Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere, and the pace of change is unabated. For business owners in the cleaning and restoration industry, the real question is not which AI tool to choose. It’s a way to adapt, stay relevant, and continue to grow as the rules keep changing.
Dean Mercado, founder of Online Marketing Muscle, has a clear perspective on this challenge. And it doesn’t start with technology, it starts with people.
“AI amplifies,” Mercado said. “That’s not acceptable.” That one thought runs through everything he teaches about AI in business. If you use it well, you will become stronger. Leaning on it as a crutch accelerates your weakness.
Mercado has identified three human skills that separate companies that succeed in this environment from those that lag. None of this is meant to tell you which platform is best for you this week.
Skill 1: Accurate communication
Mercado calls his first skill prompt engineering, but quickly expands on the horizon. It all comes down to how well you can communicate with your AI, your team, and everyone.
“AI is revealing how inaccurate we have become,” he said. “We’ve trained things like slang, shorthand, speed, half-sentences, and lazy instructions.” If you feed ambiguous input into an AI, it returns shallow, generic output. It’s not the tools that are the problem.
This modification is what Mercado calls accurate communication. That means asking better questions, providing clearer context, defining what good outcomes look like, and refining from there. This is a muscle that takes practice and pays off well beyond the AI prompts.
“If you know exactly what you want and ask better questions, you’ll probably be better able to get what you want,” Mercado says.
Skill 2: Critical thinking and insight
AI can sound authoritative. That doesn’t mean it’s correct. Mercado spoke frankly about what he sees as a systemic failure. Most people are not taught to think critically, and AI is making that gap more costly.
“AI just makes us lazy,” he says. The antidote is insight, a developed ability to tell the difference between mediocre work and truly great work.
Think about things you know well, like coffee, baseball, or work. You set the standard for what looks good in your field. Mercado argues that there needs to be the same standards for everything AI produces in business.
“If you’re working with AI and you can’t tell the difference between mediocrity and greatness, that’s a problem,” he says. “AI loves to please its users. If it can give the user exactly what it wants, it will be happy to do so. But if the user doesn’t ask for it properly, it will end up giving the user what the AI thinks it will.”
That insight also applies to strategy. Mercado pointed out that as a coach, the most difficult question to ask your clients is simple. “What do I want?” Surprisingly few high-revenue business owners can clearly answer this question, and a similar gap appears in how they use AI.
Skill 3: System Orchestration
The third skill is what Mercado calls AI orchestration, although he prefers the broader term system orchestration. Think of a conductor in front of a symphony. Someone in your business needs to pick up that baton.
“It’s not just about the tools,” he said. “Somebody has to think bigger.” Too many business owners get stuck comparing platforms (ChatGPT vs. Gemini vs. Claude), not realizing that any one of those tools can be brilliant or disappointing on any given day. The real skill is knowing when to switch and why.
Especially when it comes to the cleaning and restoration business, Mercado has a useful differentiation. Teams in the office are more likely to use AI than technicians in the field. But everyone in your company benefits from developing these basic people skills. Owners need to set the tone, he says.
“You need to set expectations about what is acceptable and what is not acceptable to you,” Mercado said. “You need a team that is always moving forward and growing.”
don’t lose your humanity
Mercado’s broader warning is that businesses are becoming “drunk on convenience.” They misinterpret the AI’s output as actual thought, and in doing so, hollow out the AI’s character.
“Everything is starting to become half-baked,” he says. “If you are an outlier, if you push hard, you are the ones who will be noticed.”
His advice to anyone feeling anxious about AI is to stop comparing yourself to people who seem to be doing it all. First, bring your humanity to the forefront, then consider whether AI can help you build on what you’re already doing well. That framing takes away the fear, he said.
“Just because a new powerful tool comes along doesn’t mean you have to change who you are,” Mercado says. “You always need to put controls in place to ensure that your business remains authentic.”
Without that, he said, there’s nothing that separates your restoration company from the next restoration company, and you’re competing solely on price. That’s a race no one wants to run.
AI amplifies. That’s not allowed. It’s a reminder of Mercado and something worth writing on the wall.
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