Brooklyn Founder Builds AI Boardroom. She Draws The Line At Art. Smart Woman.
Sara Russell, 37, runs Mainland Vintage Bath & Body Boutique in Brooklyn. She has assembled what she calls an AI C-suite to handle marketing, sales, finance, and product development. She explicitly refuses to deploy AI for creative work, maintaining a boundary between operational assistance and artistic output.
This illustrates a principle I call 'domain-selective delegation.' The mental model: treat AI as a specialized middle manager, competent at structure and repetition, useless at taste. The mechanism is boundary-setting by task type rather than blanket adoption or rejection. Most people fail at AI integration because they either trust it with everything or nothing. The correct approach is surgical.
Sara Russell, founder of Mainland Vintage Bath & Body Boutique in Brooklyn, uses AI agents across four business departments while excluding creative work from automation.
- Open ChatGPT or Claude and prompt it to act as your 'VP of Marketing' for your specific business type, including your product details and target customer. Expect a structured marketing plan you can critique and refine.
- Start a new chat and assign it the role of 'CFO,' then paste your monthly expense categories and ask for cost-cutting recommendations. Expect specific line-item suggestions, some obvious, some not.
- Create a third chat as 'Head of Product' and describe a product idea you have, asking for a competitive analysis and launch checklist. Expect a framework that reveals gaps in your thinking.