What Changed in AI in 2026, and What It Means for Your Spa

If your picture of AI is still based on what ChatGPT could do at the beginning of this year, you are running your spa from an outdated playbook, and not just a little outdated. In 10 months, we have gone from asking AI to help with pieces of our work to handing it entire outcomes. For a spa CEO doing 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 a month or more, that changes what you hire for, where your time goes, and what the next five years of your company can look like.

Well, hello my dears, and welcome to the very first episode of Growth Factor® with Daniela Woerner, episode one. Oh my gosh, I have been waiting such a long time to say that out loud. I am so excited to be here with you today. I am Daniela. I’m the founder of Addo Aesthetics, and after two decades in this industry and working with more than 1,700 spa businesses, I built this show for the spa CEO who is ready to stop working a really hard job and start running a company.

Every Monday, we are going behind the scenes of what really matters in running an aesthetic business. Profitability, leadership, team, marketing, systems, and of course, scale, with real numbers and frameworks that you can take straight to your spa. And we’re gonna keep coming back to one goal, building a profitable business that supports the life you want to live.

Okay. So for episode one, I wanted to start the conversation by what is going on in every single industry, in every single continent, and at a lot of our kitchen tables right now, AI. And I’m starting here because it’s already touching everything else that we are going to talk about on this show, your marketing, your team, your numbers, the way that work moves through your spa in general.

Now, more specifically, I wanna talk about what has changed from January of 2026 to right now, the end of October 2026. Ten months, it doesn’t sound like a long time, but in AI, 10 months is an eternity. It’s enormous. And I think a lot of spa owners are still judging AI by what it could do the very first time that they tried it.

So maybe you logged into ChatGPT a couple of years ago, and you asked it to write you an Instagram caption for RF microneedling, and it wrote something back like, “Unlock your confidence and embrace a more radiant you.” And you’re like, “Okay, no, absolutely not. That sounds so generic. That sounds awful. I’m not gonna put that out there for me.”

Maybe you played with it a few more times. Maybe someone on your marketing team uses it. Maybe you clean up an email here and there. But your mental model is still ask it something, it gives me something back. And that’s where I wanna start today, because the biggest change of 2026 is not that AI got better at writing captions.

It’s the unit of work actually changed. So if I had to sum up this year in one sentence, it would be this. In January, we were saying, “AI, help me do this thing.” Today, more and more, we are saying, “AI, take responsibility for getting this done.” That’s a massive difference, friends. And January is right about when the tools that were built for that second sentence started showing up for regular business owners.

Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in January. This is an assistant designed to work through complex multi-step tasks instead of just answering questions. So the old way, “Write me an email promoting our Shed the Dead event,” and AI would write the email. That’s great, but then what? You still have to edit it, right? We’re still putting human eyes on these things.

You still decide whether the offer makes sense. Someone else puts it into your email platform. Someone creates the graphic. Someone checks the dates. Someone builds the link and schedules it. Someone decides whether we should also send a text, and someone follows up with the people who clicked but didn’t book. So yes, AI helped with a tiny piece of the workflow, but you still ran the workflow.

Now compare that to where this is going. You say, “Build our holiday gift card campaign. Use our brand guidelines, our ICA, our ideal client avatar, last December’s numbers, our current pricing, this year’s revenue goals, and the offers that we’ve already approved.” Now with the right tools, the right connections, permissions, and systems, AI can increasingly research that information, analyze it, draft the campaign, build the pieces of it, check its own work, and move through multiple steps of the workflow.

Is it this perfect hands-off execution across every system? No. You still give it feedback the same way you would with a new hire in her first month. But it’s a very different thing than a chatbot writing an email.

So the shift is from an interaction, a, a tool that you’re using, to an outcome. And if you’re a CEO, that should get your attention because once AI can take responsibility for bigger pieces of work, the question stops being, “How much faster th- can I write?” And it becomes, “How much more capacity can I create inside of my company?” Now, there’s another reason that this conversation matters right now, because AI adoption has crossed a threshold.

So QuickBooks surveys about 5,000 small businesses every quarter, and in their latest numbers, four out of five said they now use AI regularly. In the summer of 2024, that was under half. The number that really stuck with me is that only about 18% of businesses using AI said that it was core to their operations. So if you take that information, if you put that together, it tells you something.

Says that using AI is no longer unusual, but using it operationally is. Now, there are businesses using Chap– GPT or Claude three times a week to write emails, and there are businesses redesigning the way that work moves through their entire organization. Those are not the same businesses, and over the next few years, I believe the gap between them is going to get very wide.

Not because one of them has some magical technology that the other doesn’t have access to. We are all going to have access to very capable models. The advantage is gonna come from what you build around them, your processes, your data, your documentation, your permissions, your leadership, and the willingness to look at repeatable work and say, “Why are we still doing this by hand?” That is the opportunity.

And if we stay with that 18% for a second, because almost every spa owner I talk to right now thinks that she’s behind on AI,

you’re not behind. You’re doing it manually. That’s why it’s feeling slow. Now, there is a real difference between those two, and because it’s so rarely explained, it ends up feeling like this personal failure of being behind instead of just missing a step. So using a tool to do a task faster is still you doing the task. You’re the one that has to remember it, open it, ask it, check it, and move the result to wherever it needs to go.

The tool didn’t take the job off your plate. It made the job shorter. What you’re reaching for is the version that runs without you, and the version that doesn’t start with a better tool. It starts with doing the work manually enough times that you can write it down every single step, because a process you can’t describe is a process that you can’t hand off to anyone, whether it’s a human or AI.

Okay. So let’s talk about agents. That is a word we’re gonna hear a lot in 2027. So with a chatbot, a chatbot waits for you. You ask a question, it responds. You ask another, it responds. An agent is designed to take a goal and work through multiple steps towards finishing it. So this is one of the biggest developments of 2026, and now we have some fascinating data on how people are actually using these tools.

So in June, OpenAI published research on Codex, which is one of its agent tools, and by May, more than 80% of the individual users said they had sam- that they sampled, said they had handed off at least one task estimated at more than 30 minutes of human work. About a quarter of them had delegated something estimated at eight hours.

Those are model estimates of how long the work would take a person. So don’t treat them like a stopwatch, but they’re telling us something really important, and OpenAI’s own researchers described it almost exactly the same way as I did, that the unit of work is moving past a single interaction to delegated longer tasks. Okay? So people who are getting really sophisticated with AI, they’re not saying, “Did this save me five minutes?” They’re asking, “How many hours of work did I delegate this week?” That is a completely different metric, and I want you to start using it inside of your spa.

Not how many people on my team have ChatGPT. Ask, “How many hours of repeatable human work are we still doing by hand that does not require human judgment?” That question is going to show you opportunity everywhere in your company.

Okay, so let’s take this out of Silicon Valley for a second and into the treatment rooms and your front desk. So I want you to imagine walking into your spa tomorrow morning, and instead of, you know, spending the first 45 minutes pulling reports, scanning the schedule, messaging your manager or your front desk and saying, “Hey, give me yesterday’s revenue,” or, “Tell me where we hit– if we hit our goal,” or, um, “Show me which providers are pacing behind their monthly target.

Flag any big scheduling gaps over the next seven days. Tell me where- whether our average ticket moved. Show me anything I should know.” It– You can talk to– You can have an agent set that up and pull all of that information and have it waiting for you when you walk in the door. That is the difference. Okay?

So think about your monthly leadership meeting. How are you prepping for that? Are you pulling numbers from Mangomint, from payroll, uh, your P&L, QuickBooks, retail, pre-book retention, new clients, uh, memberships, marketing? Like all of these metrics that we’re keeping track of, oftentimes on multiple spreadsheets, you’ve gotta interpret it, you’ve gotta look at the numbers, and then you’ve gotta prep for the meeting.

That is a tremendous amount of human labor happening before the leadership work even begins. AI can absorb more and more of that preparation. So instead of spending your meeting finding the information, you spend it making decisions from the information. That is a much better use of your team.

So let me give you a real example from inside of our company. This is something that I’m, like, obsessed with right now. So every Monday at 6:00 a.m., we have an agent that posts a report into my personal Slack channel. So it tells me exactly how my ads did last week compared to the week before. It says what’s performing better, what’s performing worse, what it suggests that we change.

It tells me my website traffic, how many people click to contact us. It breaks down every single one of my social channels, when we last posted, what post did the best. It even shows me YouTube watch time compared to the week before. It helps me to know what content is connecting with my audience and how I make more of what they want.

It keeps me dialed in to how I can serve them. Now, if a human were gathering all of that data and presenting it in the way that I see it, that’s at minimum five hours a week, and minimum five hours a week because that’s just gathering the information. I don’t know how long it would take to really analyze it and give me recommendations, right?

So if I look at five hours a week, that’s 260 hours a year. That’s a lot. And here’s what’s different from the beginning of the year. I don’t give Claude a prompt. I don’t open anything. I just wake up, and that report is there every Monday. It’s there on time, always at the same level of thoroughness and depth.

And that is only one of the tasks that this particular agent handles for me. That’s the difference between AI help me do this, and AI take responsibility for getting this done. That allows me to make better decisions for my company.

Now, a major shift this year is context, and people say memory a lot, but what they actually mean is context. So the big development is that AI can now work with dramatically more information about your company. So most of us, and I started playing with AI in 2024, early 2024, we would start with, “Here’s a document. Help me with it.” Now, imagine giving AI a system that has appropriate access to the operating knowledge of your spa, like your handbook, your SOPs, your core values, your ICA service menu, compensation, KPIs, meeting notes, annual plan, all of that kind of stuff.

The breakthrough isn’t that you can store all of that somewhere, it’s that AI can increasingly reason across it, and that matters because the complaint that I hear over and over since AI started is that, “It doesn’t sound like me.”

I think that is becoming less and less of a model problem and more of a structural problem on the user’s end not using it to the full capabilities of what is possible. Now, if AI knows nothing about your company and you write, uh, “Give me a facial promotion,” you’re gonna get something generic, garbage in, garbage out. But if it understands your brand, your clients, your offers, the services that you’re trying to grow, the past campaigns that you’ve run, the words that you do and don’t use, it’s a completely different request.

So we’re moving from write a promotion to write a promotion based on my business. And for an established spa, that distinction is everything. This is why I’ve become so passionate about giving every part of your business the right context. But before you get excited about agents, you have to have the foundation. A brilliant AI model with terrible company context will still make mediocre bus- business decisions.

Now, it’s the same thing that happens if you were to hire a brilliant employee and you don’t train her. She can be smart. She can be capable. She just doesn’t know how you do things.

So instead of collecting 57 random AI tools, I want you to think about the different divisions in your company, okay? So you’re gonna have fulfillment, which is what most spa owners are thinking of as the entire operation, right? Like your treatment rooms, providers, client experience. But there’s other divisions of your company. You’ve got marketing, sales, operations, finance, and HR.

Those are all departments for your company, and each of those bigger divisions can be broken down further. So if you look at marketing, for example, you could have a marketing manager who’s more of a strategist. You could have a copywriter. You could have a social media manager. There’s three different roles, and each of them needs different information to do their job well, but they’re still in the marketing department.

So every division of your company needs its own context-rich knowledge files that are specific to the work that that division does. So when AI has the right knowledge files for the right division, it does the work the way your best-trained person was. This is how we run Addo. So our marketing division has its own knowledge files with our ICA, our voice guide, our offers, our approved client stories, and that’s the difference between AI that sounds like a robot and AI that actually sounds like us.

Now, AI isn’t a little website someone on your team opens when they need a caption. It’s starting to become part of how the company runs.

So the next big change this year is connections. AI does not have to live in an isolated chat window anymore. The major platforms are building connections straight into the tools that businesses already use. So in May, Anthropic launched Claude for Small Businesses with connections into QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. And something that I really appreciated was that it keeps the access people already have.

So if someone on your team can’t see something in QuickBooks today, they don’t suddenly get access through Claude. And just this month, Google turned Gemini into an agent for businesses that gets its own workspace account, its own email address, just like any other coworker on the team. So think about why connection matters. If I ask AI, “Why did profitability drop last quarter?” And it has no access to my financials, what’s it supposed to tell me?

It can teach me about profitability. It can give me some hypotheses. It cannot actually analyze my business and my numbers. Connections change that. So we move from a model that knows a lot about business to a system that knows something about your business. That is where the CEO use cases get powerful. Now, this next one matters a lot in aesthetics.

AI got dramatically better at visual work. Our industry is visual, right? Social media, treatments, education, events, branding presentations, all of it. And historically, there were a lot of handoffs. So you would have the idea, someone writes the copy, someone briefs the designer, the designer creates something, gives revisions. Someone goes back and approve it, someone schedules it. Production capacity becomes the bottleneck.

That is changing too. So in April, Anthropic launched Claude Design, which creates slides, one-pagers, prototypes through conversation and can apply your brand’s design system so everything stays consistent. I build all of my presentations in Claude Design. Every, uh, graphic that we use is essentially coming from Claude Design. Now, that doesn’t mean that designers disappear. It means that the designer’s value moves.

The human’s value becomes taste, strategy, judgment, and creative direction. AI can generate the options, the human decides what is the right one, and that’s a very different bottleneck. Now, here’s another piece that I think is going to be huge in the coming year. In July, OpenAI released ChatGPT Live, which uses what’s called full duplex voice. So in English, that means it can listen and speak at the same time.

You can interrupt it, it responds naturally. It feels much less like I talk, I stop, the computer thinks, the computer talks, and much more like a real conversation. OpenAI says more than 150 million people already talk to ChatGPT by voice or dictation every week. So why does that matter for you? Because the AI interface starts to disappear.

You don’t have to sit at your desk typing prompts. You can be driving home and say, “I just had an idea for our January event. Can you capture this, organize my thoughts, turn it into a campaign brief, pull out the action items, and put everything where it belongs?” Or you’re walking into work and you say, “Brief me on the business before my first meeting.” Right?

Start getting your morning walks in. You can work and be talking to chat at the same time, so you have a more balanced life. I already am dictating most of my thinking with Withers- with Whisper Flow,

and that for me, it’s like infinitely faster. Okay. So I wanna give you a framework for figuring out where your business is. And if you think about AI maturity in five different levels, level one is ask AI, right? This is where most people started. Write this caption, fix this email, give me five ideas, prompt answer. It’s useful, but it’s very limited.

Level two is train AI. So now AI has context. Write this in my brand voice for my ideal client about this specific offer. It’s much better.

Level three is connect AI. So now it can see real business information. Look at my company and tell me what needs attention. This is where AI starts supporting your decisions. Level four is delegate to AI. Now you move from asking questions to assigning outcomes. Build next month’s campaign, prepare our weekly KPI review, analyze our new client retention problem, and bring recommendations to Monday’s meeting.

Level five is about orchestrating AI. Now you’re not thinking about one tool, you’re thinking about a digital workforce, different AI employees with different responsibilities working inside defined permissions alongside your people, handing work back for approval wherever judgment is required.

That is the future, my friends. Wherever you are on that list right now is fine. You just need to know where you’re at, so you know what to build next. Now, here’s another way that I’ve been kind of visualizing it. If you look at your org chart, you have the CEO, you have your managers, your providers, your marketing people, your client experience team, and underneath the human organization, there’s an AI layer, marketing, operations, onboarding, finance, people and performance, inventory, client follow-up, provider training, retail recommendations.

It’s not AI replacing the people in those roles, AI employees sitting underneath them, absorbing the research, preparation, analysis, documentation, and repeatable execution, so your humans can do the work humans are uniquely good at: leading, coaching, making judgment calls. Creating, building relationships, caring for clients and patients, having hard conversations, and solving the problems that nobody has seen before.

That is the org chart that interests me. Now, because so many of you run medical spas, we have to talk about something critically important. Capability does not equal permission. I want you to remember that. These systems may be technically capable of accessing an enormous amount of information. That doesn’t mean that they should. PHI, patient photos, treatment records, medical histories, financial information, employee files, you can’t approach any of that casually.

The more powerful these tools get, the more governance matters. Which tools are approved? Do you have to have a signed BAA? Where, what is required? What is each system allowed to access, and who has permission? Where does a human have to approve before anything moves? What does your AI policy say that your team can paste into general purpose AI tools, and what is absolutely off-limits?

That is a conversation to have with your compliance officer before anyone on your team pastes a single client note into an AI tool. Super, super important. I know it’s not the sexy part of AI, but as a business owner, it may be the most important part.

Your competitive advantage isn’t being the spa that uses AI. It’s being the company that built the infrastructure to use it well. Now, please don’t finish this episode and open Google and say the best, you know, 25 AI tools for spa. That’s not the assignment. I want you to collect the information…

Start that part over. I watch spa owners collect AI tools the way that we used to collect marketing software. Another subscription, another login, another dashboard that you don’t use six weeks later. I want you to start with the work instead. Where is our capacity constrained? Where are decisions waiting on me? What does somebody compile by hand every single week?

What knowledge lives in one employee’s head, and what reports do we have that nobody is actually analyzing? That is where AI implementation begins, not with the tool, with the bottleneck. There are 168 hours in a week, and businesses have always been constrained by human time. If a report takes your manager three hours, those three hours have to come from somewhere.

If a campaign takes 12 hours to build, those 12 hours come out of somebody’s week. If onboarding a new provider takes 20 hours of prep, somebody has to do it. That math has always been pretty fixed. Agents don’t create more hours in the week. They expand how much capacity your organization can delegate. And this is important because the goal is not great.

We have AI, now let’s fill every available second with more work. Absolutely not. If you listen to episode 500 of the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast, you know that is absolutely not what I believe. The goal isn’t to have less humans. It’s to have humans not doing an infinite amount of work, having your humans do the work that only humans can do.

That’s the part that I care most about. I don’t want AI to answer 400 more emails. I want fewer emails that need me at all. I don’t want AI so that I can squeeze six more meetings into my week. I want my company to run so well that everything doesn’t require a meeting. I don’t want my team producing twice as much mediocre content.

I want them to have enough space to create excellent work. I want CEOs to have the room to think. I want managers to coach. I want providers to be present with their clients and patients. I want teams to go home on time. I want parents to have more time with their kids. This year I started homeschooling, and it’s been the best, the best thing for our family.

I have so much more time for, with my kids. And so for me, when I think about AI, one of the things I’m personally working towards is a four-day workweek, not clever ways to fill a five-day one. That is what I’m working towards. So when technology removes administrative weight, the question becomes, “What do you do with the capacity that you get back?” And I hope that the answer isn’t always more.

So if you’re listening and you’re thinking, “Okay, so what do I do with all this?” I want you to focus on three things. First, build the foundation. Before agents, before automation, before complicated workflows, make sure that your AI has quality business context. Your brand, your ICA, your offers, your SOPs, your roles, your KPIs, your financial targets. This has to be the first thing that you build.

Second, find the work that you can delegate. So for the next week, I want you to listen to any time that you say, “I have to pull, I have to check, I have to compile, I have to rewrite, I have to remind, I have to prepare.” Look at all of those. Those are clues. Pick one, write down the process if it’s not written, review the process if it is, and start to delegate that.

Start to train your AI to handle that. Third, I want you to build the governance before you build complexity, especially in medical aesthetics. Know what your systems can access, what your team is allowed to use, where protected information lives, and where a human has to approve. This is exactly why I wanted AI to be episode number one of Growth Factor®.

This conversation, it’s gonna move fast, and we will keep having it in here. But this is not an AI podcast. This is a business podcast, and AI happens to be one of the most powerful operating tools that you have in business. So every time AI comes up, we’re gonna ask the same questions. Where does it improve the business?

Where does it create capacity or improve a decision? Where should a human absolutely stay involved? And where is the hype getting ahead of the reality? You do not need to become an AI expert. You already have-

What I want is for you to become a CEO who understands enough about AI to see what is possible and make smart decisions about where it belongs in your company. So here’s the thought that I wanna leave you with. In January of 2026, we said, “AI, help me do this.” Here at the end of October, we’re saying, “AI, take responsibility for getting this done.” And we’re still at the very beginning, which brings me to something new I’m starting here on Growth Factor®.

At the end of every episode, I’m gonna leave you with one Growth Factor® question to take back to your business and think through. This week’s question is: What work are my humans carrying that they shouldn’t have to handle anymore? Not where can I use AI? Look at the work first. Look at what you’re doing, what your manager is doing, what your providers are doing, what your marketing team is doing.

Where human time is going to work that doesn’t need human creativity, judgment, or relationships. Start there. Spend this week with that question and send me a DM on Instagram or send us an email. Let me know what you found. I’d love to hear what comes up. Now, one last thing before I go. As we’re building this next chapter, your reviews matter so much.

I wanna know what is landing with you, if an episode makes you think differently, if it gives you an idea that you wanna take back to your spa, or starts a conversation with your leadership team. I’d love for you to take a minute and write a review telling me about it. I read all of them.

All right. Until next time, my dears. Keep building a business that supports the life that you want to live.