How I Started Using AI in My Small B2B Business (Without a Technical Background)

by Meghan Brenner

I want to be upfront about something: I am not a technical person.

I don't have an engineering background. I've never written a line of code. I didn't grow up tinkering with software or chasing the latest tech trends. For most of my career, I've been the person who figures out how to make things work with the tools already in front of me, not the person who builds the tools.

I'm the COO of JB Sales, a B2B sales training company. My world is operations, finance, and making sure the right things happen at the right time. AI was not on my roadmap.

And then a business problem changed everything.

It Started With a Buyer We Couldn't Reach

About a month ago, JB Sales was repositioning some of its services. We were adding advisory offerings alongside our core sales training work, and the challenge was straightforward: the buyer for advisory services is different from the buyer for sales training.

Sales training buyers are sales leaders. They're accessible. We know how to talk to them. Advisory buyers are at the VP and C-suite level. Same company, different floor, completely different conversation.

We needed to get the word out. Not through a cold email blast. Through building awareness, growing our newsletter subscriber base, and getting the right message in front of the right people consistently over time.

That question, how do we move people from social media into a newsletter, led me to ManyChat.

The First Thing I Actually Built

I'd heard of ManyChat. I'd never used it. Setting up a ManyChat to Kit automation was the first AI-adjacent thing I'd ever actually built from scratch.

It took longer than it should have. I made mistakes I had to undo. I asked questions that probably seemed basic to anyone with a technical background. But I figured it out. And once I had, I started asking a bigger question.

If we're trying to reach a specific buyer with specific answers to specific problems, how is that buyer finding those answers today?

Are they Googling? Are they asking ChatGPT or Perplexity? Are they getting served results in AI overviews that we're not even showing up in?

That question led me somewhere I didn't expect.

What I Learned About How AI Surfaces Information

I started researching AEO, answer engine optimization. It's the practice of structuring your content so that AI tools can find it, understand it, and surface it when someone asks a relevant question.

This is different from traditional SEO, which is about ranking in Google search results. AEO is about being the answer when someone asks an AI tool a question directly. And for a small B2B company trying to reach buyers who are increasingly using AI tools to research vendors, advisors, and solutions, this matters.

What I found is that most small B2B businesses, including us, weren't set up for it. Our content wasn't structured to answer specific questions directly. Our landing pages were written for humans skimming a page, not for AI tools parsing content for relevance. Our service descriptions assumed the reader already knew what they were looking for.

So we rebuilt them.

What Actually Changed

Over the past several weeks I've done things I wouldn't have predicted six months ago.

I audited our existing content for AEO readiness. I rewrote landing pages to lead with direct answers to buyer questions. I learned what schema markup is and why it helps AI tools understand what a page is about. I built automations I didn't know how to build. I asked questions I didn't know I was allowed to ask.

None of it required a technical background. It required curiosity, a willingness to look things up, and a commitment to applying the 1% principle: get a little bit better every day. Read one article. Try one tool. Find one person already doing what you want to do.

That's it. That's the whole framework.

Why I'm Writing About This

I'm documenting this journey because I don't think I'm the only non-technical operator who found themselves in the middle of something they didn't fully understand.

If you're running operations, marketing, or a sales-adjacent role at a small B2B company, you're probably feeling some version of this pressure. AI is changing how buyers find information. It's changing how content gets surfaced. It's changing what it means to show up in your market.

And if you're waiting to feel technical enough to engage with it, you're going to be waiting a long time.

The good news is you don't have to be technical. You just have to be willing to figure it out.

One business problem. One domino. A full AI learning journey I didn't plan for and couldn't have predicted.

I'm sharing what I learn here every week. The wins, the wrong turns, the things that took way longer than they should have, and the small moments where something clicked.

Want to Follow Along?

Every Tuesday I publish The Muddy Middle, a newsletter for non-technical operators figuring out AI in real time. No expert filter. No polished framework. Just honest notes from the field.

Subscribe here and I'll see you in your inbox.

Meghan Brenner is COO at JB Sales and founder of The Operator's Notebook.