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You don't have to be technical to be good at it. Yes, so case in point, I'm an accidental tech co-founder. I have a communications degree. Right? What you actually need to be good at AI are two skills, and those are communications and organization.

Welcome to the next evolution of the podcast Entrepreneur School in the AI era, we are here to figure out how to integrate AI into the business you've worked so hard to build in a way that still feels like you. I'm your host, Kelly Sinclair, award-winning marketer turned AI platform co-founder. AI has fundamentally changed how I thought about work systems and what's actually possible. This show is about navigating that new reality together. It's going to be a wild ride, my friend, but I truly believe there's a way to leverage AI in a way that's intentional, human-centered, and aligned. It's an ongoing evolution, so let's explore, because AI may just be the unlock you need to achieve the life first business you truly desire.

Hey, hey, it's Kelly. So, normally when you hit play on this podcast, it's me interviewing someone else, or it's just me and my mic talking through whatever I'm building this week, or whatever is on my mind, but this week is a little bit different. I sat down with my friend Stephanie Mitton on her show, Women Don't Do That. This is a show that I have been a guest on several times, and something you should definitely listen to if you are a woman carving out a space in a leadership role, potentially in an industry that is not typically female centric. Stephanie has interviewed premiers of Canada, the wife of one of our political leaders in this country, all kinds of amazing guests, and I'm honored to be included in her guest rotation. So, please go and check out Women Don't Do That. This episode was really an important conversation about women and AI. We went through the adoption gap, why so many of us hesitate to use these tools, even when we know they will make our lives easier, and what it actually looks like from my perspective to go from marketing strategist to accidental tech co-founder, and it was a good one. So, I asked her if I could repurpose this episode and put it on the Entrepreneur School podcast as well. So, you're going to hear us talk about the trust gap, the whole concept of it's not cheating, it's choosing ease, a mindset shift, some of the real risks that people bring up around AI, and also a very specific story about the Family Command Center that I built, which may or may not have saved my life during softball season that we finally just wrapped up this weekend. Oh my goodness, so if you have ever felt behind on AI or unsure where you fit into this conversation, this one is for you. So I am stepping on the other side of the interviewer that today, and I'm bringing you this episode where Stephanie interviewed me. Enjoy

today, we are talking about women and AI. This episode is for anyone who is curious or skeptical or left behind in terms of AI. Kelly Sinclair is back with us. You have heard from her many times. She is an award-winning marketer. She's also the newly co-founder of Agravia Studio, the company that is building Wave, an AI platform for expert-based creators, and we are going to talk about why it matters, why women can't be left behind, how you can get started in low-pressure ways, but also we talk about some of the risks, the challenges from jobs to the environment. We get real, and we also get practical. Listen to the end for a free opportunity to take the first steps with AI as well. Let's get into it. Welcome back, Kelly.

I'm so glad I get to be on your show again, Stephanie. This is awesome.

You definitely are our most repeated guest.

Oh, that's so special.

Different phases of life do bring forward different things, though, and that's partially what we're here to talk about today, in terms of your new work in AI. So, what does life look like for you now?

Oh, yeah, it's so true when they say seasons of life, and it's like now the seasons just keep getting shorter and faster, and like bigger, like canyons that you're going across, you know, so I have been an entrepreneur now for coming on nine years, and yeah, and that's kind of crazy in itself, but in the last just. Just over a year, honestly, I have really focused on AI and how we can use this to enhance ourselves as humans, as business owners, as what insert whatever role here, and that just kind of set me on a curiosity journey where I was seeing opportunities and finding ways to implement things in my own life, personal life and business life, and that long story short turned into me having some conversations with a local software developer, and now we have a business together, and I'm an accidental tech co-founder, and we have an AI company, and it's all a little bit crazy still, but also very exciting, because I feel like this is a whole new era that we're in, like the world doesn't know what AI is yet. We don't know. We don't know what this is going to do. There's so many like predictions, and so many things that people are concerned about, and so many exciting things, and there's layers of legislation and policy and ethical use, and all kinds of things that I just feel like I want to have a role in this, in terms of how people can use it to really enhance themselves, rather than looking at it as a replacement tool. So, I call that human first AI adoption.

Very interesting. Yeah, you've been on quite a journey, and it's been fun to watch and kind of see you figure that out, and that's part of what we're here to talk about and unpack a bit today. I also started hitting that the AI train, I guess, when ChatGPT first launched and started teaching some courses about public affairs and the use of AI, which I still do periodically, but it's really just expanded into a whole other world now, and something that I'm trying to figure out, and we've worked on this a little bit together as I explore what you're doing with your company is that expert-informed AI piece, and you know what that can bring to me as a business owner, but also to my clients, which has been really interesting.

Yeah, I feel like there's a whole category to hear that we are, so my company is called Wave, W A I V, and we are working with experts, people who have years and decades of experience that is beyond what a textbook teaches, right. So, LLMs, large language models that are the foundation of ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini, they're essentially trained on everything in the world, and they just make their own sort of determinations about best practices and things based on patterns that they review, and you, as an expert, have the ability to sort of influence that with your own expertise, your frameworks, the way that you approach things, the nuance that comes from your own sort of decades of experience, and the difference between that generic AI and what we call expert-backed AI. And I think it's important as well for anybody just using AI to understand that there is a difference, so where you think, oh, I don't need a public affairs person anymore. I can just ask ChatGPT how to do this. It will give you an answer, and you have no idea how to validate that answer, right? Yes, because you don't have the expertise in the thing that you asked about. Same with anything legal, you know? I know I've been, you know, starting a new company and trying to figure out what are all the documents and things that we should put together, and you can ask AI for help with that, but you, you can't bet on it being the right correct thing, necessarily. It can give guidance, but the output still needs to be validated by the expert, and I think that's an important aspect to know. It's not just like, oh, you can just ask Chat GPT, or you,

yes,

AI, that

yes, yeah, it's true. Because when I create tools for public affairs, they have that expertise built into them, and when I use them for, like, other purposes, let's say, because I'm a small business, and maybe I can't afford, you know, XY full-time person. I have to know that I'm not getting the best thing, and it is an interim solution till you could afford the thing, because it's not going to be good enough, and sometimes that's, you know, what you end up using, but it is not the same. It doesn't replace the expertise piece, for sure. One of the things that flagged this conversation to me, and you and I have talked about this a little bit, was a post that Reese Witherspoon did a couple months ago, and she was talking about the gap for women in terms of their adoption of AI, and I think alluding to, you know, if we get left behind here, that you know we're already behind, and we're going to be further behind when we think about economy jobs, right, like women and women in leadership roles, and she talked about three out of 10 women in her book club were using AI, right, so that means a big chunk of them obviously aren't, and she got really criticized online, right, and some of those concerns were about things like jobs and creativity and consent, and I think there's probably, in particular, challenge for her because she does so much with writers and books, and that's, you know, I, at least from my perspective, different kind of layering in the AI world than some of the other types of work, at least, that I do, but it made me really think about how bad that is, like if women are left behind, and the opportunities that could be missed, and she did respond and say it's not about, you know, certain things, but just in general, it's about women needing to understand it more to not be left behind, and I looked up some statistics here. So, the Harvard Business School found that men's generative AI adoption was 47.8 compared to women's, which

Oh, well, I think first of all, one of the biggest misconceptions is if I use AI, it devalues me. And as women, we care about our value, we care about feeling valued, and showing up with our own perspectives, and we want to feel like we really did that thing ourselves. We make things hard, yeah, like it's like it's just embedded in to make it the hardest as possible. I have a sticker on my laptop right here from an event I did last year, an AI event that was all for women, and it says it's not cheating, it's choosing ease, like so. Again, I think this points back to how we can think about human first AI adoption, and it's like, what is it allowing us to do when we're leveraging something that exists to be more of ourselves to have more capacity left

to do it better to

do a better job to be better at, be better at our jobs, because we got AI. Like, I bet you used AI to get those stats.

Yeah, absolutely. And you asked for the sources, you can go and check them yourself and make sure they're real, and all of these things, right? And that's

exactly, and we don't want to, like, paint a brush on, you know, just in general the differences between women and men, but we do need to recognize that we are just foundationally different, and the things we care about are different, and it doesn't seem to bother men, like, it doesn't bother them, they're just like, "Look what I did, all the things I did, and I, yes, AI, and that's great.

Yeah,

try to hide it or anything. It's just, yeah, you seem to have a problem with the journey, like the method, right? Get there versus just the result itself.

It does make me think about, you know, that it through the lens of, like, it can also make you better at your job and make your products better, right? Like, let alone is it, you know, not just cheating, but it can enhance what you do to make it better. And I'll give a fairly simple example. One of the things that people in my industry, in public affairs and government relations, pay a lot of attention to is like the words that politicians use, right? Like, are they in different speeches, in different announcements, in different types of documents changing the way they talk about things? Have they dropped a priority? Are they talking about new ones? What are their key words, so that when I develop materials, I can develop them, so the government hears themselves in those materials, if you think about the major documents and speeches that happen in government relations, and you manually go through and try to figure that out, there is no scenario where AI, AI will 100% Be more accurate if you're literally saying, how many times have they say this? Have they stopped saying this? Like, it gives you better analysis, and I'm still going to use that and pick it up and pull it into a bigger analysis. That's just like a basic example of where it's going to get done faster, and it's actually going to be more accurate. It is better. Period.

Oh yeah, and I just want to, like, zoom that out and say pattern recognition is like one of the best, like, that's the whole job of an OLM, to be honest, it's like data retrieval analysis, and it can query things like that, any question that you would have, and the way you would look at it, if you get assistance just doing, you're still driving the bus, though. Yeah, I feel like that's what we need to let go of, is if we involve AI in what we're doing, that we somehow have lost control of it. It still needs the input, it still needs the prompt that comes from you, your original thinking, your inquiry is different. It's not. It doesn't just like give you stuff like you're still playing a role. It's an interactive process.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So, for women who are maybe listening, who are unsure or skeptical about AI, why do you think that they should change that?

I'm just,

or at least consider it, consider it.

I mean, like, not here to force my opinions on anybody, but absolutely, like, how could it make your life easier. How could it allow you more space to do the things that really matter? Like, we are over subscribed in North America in our lives. Like, I will give you an example of my last eight weeks. I have two daughters, they're about 11 and 13, they're both playing softball in Alberta, where it's like a super short season, right? Winter only ends middle of April, and then we play softball until the end of June, and we are at a ball diamond six days a week, and I'm taking them all over the place, all around different places. I have to figure out, are we having dinner? How are we? When will food happen, right? Like, that's part of my job. And I just couldn't handle it on a, like, like, first of all, like, that's crazy. I signed up for that, that's on me. But the reality that a lot of us live with is because we care about having our kids, you know, participating in extracurricular activities, and the benefits that come from that, and blah blah blah. I had to make myself a tool with AI to help manage this. I called it the Family Command Center, and it was, it was a planning tool and a communication tool between me and my husband, it was like it said, where we're each going every day. Who's driving? Who's cooking dinner? It's always me. I'm the only one who cooks dinner, so why have time to cook dinner? Are we having a portable dinner? Who's going to be where? Like, are two of us one place and two of us in another place? All of that stuff. It was that like monotonous thinking that yes, valuable? Like, it doesn't give me value to have to go through and do a weekly plan. Yeah, if I can outsource that, and the only way I can outsource that is because they actually know how I think through that, and AI can help you identify your own thought process. So, I was like, what are the additional things that are happening, so if, if it's a softball game,

we have to be there 60 minutes early. If it's a practice, we have to be there 30 minutes early. All of these things can be programmed into making that, like, remember the Goosebumps books with the different

endings, yeah,

endings, right. It's kind of like that, and being able to think that way. So, anyways, I'm just saying that it can enhance parts of your life, and you can outsource things that you don't like, like so many good opportunities. E ven if you, even if you use it to do the things that you're not like tying your identity and worth to, yes, gives you our space to do the things that right are connected to that you feel are a matter of your brain power,

right? It does make me think about a discussion, I think I told you about this before, but that I was having this with my girlfriends, and one of, one of them said, well, it's not like it's gonna get me out of the door faster in the morning, and my other friend is like, absolutely, I can, it helps me get out of the door faster, like, oh, this is so interesting, and makes me think about, so this weekend it's end of cool party season in my house, so one daughter had a pool party yesterday. Eight, another one has one tomorrow. My nephew is visited on Saturday between hockey games and bringing much of his hockey team for a swim. We literally have three days of pool parties in a row. We have a pretty, like, mechanical, like, this is what we do every time we're having a pool party, right? So I put it into Chachi BT, and I'm sure I'm gonna make like some kind of more formal tool where I can be like, you know, if I have three days advance or two days advance, like, what are all of the steps, right? And it helps me figure out, like, for all the different meals that I wanted to prep and all the different types of tasks that have to be done before and after every day, and just like broke it out for me, and then I could print it. Well, I didn't print it. I put it in a Google Doc and share it with everybody, and was like, this is what we're doing. Highlight when you do something, when something's done right, like just..

I think I want to say something here, Stephanie. And that's, you don't have to be technical to be good at it.

Yes.

So, case in point, I'm an accidental tech co-founder. I have a communications degree. Right, what you actually need to be good at AI are two skills, and those are communications and organization. So, the communication is your ability to articulate, to ask questions, to explain what you want. If you're really good at explaining what you want, then you're providing good context, and context is what is needed for AI to respond well and give you good outputs. Yeah, and then the organizational side of things is, and this is something that I've seen actually has improved for me since I started using AI, is that, oh, I understand AI gets systems right, so it will help me build systems, and it needs me to kind of look at things in systems and patterns in step, kind of like, like logical, right, linear flows, sometimes, right, and sometimes I'm getting it to help me identify what that is, so I

was just going to say, if you're not good at it, it can actually still help you figure it out by asking the right questions, or telling it to ask you the right questions.

Yes, and I want to maybe say, even for like neurodivergency, and people like me were like, I don't think that way, my brain doesn't operate in step 123, Well, what's really good is if you ask an LLM to help you understand what your process is, and you just verbally dump, like, yeah, literally use the audio, like verbal way of dictate, yes, say it how you say it. Don't try and do another filter process where you have to type things. Yes, verbally saying this is what I do. How often do I do this? Like, what are the steps? What could we create? Essentially, like, I kind of laugh because my very first business course that I ever took was talking about SOPs, standard operating persuasions and and systems and all this, and I was like, I don't, I don't understand, I don't know what this means, like, why, why do I need to know this, and now I'm like, oh, everything, like, if we could just honestly put everything into something like that, we will identify if it is something you, in fact, repeat regularly, like in your podcast every week, there are steps that have to happen for that. Here are all the things that need to get done. It's essentially like there's a checklist for this and a checklist for that. And then, how, when we know what all those checklists are, at PS AI can, like, be an extension of your brain, it can remember things for you, because that's what I do. I'm like, I need you to be my repository of all my ideas and like unmade decisions that need to happen, and help me track this, and like help me like actually make a work plan about this, because I mean, like that, the downside, upside of using AI is now that you produce so much, you have all these ideas and things you're even getting to do all of them,

right? Yeah,

now we need like a whole project management system for making sure that it happened

right, but like

that's it in a nutshell, is that if you have those communication and organizational skills and you develop those and work on those. You will be very good at AI, and it will be very helpful to you. The

other thing I think I would say too is, you know, some of the ways that, like, you were describing, right, with your family tool, like if you've never used AI, that might sound like, oh, I don't know where to start, but you just have to start with playing around with it, right, and part of it is just like sitting down with your computer phone, or even walking, but like to try stuff out every once in a while. Oh, I have this question, I'm curious about this, or I wonder if I can do this. Like, put it in and ask it, try it, practice, you'll figure out how to get better at it too. And then you can add layers of complexity, or purchase different types of tools. But it can be, you know, as super simple as here's a recipe, like, help me figure out, you know, the grocery list, or whatever, you know, like, you can start basic and then build from there, and to try not to get overwhelmed,

I mean, I have a tech company now, because I started experimenting, so I mean, there's a spectrum for sure, and that, that is it. It's it does become a habit shift. So habit shifts are challenging, right? So this is where you think about not, I think the probably one of the errors that people make is to use AI after they've done something, like they're like, "Oh, I did this, how, but I get a polish, or I ask, you know, did I miss anything? instead of using it more like a partner to help you tackle whatever it is that you're trying to do, right, and so again, personal or professional use cases all are the same. If you come to an LLM and ask for, say, here's what I'm trying to do, what, what should I be thinking about? I mean, LLMs are they trying, they're trying to impress you, they are anticipatory, that you don't even have to ask a question, but I just sometimes go, here's all the things in my brain, and it's like, okay, it will start like organizing them in a certain way, and then I'll be able to respond and go, oh no, no, that's not what I was trying to do, or oh, I didn't even think about that, and it sends you down another path, like kind of a, you don't want to know the real reason that I got into using AI, was it the

therapist,

what?

was it for therapy?

I feel like a lot of us have done that,

I have definitely used it for, yeah, dealing with interpersonal challenges, for sure, but I learned my human design. I learned that my human design as a generator, my strategy is to respond, so I'm best aligned with myself when I have something to respond to, right? Generative AI gave me stuff to respond to all day long, right? Right. It gives you a starting point instead of a blank screen. It's like, here's something, look at it now, reflect and be more in that like editor co-builder kind of, right? Instead of just be like, oh, maybe I should get a second opinion on this and go to an LLM, and do that, like, build it together.

Yeah, yeah, I would say that we have a responsibility to understand rather than to make beer-based judgments around it, like there's lots of lots of ways that we could feel fearful around job displacement, and we already talked about devaluing and all of that, but if you can actually, I think, I think before you get started, you're more apt to feel a little bit afraid and overwhelmed about it and. You easily justify the negative reputation that comes from technology advancement, right? But you don't know what you don't know, to be honest. Yeah, and things that I'm seeing, having gone deep down the rabbit hole at this point it's like it's so powerful, so valuable. It allows me to make better decisions, allows me to work in a startup, and to like the amount that I can produce, and it's not about producing more, but like certainly in North America, we seem to think that important, but you can, and that amount that I can produce in in 30 minutes. The other day I launched three web pages, like fully wrote, designed, and coded them.

Yeah, I want to add to Kelly, like when you're doing that, because you've already built in the background documents and stuff like that, like when you're producing those things, they're also really good, because you've trained it, it knows how to speak like you, it knows how to talk to your brand voice, like I know when people play with that a lot, they'll be like, well, what it put out is like terrible, I'm like, well, because it's not trained on your stuff, or you haven't actually built any tools either, and that's not not where you start, but it is where you can get to, right? And so that it does use your voice and proper grammar, and like all of these things, I, that

actually, sorry, that actually goes to context, and I said the exact same thing when I told this story on a podcast yesterday about going from brand marketing strategist to accidental tech co-founder. I said that I was not day one ChatGPT user, I'm not, I don't even have, I have an iPhone 14, like I'm not really an early adopter, and the first time I used generative AI was like, woo, this is fast, but it's kind of garbage, but what I learned was how to bring the context so that it could actually filter its response through the lens of you, so as a business owner, and I actually trademarked this, Stephanie. I own a trademark now, and that's called Brand Calibrator, and it's actually a tool that I built that helps extract this for business owners, so that you have the context that you need to be able to train AI on how to produce material for you, and even to help you with strategic direction.

Yes, yeah. No, that is so valuable, and certainly something that, as people want to build their own tools and, like, make outputs better, that they absolutely have to have something like that, for sure. I started to do some research in terms of, like, what are women concerned about, and in terms of some of the concerns that they have, and it's really interesting, because there are some areas where there's actual data where women are also like more concerned than men about particular topics. I'm not going to talk about it all now, but I will include some of the studies in the show notes, in case people want to look the map, but some of the different issues are safety, fairness, jobs, consent, the environment, the technology meeting faster than the rules, and like I would say, of course, you know some of these things are valid concerns, and yet at the same time we're navigating, you know, being left behind, so when you, when you see people, you know, some of the listeners will be concerned about adopting AI because of some of these risks. What would your response be to something like that?

Well, I think everything is about perspective and the risks when you look at it only through the lens of the direct impact of one thing, and you're not looking at the bigger picture, which we all have a really hard time doing. Yeah, I'll speak to the environmental one, for example, because I actually just read something about this the other day from a data scientist, ecological like PhD person, who do I know, actually her name is Dr. Nikki Sweeney, and her business is AI her way, so I actually highly recommend following along with her stuff, but when she talks about, yes, like water use is absolutely a concern with data centers cooling them every time you make an inquiry at water, but so does everything else that we do as humans, so we have to look at all of our consumption, not just the one industry, and I mean, you and I are both coming from, like, we work together at a PR firm 100 years ago, I'm like, that's it, it's whatever is loud and scary right now. Now is where people's attention goes, and that also seems to cause us to put the blinders on to all the other things, so we just lose a little bit of that perspective, I feel, around what else is contributing to the overall issue, and then as individuals we all have the opportunity to make our own decisions that are aligned with our own values, we have, we have the freedom to do that, and that's just where you need to be, is in alignment with your own values,

and I think it's partially too about, like, do your research, right, instead of coming to something and having an automatic this is bad scenario, there are some that are doing things better, right. And so, if you go do some of that research, you can determine, like, which companies or things like that. I want to give an example. So, Telus is a Canadian company. They are building a facility, an AI data facility that's going to use 98% clean energy, and use liquid cooling and heat recovery. It's going to use 80% less energy for what it needs to do for its data center than traditional other data centers, and the water will be 90% lower than traditional data centers, but on top of that, they're using recycled rainwater from BC Place, and by their estimates, they will actually use less water per year than what they collect from BC Place. And then they believe that they will also have the capacity to heat - I forget the exact number, but something like 100,000 homes, right? And you know, I didn't do all of the research to, you know, you know, validate every single claim that they're making, obviously, but when we see so much about data centers and water use and environment in the news, and we automatically think, oh my gosh, this is awful, and then when you look at something like this, you're like, this is a company that's doing it differently, actually, and not making some of the same impacts as other companies, and so I think that's where you know people can do the research, and to be honest, if you care about these issues, I think it's important to speak up about them, because that is why you see companies like Tell us trying to do it differently, because in order to get the social license, they have to, right, and so, like, it's okay to have those concerns, and you know, validate them, and you know, use your consumer power to decide where to put your money in, is, I guess, what else I would add to that,

yeah,

right. So that's where, again, back to what are your personal values, and how can you, you know, do your best. We're all just doing our best here.

Yes, yes. When, and I think the other thing is based on what we're seeing in the data, like it's going to impact most people's jobs anyways, like for many, many people listening, it won't actually become a choice. It's like, will you have a job or not in some scenarios, right? It's, and it's not that necessarily that AI is going to replace your job, but your sector, your job may look differently, or you may just be required to integrate those tools into the work that you do, and to know how to do that right, and to do that, you need to start at least by playing around with the tools. You talk a bit about becoming like an accidental co-founder, right? And you shared how you know you started playing with the technology. Can you maybe talk briefly about how that transitioned to all of a sudden, you know, you starting this company?

Well, for me, I was working with entrepreneurs on visibility strategy. So, how do you get in front of the right people so that you can attract your ideal clients? What are the steps? What is the strategy that's going to work for your business? And I think what we all know is. That strategy is without implementation specifically very good. Yes, we have all the great plans, and I was seeing this gap happening with my clients that they weren't actually taking action, so I actually saw AI as an opportunity to support with implementation, because a lot of the reasons why we don't take action on things are mindset, like there's something holding us back, right? Robots don't have mindsets, robots don't have to be in the mood to pitch you for a podcast, they don't have to be in the mood to write an email for you all. Now we're reducing the friction of the human element by having a component of AI added on to that, so I actually saw this, and I was starting to build some tools out that would support my clients in actually implementing that. So the first custom GPT that I built was called Valerie, the visibility auditor, to like review what have you been doing this week. Okay, here's a plan on what to do differently next week, or here's like a score, essentially. And it's all trained on my expertise and my evaluation system on what is high ROI and what isn't. So they were starting to use that, and then I just essentially saw some gaps in the technology itself around the ability to share it safely, securely. If you're actually putting all of your expertise into an LLM, what about IP protection, things like that that were of concern, and so that's when I started having conversations with a software developer, and he's like, "Well, let's fix it, and I said, "Okay, let's fix it. I proved myself as my own market, and

yes,

and now we're moving forward with it.

When you think about, you know, the company and who's listening, right? There'll be people who have never, maybe, used AI. There'll be others who have some experience. So, some people, you know, maybe further down and in their practice. What does your company do, right? Like, how does it use AI, and like, who is it for?

Definitely more for people who are wanting to productize their expertise with AI, so AI has disrupted a lot of things in the online business space. It has disrupted online education. It has commoditized information, right? We now, we, yeah, information is commoditized, so your value is no longer in just what you know, but your actual approach to how you do it, your own experience and expertise, and we have carved out this expert-backed AI segment, where when you want to have even a hybrid approach to the way that you deliver your services, where there's some components of human touch points and some components where your clients can work directly with AI that is trained by you, that is what we're doing at Wave, where we're providing the infrastructure to deliver those AI tools that you built in a way that's secure and gated and easily accessible by your clients that doesn't depend on the big LLMs and their infrastructure and their interfaces and what they're doing, you have something that's custom built for that purpose,

yeah, very interesting. Is there anything else you want to add for women who are listening that may be curious about using a tool like that, or anything else about that?

Well, I think that it's just interesting to think about the different monetization opportunities, and I honestly feel like there are multiple ways that AI can help you make more money, so, and knowing that your audience is both entrepreneurs and professionals, that might mean like upskilling yourself in your professional capacity, and it might look like, as an entrepreneur, reducing the time that it takes you to deliver a client service, so now you have capacity to take on more clients, or maybe what it's doing is actually adding more value to what you do, because you're actually able to deliver more, so people want to,

more better.

Yeah, you have the more, like I would write. I remember when I worked at the PR firm, so before AI, I would spend.. we would bill about 20 hours for communication strategy, right? Right. So 20 hours.. oh my god, what I can do with 20 hours now. Let's have..

right, right. Well. Yeah, like

that, and what it would produce is like 810, pages, 12 pages of us.

Yeah,

and now I was starting to use AI to help build the strategies to just like go deeper. So, if I said, you know, social media is or isn't a thing that you should be doing, here's like 25 content ideas and templates on how to use them, like we could go deeper, we could provide more value, because it's not taking it out of us to do that, but like that, when the effort is reduced, the value can be deeper, right, and that's the connection that I want to draw.

Okay, so you also have a podcast, so do you want to tell listeners a little bit about what's that about, in case they're interested in checking it out?

Yes, my podcast is called Entrepreneur School in the AI era, so it's for business owners who want to hear conversations about different use cases, ways people are looking at AI, incorporating it. We talk a lot about lines in the sand. There's definitely a lot of perspectives on things they will, and, and my guests will and won't do with AI, right? And then really great examples of of people who are using it in creative ways to make money, to enhance their business, those kinds of things,

very interesting. It makes me think about, you know, we're just entering summer season. If there's like a working mom listening whose kids are just, you know, finishing school and they haven't prepared anything, what's a way that they could use AI to kind of help save themselves?

I actually got AI to help make my kids a boredom jar last summer. I was like, "Here, we're gonna.. this is my kid, she likes this, this, and this kinds of things, and I need these to be non-supervised activities that she can pull out of a jar when she's feeling bored, because I'm going to be downstairs working and I don't want to be interrupted every 10 minutes with I'm bored, what can I do, this can I do that, and there's actually like a jar with papers in it that they wrote and they can pull something out and actually do that thing without me involved, so that's kind of the prompt is I want to help my kid make a boredom jar, it needs to be things that they can do unsupervised, so like glitter gluing a craft project is not something that I qualify as an easy phrase, but or like baking, but depends on how old your kids are and stuff like that, right, we want it to be non technology or whatever. Yeah, and then the thing I'm thinking about for this summer is is actually helping them to have some kind of a summer project where that, like, it's the gaps of time, like where in between things and days they don't go to camps and stuff like that for me that always cause issues that are concerned, more that my head is thinking about what are they doing, are they just watching TV all day, and I want to help prevent that. So,

yeah,

getting ideas and adding, getting AI to help, like with the structure around that, can can be really helpful.

Yeah, it's, you know, you got to start somewhere, and I think those are some, some great places for those listening as we wrap up. I want to share that when I saw what Reese was saying, it really made me think about, you know, the course that I had started teaching in Chat GBT and AI, and, you know, could I offer like a condensed kind of basic version to, you know, spend some time with women to share more about some of the basics about AI, and so that is going to happen in August. We'll probably be about an hour in remote, and I have a mentorship academy, and so I'm going to throw that up on the website, and I'll include the link in the show notes, so people can go ahead and register that, and it will be over Zoom, so people can, you know, attend from anywhere and get a replay as well, if that's of interest. As we quickly close off with some rapid fire questions, is there anything else you want to add?

I mean, I think we covered a lot of the broad strokes here, without getting into too much of the nitty gritty, it's all about perspective shifting and just experimenting, and, and nothing is a commitment, either, right? Like, you trying, trying AI doesn't mean that you now use it like all the time for certain things, or that you've given something up to it, but like, yeah, just again, I think it's about thinking of it as a strategic partner, how it can help you get through all the things that you have to do in a day.

I think that's great advice, if you wanted to give advice of like one thing they can do with or try. AI for this week, what would it be?

Oh, I mean, I hate meal planning, and we have to eat every day, so that would be what I would start with, is like just get it to help you make a meal plan, and also don't just give it a task, ask it to ask you questions that I can really customize it to you, because we need to know how many people are in your family. My husband's allergic to turkey, when I came right, don't like mushrooms, like those kinds of,

yes, so can actually produce something that's helpful versus it produces something you're like, oh wait, like we're allergic to all these things. What is one rule you broke that turned out to be a great decision?

I always find this question so hard. What is the rule that I broke?

Maybe women in tech, or women feeling like they have to have everything figured out before they start something.

I mean, that is, that is real. I think you know what's interesting in this time, where we are in AI, and now all these people are popping up as experts. It's so interesting, because it's like this didn't exist like three years ago. This is so early. Nobody's really an expert, and it's just proof that it doesn't take that much to, like, if you've done one thing, you can, you can teach somebody how to do that one thing, right? And you don't have to, like, have a PhD in it or 25 years of experience before your knowledge is valuable,

right. Very interesting. Who is a woman that continually inspires you? Maybe I should say from AI, since you've answered this question so many times, but

I think there are a lot of great women doing things in AI, and if you look to kind of create a community around that, there's I'll shout out a couple of my friends who I think are doing awesome things and have powerful platforms that they're working on, Kinsey Soderberg, Joyce Hamilton, they have a company, an organization, and her AI club, they like teach women how to use AI, and they are awesome, great. What is one book that you're learning from, or has continually shaped your wisdom and perspective? One of the business books that I've been coming back to is the Partnership Charter, that's an important one for me right now in building a co-founding company and looking at how to have conversations with another person and structure things around that, and there's some really good examples of it's all the things you don't want to think about happening and having thought about them and created, yeah, and then before they happen.

Great. Well, I haven't heard of that one, so I'll definitely check it out.

David Gage,

David Gage. Thank you, thank you so much for spending your time with us. And you know, hopefully people will, will check, check out AI if they haven't started, if they're more down their path, they, and I guess if you're new, you can, you can check out the course that I'm going to do, but if you're further down your path, you can also check out what Kelly's doing, or even if you're just curious to listen to your podcast, is a great place to start to get engaged, but the types of conversations and how it can be used. So, thank you so much for the thought-provoking conversation today.

Thanks, Stephanie.

Thank you for listening. If this episode got you thinking about how AI is impacting your business and what it might look like to integrate it in a way that actually fits, I'd love to help you think that through. You can book an AI strategy chat using the link in the show notes. It's a space to talk about where you are, what's shifting, and how to move forward with intention. And if this episode was helpful, please share it with another business owner who's navigating this evolution too. And make sure you're subscribed, so you don't miss what's coming next.