116. How to Use AI in Your Business as a Mom Entrepreneur (Without Working More Hours)

If you’ve been telling yourself you just need more time, more discipline, or a better routine to make your business work… this episode is going to shift everything.

Because the real problem?
It’s not time. It’s support.

In this episode, I’m breaking down exactly how I use AI (specifically Claude) as a coworker inside my business and how it’s helping me save hours, reduce mental load, and actually stay consistent in the margins of motherhood.

If you’ve tried AI before and felt like it was giving generic, robotic output… you’re probably just using it the way most people do. And today, I’m showing you a better way.

We’re diving into my Claude Coworker Method, plus a behind-the-scenes look at how AI can actually do work for you (yes, really).

Because you don’t need to hustle harder—you need smarter support.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why “I just need more time” is usually a support problem, not a time problem
• The biggest mistake most people make when using AI (and why it feels off)
• How to use AI as a thought partner, not just a content generator
• My 4-step Claude Coworker Method to get better, more aligned outputs
• The difference between using AI like a “vending machine” vs. a collaborator
• Real ways I use AI in my business (podcast planning, offers, decision-making)
• What Claude Cowork is and how it can actually handle tasks for you
• How AI reduces mental load so you can focus on CEO-level work
• What AI can’t replace (and why that matters for your business)
• 3 simple prompts you can start using today to get better results instantly

Your Next Step:

Ready to go deeper with this?
Grab the AI for CEO Moms Playbook → momsmakemoneycollective.com/playbook

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:49

If you've ever thought, I just need more time, I need to be more disciplined, or I need to get more organized, I want to lovingly call you out for a second. Because I used to say these exact same things. I'd finish a day feeling like I barely made a dent in my to-do list. And I'd convince myself that if I just had a longer work window or a better morning routine, or somehow fewer interruptions from tiny humans, then I'd finally feel like I had it all together. But here's what I've learned: you don't need more time, you need better support. And for me, a huge part of that support right now is from AI. Not in a complicated, techie or intimidating way, but in a holy crap, I just saved two hours and I still made it to school pickup kind of way. Let's talk about it. Let's build something sustainable. Hey, hey, and welcome to the Sustainable CEO Mom Podcast, the place for service-based mom entrepreneurs who are done choosing between a thriving business and a thriving life. Around here, we talk about what it actually takes to build something profitable in the margins of motherhood with systems, sustainability, and strategies that work with your life instead of working against it. I'm your host, Jenny, and today we're going to be getting into something that has genuinely shifted how I run my business. And that is AI, and specifically how I use it as a coworker, not just a tool. And if you played around with AI and felt like you weren't really getting much out of it, then this episode is for you because there is a totally different way to use it that most people aren't talking about. Let's get into it. So before we dive in, I want to clear something up. AI is not here to replace you. And that is something that I believed for a really long time. I was like very angry and was like, AI is going to take my job. And that was really frustrating, but it's not here to replace you. And it's also not here to make you sound like a robot. And it's not here to write generic content that sounds like it came from a corporate press release. It's also not here to eliminate your voice. AI is here to take the friction out of your work. Because as a mom running a business, you're not working in ideal conditions. You're working in the margins between drop-off and pickup and during nap time if you're lucky, while mentally tracking school events, pediatrician appointments, what's for dinner, and whether you responded to that client email. The cognitive load alone is exhausting before you've even opened a single doc. So when I talk about AI, I'm not talking about a content machine that just spits stuff out. I'm talking about something that reduces the mental overhead of running a business so that you can show up in the work that actually requires you. So the AI that I use most in my business is actually Claude. And the reason I get gravitated towards Claude specifically is the way that it holds context in a conversation. I used to be a Chat GPT girly and I definitely used Chat GPT still, but I don't know, I've just found my rhythm with Claude. And when I'm working through something in Claude, I'm not starting from scratch every single time. I can carry a thread, I can come back to an idea, I can say, remember what we were building earlier and pick up right where I left off. And that matters a lot. Someone whose workday gets frequently interrupted. So here is what I want to shift how you think about AI entirely, because there is a way that most people use it, and then there's a way that actually changes how you work. So most people use AI like a vending machine. So they walk up, they punch in a request, something like write me a caption or give me 10 post ideas, rewrite this email, and then they take whatever it spits out. And honestly, that does work sometimes. But it's also why a lot of people feel like AI content sounds a little off, a little generic, and not quite like them. And it's because the output is only as good as the context that you give it. So here's what I do instead. I call it the Claude coworker method. So the whole idea is this: you stop treating Claude like a machine and you start treating it like a coworker. So think about the difference between dropping a vague Slack message that says, Can you write something about my new offer versus actually sitting down with a business partner and saying, okay, here's what I'm building, here's who it's for, here's what I want from the feel, and here's where I'm stuck. The second conversation is going to produce something 10 times more useful because you gave it context. So that is the Claude coworker method, and it has four parts. So the first step is to orient before you ask. So instead of leading with a request, you want to lead with context. Don't say, write me an email sequence. Say, here's my offer, here's who I'm talking to, here's where they are emotionally before they buy, and here is what I want this sequence to accomplish. You're not asking for output yet. You're giving it the full picture first. This one shift alone will change the quality of everything that you get back from Claude or any other AI tool. Then the second step is to think out loud together. So this is a step that most people completely skip, and it's honestly one of the most valuable ones. So instead of going straight to give me the finished thing, you want to use Claude to process first. So things like here are three directions I could take for this offer. What do you see as the strongest angle for my audience? Or something feels off about this launch plan. Can you help me figure out what's missing? Or even here's my brain up from this morning. Can you help me find the through line? You're not outsourcing your thinking completely. You're just using it to accelerate your thinking. There's a big difference there. Then we have step three. Build iteratively. So once you've processed, then you ask for a draft, and then you react to it like you would a coworker's first attempt. I love the structure, but the tone is a little too stiff. I'd never say it that way. Or the hook isn't landing. Can we try a different angle? This back and forth is really where you stop getting generic AI output and start getting something that actually sounds like you. And then the fourth step is to stay in the thread. And this is the one that ties it all together. So most people open a brand new chat every single time they use AI, which means they're constantly re-explaining who they are, who they serve, what they're building, etc. That is exhausting and it kills the quality of what you get back. So when you stay in a thread or use like the same project space within Claude, it has all that context already. You don't have to rebrief it every time. You just show up and keep on going. And over time, that thread starts to feel like a running strategy session with someone who actually knows your business. And that is a shift that makes it sustainable. And what I like to do is I have a project space in Claude that is like for whatever that specific thing is. So, like for the entirety of podcasting for moms, or the entirety of the moms and money collective side, or even just for the podcast. And it all goes in that one project space. So they're all separated by projects, so it's not like overwhelming. So I just pop another chat into that project space because it's a different episode if it's a podcast episode thing or whatever. So it helps me kind of differentiate between all the things, but it still keeps that tone throughout that whole project, if that makes sense. So now I want to take a quick second to mention something that goes beyond this method, because Anthropic, which is the company that created Claude, actually built a product called Claude Coork. And it is worth knowing about because if the Claude Coworker method is about how you collaborate with Claude inside a conversation, then Claude Co-work gives Claude the ability to actually do the work inside of your computer, files, and apps while you're just, you know, not having to do anything. It's like going from having a great coworker that you chat with to having one who can actually open the filing cabinet, pull the right documents, draft the report, and have it sitting on your desk when you get back. So we're to be talking about what that actually looks like and whether it's something that makes sense for you as a mom or entrepreneur. So Claude Cowork. So I want to be clear about what this is because it's genuinely different from anything most people are using right now. So Claude Co-Work is available on their desktop app. You have to download it to your Mac or PC. And instead of just chatting with Claude the way you would do in a browser window, Claude actually accesses your computer, your files, folders, applications. And then you can give it like a goal or something you want it to do, and it does the work and comes back with a finished deliverable. So instead of saying something like, help me think through how to organize my client folders and then going and doing it yourself, you say organize my client folders, and Claude actually does it on its own. Isn't that crazy? It's just unreal that it can actually do that. So let me give you some real examples of how this can work because this is where it gets really cool. So the first thing is file organization. So you know the downloads folder on your computer that is basically like a black hole. You have receipts, random PDFs, screenshots, half-finished documents, files that are named like final version three. Use this one, things like that. You can point Claud Cowork at that folder and say, sort this, rename what needs renaming, pull out anything relevant to my business and get rid of any duplicates. And it does without you having to touch a single file manually. So and for a mom running a business in 20 hours a week, that kind of task is the first thing that gets skipped forever. Something that I hadn't touched in years. And that's because it's not urgent. It's just always a mess and you just leave it that way. But now it doesn't have to be. The second thing you can do is document prep and drafting. So let's say you have a handful of source files, things like call notes, client questionnaires, research, and you need to turn them into a proposal or report. Normally that's you sitting there with five tabs opening, five tabs open, copying and pasting, trying to synthesize, trying to get it all into something coherent. With cowork, you would hand it the files and say draft a structured proposal from these, and it reads across all of them, pulls what's relevant, assembles a draft, and then hands it back to you for refinement. The hardest part is already done. You just do the kind of like final layer to make it work. Another thing that's really crazy with it is it can do scheduled tasks. And I think this is going to be a game changer for business owners. So you can set it up on a schedule. So you could say, like every Monday morning, I want you to pull my metrics from my analytics and drop them into my weekly report template. And it just does it on its own every single week without you having to even think about it, which is crazy. Or you could say something like, every morning, check my email and give me a summary of what needs my attention today. You're able to find that cadence once and it handles it from there. So that is a complete game changer, in my opinion. So who is this actually for? Honestly, it's really for anyone whose workday includes tasks that eat a lot of time, but don't actually require your specific brain. The organizing, the formatting, the compiling, the sense, the synthesizing across 12 different documents. The stuff that's not really hard, but it's just a lot. And it crowds out the work that actually moves your business forward. And as a mom entrepreneur working limited hours, that stuff is especially costly because you don't have spare hours to burn on administrative work. Every hour that you spend organizing files or manually putting together a report is an hour you didn't spend on client work, content, or offers. So cowork is basically saying, let me take the assembly off your plate so that you can show up for the strategy part. One important thing to know is that is it's designed with what Anthropic calls human oversight. So that means Claude completes a task, but the consequential decisions stay with you. It's not making calls on your behalf or sending things without your review. You still lead, it's just handling the legwork. So you may be wondering, how do I get this? So it is available through the desktop app, which you can download on their website. And it's available for paid subscribers on both Mac and PC. I will drop the link in the show notes for Claude so you can check it out and get it yourself if you would like to. But the bottom line here is the Claude Coworker method that we talked about earlier. That is about how you think with Claude, how you collaborate and how you structure your conversation so you're actually getting useful output. Whereas Claude Co-Work, the product, is what happens when the coworker can also act. It can open the files, do the work, and hand you back something finished. Together, they are a pretty powerful combo for a mom who's trying to run a real business without running herself into the ground. I just want to say you don't have to do this all at once. Honestly, start with the method, get comfortable treating Claude like a coworker in your conversations. Then when you're ready to go deeper, then you can use the actual cowork product when you want to hand off the stuff that's just taking up too much of your time. Because the goal is not to do more, it's to do what matters with way less friction in the way. So here's some more examples of how I use Claude in my business to kind of solidify how great it is. So instead of staring at a blank doc, trying to figure out what to say, I'll go into my Claude thread and say, I want to record an episode about X. My audience is Y, and the thing I want them to walk away knowing or doing is Z. Help me through think through this structure. Then we map it out together, add my stories, examples, my voice, but I'm not starting from zero. The thinking is already done for me. The second thing I use it for is offer development. So when I'm building something new, like a workshop, a new offer, whether it's like a big or a mini offer, I brain dump everything into Claude. So it's like a stream of consciousness. Here's everything I'm thinking, type brain dump, and I'll say, organize this for me. And it does. It finds the thread, it identifies what's missing and helps me see the offer more clearly than I could in my own head. And the third way I use it is for getting unstuck. And this one is really underrated. So I use it when I hit a decision that I'm just spinning on and cannot come to a conclusion on what I should do. So, you know, if I have two pricing options I'm in between, two launch strategies or two offers I could prioritize. I lay out my capacity, my goals, my audience, and I say, here are the trade-offs I'm seeing. Am I missing anything? It's like having a thought partner who doesn't get tired of my questions and is always available at 7 p.m. So here's what AI doesn't replace. And I want to be clear about this. So it doesn't replace your voice, it doesn't replace your stories, and it doesn't replace your strategy. And ultimately, it does not replace you. So what it replaces is the friction, the starting, the spinning, the where do I even begin questions. You still have to show up, you still have to make the calls, build the relationships, and serve your clients. But now you don't have to do it with a mental load that's already at 90% before 9 a.m. So here's one thing I want you to take away. The reason that you feel like you don't have enough time isn't a time problem. It is a support problem. And support can come in a lot of forms through a VA, a business bestie, or a coach. But it can also come from tools that reduce friction so you can show up in the work that only you can do. AI is one of those tools. And when you use it like a coworker instead of a vending machine, it totally changes things. So I want to leave you with three prompts that you can literally open Claude and use today. So the first prompt is help me turn this idea into a clear offer. Here's what I'm thinking. The second prompt is organize this brain dump into a plan that I can actually execute. And the third prompt is refine this so it actually sounds like me and converts. Here's my rough draft, and here's who I'm writing to. That's it. Start with those three prompts. And if you want to go even deeper, I would love for you to check out the AI for CEO moms playbook by going to momsmakemoneycollective.com slash playbook. Once again, that is momsmakemoneycollective.com/slash playbook. I will leave the link and any next steps in the show notes, and I will see you in the next episode. If this episode resonated with you, share it with another service-based mom who's building something real. And when you're ready to move from reactive business ownership to sustainable CEO leadership, your next step is waiting for you. You'll find the right path, whether that's the accelerator, the collective, or a deeper intensive, by going to momsmakemoneycollective.com. You're not just building a business, you're building it your way sustainably. With profit, with margin, and with intention. Because hustle is optional, leadership isn't. I'll see you next week.