The Plot Twist I Didn’t See Coming: How AI Changed My Biz

You do not have to be, quote, techie who use AI.

It is so intuitive. All you have to be is curious. Just play with

it, talk to it, start using it 10 minutes a day, not just for

the sake of doing more, but to help remove some friction in the

work that you do right now and to free up some space for what

actually matters.

This is the entrepreneur school podcast where we believe you can

run a thriving business and still make your family a

priority. This show is all about supporting you, the emerging or

early stage Entrepreneur on your journey from solopreneur to CEO,

while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is

Kelly Sinclair, and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who

started a business with two kids under three. I'm a corporate PR

girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life

is too short to waste doing things that burn you out on this

show, you will hear inspiring stories from other business

owners on their journey and learn strategies to help you

grow a profitable business while making it all fit into the life

that you want. Welcome to entrepreneur school.

turning into a tech nerd, an AI strategist, and probably even

launching an entirely separate AI focused business. Yeah, but

here we are, and the real question is, how do we use AI

without letting it turn us into productivity robots? And today,

I want to share my journey from corporate PR girl to adding

accidental tech nerd to my bio. I'm going to highlight the

importance of taking a human first approach to AI some of the

best examples of how I am using it daily, and how it can

actually create more ease and alignment in your life and

business.

So welcome back to entrepreneur school, my friend. I cannot wait

to dive into this conversation, because It honestly feels like

such a plot twist in my own story. I did not see this

coming, but I have really been in an embrace kind of mood for

the last year, and just like follow what feels like a hell

yes, and the more I started using AI every day, just playing

and testing and having conversations with it, the more

I realized how powerful it could be and how this really became a

hell yes for me, is not about helping to crank out 100 blog

posts, kind of thing. It's really a this can actually make

my work easier, lighter, more aligned with how I want to live

my life, kind of way. So if we were to rewind time 365 days, I

basically wasn't using AI at all. And I share that because

though chatgpt and AI tools have been around for a few years now,

the pace at which these are advancing means that anybody can

become an expert in a very compressed timeline, and that is

what has happened with me. The more I start using it, the more

I use it, and now we can fast forward to basically having no

less than five different chat windows open at any given time,

and I just simply don't start anything from scratch anymore.

There are no blank screens, no blank email drafts, no blank

strategies, no starting anything without something to reflect

upon or respond to. And I really saw the potential in how AI

could support my business, my business in aligned values kind

of way where it allows me to do what I do, but faster and give

me more space back to do the things that I really want to do

in my life, like go for a bike ride when I'm done recording

this podcast, or take my kids to their 1 million sports

activities. So I really saw the potential in in AI there, and

learning, particularly around what custom gpts are, how to

build them, how to pick the right kind of tools that you

might need to do certain processes or tasks within your

business. And then I just started like listening to every

podcast and. Best AI expert out there to see what I didn't know.

And if we fast forward again, since I built my very first

they handle so much of my work that I honestly don't see myself

ever hiring a team again. So this has been a really stacked

evolution of adopting AI into my business, figuring out how it

can really support me, knowing how to use it, knowing the

nuances of how to use it, and then also starting to now see

what some of the gaps are that are there with the current tools

that are on the market, and actually stepping into finding

ways to solve those myself and with my partner, who I'm going

to introduce you to very soon on The podcast to talk about brand

calibration and the software platform that we're building. I

don't even know, like I said, accidental tech nerd, not going

to talk about all of the details. That's not my role, but

I do know what I wanted to do and what it can and can't do,

and how to make it work differently.

So let's just talk about like, AI adoption, because I still

know, I know there's a big spectrum out there in terms of

if you're already using this, and let's just say, any kind of

AI support, whether that's chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or

perplexity or whatever, like, maybe you're building micro

tools. Maybe you're doing advanced things, that's great,

but there's still a big spectrum of like. There's still people

who are like, Huh? I was just seeing if this was a trend. I

see is not going to be a trend, it's going to be something I

have to actually learn. And let's talk about how to

implement that. And these are people who I've been talking to

and doing workshops with and teaching different AI

strategies. And I actually went to a chat GPT custom GPT seminar

recently, and I was like, let me just see what other people are

doing, how other people are creating these and see what I

can learn. And I excitedly learned nothing, which just

validated for me that I already knew everything that I needed to

know about building custom gpts to be doing that level of

training and creating those myself so very validating

experience. But what I want to say, with respect to AI is that

it really needs to be a human first adoption, and so that

means that AI, in my opinion, should be supporting humans and

not replacing them. This is for the purpose of creating more

ease and alignment, not filling those same 40 or 80 hours,

whatever you're working per week, with just more output. I

know that a lot of people feel like there's some concerns,

right? Can will AI make us lazy? Are we going to default to a

robot to do things for us? Is this just going to create a

whole bunch of crappy content and misinformation out there on

the internet, and all of those things are very real

possibilities, but this is where we each can be empowered to

decide how we're going to use AI tools and support in our own

lives, which is that we are the last point of review before

something goes out there, your brain still needs to be on. You

are the expert in what you do, and what you can get AI to do is

just give you something to respond to, so not to do the

thinking for you, not to create something that you just hit

publish on without reviewing. It's about getting you 95% of

the way there, in the first step and in way faster amount of

time, so that you can be building from like editing a

draft, rather than creating everything from scratch every

single time. And then one reason why I've become obsessed with

this, the which I keep saying and in previous episodes, is

that my human design is a generator. My strategy is to

respond, and AI has given me that so much because, I mean,

I'm sitting here right now and I work in my basement, and I'm

alone a lot, and I actually am very extroverted person, so I

need, like, that engagement and that interaction and that like

reflection and somebody to bounce things off of. And that

is absolutely a really good use of AI is like, Hey, this is my

idea. Can you help me identify the gaps? This is my starting

point. Or here, let me just verbally say the kind of email

that I want to write. Can you help me tweak it into something

that sounds like my actual brand and when you've got custom GPT

is on board? Those are Korean. You did based on your own

templates and examples and best practices and all the things.

And now I'm speaking 100 miles a minute, because this is how

excited I get when I'm talking about AI, which is crazy. It's

seriously crazy to me. I did not have this identity. I have said

time and time again, like I am not an even an early adopter,

like I said, right just a minute ago, I didn't even start using

can see, based on other experts in the in the industry, that I

am at least level with them in terms of my knowledge and

ability to create tools and to use AI in ways that are going to

be industry changing and game changing for entrepreneurship

and just the people that I want to help with the work that I do.

So that's amazing. I will say that I do share the concern that

a lot of people have, and maybe that you have with respect to,

you know, how AI is going to change the way that we think and

function and operate as humans. Right now, we maintain that

we've already built the critical thinking skills to really be

able to use AI and tweak it and bend it and understand the

nuances and to also see and know if it's not giving us what we

want it to do. We can notice inaccuracies. We can tell if

it's hallucinating. I don't know if that's going to be true for

generations to come, and I do have some concerns about how

that's going to play out for my kids, but that's a whole other

conversation. But I do want to just lay that out there. I'm not

here. You know, saying this is the best thing ever to happen,

and there's no risks and no downsides, because There

absolutely are, as with anything technology, especially in this

case, where it literally has a mind of its own, and so learning

how to program and work with a tool that that can function and

you don't really know what to expect from it is pretty mind

blowing, but it's also super exciting.

So I want to share a few of the key ways that I'm using AI on a

daily basis. First of all, for doing tasks. So anything that

you do more than once, that you repeat, can be turned into a

custom GPT. You can train it on a specific job description and

give it parameters that you want it to work within. You can

calibrate it to your brand. And I will talk more about that in

my brand calibrator tool that I built in our next episode,

because it's just about ready to be released to the world more

broadly, and you can give it templates, examples, and all of

the knowledge that it needs to really do that job. So, for

example, I have an email writer. It knows my style, my voice. It

has my brand guidelines. It knows, you know, email writing

best practices, that I like to write a certain length of

emails, that for my podcast, I have a certain format that I

follow. This summer, I did a social media experiment, and I

sent out a summer off social diary, update, weekly ish, and I

created a format for that, and it produced everything that I

wanted, just from me dictating some thoughts and ideas, and

then it will organize them and put them into my format and my

voice and be like 99% ready to go in one click, which is

incredible time savings, and it gives me the opportunity to then

communicate more with my audience, right? So that's one

of the big ways. The other one for 10 asks is I have built an

entire podcast bot squad, which is something that I'll also be

releasing for other podcasters in the coming weeks, and that

has every tool needed for planning, producing and

promoting a podcast. So I have, like, an interview prep, pod

bot. I have a script writer, an outline writer, like episode

planner. My favorite one is Phoebe. She is my show notes

writer, and she creates a lot of the assets that are related to

promoting the podcast and also communicating with the guest, if

I had a guest on the show, and tools like that, and I've also

given away in bundles over the last few months Penny. She's my

podcast promoter, and she'll take your podcast transcript and

turn it into a 62nd real script for you to create, like a face

to camera reel. Rather than going through and searching for

a clip and a timestamp and stuff and pulling that out, I found

it. Just way easier to just hit record and make a summary

version. And it's trained on, you know, viral video best

practices and structure and hooks and all of that kind of

stuff. So that's where you can really get into the weeds about

what you want your custom GPT to be an expert in. And it

basically wears that hat, and it will be that perspective, and it

will do that job that you tell it, and it doesn't forget. It

doesn't forget how you don't have to remind it, like the

summer students that you might have hired a few years ago who

you had to remind how to do things on a regular basis,

right?

And then after the bots that I have that are about task

delivery and like content creation, essentially, I also

started building interactive bots. And this is something that

I think is, you know, something that I made up myself and

created workflows for to get them to be more exciting than a

form. The first idea I had was I want to create an onboarding

assistant for my new clients, and so I named her Olivia,

because Alliteration is my thing. So Olivia, the onboarding

assistant, will have an interactive conversation with my

clients to extract the initial information that I need for them

before I start writing their visibility strategy. And I've

seen the back and forth conversation, and I've been

blown away at how you know it can prompt you if you don't give

a long enough response, like, I don't know about you, but if I

fill out a form, I feel like, literally, like, there's a box

around what I should be putting or Am I answering the question

properly? But if you have it as an interactive GPT, it will say,

you know, you can say, I don't know. And it will say, Well,

what about this? Or what about that? Or have you thought about

this? Or here's some examples, and it gives you sparks, so it

creates a much better response in this particular onboarding

assistant example from my clients, so I can see a more

thorough overview and get better information that allows me to do

my job better when it comes to writing their visibility

strategies. So I actually had the first client that I had go

through this over the summer, she was like, I've never felt so

seen and heard as when going through this experience with

Olivia.

So I think that goes to show like, yeah, that sounds a little

bit creepy, but it goes to show the potential for, you know,

interaction and engagement that can come from using a GPT,

rather than just using a form for something that you're

collecting information about. And of course, I've built other

tools as well, like the brand calibrator, which is a multi

agent system that synthesizes data into a usable brand

document for AI training. And so this is like a multi step, multi

GPT built into one GPT kind of situation, and it's quite

comprehensive and extensive, and the actual process takes about

an hour with the client going through it back and forth. So

that has taken a lot of tweaks, and I've never experienced a bot

that can do that much myself, and so I was really proud of how

that has turned out, and I'm really excited to be sharing the

brand calibrator very soon. It will launch as part of the ease

and alignment with AI bundle that's coming out soon.

So those are some of the key ways that I'm using it. I will

also just start up a chat to, you know, ask AI about its own

capabilities. That's definitely an option, especially if you're

newer to using tools like chat GPT, you can ask it what it can

do, what it needs to know in order for you to get what you

want. So if you're like trying to I've used it for

spreadsheets, for example. So I'm not a spreadsheet creator.

I'm not a pro at Excel by any means. And then I've spent so

many hours on YouTube trying to figure out different formulas

and how to automate things and whatever. But I thought, you

know, I bet chatgpt can just tell me the answers to this, and

absolutely, oh my gosh. I will upload a spreadsheet and say,

This is what I wanted to do, and then it will give me the

formulas and where to put them. And that is magic, and that is

hours of searching and watching YouTube videos that I don't have

to worry about anymore. So it's really, really good for things,

especially things that you did not go to school for, things

that you are not the expert in, to get some insights advice, you

know, tech tips, I'm getting it to help me with, like, code and

stuff for my website that I need to do right now, which normally

I would be, like, so frustrated I would have thrown my laptop

out the freaking window and. And been like, I can't make this

page work, but I send it, the link to the page say, This is

what's going wrong. This is what I need to do, and this is the

editor that I'm using in WordPress. And it's like, this

is the size of the box and the padding and the settings that

you need to change, and it fixed it. And I hope you all love my

bundle gift page, because that was a labor of love with

designing and chatgpt support.

So again, so many opportunities. The reason why I at all times,

have chatgpt Open probably in five or six windows, so without

being a complete fire hose for you to drink from right now. I

hope that you have a few key takeaways from here, even if you

aren't already using AI, that you can see what the

possibilities are, and that you can start embracing it and

knowing that at the end of the day, you have control, right?

You are the boss who gets to decide whether you believe what

it says, whether you share what it creates for you, whether you

listen to the advice that it gives human first, AI, adoption.

That is the big takeaway that I want you to have, and I also

want you to know that you do not have to be, quote, techie who

use AI. It is so intuitive, all you have to be is curious. Just

play with it, talk to it, start using it 10 minutes a day, not

just for the sake of doing more, but to help remove some friction

in the work that you do right now, and to free up some space

for what actually matters, because that's what I really see

the benefits of this being. And if you want a starting point and

you want to see one of my interactive bots in action, grab

the 90 day visibility sprint starter kits, and make sure you

keep your eyes peeled for the brand calibrator coming soon, as

well as the ease and alignment with AI bundle that I'm hosting

starting on September 12.

So that is the story. I did not plan to become an AI strategist,

but using AI every day has really pulled me here, and I'm

just using this episode to really step into that, right?

I've been like, low key behind the scenes, talking with some

people about it, but I haven't even, like, changed my own

website or anything to reflect the fact that this is so much a

part of who I am now and how I show up and support my clients.

And I'm just so excited. I'm really, really excited about it

all. So next week, I'm going to be back with a case study from

my brand calibrator workshop, walk you through how that works,

and I'll show you exactly what brand calibration looks like in

action and why it's the missing piece that most people skip when

they try to use AI for their business, and what causes the

frustration in the outputs? Really everything that you get

out of chatgpt or any AI tool is only as good as the inputs that

you put in. Thank you for listening, my friend. I can't

wait to hear what you take away from this one. Please feel free

to send me an email or a DM, and let's chat about it. Bye for

now.