How AI Employees Save My Team 20+ Hours a Week With (Without Firing Anyone)
In this episode of the Thriving Therapreneur Podcast, host Carly Hill explores the mindset barriers women face around using AI, labeling the belief that hard work equals worth as "toxic feminine pride." She argues that AI should be seen as a collaborative partner that handles first drafts, allowing human team members to focus on refinement and strategy, thereby saving over 20 hours per week without layoffs. Hill details how her team leverages custom Claude agents to generate sales pages, social media assets, and podcast ideas, and describes a company‑wide audit that identified tasks ripe for AI automation. She highlights gendered statistics—one‑third of women view AI as cheating and women receive 27 % less praise than men for AI‑enabled work—calling for a narrative shift. Throughout, she promotes her Claude tutorials, Substack, a free 23‑page Cash Infusion Playbook, and done‑for‑you AI‑agent services, positioning them as tools for entrepreneurs, especially mothers, to reclaim time and focus on outcomes rather than effort.
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Welcome back to the Thriving Therapreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Carly Hill. We are talking about AI once again, but this episode is different. I recorded a previous episode on the top 3 tools that I'm using. I've recorded episodes on Carly AI, which is my 7-figure dream team that you can actually hire to do all of the marketing for you. But I'm gonna be talking about the mindset behind AI. The era that we're moving into, especially when it comes to females. There's a bit of this feminine toxicity going around when it comes to utilizing AI. And then of course, I'm gonna show you behind the scenes of how my team is using AI to work more efficiently. So let's just dive right in, rip the bandaid off. I wanna start by asking you if you've ever caught yourself saying something like, Oh my gosh, you should have seen how long it took me to get this birthday party together, or I was up until midnight doing XYZ, or it took me forever to fold the laundry and get this house in order. And there was like this tiny secret pride underneath how long it took you to do XYZ. And I see this, myself included, right? This is a bit of a pattern that I call toxic feminine pride. And it's not really feminine energy. It really is old programming. The belief that you have to work hard in order to deserve a large income. You have to work hard in order to have a clean house. You have to work hard in order to have a successful launch, or whatever the case is. Effort becomes the proof of your worth. Look how long it took me to prepare for this dinner. Look how long it took me to put this program together, as if. Suffering is the point, and you should be rewarded for how long it took you. And if effort is your measure of value, and if that is a belief that you carry, then anything that comes easily starts to feel suspicious. It feels like it doesn't count. And this is exactly the lens that a lot of women— and stats show this— are looking through when they look at AI. And there's also This— I want to say like a lack of permission to delegate in general for women, especially for mothers. It's like, I'll just do this myself mindset. Nobody else can do it the way I would. I have to redo it anyway, so what's the point? Does that sound familiar to you? We are moving out of this era, I feel. And I actually have a whole chapter in my new book on money and motherhood dedicated to rewriting this exact belief. The book is all about Rewriting entrepreneurship and rewriting these beliefs. But this idea that we have to earn ease, that in order for something to be easy, we have to suffer, we have to earn it. And AI is completely rewriting this narrative in real time because now we can literally collapse timelines. No excuses. And so here's my test for you as I say all of this. Anything in your business right now that is taking you a long time? That is not a badge of honor. That is not just paying your dues as a newbie entrepreneur. That is a signal. It is telling you you're either not doing the right things, you're not using the right tools, you're not delegating as much as you could be, a system is off. That's it. So again, if effort is your measure of value, then anything that comes easily is going to start to feel like cheating for you. It's going to start to feel suspicious. It's going to start to feel like it doesn't count. And I want to be really clear on something too, because this is a piece that people get wrong when we're talking about utilizing AI. And I talk a lot about how I have AI employees and projects, and I have tutorials around how I'm teaching you to create your own AI employees and projects. I am just helping my team work more efficiently. I'm not letting anybody go. I'm not replacing anyone. And this distinction matters so much. People think that I'm like, I'm firing team members and hiring AI employees. But how it works in my business is I have Claude skills that are built out, meaning my Claude already knows how to speak in my brand voice. It knows how to build a high-converting sales page from scratch. It knows how to pull all of my brand colors and fonts and Put together an Instagram carousel in about 2 seconds. It knows all of the podcast episodes I've ever recorded if I need another idea. AI usually gets up to like 70 to 80% of the way there for whatever we're doing. But the important part is my team goes in, a human goes in and does the last 20 to 30%, and it tweaks and it has the nuances and it adds the little human polish to it, or Makes it funnier, adds my character to it, whatever the case is, something maybe more relevant. So what that means practically is my team is not wasting time and spending hours building from zero anymore. That would frustrate me. They're spending their time and their brainpower on the parts that actually need a human. And we actually did 2 rounds of this, a whole team audit across the company of exactly how everybody was using their time. For 2 weeks straight. Then we brought back the data. We even used Claude to help us analyze this data, and we talked about how we could help the team members work more efficiently by utilizing more AI, by building out custom agents, by having, you know, more utilization of even Claude Code and Cowork. And so again, they're spending their time and their brainpower on the parts that actually need a human The strategy, the relationship, the refinement, instead of just the blank page part and building from scratch. And this is the whole shift. It is not AI versus humans. It is a collaboration. It is AI handling the first draft so that humans can do what only humans can do and polish it up. And I was doing a one-to-one power hour with a client last week and she's been in my world for years, and I was showing her some of my AI agents live, and she was also just genuinely mind-blown on how much we got through in that hour. And what she said to me last week was, this is something I really respect about you, Carly. She's like, you are constantly looking for ways to optimize and improve and innovate and go faster. And she's been in so many other coaching programs, and she's like, I just appreciate how this Is making it easier for us. And she's like, this is why I keep coming back to you over and over again. And so that comment wasn't just about technology and AI. It really was about the outcome. That's what she cares about. And that is the reframe. So I want you to sit with this. It is not about doing the actual work. It is not about suffering while you're doing the work. It is about the outcome of the work. It's not how long it took you to do the work. It's the outcome of the work. That's what we care about. So once you can separate those 2 things, it is going to make delegating, whether it be to a person or to AI, so much easier. You hear it all the time in entrepreneurship: delegate and elevate, delegate and elevate. And I know the pushback— well, I don't have the funds to delegate yet, I'm still a baby business. Listen, there is absolutely no excuse in the AI era we are in right now where you cannot delegate. Because you can delegate for free or for $20 a month if you have a paid version of AI, and you can delegate to AI employees and you can save yourself easily minimum 20 hours a week. And I teach this, okay? If you haven't checked out any of my Claude tutorials or my Substack, like this is all I talk about on my Substack. I walk you through exact prompts behind the scenes, click this, click this, and you can build out these AI agents yourself. If you don't want to build them out yourself, we'll build them out for you. Okay, we have done-for-you services where we're building out all of these agents, social media agents, whatever the case is that you need. Okay, you can actually hire my team so you don't have to have a nightmare story of hiring someone random. Hey friends, quick pause. Because you're listening to this episode, I want to give you something special, completely on me. I'm gifting you my 23-page Cash Infusion Playbook. This is the exact playbook I use in my own business, hand directly to my clients. It is packed with money-making, needle-moving activities you should be doing every single day to generate revenue and make easy sales. Too many entrepreneurs are spending their time on the wrong things— busy work that feels productive but doesn't pay— and this playbook cuts through all of that, gives you the exact revenue-generating activities that actually move the needle forward in your business. Click on the link in the show notes, drop your email and I'll send it straight to you. It is my gift to you for showing up, doing the work, and listening to this episode. Let's get back to it. So going back to some stats and pulling this together because I think it's so fascinating. I was listening to a podcast the other day and they dropped this stat. I was on my way to TJ Maxx listening to a podcast. It was only like 15 minutes away. I asked my husband the other day too because He was— had a long commute for work. It was like an hour and a half. And I was like, what do you do when you're driving? I was like, do you just listen to music the whole time? I was like, do you listen to podcasts? Because I'm driving 15 minutes down the road to TJ Maxx and I have a podcast in my ear and I just learned so much and I was mind-blown. The people who don't listen to podcasts, it just doesn't make sense to me. I am so obsessed with podcasts. I love— probably more than I love recording podcasts, even though I love recording podcasts and teaching you guys and being in your earbuds. Anyways, I digress. I was driving to TJ Maxx listening to this podcast, and this stat stopped me in my tracks where it was like 1 in 3 women still think AI is cheating. 1 in 3. 1 in 3 women still think AI is cheating. If I can do something more efficiently, I do not think that is cheating at all. I think that is leverage. And I understood where that belief came from. And again, it's the old programming that we've talked about before. And if it didn't cost you hours or suffering, it doesn't feel earned. But the second stat, cuz I already talked about that stat, okay, that's the first one that stopped me in my tracks. The second one was women are being praised roughly 27% less than men for using AI. And it kind of made me mad for a second. She got it done so fast, but she used AI. There's like a but in there. That's why they're getting praised less. There's like a little asterisk on her accomplishment. Meanwhile, a man gets something done fast using the exact tools, and it's like, yay, look how efficient he is, he gets a cookie. There's no, but he used AI. And that's not a coincidence. This is a stat, okay? This is a gender bias that is showing up in real time, and it is going to keep showing up unless we name it and we change the narrative. And I want to be really direct with you, and this is why I wanted to record this episode on like the mindset of AI. If you are downplaying your win because AI helped you, it is not cheating, and you need to switch the narrative. You still had the vision, you trained the tool, you leveraged technology, you leveraged the era that we're in, and you got a killer outcome, if not better than you would have done manually. And look how much time you've saved yourself. You still made the call on what to keep, what to change, blah blah blah. That's not cheating. This is leadership. This is moving into strong entrepreneurship, especially if you used it for your business. Okay, but you can use this in your personal life as well, especially if you're a mom. Like calendars, organizing things, schedules. Oh my gosh, please. If you're thinking about launching a podcast or taking yours to the next level, Juliana and her team are the experts you need. They take care of everything from episode funnel design to production and marketing, so you can focus on creating content that connects with your audience. Check out the show notes on how to get access to their team and just mention that I sent you. Happy podcasting. So The key takeaways, cuz we covered a lot, I want you to leave with today is the goal was never the grind. It never was, look how long it freaking took me. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us, especially women, especially mothers, we got taught that hard equals worthy. And if it was easy, it doesn't count. It was kind of like cheating and we should downplay it. And AI is handing us a chance to unlearn that if we are willing to take it. You do not have to prove your worth by how long something took you. You get to measure it by the outcome that you produced, the freedom that it buys you back. That's the goal. It is about saving your time by what you do with the 20 extra hours that you just got handed back to you because AI helped you leverage. This is the life that I'm living. This is how I'm running my business. As a mom of almost 2 with a small and mighty team. And this is exactly what I walk you through in all of my Claude tutorials, my Substack articles. You can DM me the word Substack on Instagram. I'll send you all of those Claude tutorials. Again, if you don't want to build some of this stuff out for you, then reach out to my team and we can give you a custom quote and we can build out some of this for you so that you can buy back your time. You are allowed to make this easier for yourself. You are allowed to go faster. This is not cheating. This is leverage. You have earned every bit of it, and you have to take advantage of what is available for you. My love is with you, and I'll see you in the next episode.
