My Secret AI Assistant (and Why You Need One)

There is one thing that you absolutely, really need to have in order to make AI work for you as best as possible, and that is a clear understanding of your brand, who you serve, also your offers, so that you can train AI to sound like you and really resonate with your audience.

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'll 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.

Welcome back to entrepreneur school. I haven't done a solo episode in a while, it feels like and so I was thinking, what are some of the things we have literally never talked about on the show? And it occurred to me that AI is something that we have never talked about over here, and yet it is something that I am obsessed with at the moment, and actually I foresee that being forever. That moment is forever because it is absolutely changing the way that I operate, the way that I function, the way that I think, the speed at which I can produce things, how many things I can create in a day, all of that. And it's so much fun. And so I just wanted to have that conversation today. We're having a cup of coffee. We're having a chat about AI and how it affects, how it could affect you, how you could use it. And I mean, I wouldn't call myself an early adopter, but I realized that if you're not starting to integrate AI into your business now, you're going to be behind sooner than later. So I've actually been using it quite a lot for months for the simple things like making content creation easier, eliminating that whole blank page problem. But now I am going deeper. I even built my first custom GPT yesterday. Her name is Phoebe, the podcast princess, and she takes my transcript from my podcast and turns it into show notes, SEO copy. She gives me the titles of my podcast now, she writes me an email to send out to my list, and she writes me an email to send to my guest. If I had a guest talking about the episode, it's incredible, and it happens all in one click of a button, and my mind is exploding, and that is why I had to come on today and talk about AI and what you can be starting to think about and how you can use it. So I'm going to break down how I currently use AI, what I'm learning and where I'm seeing it going next. So here's how it's working right now for me in my business, first and foremost, I'm using it with the things that I'm already prioritizing, trying to avoid the shiny objects, because you could just spend hours a day literally talking to chatgpt or whichever your AI tool of choice is, and go down all kinds of rabbit holes. And I'm trying to avoid that. So first and foremost, it is podcast support for me, because my podcast is my top priority in my business at this moment, as far as it's what I'm going to continue to consistently put out and convert into the other content that I share on other platforms, be that email, be that social media, you're pretty much just hearing what I have to say on my podcast, and that's like, that's the bare minimum of what I've got going on, because there's way too much happening behind the scenes that I can't even tell you about yet. We'll get there, I'm sure. But in the meantime, that's the stream that's continuing forward. So AI is supporting me with brainstorming my show ideas, creating outlines. So I used AI to generate this outline for this conversation, as I said, it writes my show notes, so I don't have to start from scratch. It drafts my emails, makes promo content for social media, captions that I can use for each episode. It can do the whole thing, and it always does it consistently. That's what I love. It's like having an employee that you never have to tell the same thing to twice, which is. Is amazing. They always get it right, and they learn every time, and they get better and better and better every single time. I also use it for content drafting and refining things. It really just gives me something to respond to. I talked about this in the Human Design episode, how I learned that my strategy is to respond and and sometimes that actually involves me just getting into chat GPT and starting a conversation so that I have, like, the ability to have it ask me questions that I have I can use my gut to respond to. And so that gets me into that state of alignment and flow, and that's and then that trickles over into everything else that I'm doing. So I mean, if you ever have writer's block or that blank page syndrome, if you're a big fan of templates and prompts for things, AI is definitely a place that you should be playing to try and optimize that. And really, it's not about replacing your creativity, it's just about speeding up the process, and for me, that allows me to focus on other things, to focus on what's important, right?

I also wanted to share that it's helping me think through strategies. So I'm not like just using it to write me social media captions. I have used it to build out very thorough launch strategies in a fraction of the time. When you know your framework and you know the way that you think through things, you can just use it to help you do those things faster and to summarize and create the output that you want. Like I used to work for a PR firm, and one of the main things that we would sell would be communication strategies, right? So you've got a challenge or a goal, and you have to figure out the ways in which you're going to communicate that and what the objective is. And so it totally applies to visibility, to launching all of these things, we need to know who we're talking to, what we're going to say, how we're going to say it, and where we're going to say it, and we also have to do a risk assessment on what the risks are for any of those audiences, that kind of stuff getting into the weeds of like my specialty, but I've been able to use chat GPT to help me build that out. When I would do that at the PR firm, we would be charging a minimum of 20 hours to write a plan, and it would literally take 20 hours. And for the first few years of running my business as a consultant, and that being one of the main things that I would do, I would know it would take me about 20 hours so I could put a pretty clear, you know, price tag on what my strategy would cost, because I know how long it would take. I can do the same thing now in under two hours, basically. And I haven't even tried to make a custom GPT of it yet. I will be, for sure, because that will make it even faster. And so I've just had my mind blown with the the way that it, it still produces a result that feels very much like it's customized. I created it. My thinking is involved. It's not just asking a computer to do it for you. So if you're guiding it properly, you can keep it very strategic. So if you do any kind of strategy work, launch planning for yourself or your clients. Absolutely you can lean into AI for this. And if you start asking it the questions, the way that you ask questions, getting the information that you need, and then you're able to guide it with tweaks that help it to really create a solid output. It's amazing.

And so I what I've ended up creating, and some of the recent, like visibility strategies that I've done have been Oh 26 pages long, like super thorough, very detailed, lots of ideas, plus a timeline of, like, themes, priorities that have taken my clients out over the next three to six months. Like, here's what you need to do when you need to do it, and why. Like, how it's phased, how the goal is shifting, how the message is shifting as we move over time. It's amazing. I don't know if you can hear it at my voice. I'm just, like, even recapping this to you, it's just really blowing my mind. So really, once you have, like, you know, the right questions, and you have a bit of a framework, if this is something that you do regularly, you know, the process, and I can just help you be faster at being you, really, it's an extension of your own brain. So the new thing that I think is kind of, well, it's not even super new, but I now feel like it's very accessible, because I have created this myself, and again, I am technologically adept. Is that the right word? I'm not intimidated by technology, but I'm also not an early adopter, like I'm not the person who needs the latest and greatest thing. I'm not. Like, usually on the cutting edge of this stuff, and I built my own AI bot. I made a custom GPT Phoebe. Phoebe, the podcast Princess, yes, she now can take my whole transcript and produce so many things for me. I think I already just said that I didn't know that. Like, usually when with chat GPT, you kind of have to plan to tweak it several times and, like, ask it to rephrase and whatnot. But once you create your own custom GPT that does something very specific, and you give it very clear instructions and and also knowledge files so that it knows, like, your style, it knows your voice, it knows your template structure, like how long you want things to be, all of that stuff. So you've done that legwork. It literally is one click, and it produces exactly what you want. So incredible. And I'm experimenting with how I can build these out for visibility strategy for PR, I had this idea to do a pocket publicist that helps business owners to generate custom pitches that help amplify your visibility. There are really no limits to what can be created using this technology. And I am super on board. So I will say there is one thing that you absolutely, really need to have in order to make AI work for you as best as possible, and that is a clear understanding of your brand, who you serve, also your offers, so that you can train AI to sound like you and really resonate with your audience. So you need to know your audience inside and out. You need to be able to articulate your writing style, your brand, voice and your tone. You need to know what key phrases you use and don't use having a story bank of personal stories that can be pulled into the conversations and the content that you're creating. All of this is essential, and it's really essential, regardless of whether you're using AI to help create your stuff or whether you're creating it yourself. You need to know these things. It's it's your guidelines. And I think a lot of the time we overlook it and we just start doing but the good thing is, if you've been producing anything for any period of time, you can actually get AI to synthesize it and analyze it for you. So you can ask it these questions. You can say, hey, like, for example, if you use my content creation, like my simplified content system, you're capturing every single piece of content that you write within one Google document.

So I was able to take my one Google document and it has every post I've ever put on social media for the entire last year in one place. Have chat GPT, read it. It learns my voice, it learns my style, it learns the core topics that I talk about. It can learn a lot from you, so I would highly recommend that you can also get chatgpt to help you do a deep dive on who your ideal audience is. And I also was starting to go down a rabbit hole before I started recording this to see about how it can actually get to know you better personally. Like, I think there was a time, and maybe it's still in transition, where people were talking about, you know, these are the exact chatgpt prompts that you need. I call BS because you literally just need to ask it questions. The prompt that I just gave it was something along the lines of, I'd really like you to get to know me better, so that you can really infuse my personal stories and personality into all of your outputs. Where should we start? And it came up with a list of themes of around asking me questions about my business, origin story, the reason why I started my business, what got me into this? And personal things like, what? What's a hill you would die on? What are some relatable Millennium mom moments that you've had lately? Like those kinds of things. Because I feel like for me, personally, I am corporately trained, like writing, corporate like professional writer. That is my background. I went to school for it, and it's really hard to peel some of that away when you want to get more personal and add way more personality into your writing, and when you do that, that's what creates a lot of connection. It's a really great way to create connection with your audience. So I wanted to be able to not just be like, look at all the smart things I can say, but also like, I'm a real human, and this is what's going on in my life, and I struggle with blending those things together. So. I think that's where AI can be really good. If you give it some directions, if it knows you really well, and you give it clear directions, it's going to create amazing outputs for you that will take very little tweaking to create what you need to create. So don't worry about, like, phrasing things a certain way. When you're doing prompts for chat, G, P, T, or whatever you're using, just tell it what you're trying to do, and ask it how to help you do that. And then go make sure you put a time limit on your rabbit hole, because you are about to have your mind explode, and I want to hear all about it. So please come and send me DMS on Instagram and chat with me about what you're experimenting with when it comes to AI. So I do want to leave you with like my I guess, I don't know. I don't have super predictions for this, but I do believe that AI matters for every business, every business owner right now. It's not going away. It's evolving every single day you log in. Sometimes there's new features. There's lots of stuff to follow. You really don't need to be an expert, but I do believe you need to start getting familiar with it. So if you haven't touched it at all, I encourage you to do that, to jump in, to start playing, to get some familiarity with it, because then it's going to start opening your mind to ways that you can use it that are going to save you time, save you money, make you money amazing. It's really not to the key is really not about like using AI to replace what makes you unique. It's to speed up and support your business. So content creation, marketing, brainstorming, ideas, AI can really help you work smarter, not harder. And I know that I am just scratching the surface with AI, but I really can see so much potential here, and I'm very excited about it, about how to integrate it for my own operations, for creating products and tools that will really help my clients to be more effective and do things more quickly and get more clear on what they're trying to get out there. So just start small. Use AI. Generate some ideas, refine your content. Automate one little task. I would love to hear about what you're doing. You want to talk about how it's blowing my mind open. I am in my DMs at ks co underscore Kelly, and let's chat about it. I will see you again, hear you again. Be in your earbuds again next week. Bye for now.