Confused About AI? These Mentors Will Actually Explain It.
A marketer (not a developer, not a technical person) spent four months stuck trying to get an n8n workflow to do what she needed it to do. Four months of YouTube tutorials, forum posts, and trial and error that went nowhere.
She booked a 30-minute call on GrowthMentor. The mentor looked at what she’d built, spotted the issue, and walked her through the fix. Done.
That’s it. That’s the whole story. Four months of spinning, solved in half an hour by someone who’d already been through it.
This is happening constantly on GrowthMentor right now. We looked at session data and found 25 to 30 AI-related sessions in a recent analysis, with more showing up every week. And what’s striking isn’t just the volume. It’s what people are actually getting out of these calls. Not theory. Not an overview of what AI is. Practical, specific help with the exact thing they were stuck on.
The mentors here are accidentally running an AI bootcamp. Except instead of a 40-hour Coursera course that costs $500 to $2,000 and leaves you with a certificate but still not sure what to do, you get 30 minutes with someone who’s already solved your problem. And then you go fix it.
Here’s what people are actually getting help with.
“I don’t know if I should build this AI thing or if I’m just following hype.”
This might be the most valuable conversation you can have right now. And it’s not the one most people expect.
You’ve got an idea. Maybe you want to add a chatbot to your site. Maybe you want to build an AI-powered feature into your product. Maybe you’ve been told you need an AI strategy and you’re trying to figure out what that even means. So you start researching, and everything you read makes it sound like you need to build something immediately or you’ll fall behind.
Here’s the thing most people don’t know: the most valuable thing the AI mentors on GrowthMentor do is tell founders what NOT to build.
Multiple mentors on this platform have said the same thing in different ways: “You don’t need AI, you need automation.” That distinction has saved founders real money. We’re talking $5,000 to $50,000 in avoided bad builds, projects that would have taken months and solved a problem that a $20/month Zapier workflow could have handled.
Federico Toscano is a fractional CTO and startup tech advisor who specializes in helping non-technical founders make exactly this call. He doesn’t start with the technology. He starts with the problem you’re actually trying to solve and works backwards from there. Sometimes AI is the right answer. Sometimes it’s not, and he’ll tell you that directly before you spend six months building the wrong thing.
“I use ChatGPT but I feel like I’m barely scratching the surface.”
ChatGPT showed up in the majority of sessions in our recent analysis. Claude was a close second. These are the tools most people have already tried, and the question that keeps coming up isn’t “what is this” but “am I using this right?”
Usually the answer is: not quite.
Most people use AI like a search engine. They type a question, they get an answer, they copy and paste it. The output is fine. It’s just not particularly useful. The people who get genuinely good results out of ChatGPT or Claude have figured out how to give it proper context, how to build a back-and-forth that actually refines the output, and how to use it as part of a real workflow rather than a one-off lookup tool.
That gap between “I use ChatGPT” and “I actually get great results from ChatGPT” is a learnable skill. It’s just hard to learn from a YouTube video because the best way to pick it up is to watch someone who’s good at it work through a real example with you.
Stuart Brameld runs Growth Method and advises B2B companies on growth strategy. He uses AI heavily in his own work, including for content creation, programmatic SEO, and outbound. He’s past the “figuring it out” stage and into the “this is part of how I work every day” stage, which means a session with him isn’t about understanding AI in the abstract. It’s about watching someone who’s already cracked it show you how they do it and adapting that for your situation.
“I want to build something with AI but I don’t know where to start.”
You have an idea. Maybe it’s a tool to automate something repetitive in your work. Maybe it’s a small app that uses AI to process data or make decisions. You’ve seen what’s possible, you’re motivated, and you keep hitting a wall because there’s no clear path from “I want to build this” to “I actually built it.”
The hardest part isn’t the code. It’s knowing what to build first, and in what order.
A lot of people spin out in this phase for months. They take a course, get excited, try to build something, get confused, and start over with a different tutorial. What they actually need is someone to sit down with them, understand what they’re trying to do, and map out a realistic path. Start here, then here, then here. That kind of clarity is worth more than any course.
Raluca Bejan has done exactly this with people who are new to building AI systems. In one session, she helped someone working in consulting figure out how to get started with AI agent frameworks, walking them through how the pieces actually connect and what to learn first. In another, she worked with a medical researcher who wanted to build an AI tool to help classify research papers, helping him think through the right approach before writing a single line of code. She meets people where they are, figures out what they’re actually trying to build, and gives them a concrete next step instead of more things to read.
“I have some technical skills but AI still feels like a black box.”
Not everyone coming to GrowthMentor for AI help is starting from zero. About 40% of AI sessions involve people who have some background in data, analytics, or even coding, but still feel behind. They know enough to be dangerous and not quite enough to be confident.
One person who came through GrowthMentor was a medical researcher learning Python specifically to build an AI tool for his work. He had more technical background than most people, and he was still stuck because the gap between “I can write some Python” and “I can build a working AI system” is bigger than it looks.
The problem is usually less about missing technical skills and more about missing context. How do these systems actually work? What are the real constraints? What does a well-built version of this look like? Those are questions that are hard to answer from documentation alone, but straightforward for someone who’s built these things to walk you through.
Suiyao Chen is an Applied Scientist at Amazon with years of experience building AI and machine learning systems that go all the way from experiment to real product. He’s worked with a lot of people who have solid analytical backgrounds but need someone to help them connect the dots between what they already know and what building with AI actually looks like in practice.
“I have an AI idea but I don’t know if it will actually hold up.”
You’ve been thinking about building something. Maybe adding an AI feature to your product, maybe building something new from scratch. You have a rough vision for how it would work. And somewhere in the back of your mind is a nagging question: is this actually a good idea, or am I just excited about it?
That question is worth taking seriously before you spend months building the answer.
Most founders don’t have someone in their corner who will genuinely challenge their thinking rather than just cheering them on. Advisors want to be helpful. Friends don’t want to be discouraging. So bad AI ideas get built all the time, not because founders are reckless, but because nobody gave them honest pushback early enough.
Siddharth Gupta leads engineering for a major AI platform at AWS and has built large-scale systems at Yahoo, Glassdoor, and Twitch. In one session, he helped a startup founder realize their four-source data integration plan was too broad for an MVP and that access management would likely blow up the whole thing before they even got to the AI part. In another, he talked a founder out of splitting their AI system into multiple agents when a single well-built one would do the job, saving months of unnecessary complexity. He’s not there to validate your excitement. He’s there to find the holes before they find you.
30 minutes beats 40 hours. Every time.
AI is showing up everywhere right now. In 7 out of 10 outbound calls, content strategy sessions, paid ads conversations, ecommerce questions. It’s not a separate category anymore. It’s woven into almost every conversation about how to grow a business.
Which means the question isn’t really “should I learn AI?” It’s “what’s the fastest way to learn the specific part that’s relevant to me right now?”
A Coursera course runs $500 to $2,000 and takes 40 hours. It’ll teach you a lot of things, most of which won’t apply to your situation. A GrowthMentor session is 30 minutes with someone who’s already solved your exact problem.
That marketer from the opening didn’t need a course. She needed someone to look at her n8n workflow. Thirty minutes later, she had her answer.
