Coaching & AI: What you need to know with Nivek Harrison

Everyone's talking about using AI to create more content and we think that's the least interesting way to use it! In this episode, Nivek Harrison joins me to explore why AI doesn't have to make your coaching practice feel less human. 

We talk about where it can genuinely save you time, where it absolutely can never replace you, and how to use it without handing over your judgment, creativity or values.

Three reasons to listen:

• Forget churning out soulless content - AI can become an extra member of your team.
• Learn why your coaching is becoming more valuable, not less. 
• And of course we talk about some of the ethical questions: the hype, the built-in bias, and the weirdass hallucinations, so you can make thoughtful decisions about where AI might support you (or not).

Meet Niv:

• thevirtualchapter.co
• @thevirtualchapter on Instagram and Threads
• Effortless Online Systems Podcast https://thevirtualchapter.buzzsprout.com/

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Website: www.saspetherick.com | Instagram:  @saspetherick

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hello and welcome to Courage Inspice Coaches, where you build your self-belief and your business in under 30 minutes a week. I'm Seth Etherick, your host. I'm a coach, supervisor, and unapologetic self-belief nerd. My mission is simple. I want your coaching practice to feel like a right fucking bitch. Let's go. You guys, Navek Harrison is here. She is a system strategist, an OBM award-winning agency founder of the Virtual Chapter, and she builds operating systems for us for online businesses that want to earn more, work less. We met years ago because Nivek has worked with my old business coach Ali Swift, shout out Ali, um, for years. And these days, Nivek is specializing in this area of AI, which I think is so fun and interesting, and very much in what I who I know Nivec to be, which is very practical, human-first solutions, really about how do we save ourselves time, how do we create businesses that feel really fun and satisfying to run. And if you're following along on the virtual chapter on Instagram, you'll see that Nivec's starting to talk a lot more about AI in this very practical and relatable way. And I just think it's such an important conversation for us to be having. So welcome, Liv. I'm so glad you're here.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited for this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Yeah. Yeah, me too. Me too. So, I mean, just to kind of put my cards on the table, I'm in a kind of ex tech person. Like I my most of my days in the corporate world were either working around technology in government departments and and kind of how do we rationalise and and utilize technology, or I worked in tech companies themselves. So very much connected to that world. I see myself as a bit of an early adopter, love the possibilities of tech. I think as well, because I grew up in the 80s before the internet, it will never not feel magical to me that we have all of this stuff that is helping us do our work. It's like you what? You can work from your spare room. What? Yep. Um, I've been following the conversation around AI for years. I think it's been humming around in the background for the last five years, certainly. And it feels like we're now starting to reach a kind of critical mass where mainstream people kind of know a bit about AI. Like your mum knows about it, you know it's kind of in the world, right? So I wonder if we just start with like what is AI? Because I think a lot of us see it as a kind of sexy search engine, and it's not that, really.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

No, it's not that. I love this. AI, I mean, AI has existed for years. Let's call a spade a spade. We have had artificial intelligence in all different industries for years now. A lot of us use it without really even thinking about it being AI. But in this season, when we talk about AI, it is usually large language models. So these are things like Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, these chatbots that are trained on this incredible volume of information. And it feels like they have the answers to anything we could ever possibly imagine. And we can talk more about like how accurate that information is a little bit later. But that's what most of us are talking about when we talk about AI in this season. That's certainly been the case for I think it was 2023 when ChatGPT first launched publicly for access. So a little under three years now. And we're starting to see this next step into more automated agentic AI where the computers are doing things for us, which I think is the really exciting phase. Um the chatbots were cool, but you know, they were chatbots. Now we have tools that can literally do things for us while we're sleeping, while we're speaking to clients, while we're hanging out with our families. Like things are still happening in our business. And that's where I think there's so much potential for all of us, but particularly for those of us women business owners, we're usually juggling multiple hats within the business and in our lives. If there's a tool that can take some of the admin repetitive things off my plate and out of my brain, I'm here for that. Totally, totally with you.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

I and I want I do want us to talk a bit about the ethics of AI because I I I know certainly for myself and I know my audience of thoughtful coaches, we get a little bit antsy about the environmental concerns. Like it's taking jobs in the creative industries, like we don't actually want AI writing screenplays, you know, and the hallucinations, taking jobs, all of that stuff. So I do want to talk a bit about that, but I actually think that it is really important to sit in the possibility of what this actually means. And and I think as well for anyone who is feeling either agnostic or really kind of adverse to using AI, like, what do you think business is gonna look like in the I would say the next 12 months? Like, what do you see the possibilities being? Because I think let's create a bit of a vision and then we can talk a bit about how we get there.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Fun. Fun. I think anybody who is denying the impact that AI is having on workspace and business across the board, we are living a little bit in delusional land because it is already happening. We are seeing layoffs on big scales in relation to AI. Again, rightly or wrongly, we can talk about that, but it's fundamentally changing the way that we work. The same way any advancement in technology always has. And you would know this from your experience working in tech. Whenever we have these big fundamental changes, particularly in an organizational level, there is changes to our org structures. There are changes to the way we work, there are changes to the types of roles that are required in a business. When I think about like the people I serve, coaches, creatives, online entrepreneurs, uh I don't see for most of us fundamental shifts in uh our ability to show up and serve our humans. What I see changing is the operations behind the scenes. And I think this is where it gets interesting because a lot of what we've seen over the last couple of years has been about uh content. We can use AI to push out all of this content. And to me, that's like the most boring use case for these tools because I don't want to hear what ChatGPT thinks. I want to hear what you think. I agree. I want your stories, I want to see your face on socials, I don't want to see, you know, b-roll stock footage with a chat GPT prompt over the top. Like that is boring. And there's big ethical complications around that as well. So uh that is that is one side of it. If that's you and you want to use it to support your content processes, I think there's so much potential there. But I think there's so much potential in taking over a lot of the admin, the repetitive tasks that we do, the day-to-day operational things that take us away from the work that we really love. Now, historically, to do that, we would have had to outsource. We would have hired somebody, we might have bought in a VA, an OBM, we might have had multiple people, or things just haven't happened because we haven't had capacity to be supported in that way. But now we have tools that can do it that are more cost effective in a lot of cases than hiring team. And I don't say that to be like, you don't ever need a VA, but I love VAs. I have a team at home. Like there is a place for them. And again, if we can free them up from the repetitive things that don't really require our brain to do their specialties, work in their zone of genius, we build a team of people who are really thriving in their jobs. And that's best case scenario for me. Totally, totally.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

And so I'm seeing this kind of maturing of AI where it started off where it was a bit of a sexy search engine, you know, you something you can talk to and ask it questions. You know, I'm going on holiday. Can you do me a Towee hotels in the area? And it would give you all this great stuff. Cool. Then we started to see like custom GPTs, which I had a little play with at the beginning of this year and creating one, um, which I think can be really fun if you want it to do a specific thing.

unknown 9:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Now, what I'm seeing is that we're talking less about these kind of piecemeal bitty things, and more how do we build infrastructure where you actually get um agents as opposed to custom GPTs, right? Agents, so they're actually almost doing a job. Like, so for example, you could have an agent that's doing the repetitive task of going through your inbox at 6 a.m. in the morning and putting everything into into folders for you. So here's all your marketing emails that are related to you know, the the kind of midnight clothes buying, right? The comfort clothes, right? And here's all your emails related to industry stuff, and here's invoices, and blah blah blah. So, and here's the one from your sister who you know sends a a podcast. So it's like it can do that kind of like repetitive stuff, it can save you a ton of time and help you get organized. But I'm also saying that actually now you can have that inbox thing happening, but you can also have another agent that is um giving uh going through the news externally and looking for relatable content and then combining that with what's in your inbox news and giving you ideas for newsletters, right? And and so it's they're talking to each other, and I think that's where it starts to get a bit more sexy because it's like this is actually saving me real time. It can do stuff that is just a faff that I probably wouldn't actually hire someone to do because God, can you imagine asking someone to actually go through your inbox? Like what a what a total bore and annoyance. And you want it to do specific things that only live in your mind, yeah, that's what we can start using AI for, and it can save you over months, like hours and hours and hours.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Hours and hours and hours. Agentic AI has been a thing that we've sort of been promised for three years. And if you've been following the AI conversation, certainly in the online business space, there's been a lot of like, oh, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, you'll be able to do these things. But unless you were a developer who could custom code something, it wasn't in our wheelhouse for almost all of us. It wasn't within reach. And then Claude this year released co-work and code on really accessible platforms. They're incredibly easy to use. And suddenly it's really easy to build these little bots that go and do things for you. And so, you know, one of mine is that it goes in every Monday and it does my client reporting for the agency. Now, historically, that's been a task that a team, a member of our team, has had to do every Monday. If that team member was off sick, it didn't happen. If we had change in the team, we had to retrain somebody. If, you know, life got in the way, life got in the way and it didn't happen. But now the bot just does it. And it happens every week. And it's exactly the way that I wanted to do it. Now, a lot of the things that we think about wanting agents to do sometimes just need an automation. Sometimes we just need to get into Zapia, set up an automation, and it doesn't actually require an AI level into it. And sometimes it does. Sometimes we want a tool that can understand what's in our inbox and make decisions about what folders does it go in, what needs a response. I'm gonna draft a response in your voice that you can then review, edit, and send. All of these things that you know we've either had to spend time doing, or like you said, we never got to it because who had the time to do it?

unknown 12:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

But now we have these tools at our fingertips. Yeah, I love that so much. Um let so it so I think where we're going with this. I'm gonna just I'm gonna put a little prediction, which I'm very hesitant to do, but I'm gonna. I think that this is going, our world is not gonna look the same in the next five years because of AI. I think it is going, I think it is going to be unrecognizable. I I mean, I get notifications on my phone now from our washing machine telling me that it's on a different cycle. And I want to bring that up because I th because I want to talk about the ethics of this. I grew up where my mum did the washing on a mango machine. I don't know if anyone remembers this. It might be an antipodean thing, but you it was a big tub, right? That you actually, it had like a it was like a cake mixer, it washed things. But on the top of it, it had almost like a pasta machine where, and that was called the mangle. And so once you had washed everything in the cake mixer bit, you put clothes through the mango and had a hand crank on it, and it would um kind of rinse out, like squeeze out the middle of the water. And then you hung it on the line, right? This is before washing machines were automated. I once put got my hand jammed in the mangle, and you could just release the the kind of clip so that you could get out, but my mum uncranked it so it actually squashed me twice. It was brilliant. It's very my mum. But um, she was never great with tech. But I think this is the situation that we're kind of seeing, right? Is that we've always had to do things really manually, like a mangle washing machine. Then we got a bit more automated, right? Now we have things like software that talks to each other, right? So Zappia is a great example. If you've got a newsletter that you send out, someone can click through and go to your website, that's AI. Like that is how software works. Look at this and then do that. Now, and that's a form of intelligence, but now we've got something that has all of the knowledge inside these large language models that are very, very good at predicting what comes next, right? That's it's a language model, it's just predicting language. It doesn't actually have a ton of intelligence, and I think it's really important to say that because even now it feels like magic that my washing machine can send me a text message. Love that for it, right? But it's only doing that because someone has told it when you get to this place in the cycle, send a text message. And I think that's the part that we need to get our heads around is that none of this is automatic. It requires us to really know our businesses and say, do this at this time in this way with this output. And then we need to give it feedback and say, I don't want you to do it like that. And and so I think people get a bit like, oh, I don't know how to get into this. I don't know how to do I I almost need to know more than AI. And for those of us who are overfunctioning eldest daughters, which is I think at least 60% of my audience, right? We just go, oh, sodder, it's easier to do it myself. And I really want us to encourage folks to go, it's actually not, it's actually way easier to tell the bots to do it for you. And it is a bit of a faff to start with, but once that's set up, it is going to save you exponentially so much more time that you then get to do spend that time on the things that really matter to you, be that in your business or out of it.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

I've been having this conversation for years in the context of virtual assistants, right? Like, oh, I know I need a virtual assistant, but it feels like it's it's harder for me to brief them than to just do it myself. So I'll just keep doing it myself. And so, yes, in the moment, a five-minute task might take you 30 minutes to brief. It might take you an hour to train an AI tool to do it for you. But if you're doing that task every day, every week, every month of the year, that compound is huge. And so it's almost we have to come into it with this thinking of like, yes, there are some things that literally I just need to do right now because it needs to be done right now. And that's okay. And there are things that I can take the time to train on and I'll never have to touch it again. And that's that will just always happen. That will just always happen. Yeah. But if it doesn't, we want to make sure we've got things in place that notify us if it doesn't happen for any reason. So we're not sitting here assuming everything's fine and it goes wrong, which happens. Um, but it just we don't have to think about those things again. And I think, you know, for so many of us already, we are so overloaded as it is that it can feel like, well, I just don't have more time. And we almost have to go, well, I need to make the time or I'm gonna be in this cycle forever.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Completely, completely. And I think it's a great analogy, right? Of thinking about bringing on team because we almost need to think about that as like bringing on a team of maybe maybe it's 20 little bots. They all do a very specific thing. But you need to give them a job description and you need to tell them what to do and when and what and how and what they need to speak to and where they get their information from, how they retain that memory, all of all of that jazz. I actually have found that bit, that specificity, is almost the hardest part. It's not the tech. Yeah. So the so the way that AI is now set up is it's very the it's the lowest barrier to entry. If you can write a Word doc, you can get AI to do stuff.

SPEAKER_00 19:23

It's it's all these tools are set up, and this is, I think, why Claude, in particular in Anthropic, has advanced so quickly in the market this year, is because previously we had AI tools that could code and build things, but you still had to take that information and put it somewhere. So you needed to know what the tools were that allowed that code to turn into something. Anthropic and Claude have built these platforms where you're just chatting to the chatbot about what you want. Behind the scenes, it's building all the code, but it's building all of that and pushing it out for you. You don't ever have to touch it, which makes it so accessible. So we can go in and go, okay, I want, I want you to help me create a workflow that checks my inbox every day, that categorizes my emails. These are the folders I have set up. These are examples of the things that go into each folder. But here's what I want you to do. If there's things that don't fit any of these categories, I want you to send me a notification in Slack about the emails that I, you know, I you don't know where they live. And we we are just building these systems by having a conversation. I think for a lot of business owners, like you said, it it sounds like work because for a lot of us, we have worn all the hats for a long time in our business. And so we're just used to doing the things the way that we do them. We've never really documented our processes. Maybe you've had a VA and you've handed some things over, but not everything. But in order to give something to a bot, to a tool, that it's interesting that we call it artificial intelligence because you're right, there's not necessarily a lot of intelligence there. There's a lot of predicting going on. But we have to be really specific. We need to have a standard operating procedure that we give to the bot that says step one, step two, step three, step four. And if it fails, do this instead. But yeah. And if we have those SOPs, they they serve us, they serve the bots, and they serve any future team members. Like we're building assets for our business. Totally.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

And and it's just like bringing on a new member of the team.

SPEAKER_02 21:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Here's what I want you to do, and when and how. And here's feedback when it's not perfect.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Yeah, yeah. Love it. This is a really important part of the process, is I think you know, often we we dabble with it. And I've seen a lot of people dabble with AI tools and, like, oh, but it didn't give me what I wanted, so I just abandoned it. It's like, cool. It would be the same if you bought in a team member, gave them a pretty average brief of what to do. They did the work, and you were like, I didn't like that. So I let the team member go.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

We have to give feedback. Totally. Like, I have to laugh because I think just working with AI is giving me so much training in being clear.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Absolutely.

unknown 21:59

Right.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Right? Like and and boundaries. Like, no, I don't want you to do that. Like you and because it's not a human, it's sometimes easier to just be very straightforward with it rather than have to play politics. We don't have to worry about feelings.

unknown 22:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

No, this is wrong. Yeah. Yeah. This is not what I wanted. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um okay, so how do you think this is gonna impact those of us in these very human-centered businesses? Like we're coaches, consultants, creatives, the folks that that you work with, and and that that I am in love with. And and I just think how how do we conceptualize and remove some of the fear factor around what this is gonna mean for these industries that we hear about?

SPEAKER_00 22:53

I think the important thing here is like for those of us who are in any sort of human-facing role working with humans, that's going to continue to exist. AI is not gonna replace what we can glean from a face-to-face conversation with a client. AI, and I mean, look, I'm sure the technology will advance to a point where it learns to read body language. We're not there yet. It's okay. Yeah. But like there is there is so much more than just following a process. And so I think it's getting really clear on like, what is it that makes you incredibly unique in the way that you coach, in the way that you deliver, in the way that you design your programs, the way that you support your clients. Because that isn't replicable. AI doesn't have your history, your lived experience, your results, any of that. You can tell it some of those things, but that doesn't mean it understands it on the level that you do in the way that you then work with clients. I'm excited because I genuinely think it's going to enable so many people to go deeper into their modalities, deeper into service because we're not busy downloading Zoom videos and uploading them to our course, right? Like there's these little admin tasks that we just have to do. Imagine if you didn't uh and I think this is the possibility I want people to play with. Imagine if you didn't have to do the busy work that you're doing right now, and you got to show up and you got to coach, you got to talk to people on social media and actually be social on social media again. Imagine if you just got to be even more in service than you are right now, and your business is still operating behind the scenes really, really well. Yeah.

unknown 24:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Imagine that. Imagine that. Like yeah, I I think that's the thing that has always kind of struck me, like this this big fear, right? About AI is going to do the thing, like write write the screenplays and create all the content and all that. And I think, well, we've reached that point where it can do all of that, and none of us love it. No one's really using it for that.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

Yeah. And it's funny how quickly we pick it up of like that's it's not connecting. There's something missing here. Completely.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

And it's not just us, Disney have binned Sora, right? Which was their billion dollar investment. This is this is gonna be how anyone can create anything. And they've gone, nah, we don't want it. Like, I think this is incredibly hopeful because and we've seen this, like, there is this thing in the UK where all the kids that have trust funds end up going to art school, right? And everyone's like, oh god, you know, and I just think, no, this is the best news ever. We want we all want that. And doesn't it make you just so hopeful that actually when all your needs are taken care of and you don't have to worry about money, where do you go? Creative. And I think that's the bit that I feel like, yeah, if if we actually can deepen our work, which is I think the best marketing strategy ever, right? When you're really great at coaching and people refer you to everyone they know, that's what gives you sustainable business, or they just keep working with you for years and years and years. I mean, that's that's the money, right? That's where the money is, and that means you have more to give. It also means combine that with AI, you're freed up from all of the stuff that drives you crazy. You know, you have more to give to your actual work that you really love to do. So I think there's something about unlocking this idea that somehow AI is wrong, bad, or dangerous. And and seeing it as it is an incredible tool with immense possibilities that used well can really free things up.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

And I think that's the key. It's at the end of the day, it's a tool. Tools are neutral, they are neither good or bad. That's just like, we're on Zoom, is Zoom good or bad? It's a video conferencing tool. It doesn't have morality, like they're businesses, the companies running them. That's a different, that's a different story. But like it's a tool, and it's a tool. If we use it well, we get to use it to do things that serve us, that serve our clients. And we don't have to. We don't have to buy into oh, you should be using Claude to create 30 Instagram posts a week. You don't ever have to do that. You don't need to churn out AI content for the sake of it. You don't need to write a book written by AI, you don't have to do any of that. You still get to be you, and you can use AI to take care of all the little bitty things that live everywhere else, or to speed up the process, or to do the things that aren't unique to you. That's the key, right? Like if we had more time to just be us, to be more present, to spend more time with our kids, to spend more time with our loved ones because our business is happening, or even just life admin is happening. I think this is where you know women have such an opportunity on these platforms. But you could build a bot that does your meal planning and grocery shopping online every week to the point that it almost like here's your order, review it and put in your payment details. Like that is a task that a lot of us spend a lot of time doing. Or maybe you're a little bit ADHD like me and you don't spend enough time doing it, and then you spend extra at the grocery store because you didn't plan it well. And you're shopping hungry. Yeah. Right. Like we have tools that can make things a lot easier for us. We just have to decide, like for ourselves, what is our boundary? You might never want AI to touch your content. Fantastic. You might want AI to repurpose your podcast. Fantastic. The podcast is still your unique thought leadership in this space. You can give it really defined parameters so it's not making things up outside of what you spoke about on the podcast, but it can suddenly write your show notes, draft an email, draft your Instagram, draft a LinkedIn, whatever it might be, and it speeds up the process for you. I'd rather do that than sit on my phone scrolling for an hour because I was looking for inspiration and then got sucked into the algorithm.

unknown 29:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um so I think you you touched on this idea that the tools are pretty agnostic. We really don't need to assign any morality to them. The companies, however, another story. And I I guess I I don't want to put you on the spot because I don't think any of us can speak around this stuff, right? It's like above our pay grade. But also I just wonder like, how have you kind of reconciled with that for yourself?

SPEAKER_00 29:56

Great question. I'm always and have for a long time, like before I got into the work that I do now, I worked in not-for-profits in the social justice space. It's always been a thing that really matters to me. Like people matter, people should be at the center of all of our decisions, right? And so I have never wanted to invest in a company that is actively harming people or our world. Now, active harm looks different to different people, and we all get to define what that looks like for us. But when it comes to AI, I'm looking at things like do they acknowledge the very real environmental impact? If they acknowledge it, that's the first step. Are they actively doing something about it? I mean, one of the big reasons we saw this huge migration from ChatGPT to Claude earlier this year was because Chat GPT, OpenAI, uh wanted to maintain a contract with the US government, but Claude pushed back and said, nope, we're not working with you in this way. We don't want our tool to be used in these really harmful ways. And so a lot of people went, well, that's a good reason for me to jump shit because I don't want to be part of that. I don't want to give my money to a company that is helping to fund weapons systems. Great, that's a personal choice. So I'm always looking at like, what are these companies doing? Do we have a similarity of values? And also knowing there's no perfect business out there. I don't know everywhere Zoom invests their money. I don't know the values of every single member on their team. Like, I can't possibly know those things. And I'm not going to tie myself up in knots trying to figure those things out. What I do think is important in the AI space is there has been a lot of fear-mongering around the tool. And so I think it's important to go, well, what's real and what's not? So if we look at things like environmental impact and water usage in particular, are two of the big things people talk about in relation to AI tools. Yes, data centers use water. Yes, data centers take land, yes, data centers use a lot of energy. But AI is not the only tool that uses data centers. Everything we do online requires a data center. So if that's something that's important to you, and you are also thinking, well, I'd like to use more AI to make my business and my life a little bit easier, look holistically at your footprint. Scrolling on TikTok has a really similar usage to having a brief conversation with AI. And so we get to go, yes, there's an impact, but yes, we might want to get involved on a local level or a government level of advocating for change, advocating for regulation, which I think is really lacking in the industry at the moment. And also the best way to do that is from being in the room. But when we understand the tools and we understand the possibility, we have a better chance of having a seat at the table and going, This isn't how this should work. I want something better. I want companies to commit to closed loop water systems where they're using recycled water instead of fresh water. I want the government to regulate what the tools can and can't do and the access to data and all of these things. It's really hard to do that when you don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 33:06

Yeah, learning about it comes from being involved. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:11

And, you know, I also think um women need to be using AI in far greater numbers than we are now, because there is no doubt that tech generally, and certainly the AI industry, is run by predominantly white men. And that is a problem. If we are acknowledging the impact that AI is going to have on our world, then we also need to be influencing this, you know, this infrastructure. You know, and and we know that yes, there are people, uh there are like inbuilt biases, because remember, it doesn't have its own intelligence, it's just going to reflect ours. So of course, all of the, you know, the sexism, racism, misogyny, etc., is built in. It that's a reflection of us. It's it's a just a giant mirror. It's not in and of itself any better or worse than we are. But I think the more that women are kind of outside of the conversation, um the more that that is going to be kind of a feature rather than a bug, you know?

SPEAKER_00 34:35

I did an experiment with my audience last year where I gave them a prompt to ask at the time Chat GPT or whatever tool they were using to reflect back what it thought were their values or political views on the world. And it was a really interesting experiment because there are a lot of people who were like, oh, this tool knows nothing about me, because it reflected back biases that I do not have, but it has, right? And so this is where it's really important, particularly if we're using it to create anything, to write in our voice, to validate our ideas, if we're using the tool in that way, we need to make sure we've trained the tool on who we are as people. And the things that really matter to us, because otherwise it gives us ideas that don't align with our values. It creates content that don't match the things that we care about. And so, yeah, like as much as I would love to say, like, oh, it's a it's a chatbot, it shouldn't know your political views. If it's creating something for you, it absolutely should. Yeah.

unknown 35:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

Like that's and we've got to tell it. We've got to tell it. We have to give it all of the information about us because that's how it is most useful. Otherwise, it is trained on the world wide web. The world wide web is not a great place most days of the week, has a lot of biases that are very anti-women, anti-minorities. And so if we're not actively training our own usage, let alone the wider LLM landscape, those biases persist and get worse and get compounded.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

Yeah, yeah, completely. And you know, the other part of it is that it is it is an imperfect tool that still hallucinates, right? Like AI hallucinations, you know?

SPEAKER_00 36:20

I love how you just remember the whole word for it. I know it wrong, it's just hallucinating things. Like just tell us it's wrong. But nobody would use it if we said it's wrong. So they do hallucinate because if we think about the way that these LLM work LLMs work, they are prediction models. So you give it a sentence, it looks at all its information and predicts what it thinks comes next. That prediction isn't fact-checked against anything at all. It's just making a prediction. And so, again, if we also think about like everything it's been trained on, but not everything on the internet is true, not everything on the internet is factual. And these tools don't necessarily have great ability to determine between fact, evidence, and fiction, storytelling, fantasy, opinion. And so when we're asking it to give us information, we want to be really, really careful about what we're doing with that next. Because uh it's been known to make up sources and data and statistics that aren't real. So if you're getting anything that is like in the data space, you're looking for, you know, a quote or evidence, uh tell it to give you the source and check the source, make sure the source actually says what it's telling you. That's the first thing. The second thing is that these LLMs have this default yes man algorithm, right? Like every idea you've ever had is fantastic in the eyes of Claude. Yeah, which is really dangerous for us as business owners, right? Because if we're going to these tools, similar to the way we would maybe a business coach, hey, I have this idea, what do you think? And the tool by default is like, you're amazing, this is genius, nobody's ever thought of this. That's not necessarily in any way, shape, or form equivalent to genuine market research, right? Totally. It's just telling you it's a good idea because there's this built-in strategy to keep the conversation going.

SPEAKER_01 38:13

Yeah. It's um it had um what was it, the sicker fancy dial turned up to kind of a level way up, which is why you saw, you know, quite sad cases. I remember there was one man who had just been made redundant, and he thought he'd discovered some new physics or maths because he was having these like ongoing conversations with Chat GPT that was just saying, look, you're a this is a is genius level, you know. And he was just like, Oh, I've got it, I've got to tell NASA, you know, and and Chat GPT was like, let me draft an email for you. Because it and I think that's the bit that we have to remember is that this requires our discernment so much because it isn't actually intelligent. It it has no consciousness, it can't rationalize.

SPEAKER_00 39:11

It's not acting with our best interest at heart. At the end of the day, it's acting as a tool owned by a company, and their best interest is realistically their bottom line. How do they keep you paying for your subscription every single month? And you are less likely to pay for a subscription to a tool that tells you that's a terrible idea. Yeah, that's the reality.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

Yeah, like nobody wants that. Arguably someone saying, Look, mate, you're actually full of shit. And I think you need to get off me and start looking for a job because it's not healthy for you to be inside talking to a bot. Yeah. But who it, you know, I mean, I think this is the bit we've got to think about is why would it say the things it's saying?

SPEAKER_00 39:56

Yeah. And this is where like I think it's important to understand this this isn't this technology isn't going anywhere. I think there's a lot of people who wish like government regulation just came in and shut down these companies. It's not going to happen. These tools are going to exist, they're going to get better, they're going to exist in more and more of spaces in our lives. And so understanding how they work and the way they're built means that we can use them effectively. So, for example, in my Claude and my Chat GPT accounts, I have built-in instructions that say, do not agree with everything I say, genuinely challenge my ideas. And sometimes it irritates me because I'm like, stop arguing. I know it's a good idea and I'm running with it. But at least like it's it's encouraging a lot of reflection. I'm like, why are you challenging this? Am I missing something? Have I looked at the big picture? What are the things that I'm missing? So that is baked into my settings in my AI tools, so that I'm not just getting this constant loop of like, this is genius, you're amazing. Every idea you've ever had is fantastic because that's not helpful. So again, like it's important to go, okay, well, what is the purpose of the tool? How has it been built? How can I make it work for me? What is the style of conversation that is best going to serve me in this season? Do I want to train a chat bot that is a cheerleader because I actually need that confidence boost? Versus, do I need to train a bot that is really direct and blunt and to the point and just tells me how it is? And even when we do that, we still have to have this understanding of it's not a person, it's not intelligent, and it's not necessarily acting with my best interests, it's acting in its own. So there's there was a case that came out. There was actually a really good report that was done just a couple of weeks ago about cases where AI bots in big corporations have gone rogue. And it happens. We've had these bots that have deleted code that was designed to limit it because it didn't like that it had limitations. We have these examples where these bots have deleted whole databases. There's a really big one that came out of Amazon. It cost Amazon millions of dollars because the bots made a huge database mistake and deleted a whole bunch of orders. Like things go wrong, but we can't know that, we can't prepare for that, we can't plan for that until we're inside it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:27

Yeah. And I think that's the one thing that I feel really comfortable with it is because I know what it is and what it isn't.

unknown 42:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:37

And I think, and that means it's helpful to me to know what I should use it for and what it never gets its paws on. Yes. You know, so it's so it's like it it is never going to be front-facing in my business.

unknown 42:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:53

As painful as it is to walk through a sales page and you know, like figure out like where things go and you know, get human feedback on that. I'm always going to do that rather than say, whip me up a sales page, because I know that this human-centered work is an energy transmission, as potentially woo as that sounds, but it's why we look at AI slop and go, uh, it's just flat. It's hollow. There's nothing to it, right? Whereas something that we've written, as imperfect as it might be, we know it's human. We we feel the energy exchange of it. It's got something to it. And I can see that we're just going to get better and better and better at spotting that, at resonating with it or not. So AO is never going to be front facing, but backend systems, processes, ways of working. Oh my goodness, like it's saving me so much time. I'm like, I think I actually do have time to write. a book right like it's like in a way that is never felt really possible before although self-doubts taught me as well but you know it's the irony but but I think there's something about really seeing oh I still get to lead this I'm in charge it only does what I tell it to do.

SPEAKER_00 44:20

There's there's a real sovereignty piece for us as business owners in using these tools, right? The same way there is when we engage with a coach. You could work with a coach who's going to tell you exactly what to do based on her or his lived experience. And it might not be right for you. You still have to make the final decision of is this for me? It's the same when we're using these tools. You might have a conversation with ChatGBT and it might tell you hey you should put out this lead magnet that's the greatest idea ever. And you might go actually that's not how I want to create that's not what my audience most needs right now. I want to finesse this a little bit. I think about things like I am never giving a chat tool my financial data. There are people doing this. I don't know why like I am never giving up my financial data. I am not giving up my passwords. Understanding security I think is really important with these tools as well. I had a conversation yesterday I've been trying to build a calendar based workflow to help to get Claude to essentially look at my day, look at my tasks across my clients and my own business and time block my day for me because I hate doing it myself. Time block it for me. So every morning I open my calendar and it's blocked out. Amazing love it. And it says to me well you can just put your little API codes because I can't access them put them into a Notion doc and I'll read it from there. And I'm like that's not secure we're not going to be doing that. I'm not giving you that level of access now there are structured channels to give it access to data and access to our tools. I am fine with that. But I'm not going to open up a Google a Google Doc or a Notion page and go, here's my username, here's my password, here's my API secret key, here's my credit card information go nuts. Like we have to understand what these tools are doing. The same way I'm not bringing client personal information into my tools. That's not my place. That's not how I ever want to use those tools. I think the other thing that the online space hasn't necessarily fully wrestled with yet is our contracts and our terms and our privacy policies and what they need to evolve to in the age of AI because most people haven't updated their contracts yet and we're not covered and yet maybe we're feeding it transcripts of coaching calls and using that to turn it into things that we don't necessarily have explicit consent for yet. So there's lots of there's lots of pieces along the way and I don't say that to be like oh it's too much and it's overwhelming and it's scary. Just so that we've got an understanding going into it of like these are the considerations, these are the decisions I need to make on how I can best use the tool to support me. Totally.

SPEAKER_01 46:54

And I think the overwhelm is real and totally understandable and I feel it too I think the the exponential pace of change is something that I'm like oh I'm gonna get left behind. Like I notice that that is a buzzy thing around in the background I'm like no no that actually that's that's not true. Right? It's like because actually this is more about what do what are the repetitive tasks in my business that I can help get help with from a a bot of some sort that's actually an appropriate use of AI for my business at this stage in season. As the tools get more ethically sound or more advanced or I feel more comfortable with them, then I might give it more things to do.

SPEAKER_00 47:46

And I think this is the key right the overwhelm is very real and I say that being somebody who is in this space who is contributing to the overwhelm by talking about these things. Like I open my Instagram and some days I genuinely do not want to scroll because it's just I built this with Claude Claude can now do this get this skill I made $30,000 in three days posting with Claude like it's it's a lot right and it is very easy to fall into this trap of like oh if I don't move now I'm going to be left behind. And also a lot of those people their business is AI. That's it their business model is selling you an AI product an AI tool prompts training whatever it might be. So it's in their best interests to create and show you all of these things. But for the rest of us who have businesses outside of AI, we don't need to drop everything and suddenly learn how to code, how to build apps, how to use these tools. We don't have to be at the forefront of the industry but we just need to know it exists. We need to know it exists exactly we need to know what it can do. We need to decide where it fits in our business if that's our mentality we're not getting left behind.

SPEAKER_01 48:56

Yeah yeah exactly I I think that's the the key to any of this stuff is discernment like really asking yourself oh this is feeling uncomfortable why what am I what am I worried is going to happen here and then is that actually real what what I need what does my business need and I think at this stage we should be in the creation rather than the consumption phase that this is still nascent development you know in terms of the tech it's not really there yet I mean I think but I think there are absolutely ways we can use it now that will set us up for future developments which are going to come thick and fast in the next few years. But we shouldn't be saying to AI hey what kind of coach should I be or how should I talk to my clients like we're not letting it create we are the creators we shouldn't be consuming its content and replacing that with our you know our own judgment with it.

SPEAKER_00 50:05

Yeah. At the end of the day like I actually think coaches are one of probably the best resource groups to be using AI tools because I say this as a very big generalization but I know that this will probably land for your audience. We are very smart, savvy coaches who have a great deal of ability to self-reflect and that means we can use the tools to our advantage because we know what serves us and what doesn't and we have great skills at discernment what is good advice what might not be good advice is this advice intended for me like we have learned these through building our coaching practices right like we have these tools that if I look at say you know my group of friends the school moms don't necessarily have in the same way because they don't work like we work in the coaching space. Now that's not to say we are not susceptible to falling for AI hallucinations or you know falling into like AI will tell you things it can do that it definitely cannot do. Likewise it'll tell you it can't do something that it absolutely can. It's there's this level of like I need to understand how my business runs, how I think and what I need and I'm going to tell the tool to do exactly that versus I don't know what I need. Tell me what I should do tell me how I should think tell me what I should say.

SPEAKER_01 51:25

Exactly yeah and I think that's that's a great place to enter this little playground which it it absolutely is I think it is a business playground it can really support us to call back time which is our greatest finite asset and and that for me is like it's worth you know being with its imperfect you know embryonic state right now just just to sort of see what can it do?

SPEAKER_00 51:56

What how does it you know help me to to gain more time absolutely at the end of the day and I I I've worked in the systems and operations space for for nearly 10 years now because of wanting to help predominantly women business owners create time not even time to do more in their business but time to live their lives like I don't want any of us to be working 50, 60 hour weeks to make our businesses grow. Most of us left corporate because we didn't want to do the 40 hour work week anymore. Like I want us to use systems and automation and structures and effective delegation and now AI so that we can still serve our people and still go to every school event and still be there for our elderly parents and still go out for cocktails with girlfriends and to have a really full life and if an AI tool means that I get to be at school pickup at 3 pm every day great sign me up I'm in totally with you.

SPEAKER_01 52:54

Amazing um where would you invite people to start if they're like all right I'll I'll listen to you guys I'll give it a bash like where would you invite people to kind of look at entering the AI playground?

SPEAKER_00 53:11

I would enter it from a place of I have a problem and I want to solve it. So what is the specific thing in your business right now for your life that really just grinds your gears if you're like I never want to touch this thing again that is a great first project to start to play with well where can AI support me in this so maybe that is there is reporting that I hate doing in my business maybe that is there is just admin like I said the example of uploading Zoom calls or sharing recordings with clients. Like there might be these little admin things that you're like oh I have to do them but I hate it every single time great but play with it open Claude I think Claude is probably further along than ChatGPT is right now I say this on the 29th of April knowing OpenAI could release an update tomorrow that will absolutely change the game. This is the world we're living in but I would open up Claude and I would start a conversation of I want to outsource this to you here's how I work what do you need from me and it'll ask you questions and it'll tell you what you need to have set up and you'll start to play with like oh okay what does this look like and you'll think about like okay what is my process what are the steps I would take if I was doing it great that works for me let's see if it works and you do a test run and you'll refine from there and you'll keep refining from there to a point that you can fully automate something and then it's off your list and you don't have to think about it. Love it.

SPEAKER_01 54:39

Love it. And that can be an hour or two of time just so well spent.

SPEAKER_00 54:44

Yeah yeah yeah if it's something that you're doing you know 15 minutes every week spending an hour on it literally is going to save you so much time across the year.

SPEAKER_01 54:54

Yeah yeah yeah love it hey Nuv thanks so much for coming hanging out my pleasure thank you for having me this has been such a good conversation yeah really fun and I'll put um Nuv's contact details obviously in the show notes so you can go listen to her podcast and follow along for more stuff about AI and all things systems. All things systems love it thanks Nov appreciate you cheers