Intuitive Marketing Podcast

#16: How AI Can Be Your Most Aligned Business Partner (Without Losing Your Authenticity)

• Chelsea Fournier + Meg O'Neill • Season 2 • Episode 16

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Embracing AI in business can transform how you operate. This conversation highlights the benefits of utilizing AI technologies to enhance productivity while managing the complexities of running a business. 

- Introduction of AI’s significant role 
- How to integrate AI into everyday business functions 
- Addressing concerns and skepticism about AI 
- Sharing real-life applications and success stories 
- Techniques for optimizing time and energy using AI 
- Practical steps to start utilizing AI tools 

If you are looking for a way to revolutionize your business approach, tune in for insights that empower. 


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Want to connect more with the hosts?

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Follow Chelsea on Instagram @intuitivebusinessmentor...

Speaker 1:

What if your next business partner was AI? Could it save you time and energy while increasing your profit margin, and how would you actually feel about that?

Speaker 2:

Today we're peeling back the curtain on how we've been integrating AI into our business and, as two neurodivergent business owners running busy home lives and growing a business together, committing to learning and using AI has opened our mind as to how we can truly get actions done that would honestly otherwise take us way too long, get put off or cost us too much to delegate.

Speaker 1:

Hey there friends.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the Intuitive Marketing Podcast, where we ditch the bro marketing BS and bring you big sister vibes instead. I'm Meg and this is Chelsea your new biz besties. We met on TikTok in 2023. Fast forward to now and we have teamed up here to guide you through the wild world of marketing your business with heart and soul.

Speaker 1:

Are you feeling lost or overwhelmed, maybe unsure of your next steps, but you have a big vision of where your coaching, healing, speaking or writing career could be in the next five years, 10 years. Don't worry, we've got your back. We'll help you tap into your intuition, build a brand that lights you up and leverage proven marketing strategies to grow towards a six or even seven-figure business in a way that won't make you cringe.

Speaker 2:

We're actually here to help you bring the magic back into your marketing.

Speaker 1:

Because marketing should feel good, not gross.

Speaker 2:

Grab your favorite drink, get comfy and let's get started.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So I embraced AI right off the bat when I heard that it was coming out. I had heard about it through social media and I was so excited by it. I was like this is so cool. I started playing with it right away and I really it really was clicked in my brain of oh wow, this can help me really make decisions much more quickly, help me with ideas, because I have an ability to have a very big idea but not have the language to put in.

Speaker 1:

And even as I'm explaining this, you can hear like I am not super clear on, but I can work with AI to really tease that out and then feel so much more clarity. So I did use it from the very beginning, but now I am learning more about being conscious around the ethics of it and how much it impacts the environment, and I want to stay really on top of that. But I also know that it's not going anywhere. Like how can? The question that's on my heart and intuition is like how can we use AI for good and use it in an ethical way?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and it's all so new, like even though it launched like less than two years ago OpenAI and there's so many spinoff softwares and so many existing softwares we were already using, like Canva and Buzzsprout and different things, now have an AI component or an extra add-on that you can have, and so I've been really drawn to learning AI. There's the line one in my human design chart, that's I need to learn it before I can speak about it. I've always been really drawn to it for finding efficiency and managing my energy, because as a part-time business owner, we got to be effective and we got to be efficient, and so if I'm putting deep thought energy into things that can be done by someone else or by AI, then it's going to save my most like potent energy for actually working with clients and doing the big work. But I'm someone who's grappled a little bit more with whether it could be truly authentic. You see so many people talk shit about.

Speaker 2:

Oh, you know, something has been created by Chachi PT if it uses Game Changer or Rocket E rocket emoji, and so I really wanted to get the big picture and immerse myself for a little while on. How can it be super customized so that it's actually representing me. I often think about how much time it goes into training an intern or an assistant and how much forethought has to go into that, and so I really wanted to learn how to train it. So that it wasn't obvious. It was like more serving me instead of distracting my audience.

Speaker 1:

And I think we're getting really good at that and we're getting to the point of what I look at. It, as is too, is you're always going to edit and iterate things, and that's what I look at, chatgp2dm. I don't just put something in there and then just take it and slap it up on a social media post.

Speaker 1:

It really helps us organize like me specifically helps me organize my thoughts and organize my writing in a way that, taking my words and just putting them in a way that I can then read it back and say, oh, that's so clear. And as somebody with ADHD and I am a verbal processor, I love the feature on ChatGPT where you can actually talk just right into it. So sometimes I'll be on a walk and have an idea and put it in there and then it will lay out a whole masterclass idea for me.

Speaker 2:

And now if?

Speaker 1:

I went on my walk, then came back. I would be folding laundry or putting dishes away or something and totally forgot that I had that master class idea.

Speaker 1:

So I think using it as like an assistant too has been really helpful, and especially for just like my brain and working and we are people that hold energy for our families, we hold energy for our community, we hold energy for our clients. It's nice to have a place where you can just land and say here are all the things that I'm thinking now reflect that back to me. It's without giving me your opinion.

Speaker 2:

It's nice yeah, and I actually, when I'm training a chat, I will tell the thread that I have ADHD and that I'm gonna forget steps. So I ask it along the way to like recap what the steps are that we've talked about and make a checklist at the end.

Speaker 2:

So one of the places one of the threads that I did that for is Saturday bookkeeping, so every Saturday we pay all of the team members that have done work for clients in the agency and I like divvy up. Did we meet our weekly goal, did we not? And every week it felt like I was restarting, because ADHD Chelsea was like what tabs did I open last Saturday? And so I spent probably two hours on one Saturday training a particular thread on everything that it needs to know about my business and how we do accounting and what our bookkeeper does and what I need to do every Saturday. And now, every Saturday I open it and I'm just like ready to get started. Today I also asked it to give me a positive affirmation. Oh, intuition.

Speaker 2:

I was like make sure to pump me up, because sometimes if it's been a slow week, I can feel down Right, and so that has been super helpful.

Speaker 2:

Because that's a repetitive task that is not my zone of genius, but as a business owner, I need to do it, and so how can I do it effectively?

Speaker 2:

Another one that was a big project for me was sitting down and really auditing what are the offers and the packages that we want to continue offering in 2025.

Speaker 2:

And I needed to figure out the pricing. Now, a lot of people raise their prices around the new year, and so we were coming up on the new year and I wanted to get really honest on profitability, and so I trained it and we created a spreadsheet. I trained it to know what the profit margin needed to be on every project and to hold me accountable to not price too low to make sure that the packages we were creating would be profitable for the agency and as accessible as possible for our clients. So I also trained it on our value of like pricing, accessibility and how much we pay each of our team members hourly and projects, and so that took a while to train that, but then it created this massive document that had, for every single offer, what we needed to charge, what the deliverables were, who would be paid what. So that was like a very. It would have taken me like two weeks to do that chipping away.

Speaker 1:

That would take a human, exactly OK, today I can do this package.

Speaker 2:

Today I can do this package and tomorrow I can do this package, and so I sat in my armchair with chubby tea and a glass of tea for two, three hours and got it started and then finished it. So that was a huge one. I've also been using it to audit website copy. So, as we've been more clearly like bringing you in to the brand and being like, okay, we're going to have pictures of Meg and both of our stories, I had to audit our intuitive business by design page and highlight where it would make sense to be highlighting your story, your expertise. And then, because I had trained it on our about us page and just different like place transcripts of places we've spoke, it knew enough about some of your stories to put it in, and so then it was, I think, a lot easier for you to go edit and be like, oh, I'd say this differently or whatnot yeah, yeah and then also I've been using it to talk through conversion rates.

Speaker 2:

So, like the funnel that we have some ads running to, right now we haven't had an enormous amount of traffic yet because it just launched and so saying, okay, if this number of people have seen the page and this number of people have opted in, is this a good average conversion rate for cold traffic, cold ad traffic. Ok, it's a little bit low, but that means like here's some considerations we could take. It was so helpful, so it wasn't an emotional oh no, it's not converting how we was like, oh, you're less than a month into the campaign, it's learning your audience, don't stress. That was super helpful. And then also something that is relevant for what we're doing right now is that we have developed a custom GPT bot to be a podcast production assistant, and so it's really cool that I can actually go into this GPT. What I do is when we have a recording session, like today, I go through our telegram and look at ideas that we've had, or good riffs that we had, or blog posts that we shared with each other that we liked, and I pull those and put it into this GPT as a topic idea and then it generates this whole outline that we've trained it on of how we typically like to flow. And then it takes us well, I don't know five, 10 minutes to go through and customize who's going to talk about what.

Speaker 2:

And then we're also going to be making it so that we'll be able to take the transcript of each podcast episode, drop it into a Google folder and have ChatGPT and Zapier make a baby, a blog post. That will be, from our words, I guess, the takeaway for me. I was so nervous about it feeling authentic and speaking like me, but I've just gotten really comfortable with training it. Here's the knowledge base of what you need to know. If you were a college intern coming in to help me with podcast production, what would you need to know? You would need to know some of our best episodes and read the transcripts, and so I feed it intuitively of what would a human being need to know to play this role and really spending the time to do that once. It's not like an intern who's going to come in hungover the next day and have forgotten no-transcript, or there's all different ones.

Speaker 1:

There's Gemini, chatgpt, claude, yeah, perplexity, so there's different ones that work for different people, or just like Perplexity is really good for like research and things like that, I believe. So when you go on, you're just typing into it and then you can set up like projects, what Chelsea is talking about. Creating your own GPT is like creating your own little robot within that.

Speaker 1:

GPT. So there's many layers here and it actually, if this is something you're not totally interested in, it might feel like your eyes just glaze over and you're like you can't imagine it. But once you get into, it is a lot easier for non-technical people. So it sounds really technical and it's actually really language. It's language based, it's a language learning model. That's what it is the tech side of it. So it is. It's not you don't need code or anything like that. So it's very accessible. It's not you don't need code or anything like that, so it's very accessible.

Speaker 1:

And I don't want you to get overwhelmed to thinking about oh my God, all of these. Totally it sounds very high level. But one example I can talk about and what I have done for our Intuitive Marketing Collective Instagram page we really want we have this idea of really creating and having us be visible without being visible every day. So what would it feel like to create 12 weeks of content and get it all programmed into Social B and have it done? So I worked with ChatGPT by. I just take my Google Docs. We actually have downloaded them as what is the word for it? It's the MX files. Mx file.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, something like that.

Speaker 1:

Our AI coach told us that it reads MX files better, so I've been uploading some of our brand voice, our samples of our writing, our different packages, things like that and I uploaded that into ChatGPT and told it on each day of the week what my theme is and what I want to cover, and I want it to circulate between educational, inspiring and thought leadership. I don't know what the other word is, I don't have it in front of me right now Content, but if you have questions about this, you can reach out to us. And it was able to pump out three months of concepts of posts and then also put it into a table, a Google table, a Google sheet, and now what I'll do is then I'll go through and create the images and I'll create more of the captions.

Speaker 2:

But it made it that process.

Speaker 1:

It's a real heavy lift and for people who are like we're working five hours a day, that's what I get when my kids are at school, right, so to have something to cut down on that time and then be able to organize me and keep me on task, to potentially be visible six days a week for three months once I get that all uploaded is whoa, yeah, it's really. It gives that kind of you might. We've felt the hustle in the past and now it's okay. I can work this, especially as a manifester. I could be creative for this burst and then ride the wave of yeah, so that's exciting.

Speaker 2:

We'll let you know, we'll fill you in.

Speaker 1:

so that's exciting. We'll let you know, we'll fill you in once that gets all out there.

Speaker 1:

It also has really been helping me in one of our freebies that we created and now we're moving on to the next project, which is our service and pricing guide. It's helped me put that together in Canva, so not that I'm taking it directly from Chachi being putting in Canva, I'm using a template in Canva. But I'm using our pricing document that Chelsea had worked on to then lay out like a service guide, ebook type style, and it's just saving me so much time, just like helping us create the copy it's already taking from what we have created, but just breaking down that organization and telling me. It's been really helpful there too. And then, yeah, it also has just helped me personally with recording different brainstorm ideas, like I said, like when I'm on a walk or something to create either a transcript for a master class or a layout for a class, I rely on it more for that organization and layout. That just saves me a lot of time.

Speaker 1:

Creating task lists also of okay I have to do. I recently just did a workshop selling on stories in our community and it helped me lay out the different topics that I wanted to cover. It was all my idea, yeah, yeah. But then it just lays out okay, make sure to talk about this and this. It was really helpful.

Speaker 2:

And I think, as you were saying, that I care a lot about making sure we're meeting different learning styles as well and so that, as we're creating content, we could even train it. Hey, we'd like to make sure that there's visual cues, auditory cues, like different ways that we're engaging students and people who are participating in our membership, so something for us to remember.

Speaker 1:

So it really is just like an ultimate assistant for us. The thought of hiring a personal not a personal assistant, a virtual assistant in the past was so overwhelming to me because I didn't even know what to assign them, right, like it felt okay, this is a great idea in theory, but to me I didn't know. So I can use ChachiPT to say okay, these are the five projects I'm working on. Tell me where I should start first. It helps me brainstorm like that and get myself saves just so much time in between, like when I start, when I have a thought for a project, and when I start it. It also with creative ideas and content creation. It really helps, again, maximize your efficiency by helping with a first draft or an idea. You can.

Speaker 1:

I will often say something like we work with intuitive entrepreneurs who are starting their business. Whatever. Describe your person and say give me a list of 10 to 20 problems that they have. That would be a lot of time to do the market research for that, right, yeah, but if you could do that with chat, gpt, and then you can then say okay, here's the list of problems my ideal client has. Create 10 pieces of content and then so it's like it, you. It then breaks it down into another step and then you can take each piece of content and say write directly to this kind of person and help you make a caption for that. It helps you really create more omnipresence because you can get more content done. That's actual quality content, speaking to your people, and it gives you a little bit of ease around showing up in more places.

Speaker 2:

That makes a lot of sense, yeah, and with our journey, we were looking at stepping into 2025, knowing the scalability that we want to be stepping into and also this idea of creating self-managed income streams, and so we decided to collectively invest in working with an AI speed coach, and it's someone who I've worked with for years in different capacities.

Speaker 2:

I really value her, I know she cares about the ethics of things, and we really wanted to just get what are some real world examples people who are really deep into AI are doing.

Speaker 2:

Because, like I never would have thought about how she's helping us create this blog post yeah, it's awesome. In a million years, I would not have figured that out on my own of how to take this transcript and turn it into a blog post, and so I wanted to really be surrounding myself with people who I think are doing a great job in business and just in being a human. And what are you using this for? And also looking to software that we already pay for and use, like we use Buzzsprout to host our podcast and for an extra five bucks a month, we can have their copy AI assistant. It basically takes the transcript and creates the description and gives us five suggestions for titles and some ideas of what some social media posts could be. Descript also has a little add-on called Underlord, which is creepy, but it does so much it does like mastering of the audio and all kinds of things.

Speaker 2:

So just looking, even if you are just curious, looking at software you're already using, free or paid is there a way to implement AI? And if so, go on to YouTube, watch some tutorials, like seeing if it feels doable for you to step in and see how it cuts some time for you if it feels doable for you to step in and see how it cuts some time for you.

Speaker 1:

A lot of the social media things like Social B, metricool, flick things like that have different AI components too. Again, yeah, like just looking at how you can cut down on some of your time, and, especially where we work with a lot of highly sensitive and busy entrepreneurs, what are ways that we can get out in front? So many of our people have such a beautiful and potent message on the heart that they want to get out and help people with, and this is something that can help you do so more efficiently. And one of the ways is, like it really can help reduce your decision fatigue and overwhelm, at least in my case of OK, I want to do a masterclass freebie, let me sit down and talk to GPT. This is my expertise. Give me five ideas on a masterclass that would speak directly to my audience.

Speaker 1:

Like you could pay a coach to do that. Like we do that with people too, right? But that's expensive and not everyone is in that space right now. So how can you use it to do that? Generate some income for yourself and then you can hire out the humans, right, it is important. We do want to pay humans. We believe that, but how can we get people? There's a lot of coaches that aren't making the money that they need right now.

Speaker 1:

So use this in order to bolster yourself up so you can invest in the people around you, up so you can invest in the people around you. It also helps, like creating systems that honor our energy level and on those times that we have lower energy or we really just need that help. It can be jog our memory on like projects that we're working on, or help our creativity. It also just helps me with personal care. I spent last night putting in telling it like what my health goals were and what my weight and life circumstances are, and it gave me an amazing customized plan along with a grocery list, along with like a mapped out calendar. So that just takes all the thought out of it for me. If I can just hold myself accountable, hopefully I'll be taking better care of myself this week, and I didn't have to spend an hour like chatting with somebody about it because I've spent 15 years hiring different people around.

Speaker 2:

That I just want to get to the meat of it and help me there. That's so interesting and, I think, why solopreneurs most of our clients are a personal brand coaches, healers, speakers, authors, and so, especially if you are just looking for ways to buy back time or to stay consistent, I think so many small business owners struggle with consistency. Is it consistency of emailing your list? Is it consistency of showing up on social media? Is it consistency of doing a launch to get bigger visibility? Consistency on pitching yourself to podcasts? Is there one thing that you struggle with on consistency that you could just start exploring how AI could help you with that, because there's things that we all need to do. On repeat, I need to pay our team every Saturday.

Speaker 2:

I need to, we need to record our podcasts, and so what are some of the things that need to happen You've committed to doing and just gradually explore more complex things. Like it doesn't have to be complex to start with, and something I'm excited about doing is and it will take a little time for me to carve out but even customer service. Like I want to create a custom GPT so that when people come into our membership, it will onboard them hey, where are you at in business and ask it some questions and then be like, oh, you'd be a really great candidate to start with our intuitive marketing framework workshop and it can even assign homework to say, once you've watched that workshop, come to our next group coaching call and let Chelsea or Meg know what phase of your marketing that you're in, and that like help. I think it will help with engagement yeah, of people feeling like they're not lost, and I think direction.

Speaker 2:

I really feel, just from an ethic standpoint and where things are going, I feel like business owners could freak out and be like this is going to replace me, but what I really think is going to happen just with your example maybe you aren't in the market right now to hire a nutritionist and a personal trainer, but it's getting you going and so if you were going to hire a personal trainer, it might be because you want that personal touch.

Speaker 1:

Exactly Like. I want to go to the gym with that, exactly.

Speaker 2:

I think there's going to be a re-emphasis on bringing your energetic fingerprint, bringing your like zone of genius, because people can get the basics from anywhere.

Speaker 1:

And so as a thought, leader.

Speaker 2:

It's like now. It's almost forcing you to own your bigness and being ready to be on bigger stages and being more visible, because people are going to still need people and they're going to be inspired by people and learn from people and be moved by people. And I think it's going to force those of us who really care about making a big impact in the world to do it, because selling a $27 e-book is not going to be as compelling to people because they could go Google and chat to PT and get that.

Speaker 1:

Exactly.

Speaker 2:

Let's give you guys some just simple homework. Here's our thought is maybe you've heard something on here that you didn't even know you could do with AI. We certainly don't want you to be overwhelmed. Hopefully this can be more about an inspiration, of thinking about how you could dip your toe in or go even deeper in your business, of using AI for efficiency and for protecting your energy, and so our simple homework is just to explore with a free or entry-level AI tool. So that could be ChatGPT, Claude Gemini more for like copy or writing Canva there's so many even like image making Our speed coach makes these like gorgeous images of her.

Speaker 2:

Of course, it's on brand for her, like her writing sea dragons and her writing like different things, just to be like shock value. But even if it's like figuring out some simple ways to be more consistent, I would say for the homework identifying one area of your business that you keep saying you're going to be consistent or go all in on and you're just not following through and explore how that one piece could potentially be supported by AI to be more consistent.

Speaker 1:

So exciting. There's so much that I can help you with. We hope that you found this episode of the Intuitive Marketing Podcast as inspiration to help you bring the magic back into your own marketing. Our goal is for this podcast to be a compass in the chaos. We know you get bombarded with information options and conflicting ideas out there on the internet streets. We hope you tune into the next episode and we will see you soon.