The Introvert Leader

The 5 Rules for Using AI in your Career

• Austin Hopkins

Share episode

I’ve used AI for over 1,000 hours to grow my career, build a brand, and scale this podcast. In this episode, I’m sharing five rules to help you use AI the right way. Whether you're writing a resume, preparing for a big meeting, or trying to get promoted faster, AI can help, but only if you know how to use it well. This is your no-hype playbook for making AI a real advantage in your career.

Not sure if your job is still the right fit? Take my free 3-minute Career Fulfillment Quiz to find out if your current role is fueling you or draining you. You’ll get a custom score, insights, and a plan to move forward.
Try It Here



Timestamps

  • 00:56 - Storytime: I built something cool with Artificial Intelligence. 
  • 04:18 - Rule 1: Mastery Creates Separation: Why using AI everyday is the fastest way to get ahead.
  • 05:43 - Rule 2: AI Isn’t Your Crutch: How to avoid letting AI weaken your instincts or critical thinking.
  • 07:05 - Rule 3: Blind Trust is Bad: AI makes mistakes. Learn to question the results and double-check everything.
  • 08:21 - Rule 4: Bad Inputs = Bad Outputs: I walk through the four things every great prompt should include.
  • 10:11 - Rule 5: Stay in Your Strength Zone: Use AI to eliminate the boring stuff and stay focused on what makes you great.
  • 12:27 - Career and Leadership Use Cases: Real-world examples of using AI to write resumes, negotiate salary, prep for meetings, and coach better.
  • 18:32 - Challenge for Listeners: Pick one task this week and run it through AI. Compare before and after. Was it more efficient? Did it help?





Career & Leadership Coaching

  • Want a better career? Clients who work with us earn 57% more and get promoted 3x faster on average: Book your free career clarity call here.




Engage




Austin Hopkins:

Hello, this is your host, austin Hopkins, and welcome to the Introvert Leader Podcast. I've used AI for over a thousand hours to navigate my career, build a brand and grow my podcast, and I've learned one undeniable truth AI won't replace you, but it will scale you. Artificial intelligence allows you to bring more of you into the world, but here's the catch when I scroll through social media, I see the same thing fake videos, cookie cutter content and gurus selling their master prompts that are going to help your career. That's why this episode is different. I don't follow trends and I only share stuff I know will be valuable. Artificial intelligence is the coolest thing to come out in my lifetime and I want to help you leverage it, so settle in. Today we're going to cover the five rules for using AI in your career.

Austin Hopkins:

10 years ago, I was sitting at my desk at Bank of America and I was asking myself the question that I asked myself almost every morning, which was am I on the right path? You know I had spent years wasting time applying for the wrong jobs, staying in jobs too long and doing work that really didn't align with my highest value, and I always wished there was a simple way for me to find out if I was on the right path. Am I in the right career? Am I doing the right stuff? Fast forward to this year, I decided I wanted to build something, a career fulfillment quiz, something quick and easy that people could use to figure out is the work I'm doing fueling me or is it draining me? So I googled existing options and everything just didn't look right for me. It was clunky or super expensive or really wasn't customizable to the level that I expected, and so I kind of put it on pause. I thought you know what, maybe this isn't the right time. I can't really create this right now, and who knows if anybody even wants it. So, fast forward to August of this year, gpt-5 launch and I realized I can make this whole thing myself. It didn't take any coding experience and all for 20 bucks. I could spin up an MVP, a product that I might actually be able to get out into the world. So I spent a few days working on that, customizing really what I wanted it to look and feel like, and then I did what I've always done, which is I wanted to get some feedback. So I sent it to a whole bunch of people that I knew would give me some direct feedback, and I got some great feedback. So I started to keep iterating it and making sure that it was exactly the experience that I wanted folks to have when they use this tool.

Austin Hopkins:

And, day by day, that idea that I had in my head started to become a reality. So it wasn't no longer me just kind of dreaming about it. I was actually starting to see an actual product. I was able to take action and see something tangible in my hands. And the cool thing is AI allowed me to take this idea in my brain and to take a part of me that I hadn't put out in the world and make it real.

Austin Hopkins:

And that's what this episode is all about. It's about using AI to scale you, to leverage AI to get more of you out into the world, to get those ideas, those passions, those insights that you have out into the world in a tangible way. And here's the best part that quiz is live today. I told you about it the last episode. I'm really pumped. Here's some of the feedback I'm already getting from folks.

Austin Hopkins:

This was a great quiz. The questions actually made me think about my career. Another person said it reminded me that I need to start looking for a new job. Another person said it helped me ask myself some tough questions I'd been avoiding. So if you give me three minutes, this tool will help you figure out if the career you're in is fueling you or draining you. So the link is in the description. I'm super pumped about it. I want you to take that quiz and see where things are at. Are you on the right path? Are you where you need to be? What I built was only possible using AI.

Austin Hopkins:

Now, the great thing about AI is it's an amazing tool, but it's only as good as the way you use it, and so I want to cover today the five rules for using AI in your career. How you approach artificial intelligence is going to determine the next decade of your life. Will AI replace your job? Will you be a late adopter? Will you let AI take over your life? We're at a turning point in artificial intelligence. It's making its way into every facet of our life. I can't turn on the TV without seeing a commercial for AI. I can't go on LinkedIn without hearing about someone who just launched an AI business. So, before it's too late, I want to help you figure out how to use AI to get the things you want in your career to get promoted faster, to get more responsibilities, to stand out more, to do work that actually aligns with your highest calling. So I'm excited to jump into it. So rule number one mastery creates separation.

Austin Hopkins:

So I'm embarrassed to say I use AI way more than I'd like to admit. I use it every single day of my life. Sometimes it's 30 minutes. So I'm embarrassed to say I use AI way more than I'd like to admit. I use it every single day of my life. Sometimes it's 30 minutes. Sometimes I'm on it for 10 hours, 11 hours a day, using different tools. But the key is, the more I use it, the better I got at it.

Austin Hopkins:

In the beginning. My prompts were absolutely crap, my outputs were crap and I was getting frustrated because I wasn't getting out of the tool what I expected from it. And then I realized that's on me. If you don't know how to use it, it's a waste right, and so the more I use it, the better I got, and I think that's the key here. If you haven't started using AI on a daily basis, you're behind, because there are people right next to you in your company, your co-workers, your competitors who are using it to level up their career and level up their life. So the key is starting now, and I want to give you a bonus pro tip.

Austin Hopkins:

Here are some of the questions that I really, really like to ask LLMs. I'm using Questions like what are my blind spots? What do I have that others need? Where could I be working harder or smarter? Where am I wasting time? Does my plan need to be changed given the current trends? Right, so we have a strategic advisor in our pocket that we can ask questions to, that can give us unbiased feedback. I mean, who doesn't want that? Right? That's the way we grow. That's the way we move up in our careers. So mastery creates separation.

Austin Hopkins:

Rule number two AI isn't your crutch. So using AI as a crutch for thinking is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Ai is fantastic. Artificial intelligence can save us time. It can do amazing things, but it's not a replacement for our brain. We were born with amazing brains that are capable of fantastic, complex thought. Why would we give that up and use a tool instead?

Austin Hopkins:

What happens if all of us start using AI every single day to make all of our decisions? What if it replaces us? Listening to our gut or our instincts? Do we all become the same? Are there any personalities left or we're all becoming clones of the same thing? Are we all going to be putting the same things out into the world? That's my worry. So when I think I'm relying on it too much, I need to ask myself a question and say well, why am I relying on it right now?

Austin Hopkins:

Anytime there's creative tasks involved, I want to be the one doing those. I don't want to ask AI to do that. I want them to be there for the boring, mundane stuff that just takes away my mental bandwidth. So what would happen tomorrow if your favorite LLM was just gone? What if ChatGPT just didn't exist? Tomorrow, could you get through your day? Could you effectively do your job? If the answer is no, that's a problem. Ai should be a part of the value you bring in this world. It should not be all of it. If your entire filter and how you operate in the world is all done through artificial intelligence, no bueno. So I highly suggest that you keep that in the back of your mind. So rule number three blind trust.

Austin Hopkins:

In the beginning, I put way too much trust in the outputs that I got from the different AI tools I was using and I assumed every time it put something out it was probably the best answer, the most trustworthy, it was the most accurate, right. I just assumed it's pulling from the best sources. That ain't the case. In fact, I just read a study a couple of days ago that showed up to 40% of the data that ChatGPT gathers is from Reddit. That's scary. If that's where it's getting its facts, I don't want to trust those facts. There's some great stuff on Reddit, but there's also a ton of crap. So blind trust in AI is not something you want to do. You want to always be asking yourself does this output make sense? Given my experience, given my expertise, does this output make sense? Don't just trust. And something else that I think is worth mentioning is I don't know if you've been on these LLMs recently and realized how encouraging they are.

Austin Hopkins:

Sometimes I'll put in some ideas that I have, some strategies that I think work, and it will tell me they're amazing and they're absolute crap. Like. These are crap ideas. They stink. Your tool should not be saying this is a great idea. It should be telling me it sucks, just like if I had a friend and I asked them, they would tell me it sucked.

Austin Hopkins:

When we put too much trust in the outputs and just assume it's got our best interests and knows what we want at all times, we're failing. We're putting too much trust in another technology. Rule number four bad inputs equals bad outputs. So AI outputs are only as good as the inputs. So you could ask it an amazing question and you can get an amazing output. Or you can ask it a unclear, boring, dumb question and you can get very basic outputs. And so I think a lot of times people get frustrated with AI because the outputs aren't good. Ah, that's not giving me what I want, or it's just repeating the same things back to me. Well, I hate to tell you, but that's on you. That means your inputs aren't good, and I don't want to spend a lot of time giving you all of the specific prompts that I use, but I just want you to remember there's a couple of things that you can do to make sure, when you're using these different AI tools, that you get what you want. So I always kind of looked through four different lenses.

Austin Hopkins:

I want to make sure that I'm giving it the role I want it to play. So is it going to be a strategic advisor? Is it going to act as my best friend? Is it going to act as an industry expert? I want to give it the context what's at stake, what's going on, what's happened in the past, what is the state of the union. I want to give it the desired output. What do I want it to give to me?

Austin Hopkins:

And then I want to get the format. Do I want it in a list? Do I want it in a paragraph? Do I want a specific design? So, again, I make sure I want to give it the role that I want it to play the context, the desired output and the format. And even if you do all four of those prompts, it's still going to spit out some crap from time to time. I just want you to realize that comes with the territory.

Austin Hopkins:

And I want to give you a couple bonus pro tips, things that I've done that have really helped me. Number one within each conversation with whatever LLM I'm using, I make sure to have like kind of a master guidelines or prompts, and in that I'm including things like what my voice and style are going to be like, and I also have expectations on how I want the tool to challenge me. So something that I really, really enjoy with these artificial intelligence tools is the way that it allows me to challenge my thinking and really hold myself accountable to a higher standard. Okay, I want to move on to the final rule stay in your strength zone. When we're in our strength zone, we are showing the world our best self, we're showing them our highest value, and guess what? People resonate with that. So we don't get burnt out, we don't lose our passion. Ai enables us to stay in the strength zone.

Austin Hopkins:

How cool is that? We have a tool that can now do all the shit that we don't want to do All the boring, mundane, repetitive, low value tasks. I don't have to do that anymore. I get to spend time on the stuff I'm best at. So, as I was building this podcast, as I was building this business, I didn't have to spend hours and hours and hours doing shit I didn't want to do. I got to focus on the big picture stuff, the strategy, the vision, the creative work, the stuff that I actually enjoy.

Austin Hopkins:

In my career, I never enjoyed the boring, mundane, record-keeping, operational tasks, but I always enjoyed when I got to just think creatively, when I got to think about what the future was going to look and feel like. And that's what the cool thing about AI is it allows us to do the things that suck. So where in your career right now could you start using AI? Could you use it in some cool ways to take tasks off your place? Could you use it to free up mental bandwidth so you can focus on the important stuff?

Austin Hopkins:

A bonus pro tip is I use it to take action. So do you want to guess? The biggest thing that holds people back from doing cool stuff in their career and in their life? It's they don't take action. They're waiting for the perfect moment. I'll wait till I learn more about X so that I can then do Y. I want to wait till I get a little bit more feedback before I launch that product. I want to spend a little more time and make sure that the environment's perfect before I do it. Well, fortune favors the bold, and when we take action, we separate ourselves from the rest of the world. So AI has allowed me to take action over and over again, just like that quiz. Instead of waiting for another two years to get that made, I was able to make that in a couple of weeks.

Austin Hopkins:

Artificial intelligence allows us not only to stay in our strength zone, but it allows us to take action in our strength zone. So is there something right now, a cool idea, a side hustle, a passion, something at work, something in your personal life, that you could use AI to make it happen, to make it a reality? If so, might be something to think about. So again, the five rules. Rule number one mastery creates separation. Rule number two AI isn't your crutch. Number three blind trust is bad. Number four bad inputs equal bad outputs. And number five stay in your strength zone.

Austin Hopkins:

So, now that you've got the rules down, I wanna talk about how you can actually start using this in reality in your career. I have a feeling this section is gonna be be your favorite, because there's going to be six actual use cases that are going to help you understand how you can use AI to scale yourself. So I've got four career use cases and I've got two leadership use cases. So let's start with career first. So the first one searching for a job. Have you ever struggled to find small to mid-sized companies that are in your desired sector? Yeah, so have I. There are a lot of times where I want to find a job. Right, I want to find a company that aligns with what I want. Well, why am I not using an LLM, an AI tool, to accomplish that? Why am I going and scouring the internet to spend all that time trying to find companies that fit my needs and style? Well, here's how I would use AI to do that. I'm going to give you a prompt that might help, so it could be something like this Help me put together a list of 10 to 30 companies with under 200 employees in the medical billing sector located within a 30 mile radius of Atlanta. Organize the companies by employee rating on Glassdoor. So I am now going to get a list of 10 to 30 companies that are the exact size that I'm looking for. They have the right culture, they're organized in a way that matters to me and, great, I didn't have to spend an hour to two hours looking for that. Done for me, right, easy.

Austin Hopkins:

Another career one would be writing a resume. Raise your hand if you hate writing a resume. Yeah, me too. Resumes suck. I wholeheartedly hate writing resumes. It is the bane of my existence. So much so that a few years ago, I hired a professional resume writer. I paid him like 800 bucks. He made me a great resume. But now I can do that in an hour. I don't need anyone else. I could customize the resume for each job description, or hell. There's even full tools that are do-it-for-yourself platforms like Teal that can literally make your resume from start to finish with zero input from you. So that's something I'd keep in mind. How could I use AI to write a resume that gets me noticed?

Austin Hopkins:

So the next career one is salary negotiation. So I've negotiated probably 25 times for a higher salary in my career and all 25 times I felt uncomfortable, got sick to my stomach sometimes, and it was never easy. Well, what if I had an expert to help me get through those things? Or, hell, even just prepare? How about if I had an AI tool that could help me role play? Well, you can. I have used AI to help me negotiate for salaries, to negotiate with brands, and I think it's an amazing tool because it allows us to challenge our thinking, to get us out of our comfort zone, to make sure that we're prepared, because, at the end of the day, when we go into these salary negotiations, we want to have data, we want to make sure that we're prepared, right? So a bonus pro tip is I actually have a whole episode dedicated to salary negotiations. So if you want to hear how I've negotiated for hundreds of thousands of dollars in my career, give it a lesson. I'm positive you'll find some value.

Austin Hopkins:

Okay, the next two are going to be for leadership. So the first one is preparing for a meeting. So I used to be a leader of a large team and I would hold weekly meetings and monthly meetings for all of my teams, and sometimes that got really challenging to pull together all the information, to put together what I thought would be a concise meeting to make sure that when people showed up for an hour, an hour and a half, they felt like Austin put time and care into this and they actually got something out of it. So I really enjoyed using AI for preparation. It did a couple of things for me. Number one it helped me stay organized, so I was able to pull in all of my ideas, my thoughts, and kind of get a concise path. What did I actually want to achieve with that meeting? A lot of times we have all these ideas for meetings and they don't have a structure or a theme, and so AI was allowing me to kind of refine that Another way that I used it to prepare for meetings is that I would ask it to poke holes in my agenda and poke holes in the ideas, the sections that I was going to cover, and tell me did that make sense?

Austin Hopkins:

Was that really the best use of our time? Did that really get us closest to our goal that we had as a team? And if it didn't, I would make changes. So it was basically again like a strategic advisor that would say, no, this doesn't make sense. Yes, it does. Yes, you're on the right track. No, you're not. Cool stuff Easy to use anytime you're preparing for a meeting. As a leader, bonus pro tip is that I would actually use it a lot of times to inject a little bit of fun. So you know, for me, I always wanted meetings to be filled with important stuff, but I also knew that I was like a human being. I wanted to have a little fun, I wanted to connect with my employees. So I would use AI to sometimes figure out what are some fun games we could play, what are some cool ways we could connect outside of just a work talk, to make sure that we're really building that culture that we want as leaders.

Austin Hopkins:

The next one for leadership. The next use case is finding themes in your performance so you can coach better. So I actually have a friend who's in the consumer clothing space and he told me the other day that he uses AI every single day at work and I was like asking well, how do you do it? I mean, you've been in the industry for a while. What are you really getting out of it, specifically for leading your team? And he said there's two things that he gets from it. Number one is the insights are more interesting. So he's been in the industry for a while and all of his insights are, through his lens, right, his expertise, experience, and they're fantastic and highly valuable, but he doesn't know what he doesn know. And so having a partner that's thinking different, that's challenging him differently, allows him to get insights that are more interesting. And when he gets more interesting insights, he then gets to spend more time coaching to the things that actually matter. So instead of spending hours and hours trying to find themes so that he can then coach, he gets to offset that task and then instead actually spend time coaching. Because if I spend all of my time looking at the performance gaps and the themes which, by the way.

Austin Hopkins:

I had a boss that did that all day. That's what he did, but he never once coached us. He never once had a conversation with us about the things that he was finding. Well, what value did that provide? It didn't provide any value. He had a whole bunch of information and thoughts, but he never did anything with those. That's the amazing thing with these artificial intelligence tools it allows us to move faster, to scale our coaching. Again, remember, it's all about how can we scale, how can we get more of us out into the world with the use of AI. So I think artificial intelligence as one of the coolest things that we have at our fingertips, but it can't replace real world experience.

Austin Hopkins:

So if you're in a career situation at work where you feel stuck, things aren't going well, you're not paid enough, you're not moving up fast enough, you want to get promoted, you want to get selected to do bigger projects, you want to be a better leader, if you're faced with one of those situations, I know I can help. I've made a career out of helping people be the best version of themselves and I want to help you do that too. So click the link in the description. I'd be happy to have a chat. To wrap things up, I want to give you a challenge. So here's your challenge for the week.

Austin Hopkins:

I want you to pick one career related task this week. It could be writing a resume, updating your LinkedIn profile, preparing for a big meeting I don't care what it is, and I want you to run it through AI. I want you to compare what you had before you used AI and then compare what your output was. Did it make it easier? Did it improve your efficiency? Did it allow you to free up some space and focus on the things that actually matter, the stuff you actually enjoy doing at work? If you're not using AI to spend more time in your strength zone, you are missing out. So I hope this was helpful. I had a blast preparing for this and sharing everything that I'm using AI for in my life. I wanna say thank you so much for listening. Make it a great day. To say thank you so much for listening. Make it a great day. This has been the Introvert Leader Podcast. Subscribe for new episodes every other Wednesday.

People on this episode

Contributor

Austin Hopkins

Host