“Should we use ChatGPT or Claude?” We get asked this almost every week, and our answer is always the same. It matters less than you think.

A new model comes out every few weeks. Each one is a bit better than the last, and the lead swaps back and forth. If you pick based on this month’s winner, you’ll be picking again by Christmas.

The model isn’t why the answers are average

When an owner tells us AI gives them generic answers, it’s rarely the model. The AI just knows nothing about the business. It doesn’t know how you talk, what you charge, or how a quote actually goes out the door. So it guesses, and a guess sounds like every other business.

A smarter model guesses more convincingly. It still guesses.

What fixes it is the setup: everything the AI knows before you type a word.

Five things your AI should know before you start

  1. How you talk. Paste in five things you’ve written, like emails or posts. Ask the AI to describe your voice. Save what it says, and correct anything that’s off.
  2. What you sell and what you charge. Your offers, your prices, and who each one is for. Without this it’ll make prices up, confidently.
  3. How your jobs get done. The steps for the work you repeat every week. Quotes, onboarding a new client, following up a lead.
  4. What it’s never allowed to do. Write the rules down. Nothing goes to a client without you seeing it. No client names in anything public.
  5. What good looks like. Two or three pieces of work you’re proud of. AI copies the standard you show it, so show it your best.

None of this is technical. It’s the same stuff you’d tell a new team member in their first week. Most owners have it in their head and nowhere else.

Keep it in files you own

Here’s the part that answers the ChatGPT or Claude question. Where does all this live?

If it lives inside one chat app’s settings, it’s stuck there. Switch tools and you’re starting from zero. That’s why people feel locked in, and why every new release feels like a decision they have to get right.

If it lives in plain documents you keep, like a folder on your computer or your shared drive, it comes with you. Any AI can read it. When something better comes out, you point the new tool at the same folder and carry on. Switching takes an afternoon.

Your team can read the files too. The document that tells the AI how you quote is the same one that helps a new hire.

Your first hour

You don’t need all five today. Here’s a start that fits in an hour:

  1. Make one folder called something like “AI setup”.
  2. Write a page on how you talk, using the paste-five-things trick above.
  3. List what you sell and what you charge.
  4. Add one rule the AI can never break.

Then use whichever AI you like. Try the same task in two of them with the folder attached and see which you prefer. Your favourite will probably change over the next year. The folder won’t need to.

So which one should you use?

Honestly, whichever one your team will actually open. The best model for your business is the one people use every day with good context behind it.

If you’d like a hand writing the setup and getting it working on your real jobs, set up your own AI Operating System is where to start. Work with Brightwaters shows what it looks like when we train your team on it.