060 From AI Skeptic to Superfan - Which AI tool is best?

In this episode, I’m sharing the behind-the-scenes story of how AI went from something I resisted... to something I now can’t imagine running my business without.

I talk candidly about the initial fear, confusion, and frustration I felt when AI tools started flooding the online space — and how it hit me hard (including a big drop in my SEO traffic and income).

But I also share how things shifted.
 How I stopped seeing AI as a threat… and started using it as a genuine teammate in my business.

You’ll hear about the different tools I tested — from ChatGPT to Claude to Gemini — and what each one is actually good at (because yes, they all have their quirks).

And I’ll introduce you to Sarah AI — the custom assistant I created for other healthcare professionals who want to grow their businesses ethically, without spending all day online or learning tech they’ll never use.

This one’s honest, hopeful, and full of practical takeaways if you’re still figuring out where (or if) AI fits into your world.

Takeaways:

• When AI first exploded, it felt like a threat — especially to how I’d built my business through content.
• I experienced a big drop in SEO traffic and income, and I’ll talk about what that was really like.
• I initially found AI tools frustrating and overwhelming — but I kept going, and it changed everything.
• The real turning point was when I stopped seeing AI as a “shortcut” and started treating it like a team member.
• Different tools do different jobs:
  • ChatGPT is brilliant for planning and internal strategy.
  • Claude writes content that actually sounds like me.
  • Gemini helps me with research and admin-type tasks.
• I created Sarah AI because none of the tools were quite built for us — health professionals with ethical standards and complex lives.
• AI isn’t here to replace us. It’s here to support us — especially when we’re tired, stretched, or just don’t want to stare at a blank screen again.

Lets keep in touch!

Website: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusiness
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

FREE Workbook - The Master Plan

Discover the 22 steps you need to take (in the right order) to build a successful business so you can earn enough to live the freedom lifestyle you dream of. https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

Work with me:

• Business Coaching: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/mastermind
• Sarah AI: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/offers/AYjozgYc/
• Book a discovery call: https://thechildrensnutritionist.as.me/discovery

Transcript

You've probably heard it too. The whispers, the hype, the fear, AI, it's coming for your job. Soon, we probably won't need human written anything. Why bother creating content when ChatGPT can just do it for you in five seconds? As a healthcare professional, especially if you're building something online, a course or a clinic or a business beyond the one-to-one model, it can feel so confusing to know what's worth paying attention to and actually what's just another digital distraction. 

And for me, it was personal. AI didn't just disrupt the industry. It walked right into my business and hit me where it hurt. In this episode, I'm sharing my honest journey with AI, the impact that it had on my income, how I tried, gave up, and then came back stronger.

The tools I now use daily and how I use them, and a new kind of support I've created for you called Sarah AI that's helping dietitians and healthcare professionals do business with more ease, more clarity and more confidence. So if you've ever felt overwhelmed by tech or worried about being left behind or just curious about what AI could actually do for you in your business, then this one is for you.

With that said, let's dive in.

Let me begin this episode by sharing with you my journey with AI. It's just a couple of years ago, it's 2023. So at this point in time, chat GPT was everywhere. It felt like the whole world was either panicking about AI taking over, that businesses would collapse, that even healthcare professionals like me as a dietitian could be redundant, or they were trying to ride the wave without really knowing how. And...

In all honesty, I was a bit torn. I was really intrigued, but yes, I was also a little bit nervous. And I was right to be nervous because I built my first business on SEO, search engine optimization. And AI has more or less made Google search as we know it redundant.

I was that person who'd figured out Google. I was writing blog posts with the perfect keywords, answering all of the questions that parents typed into the search bar about nutrition for babies and children. My posts were showing up on page one, many even in the top spot. And it worked beautifully, not just for visibility and building my brand, but for passive income too. I had display ads running on my website that generated between

Two and a half thousand to three thousand pounds every single month just from blogging. I felt like I'd cracked the code. A steady stream of income with minimal effort after that content was live. Bliss. And then AI arrived and overnight people stopped clicking. Because now when someone asked the internet a question instead of being directed to my carefully crafted blog,

they were getting answers straight from AI. No clicks, no page views meant no ad revenue. And it wasn't just me. I watched in real time as colleagues in SEO blogging groups shared horror stories. People who were making a full-time income from their websites suddenly couldn't even cover their web hosting fees.

For some, that was their entire livelihood gone. My heart sank because I saw the writing on the wall. We can't outwrite the robots. So now for me, that loss of income, that stung. It really did, but it didn't ruin my business, fortunately. I am a multi-passionate entrepreneur. I love a shiny object. And so I had quite a few other revenue streams, digital products, courses, memberships.

I worked as a consultant for brands and I even did some sponsored posts on Insta. but what it did do was wake me up because I could see how fast everything was changing in the online space. One minute I was celebrating my website hitting 150,000 views a month. The next I was asking myself if people even needed human written content anymore.

And that brought up something deeper, a fear that many of you listening may relate to. What if this thing that I've worked so hard to build becomes irrelevant? It hit that part of me that craves stability. You know, the part that worked in the NHS for 20 plus years because it felt safe. The idea that some clever machine could just swoop in and do my job faster and cheaper and easier, was gutting, especially for us in the caring profession, like dietitians and therapists and other registered healthcare professionals, where our humanness is kind of the whole point.

And then, of course, there was the frustration. The frustration of spending hours trying to crack chat GPT, copying and pasting prompts from gurus on Instagram.

Buying courses that promised magic, AI workflows, getting excited when it kind of sounded okay, and then crushing back down when the final results still didn't sound like me. The tone was off. It was too formal, too American, too marketing speak, too robotic, full of dashes, you know, those longer versions of hyphens. It was full of phrases that I would never say out loud, like shouting into the void, or let's skyrocket your business. No, just no. And I think other people found this too. Lists started to appear online of other obvious GPT language. And so people started to shy away from using AI for fear of being found out. I felt duped. I felt tired, like I was chasing some shiny time-saving tool that just seemed to make my work harder.

And so I stopped. I went back to basics and for a while I felt quite proud, like, yes, I don't need AI. I'll write from the heart, old school. But deep down, I knew I couldn't ignore it forever because it wasn't going away. Now, as I said, I do love a shiny object and this one seemed to have that little bit of extra sparkle and so I didn't give up.

What I did instead was I upgraded my account to the paid version, hoping for better quality results. I tried out prompts that people were sharing on social media and I bought some from those who seemed to be a bit more in the know and to a degree this all worked. It made the outputs so much better. But still, it seemed to take ages to give the bot enough information about me, about my business, about my ideal client, about my goals of what I wanted it to do for me. And of course, to then personalize the prompt itself. And then there was the editing, the back and forth refinement until I eventually got something I felt that I could use. And by the time I'd fiddled with that prompt and given it a backstory and corrected the grammar and deleted the emojis and swapped out the ridiculous metaphors and rewritten it line by line. I thought, you know what, Sarah, I could have just taken my laptop to a cafe, ordered an Americano and written this by myself in less time. And it might even be better.

And then a moment came when actually everything shifted. It started with a conversation with a mentor of mine, someone who I trusted. She mentioned that she was using AI in a completely different way, not to write social media posts or blog outlines, but to run various aspects of her business. That lit a little bit of a fire in me because I am a little bit of a tech geek at heart and I do love tools and systems and efficiency.

And if there's a way to do something smarter, I am in. And so I went all in. I took courses that she recommended. I joined memberships. I tried out every AI tool that I could find. I experimented like a mad scientist with prompts and personas and tweaking and testing and fiddling with the backend settings. And I created custom GPTs. I trained Claude to sound like me.

I spoke to it like I would speak to a brand new team member. And slowly things started to work. I stopped treating AI like a tool and I started using it like my team. And what that meant was that suddenly I was able to map out an entire sales funnel with dates and steps and workflow and content for each stage. It took me about two hours, but before that would have taken me weeks, six weeks or so.

I was able to repurpose a podcast episode into three emails, four social posts, a YouTube video description with it as well, and optimized blog post for SEO all in less than an hour. One of the biggest things it did for me was it helped me translate legal contracts into plain English so that I could actually understand what was being asked of me. And that was such an important thing for me because

It got me out of a sticky situation with a brand deal that went really too far south. I would also use it to help me respond politely to customer services requests. know, those who email you for the 55th time having lost their password and can't find the password reset button. And then I had the wild idea of building a mindset coach using AI.

So the story here is I started a mindset and life coaching certification at the beginning of this year. And it was to enhance the support that I could give to my clients. And I decided to see if I could create an AI mindset coach just for me to help me with my own mindset. So every morning I would open my laptop and I would tell it how I was feeling, what was going on that day, especially if something had triggered me.

And it would give me some journaling prompts, that's what I asked it for, to encourage me to have some mindset shifts. And do know what happened? I noticed that my inner dialogue changed. At 49 years old, I started prioritizing me and my enjoyment of life, my health. I actually started enjoying exercise, not just tolerating it, but loving it.

I've always had a bit of a dislike for exercise. I do it once a week with a PT and that's for the benefit of my health. But if she takes a week off, I'm joining her with a week off as well. Now I'm finding myself doing four to five sessions a week. I've got Peloton bike. I do beach runs. do weight training and all fueled by this digital AI coach who's encouraging me to honestly be the best version of myself.

And the results, well, I've lost five and a half kilos for a start. I've got muscles. I sleep better. I feel sharper. And for the first time in forever, I feel like I'm thriving and not just a wife and a moment of business owner getting by.

My AI mindset bot also saved me some money in my business because it made me realize that there was a couple of contractors I had in my business who I probably didn't need anymore. And so I decided to let them go and save a bit of money because my custom made AI tools, they could do the work for me for free. And what was a real surprise was I discovered I had more time.

Because I didn't have to create tasks and then explain what I wanted. I didn't have to answer the questions that came up. I didn't need to review my contractors work before I used it. And that's when I knew this is it. This really is the future. So AI didn't replace me, but it did free me. And today I've built a full AI team that supports both my business, like actual digital assistants who helped me stay on top of things. 

They draft content outlines for my future course ideas. They write marketing emails that still sound like me. They brainstorm podcast topics when my brain is fried. They summarize research papers so I don't have to scroll through PubMed for hours. And they even handle all of the admin of a launch from email sequences to tech checklists. They help me write kinder responses to tricky client emails.

And yes, one of them even helped me plan our family holiday to Barcelona later this year. And this means that I can spend my energy on the parts of my business that only I can do, the bits that need my face and my voice and my unique skill set and my experience because AI can never replace that.

Okay, so now you know my story with AI, let's get to the good bit, the actual tools. I get asked all the time, Sarah, which AI tool is best? And my honest answer is, depends on what you need it to do. Because just like in your clinic when you're working with clients, you wouldn't use the same tool for meal planning as well as admin and taking notes and marketing. AI is exactly the same.

Each tool has its own personality, its own strengths, and also its own limitations. So before I dive into which tools I use and which ones I recommend for you, let's just get one thing straight. Today, I'm talking specifically about large language models, or LLMs for short. Now, don't worry, this isn't going to get all techy. A large language model, well, think of it like this.

It's a type of AI that's been developed to understand and generate human language. So not just words, but patterns in how we speak, how we write, how we ask questions. So you can type in a prompt, like write an Instagram caption about why certain IBS sufferers can't tolerate onions and garlic. And it'll come back with a full draft in seconds. But it can do way more than just write things. So in short, these are

AI tools that can help you think, they can help you write, they can help you plan, and they can help you communicate more efficiently, which is why they're so powerful for business owners like us, especially when you're juggling client care and CPD and school pickups and social media and trying to eat your lunch before three o'clock. So how do these actually work? 

Well, at its core, a LLM, a large language model is trained on huge, huge, huge amounts of text. So we're talking books and articles and websites and online conversations. So it's quite literally seen millions and millions and maybe even billions of ways people ask questions and write sentences and structure ideas. It doesn't think like a human. It doesn't have feelings or opinions, but what it does have is pattern recognition.

So that means when you ask it to draft an email or a blog, it's not guessing, it's actually pulling from thousands of patterns it's seen before and it's stitching them together to match your request. So when you give it something long and ask for a summary, it scans for the main points and it reshapes them in a more digestible way, like the world's fastest note taker. When you're feeling stuck or foggy and you ask it can you help me plan this workshop it turns your rough thoughts into a logical outline because it's been trained to recognise structure and steps and flow and when you ask it to make this sound like me it can learn from examples of your past writing and replicate your tone casual professional nurturing no nonsense however you typically sound so it's not magic it's certainly not perfect especially at the beginning.

But when you give it enough context and you ask it clearly, it can feel eerily quite helpful. So think of it less like a genius robot and more like a super efficient assistant who's read everything on the internet and can organize your chaos into something really, really usable. And that's why it can be so powerful when it's used well. Especially for us running businesses around real life, real clients and very little spare time. 

All right, let's talk specifics. So there's loads of tools out there and I've played with a lot of them and these three are the ones that I use every single day. Each one has its strengths. Each one fits a different need in my business, but when I use them together, they can feel like having an extra team member, but without the payroll.

So number one, of course, is ChatGPT. And I think that this is best for thinking and planning and internal business systems. So if you've dabbled in AI, I'm pretty sure this is probably the one that you've tried. It's like the Swiss Army pen knife of language models. It's good at a lot of different things, especially if you know what to ask it. And actually, it's my favorite. It's the one that I use the most.

So I like ChatGPT because you can do a lot of back and forth in the chat without reaching any limit. Now, I've got the paid version and I've never ever reached the limit, but I have with some of the other tools, even on their paid versions. So here's how I use it in my business. So for internal business things like planning launches and timelines, I might say, I want to launch a short course in six weeks. Here's what it includes. Map out the steps for me.

Boom, instant marketing structure. I might ask it to brainstorm weekly content themes for my podcast or email sequences if I'm promoting something, particularly helpful when your brain just feels a little bit too tired to be creative. I will use it as a business strategist. So I've uploaded all of my knowledge, the transcripts of my courses, my curriculums, the scripts for everything I've ever created on business strategy, which means I can ask it for help when I have a particular goal to meet, like I want to make 10,000 pounds next month from my Happy Healthy Eaters Club membership, please create the strategic plan. I use it to break down big projects into more manageable to-do lists, like when I want to update the structure of my website. 

And what makes it so powerful is, well, the paid version, which I think is about 18 pounds a month gives you access to make custom GPTs. So think of these as AI team members who can be trained by you to understand your business, your audience, and even your tone of voice. So as I said, I've built my mindset coach. I've got a podcast content creator. I've got a customer services assistant. I've got a marketing assistant for this business and a separate one for the children's nutritionist. I've got my strategist that I just told you about. I've got my email expert and I've got my customer services queen and they all live inside of ChatGPT. 

It's not the best for writing polished client facing copy. I've given all of my assistants full training on my linguistics, but even so the tone can sometimes come off a bit generic or sometimes actually a bit too enthusiastic. But if you're running a business and it's just you, or you and a couple of contractors and you're wearing all of the hats and it's feeling overwhelming at times, Chat GPT is brilliant for supporting you with those internal business operations.

So the second tool that I love is Claude. And this is best for writing content that actually sounds like you. So if ChatGPT is the planner, Claude is your writer. And it's not just any writer. It's the one who sits down with a cuppa, listens to your voice notes, and then turns them into content that sounds just like you would say it. Here's where Claude shines in my world. First of all, writing nurture emails that sound conversational, personal and not like a pushy sales funnel. 

Social media captions that sound like me, even when I've only got a rough idea. Sales page drafts that actually feel human that don't make me cringe when I read them. Turning my voice notes or bullet points into a podcast script, I'll often use ChatGPT to write something like an email sequence and then pop it into Claude and ask it to rephrase it to mirror my tone of voice.

Claude is just, how can I describe it, warmer. It's more natural with tone and it's especially good at mimicking your voice once you feed it a few examples of how you write or how you speak. So what you need to be aware of with Claude is there's a free plan, but you'll hit your usage limits really quickly. So you do need to pay for it. The paid version gives you a lot more flexibility, but there's still a cap. 

And also, it's not as strong for tasks that need lots of logic or step-by-step planning. It can get a bit woolly. It's not good at being strategic. So you can still create custom assistants in Claude, which they actually call projects, which is actually quite confusing because ChatGPT also has projects, which are actually just folders, where you can group together chats into collections. Claude is perfect for you if you're not very eloquent with words, a like me.

If you're not trained in conversion copywriting or you simply just dread writing salesy content. Now, the third tool that I want to talk about is Google Gemini. So I think this is best for quick research, admin tasks and content support. Let me explain what I mean. So.

Gemini is Google's answer to AI. And whilst it doesn't get as much buzz as the others, it quietly gets on with the job. It's especially good for helping with research-based tasks, admin, or can you just help me understand this type of moments. I also think that this is one to watch. Google is massive. And I'm sure you know it isn't going anywhere soon. So I can only see Gemini getting more and more powerful in time especially with other Google-based integrations. I notice Gemini is now in my email inbox. So here's how I use Gemini. It's great for summarising research papers or journal articles, so ideal if you need to brush up before creating some CPD content or answering a tricky question from a parent or a patient.

It's good for outlining educational pieces like Instagram tips or carousel posts or lead magnet downloads. It's good for helping me decide between tech tools or platforms when I don't want to sit and scroll through 20 comparison blog posts. It works well because it's backed by Google. pulls in more up-to-date information than ChatGPT or Claude which are trained on older data. So for research trends or facts, it's often actually a bit more accurate. What it's not great at is gemini's tone can be a bit stiff. It's not gonna sound like your best friend writing an email, but actually that's not what it's built for. Think of it more as a helpful researcher than a copywriter. It also still gives false information.

Did you hear about what it recommended for keeping melted cheese on pizza? Super glue. Now there's a fourth tool, and this is a bit of a bonus one. It's called poe.com, P-O-E dot com. And this is great if you're not sure which of those other three tools to commit to because poe.com lets you try all three tools in one place. It's a bit like a playground for AI, but, and it's a big but.

If you're planning to build custom assistants or use trained voices, it's better to use each tool on its own platform. Poe doesn't support that level of personalization, so I'd only recommend it if you're just getting started with AI and you don't really know which is the best one to choose. Now, before we wrap up today's episode, I want to share something with you that I'm genuinely so excited about.

Because if you've been listening and thinking, well, all this sounds great, Sarah, but I don't have time to figure out how to train an AI tool or tweak prompts for three hours just to write one caption for social media, then you are going to love this. So over the past year, I got so many questions from my clients, lovely, brilliant healthcare professionals like you who were just feeling stuck. Not because they didn't want to use AI.

But because it just didn't feel safe or ethical or sound like them. And so I created something to help. It's called Sarah AI and it's kind of like having me in your pocket. So she's not just another AI template or fancy prompt pack. She's actually a fully custom AI assistant trained on everything I teach inside the Accelerate Mastermind and grounded in real life experiences of regulated professionals building values-based businesses.

So what makes her different? Well, she gets our world. She understands why your content needs to be evidence-based and human. She knows why you feel weird using the word transformation in a sales email and why just go viral on TikTok isn't the solution when you've got a full clinic day, CPD, deadlines, and a child at home with a tummy bug. She's already helping freelance dietitians and healthcare professionals to act as their business strategist, helping them make decisions, refine their offers and map out growth plans when they feel stuck. Create content that actually converts without the feeling of burnout. Write professional marketing emails and sales sequences, blogs and captions in minutes and not hours. Repurpose what they've already created from webinar replays to course modules.

Plan launches and troubleshoot why an offer isn't converting. Coach their mindset on those wobbly days when imposter syndrome kicks in. And map out systems that make business feel less like chaos and more like calm. She's even been described as game changing by our early testers, not because she's flashy, but because she's really thoughtful. She understands nuance. She's trained in our professional standards because she was built specifically for us. 

But no, she will not replace you. No one could ever do that, but she will support you. She'll help you think and strategize and write and plan and sell with more ease. If you're curious, there's a link to learn more in the show notes.

So there we have it. After all the overwhelm and hype, the truth is that AI isn't here to replace you, but it is here to stay and to assist and support you if you let it in. And when you stop treating it like a gimmick and start using it like a team member, it becomes so much more than just a content generator. It becomes your strategist, your sounding board, your behind the scenes magic maker. 

Whether you're creating your first online course or trying to just show up more consistently or want to stop rewriting that one caption for the fifth time, these tools can genuinely change the game. And if building your own team of AI assistants sounds like one more thing on your already full plate, Sarah AI was made with you in mind. She's like having me, your mentor, your coach, your business bestie inside your laptop, ready to help you at 10 PM when your brain's foggy and the kids have finally gone to bed.

I built her for dietitians, nutritionists and regulated healthcare professionals who care deeply and want to build smart, ethical, sustainable businesses that reflect that. So take what you've learnt today, start small and let these tools take some of the pressure off. You don't have to do it all on your own anymore.

Bye for now.