When Rita Ramakrishnan first started her executive coaching company, Iksana Consulting, not all of the new skills she needed to hone came easily. As a solopreneur with autism and ADHD, certain operational basics of running a business were more difficult for her than for some of her peers.
“Anything that requires being on a specific schedule, anything that requires deep organization, those things were really challenging,” she told Business Insider.
With artificial intelligence, Ramakrishnan said that she now has the help she needs to stay solo. “AI has become my external executive function, compensating for what my brain doesn’t do well so I can lean harder into what it does brilliantly,” Ramakrishnan said.
Since integrating AI into her workflows over the past year, she has grown her business revenue while being a graduate student.
“I don’t think enough people are talking about how AI is opening up market opportunities for neurodivergent folks.”
Ramakrishnan and another neurodivergent solopreneur, Chris Haddox, founder of clothing brand DECOY LTD, shared the specific ways they have integrated AI to streamline their work processes.
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AI helps with task and energy management
Ramakrishnan’s AI workflow starts first thing in the morning, when she dumps everything on her mind into Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini and has the generative AI tools organize the
“It helps me move from a jumbled place where I’m at first thing in the morning into a synthesized and organized place.”
She uses a similar process at the beginning of a new client project, putting unstructured thoughts into an AI chat and asking it to organize them into a thoughtful project plan.
From there, she transfers the information into the productivity tool Motion, which can schedule reminders and add tasks to her calendar.
Beyond basic task management, Ramakrishnan uses AI to plan for the energy swings she experiences throughout the day as a neurodivergent person. “It knows when to schedule things based on when my energy levels are high or low, and based on what types of tasks I gain further energy from that I love doing and tasks that I deeply hate doing,” she said.
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To do this, Ramakrishnan said she had both Claude and Gemini track her daily energy for a few weeks. Then, she built custom projects in each tool based on how they synthesized her energy patterns. Now she can drop tasks into each LLM, and they will suggest an optimal time for each one, Ramakrishnan said. “It knows that if I have to write proposals, for example, Monday, Wednesday, and Thursdsay afternoons are the best time,” she said.
AI helps founders stay focused and organize information
Though Haddox, the founder of DECOY LTD., intentionally avoids using AI for the creative and artistic aspects of his work, he’s found it useful for keeping him on track as a solopreneur with ADHD.
“It’s difficult for me to stay focused on one train of thought. It’s very easy to want to get my hands on everything in front of me when initially, I wanted to solve one task,” Haddox said.
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He said that having a conversation with another person can keep him focused, but since a second party isn’t always available, a back-and-forth with AI can help fill that gap. For example, he might go to Claude with a technical bug and get a reminder of a solution that’s worked in the past, industry best practices he wouldn’t know otherwise, or additional questions he didn’t think to ask. “It certainly organizes my thoughts better than I ever could,” he told Business Insider.
He said he’s found this especially valuable as someone balancing running his business on the side with a full-time job. “Being able to come home after work and pick up where I left off on a chat that maybe I had even last week, without any sort of error, is really helpful,” he said.
AI supports sales and networking prep
AI has even helped Ramakrishnan improve at one-to-one human conversations, which are necessary for growing a business.
“Put me in a coaching session and I am my best self. Put me in a sales conversation and I’m an awkward turtle, and that is the autism talking,” she said.
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To scale her business, she knew she had to get better at these types of calls, so she uses AI to aggregate online information about who she’s meeting with, and then rehearses different scenarios for pitching her services.
“My autistic brain loves data,” Ramakrishnan said, adding that this research puts her at ease and makes her feel more equipped to somewhat predict what the person might need or empathize with what they’re facing. She said that she uses the same process to prepare for conferences and meetings.
“I’m not using AI to be more productive. I’m using it to stop punishing myself for how my brain works,” Ramakrishnan said.
