TL;DR
Wealthy Affiliate says its new AI assistant, Ace, won’t simply answer prompts. It’s being designed to understand the individual business you’re building and use that context when helping you learn, plan and create.
That’s the part I’m interested in testing.
I already have established websites, years of content and workflows spread across WordPress, AI tools, social platforms and other systems.
If Ace really can become the “brain” behind a business, mine should give it a fairly good workout.
I Don’t Really Need Another AI Chatbot
I use AI every day.
It’s part of how I brainstorm, research, question my own ideas and work through problems.
So when Wealthy Affiliate first started talking about Ace, I wasn’t particularly interested in whether it could give me ten keywords or write an article.
I can already do those things.
The claim that caught my attention was something different.
Ace is supposed to understand the business it’s helping with.
That’s much harder.
And potentially much more useful.
There’s a Big Difference Between Knowing Things and Knowing My Business
Generative AI can know an extraordinary amount.
But that doesn’t automatically mean it knows what I’m trying to accomplish.
Take The Gentle Earner.
A useful assistant would need more than the URL and a few article titles.
It would help to understand why I deliberately avoid hype.
Why I don’t want every article aggressively selling something.
Which audiences I’m increasingly writing for.
What I’ve already tried.
What’s worked.
What hasn’t.
How the different pieces of the site connect.
And what I’m deliberately not doing yet.
The Layered Traveller would need completely different context again.
That’s what makes the idea of Ace interesting.
WA says that context will increasingly build around each Hub as you work.
A New Business Might Actually Be Easier
If I started a completely new business inside the new Wealthy Affiliate, Ace could potentially be there from the beginning.
Here’s the idea.
Here’s the audience.
Here’s how I hope to monetise it.
These are the channels I’m using.
Here’s the content we’re creating.
Here’s what we’ve tried.
Ace watches that history accumulate.
Simple enough.
Except that’s not how my existing businesses were built.
Ace Has Some Catching Up to Do With Me
Not all of my work currently lives inside Wealthy Affiliate.
Many of my articles aren’t created entirely through WA’s Article Designer.
I regularly publish directly through WordPress.
A lot of my strategy discussions happen with ChatGPT.
My Pinterest and social activity happens elsewhere.
Analytics lives elsewhere.
Planning happens across other systems.
In other words, the business exists.
But its entire history isn’t sitting neatly inside a Wealthy Affiliate Hub waiting for Ace to read it.
Which leads to my biggest question.
Can I give Ace enough external context to understand why the business looks the way it does?
That’s something I intend to find out.
I Also Want Ace to Disagree With Me
This is important.
AI can be very agreeable.
Sometimes wonderfully, uselessly agreeable.
Tell it your questionable new idea and there’s always a risk of receiving:
That’s a fantastic idea!
No.
Sometimes I want:
Have you considered that this may be a terrible use of your afternoon?
WA members have asked about this too.
Kyle has said Ace can be asked to be critical and is intended to help members make better decisions rather than simply becoming a “yes robot.”
He has also acknowledged something equally important:
AI doesn’t always know best.
Good.
That’s the relationship I want.
Give me another perspective.
Challenge the assumption.
Show me something I’ve missed.
Then let me decide.
Generation Isn’t the Hard Part Anymore
This is perhaps why Ace’s ability to create content isn’t its most interesting feature for me.
AI can already produce an extraordinary amount of stuff.
- Ideas.
- Articles.
- Images.
- Plans.
- Keywords.
- Social posts.
- More ideas.
Then another 47 ideas because apparently we hadn’t suffered enough.
The scarcity has shifted.
What I often need isn’t another thing I could do.
It’s help deciding:
What actually deserves my attention now?
WA has specifically talked about Ace helping with prioritisation.
If it genuinely understands the business well enough to say:
These five things are possible, but this is probably the one that matters now.
I’m listening.
That would be useful.
The New WA Could Give Ace an Advantage
This is also why I don’t see the question as:
Ace or ChatGPT?
I don’t particularly want an AI loyalty program.
I’ll use whatever helps.
A general AI tool can be brilliant for brainstorming, analysis and exploring ideas.
Ace potentially has a different advantage.
It lives beside the Hub.
The learning.
The content being created.
The website.
Eventually, perhaps, more connected channels and business data.
If that proximity gives Ace useful context without me repeatedly explaining everything, it has a reason to exist in my workflow.
If it doesn’t, I already have tools I enjoy using.
That’s a fairly simple test.
So I’m Giving Ace Two Very Different Challenges
When the new Wealthy Affiliate arrives, I want to test it from both ends.
First, I’ll introduce it to businesses that already have history.
That’s the difficult one.
How quickly can Ace understand what I’ve built, where I’m going and why I’ve made the decisions I’ve made?
Then I want to experience the other extreme.
A fresh start.
No years of baggage.
No established workflow.
Ace involved from the beginning.
I suspect those experiences could be quite different.
And that’s useful information for my eventual Wealthy Affiliate review too.
Someone considering joining WA for the first time needs a different answer from somebody who’s been there for years.
What Would Make Ace Genuinely Useful to Me?
I’ve thought about this quite a bit while watching the previews.
I don’t need Ace to produce the most words.
I don’t need it to give me the longest list.
I don’t need it to tell me every idea is brilliant.
I want something closer to:
I know what you’re building.
I know what you’ve already done.
I can see what you’re currently working towards.
Here are your realistic options.
This one probably matters most.
Here’s why.
Do you want help doing it?
If Wealthy Affiliate can eventually deliver that, Ace becomes much more than another AI chatbot.
If it can’t, I’ll find that out too.
Either way, this is one part of the new WA I don’t want to judge from a demonstration.
I want to give it an actual business and see what it does.
Poor Ace.
It doesn’t know what’s coming.
FAQ
What is Wealthy Affiliate Ace?
Ace is the AI assistant being integrated throughout Wealthy Affiliate’s rebuilt platform. WA says it will use the context of individual businesses to help members learn, plan, create and prioritise work.
Will Ace know my existing website?
WA has said existing Hubs will move into the new environment and website management is being substantially upgraded. Exactly how much Ace understands automatically about established external business activity is something I’ll be testing after launch.
Can I bring externally created content into Ace?
Yes. WA has said externally created content, including complete articles, can be brought into the environment and developed further.
Does Ace make decisions for you?
Ace can provide recommendations and can be asked to critically evaluate ideas, but WA has emphasised that the user retains control and that AI won’t always know best.
Will Ace replace other AI tools?
That will depend on individual workflows. Its potential advantage is its access to the context being built inside the Wealthy Affiliate business environment. I expect I’ll continue using different AI tools for different jobs.