are becoming restricted.
@vince, who runs a business and pays for multiple AI subscriptions, offered a practical observation that many members recognised: different AI tools have different strengths, and sometimes they have bad days. He described trying 10 times to get Gemini to extract tables from a PDF accurately, giving up, and then getting the same result from ChatGPT on the second attempt. His conclusion was pragmatic and pay for both for a while, use whichever works for the task.
This kind of honest, trial-and-error experience is precisely what UKBF does well. There's no affiliation here, no sponsored content, no one with a product to sell. Just business owners comparing notes.
---
The sceptics: "I'm not convinced, and here's why"
The sceptics in the thread are not technophobes. Several of them work in IT or tech-adjacent sectors. Their concerns are substantive.
One recurring theme is what might be called the "brain atrophy" question. Member @ctrlbrk shared research from Harvard Business Review and Fast Company suggesting that heavy AI use, particularly overseeing multiple AI agents, can intensify cognitive load rather than reduce it, and that some studies have pointed to declining critical thinking skills with over-reliance on generative AI.
This prompted genuine debate. @Mark T Jones made a distinction worth noting: satellite navigation gives you factually correct information if you input the right data. AI gives you a mix of fact and plausible-sounding nonsense, and the problem is you can't always tell which is which. That's a meaningfully different risk profile.
Ozzy acknowledged the sat nav point from personal experience, noting that his own sense of direction has diminished since he has used navigation apps regularly. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of honest observation that makes this community worth reading.
@UKSBD — another long-standing moderator — raised a concern that many business owners will recognise: the pricing trap. Once you're embedded in an AI tool and your workflows depend on it, the provider has leverage. Prices that start low and are accessible tend to rise, sometimes sharply, once you're locked in.
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The question nobody fully agrees on: are jobs changing or disappearing?
One of the most substantive exchanges in the thread was sparked by a member from Birmingham who works in AI-generated 3D modelling. Their argument was that any role that primarily involves operating tools rather than making decisions is increasingly at risk of automation. The overarching trend, as they put it, is that basic tool operation with minimal intelligence applied is being replaced.
@Keynote Speech offered a counterpoint that felt more grounded: the output still needs to be checked. The tools are great for getting something started or speeding things up, but they're not at the point where you can hand over the wheel entirely. Roles aren't disappearing so much as shifting from execution to oversight. Someone still needs to decide what good looks like.
@Data Swami, whose company works in AI automation for UK businesses, took a longer view: take advantage of the current low pricing, build your capabilities, but don't build yourself into a dependency you can't escape. His position was essentially: use these tools now, on your terms, and build so that you're not permanently reliant on any single provider.
@gpietersz, who has a background in software and education, made an observation that stopped a few people in their tracks: literacy made humans worse at memorising long texts. Writing things down replaced the need to hold them in your head. But the benefits of literacy outweigh what was lost. The calculator parallel runs in the same direction. The question he was raising, implicitly, is whether AI might be the same kind of trade-off — we give something up, but what we gain is worth more.
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The part nobody planned to discuss: AI and authenticity
Midway through the thread, the conversation took an unexpected turn. @JEREMY HAWKE , a courier business owner from Exeter, mentioned almost in passing that he'd been listening to music this week, only for his granddaughter to tell him it was AI.
It unlocked something. Ozzy described the same experience, finding acoustic music on YouTube he wanted to save to Spotify, only to discover it was AI-generated and therefore unsaveable. And then something broader: YouTube, he said, has become full of what he called "terrible AI rubbish." Educational and investigative content he used to value has been replaced, in many cases, by extended videos with the same generic AI voiceover, adding little and taking up space that used to belong to something real.
Member @DontAsk added to this: pictures and video that bear no relation to the voiceover, repeated just to fill the time.
@MikeJ had seen the same on LinkedIn: AI-generated posts that contradicted themselves, using the same abbreviation three different ways, and being enthusiastically reshared by people who clearly hadn't read them.
This part of the thread wasn't really about AI tools for business. It was about what happens to the information environment when AI-generated content scales to fill every available space. That's a question that affects business owners directly, as consumers of information they rely on to make decisions, and as content creators trying to be heard above an increasingly noisy baseline.
---
What this means for your business
If you read the thread carefully, you will see that there is no single answer.
If you're already using AI tools and finding them valuable, the advice from experienced members is: keep going, but don't stop thinking. Review everything it produces. Build workflows that keep human judgment in the loop at the points that matter. And be alert to the pricing trajectory of anything you become dependent on.
If you're sceptical, the thread suggests your scepticism is well-founded in some areas, particularly around the reliability of AI outputs, the risk of information degradation online, and the long-term cost question. But it's worth distinguishing between "AI isn't right for this specific task" and "AI has no value in my business." Those are very different conclusions.
If you're in the middle and using some tools, uncertain about others, not sure what to do next, that's actually the most honest place to be right now. The technology is moving fast, the evidence is still accumulating, and the community that has been having this conversation for months hasn't reached a consensus, because there isn't one to reach yet.
---
The conversation continues
The thread is still open. If you've had an experience with AI — good, bad, or somewhere in the middle — that's where it belongs.
What UKBF has always done best is give experienced business owners a place to say what they actually think, without a PR filter, without a product to sell, and without the pressure to land on an optimistic conclusion. On AI, that kind of honest conversation is rarer than it should be.
Join the discussion: AI does have its uses — UK Business Forums
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This article draws on the live "AI does have its uses" discussion thread on UK Business Forums, active since February 2026, with contributions from members fisicx, ctrlbrk, Data Swami, gpietersz, UKSBD, Keynote Speech, Mark T Jones, vince, JEREMY HAWKE, MikeJ, DontAsk, Newchodge, Imgto3d, and Ozzy.
This article is drawn from that thread and from the community it represents. No single view here is the editorial view. The value of UKBF has always been in the range of voices — and on AI, that range is wider than almost anything else we discuss.
---
"AI is just another evolution of human reliance on technology"
That's what @Ozzy, founder of UKBF, wrote in the thread. It's a measured framing and it set the tone for what followed.
Because what followed was not the usual binary of "AI will save your business" versus "AI is destroying society." What UKBF members have been doing, across hundreds of posts and several months, is something more useful: working through what this technology actually means for them, in their businesses, in their day-to-day, and in the broader world they're operating in.
What emerges is a picture that looks less like a divide and more like a spectrum. Champions at one end, sceptics at the other, and a large middle ground of pragmatic, thoughtful business owners trying to make sensible decisions amid a lot of noise.
---
The pragmatists: "I use it, it helps, but I'm watching it carefully"
The largest group in the thread are the pragmatists. They are using AI tools, some daily, and finding genuine value in them. But they are not uncritical adopters.
Fisicx, the thread's originator and one of the forum's most experienced moderators, has been clear throughout: AI has real uses, particularly for tasks like debugging code, but it has limitations that people underestimate. As he put it simply, it can be very good for debugging. But in the same breath, he challenged the idea that AI costs will keep falling, pointing out that current pricing structures are unsustainable and that even free tools are becoming restricted.
@vince, who runs a business and pays for multiple AI subscriptions, offered a practical observation that many members recognised: different AI tools have different strengths, and sometimes they have bad days. He described trying 10 times to get Gemini to extract tables from a PDF accurately, giving up, and then getting the same result from ChatGPT on the second attempt. His conclusion was pragmatic and pay for both for a while, use whichever works for the task.
This kind of honest, trial-and-error experience is precisely what UKBF does well. There's no affiliation here, no sponsored content, no one with a product to sell. Just business owners comparing notes.
---
The sceptics: "I'm not convinced, and here's why"
The sceptics in the thread are not technophobes. Several of them work in IT or tech-adjacent sectors. Their concerns are substantive.
One recurring theme is what might be called the "brain atrophy" question. Member @ctrlbrk shared research from Harvard Business Review and Fast Company suggesting that heavy AI use, particularly overseeing multiple AI agents, can intensify cognitive load rather than reduce it, and that some studies have pointed to declining critical thinking skills with over-reliance on generative AI.
This prompted genuine debate. @Mark T Jones made a distinction worth noting: satellite navigation gives you factually correct information if you input the right data. AI gives you a mix of fact and plausible-sounding nonsense, and the problem is you can't always tell which is which. That's a meaningfully different risk profile.
Ozzy acknowledged the sat nav point from personal experience, noting that his own sense of direction has diminished since he has used navigation apps regularly. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of honest observation that makes this community worth reading.
@UKSBD — another long-standing moderator — raised a concern that many business owners will recognise: the pricing trap. Once you're embedded in an AI tool and your workflows depend on it, the provider has leverage. Prices that start low and are accessible tend to rise, sometimes sharply, once you're locked in.
---
The question nobody fully agrees on: are jobs changing or disappearing?
One of the most substantive exchanges in the thread was sparked by a member from Birmingham who works in AI-generated 3D modelling. Their argument was that any role that primarily involves operating tools rather than making decisions is increasingly at risk of automation. The overarching trend, as they put it, is that basic tool operation with minimal intelligence applied is being replaced.
@Keynote Speech offered a counterpoint that felt more grounded: the output still needs to be checked. The tools are great for getting something started or speeding things up, but they're not at the point where you can hand over the wheel entirely. Roles aren't disappearing so much as shifting from execution to oversight. Someone still needs to decide what good looks like.
@Data Swami, whose company works in AI automation for UK businesses, took a longer view: take advantage of the current low pricing, build your capabilities, but don't build yourself into a dependency you can't escape. His position was essentially: use these tools now, on your terms, and build so that you're not permanently reliant on any single provider.
@gpietersz, who has a background in software and education, made an observation that stopped a few people in their tracks: literacy made humans worse at memorising long texts. Writing things down replaced the need to hold them in your head. But the benefits of literacy outweigh what was lost. The calculator parallel runs in the same direction. The question he was raising, implicitly, is whether AI might be the same kind of trade-off — we give something up, but what we gain is worth more.
---
The part nobody planned to discuss: AI and authenticity
Midway through the thread, the conversation took an unexpected turn. @JEREMY HAWKE , a courier business owner from Exeter, mentioned almost in passing that he'd been listening to music this week, only for his granddaughter to tell him it was AI.
It unlocked something. Ozzy described the same experience, finding acoustic music on YouTube he wanted to save to Spotify, only to discover it was AI-generated and therefore unsaveable. And then something broader: YouTube, he said, has become full of what he called "terrible AI rubbish." Educational and investigative content he used to value has been replaced, in many cases, by extended videos with the same generic AI voiceover, adding little and taking up space that used to belong to something real.
Member @DontAsk added to this: pictures and video that bear no relation to the voiceover, repeated just to fill the time.
@MikeJ had seen the same on LinkedIn: AI-generated posts that contradicted themselves, using the same abbreviation three different ways, and being enthusiastically reshared by people who clearly hadn't read them.
This part of the thread wasn't really about AI tools for business. It was about what happens to the information environment when AI-generated content scales to fill every available space. That's a question that affects business owners directly, as consumers of information they rely on to make decisions, and as content creators trying to be heard above an increasingly noisy baseline.
---
What this means for your business
If you read the thread carefully, you will see that there is no single answer.
If you're already using AI tools and finding them valuable, the advice from experienced members is: keep going, but don't stop thinking. Review everything it produces. Build workflows that keep human judgment in the loop at the points that matter. And be alert to the pricing trajectory of anything you become dependent on.
If you're sceptical, the thread suggests your scepticism is well-founded in some areas, particularly around the reliability of AI outputs, the risk of information degradation online, and the long-term cost question. But it's worth distinguishing between "AI isn't right for this specific task" and "AI has no value in my business." Those are very different conclusions.
If you're in the middle and using some tools, uncertain about others, not sure what to do next, that's actually the most honest place to be right now. The technology is moving fast, the evidence is still accumulating, and the community that has been having this conversation for months hasn't reached a consensus, because there isn't one to reach yet.
---
The conversation continues
The thread is still open. If you've had an experience with AI — good, bad, or somewhere in the middle — that's where it belongs.
What UKBF has always done best is give experienced business owners a place to say what they actually think, without a PR filter, without a product to sell, and without the pressure to land on an optimistic conclusion. On AI, that kind of honest conversation is rarer than it should be.
Join the discussion: AI does have its uses — UK Business Forums
---
This article draws on the live "AI does have its uses" discussion thread on UK Business Forums, active since February 2026, with contributions from members fisicx, ctrlbrk, Data Swami, gpietersz, UKSBD, Keynote Speech, Mark T Jones, vince, JEREMY HAWKE, MikeJ, DontAsk, Newchodge, Imgto3d, and Ozzy.
