My Top 3 AI Tools That Save Me DOZENS of Hours Every Month [Ep 62]

Welcome to the Thriving therapyneur podcast. The show for ambitious therapists who are ready to unapologetically make more money, scale their impact and build their dream coaching business. I'm Carly Hill, therapist turned coach turned CEO of a seven figure online business. I created the Thriving Therapeutic Podcast because I'm obsessed with helping big hearted therapists outgrow the office and build successful and sustainable online businesses. So if you are wondering how you can continue to make an impact without sacrificing the life you love, welcome Therapreneur. This is exactly the place for you. Think of it like the business school we never had. I am so excited to dive in with you. Let's get started. Hello my friends. Welcome back to the Thriving therapreneur podcast. Today's episode is going to blow your mind. Probably save you dozens of hours every month, every week, every day, to be honest with you. We're talking about my favorite AI tools right now. How I'm using them both in my business and my personal life. And how you can start using them even if you're not techie or you've been avoiding AI like the plague. Maybe you just haven't even hopped on the ChatGPT train yet and you're like, I am so freaking behind in AI. Don't worry, I got you and you just have to start small. I will talk about ChatGPT a little bit later on and I'm going to break down the exact platforms I use, how they fit into my workflow. I'm going to give you some pro tips for getting the most out of them. And just know I use these tools every single day. From creating content and launch plans to finding the best restaurant when I'm traveling. Like flight plans, even teaching me about sleep training and how to make purees for my 5 month old. So literally anything and everything you need to Google you can just use AI for. So grab your coffee, let's dive in. I want to talk about Gamma first. This is the number one tool for creating PowerPoint presentations and slide decks. I actually just used it today for the first time and that's what inspired me to record this podcast episode because I was mind blown at what it created in five minutes or less and I was like, wow, I should share this with everyone and some insight into the other tools that I'm using. So Gamma is an AI tool that turns my messy notes into fully designed professional slide decks. I had a webinar that I was doing on the top three marketing tips that are working in 2025 right now I had a whole Word doc that I had just typed up all of my talking points. I plugged it into Gamma and in five minutes it spit out this beautiful presentation. You can customize colors, fonts and layout just like you do in canva, where you can upload essentially your brand K. So it can still very much feel like your brand and not just a cookie cutter template. Everything is super customizable. You can pretty much just drag and drop, you can replace images, it can generate AI images for you. So anytime you have a webinar, a workshop, or even you're creating trainings for your online course, it can help you with that. So if you can just get whatever you have to say out of your head onto just a Word doc, or you could even type right then and there inside of Gamma. Instead of spending hours picking out fonts and aligning text boxes or trying to find the right image, you can just paste your bullet points or whatever you have into Gamma's format and then it's going to spit it out into this beautiful on brand presentation. It is like skipping straight to the fun part. And then you can just teach without all of the hours of the prep work. And I've been in business long enough to remember the days when everything was manual. I mean, I was making every single slide deck from scratch. I was spending hours writing the copy, I was brainstorming all the content, I was trying to figure out what to post and when. And AI has completely changed that. When you're using AI, it is like having a team of extra assistants who never sleep, they never need a vacation, and they just do what you ask to do instantly. Obviously, I don't do pretty much like anything manual these days. There's very few things that I do manually in my business because I have a team, because I have automations, and because I leverage AI, there's some things I do manually. But if something needs to be done manually, I usually delegate it to my virtual assistant. You can get a virtual assistant for like 10, 15 an hour and they can help you with some of this stuff. But in this case, when I was using Gamma, I was about to do a presentation in like 15 minutes and I was just going to share my screen and teach off of my Google Doc. But instead I signed up for Gamma. It was like $97 for the year because the free version only gave me 10 slides and boom, I had a presentation. So I didn't have to email my virtual assistant and then go back and forth and talk about different instructions. So she makes sure she knows exactly what she needs to do and then wait two or three business days for her to turn it around to me. No, I didn't have to do that and I didn't have to pay her because I could just plug in my janky notes into Gamma and boom, I have a presentation. So that's the first tool is Gamma. If you need anything put into a slide deck, a presentation, a webinar, workshop, course creation, try using Gamma. The second tool that I've been using and experimenting with is freepik. F R E E P I K. So if you follow me on Instagram, you've probably seen my brand images. I'm like smiling, I'm holding a coffee, I'm in cute outfits. Except I did not take those photos. Some of them are AI generated on my Instagram, some of them are real. Maybe you can spot the difference, maybe you can't. I don't know. The people who know me really well can spot the difference. I really haven't used it too much. Majority of my photos on my Instagram are very real. But I've been playing around with Freepik, so here and there I've been posting some images. When I first got it, I was posting on my stories about it a lot because I was trying to train Freepik that I'm not as young and hot as. It keeps making me like, it keeps putting me in crop tops and I have a six pack and I'm like, dude, I am a mom now and I don't look like this. Please put me in full clothing. Anyways, you can train it. So I created a custom character. It looks exactly like me. And what you do is you just upload around like 30 pictures, all different angles. So I had to do like back of my head, side angles, full body, close ups, et cetera. They have a guide on the type of photos that you can upload and then you can give free pick directions. Like create a picture of me in front of a burning couch. This is one that I actually did because I wanted to create the image of getting off the therapy couch and burning down the therapy couch and creating an online coaching business and having freedom instead. So I started to type that out. Then you can click the AI button because it will just refine the prompt that you gave it and it will add more descriptions and then it can turn it into an animated video that matches your brand vibe. Like, my mind is blown using this also, I have found that the AI generator that adds more descriptors inside a freepik isn't as good as ChatGPT. So oftentimes I will plug my ideas into ChatGPT and tell it to make it more descriptive. Then I will plug that into Freepik and then it will make my image from there. And then from the image I can turn it into an animated video so you don't have to go out all the time and take new brand photo shoots. Although that's still fun. I have one scheduled coming up. I still very much like to have real photos of me in the bank, but if you just have an idea in your head that you want to portray, you can just have AI do that for you. Hey there. Did you know we give away one of our incredible digital products every single week? All you have to do is leave a review for the show, then submit proof using the link in the show notes and you'll be entered to win. Prizes include amazing resources like our Passive Income course, the License Protection Bundle, top business trainings, my best selling book, and so much more. It's super simple and your review helps us reach more listeners just like you. So take a moment to share your thoughts, enter to win and maybe you'll be our next winner. You can instantly create images for social media, for sales pages, emails or ads. You don't have to wait. And then you can even make AI generated videos for reels and that can look and feel personal, but it just takes minutes to create so it keeps your content very fresh. You can have fun with it. I always like to disclose if it's AI or not. You know, there was one photo that I posted I had like four fingers. There was another photo that I posted and I had back pockets on my blazer. People typically don't have back pockets on their blazer. So you can have fun with it without having to get dressed up, hire a photographer, or wait weeks for edited photos. It's not going to be perfect at the beginning. You have to train Freepik and train it to create a character that looks exactly like you. It takes a little bit of time, but once you nail it, it's really fun. The third tool that I want to go over is ChatGPT. So of course I have to talk about ChatGPT. We're now on version five, which is crazy game changer. Some differences that I have noticed with GPT5 is it has better reasoning so it's just connecting the dots more accurately. I'm finding that I'm not having to correct it as much. If you will redirect it with all of these prompts and Also has longer memory. I was running out of memory like crazy. That's how much I use ChatGPT and now it can handle big chunks of text without losing track. It also seems like it has a more natural tone, like it's sounding more like a human and not a robot. But this is also because I'm probably continuously training my ChatGPT and I make custom GPTs. But I do think that we're just headed in the direction of sounding more like a human and not a robot and then multi step thinking as well. So it can handle complex projects start to finish. And this is probably because it has a larger memory and you don't have to keep reminding it of things that were way up in the thread. So I use ChatGPT for everything. Planning out content, calendars, fine tuning my own words for post and emails, outlining podcast episodes like this one. Like I just had all of my ideas and it kind of organized it into an outline for me. Writing launch plans, mapping out my whole entire year in business, organizing and prioritizing my to do lists, time batching, running revenue projections, like anything and everything. And I don't just use it for business too. I also use it in my personal life of finding new recipes. I have XYZ in the fridge. Like what can I make out of this? Helping me with baby sleep training tips, postpartum mental health help, finding restaurants when we travel. Recently I've been using it to compare flights and planning itineraries for me. So it's like your right hand assistant and it can get to know you, your style, your preferences, your priorities. It is just mind blowing. The more you use it, the better it gets to understand you and your voice. And if you don't know how to use it, just open up a ChatGPT thread and be like what can you do for me today? And then it will just give you ideas and then you can kind of just go back and forth and just again, have fun with it. I feel like there's so many AI tools it can be daunting because there's so many different things that you can use it for that you feel like you maybe have to use it perfectly. But just treat it like a science experiment and kind of have fun with it. The last thing I want to talk about is still chatgpt, but it's custom GPTs and this is something that I'm doing for my clients. So I use custom GPTs in my own business. But I'm super duper excited because I am building custom GPTs inside of my paid mentorship programs for almost everything. I want my clients to have a faster way to get results. So I started creating like a niche specific AI tool that they can access anytime. It's a custom niche finder. It's going to help them get crystal clear on their niche in minutes. Using all of my formulas, a sales auditor to review their messages or sales pages, their emails, their sales calls, and it's going to tell them exactly what they need to tweak to convert better, better an offer suite generator. This builds off the offer ladder so that they can have a next step for clients and keep ascending them into their offers. Auditing their offer stack and making sure the perceived value is high. Auditing the price or helping them come up with payment plans. And then also a social media copywriter. So writing captions in their voice aligned with their brand. But also following all the proven copywriting frameworks that I use. I already have quite a few AI trainings in my mentorship. I have one where you can spit out a hundred pieces of content in less than 10 minutes. But this is just taking it to the next level. I'm always looking for ways to have my clients take a hop, skip at a jump and get faster results. And leveraging AI is just going to help them do it so much faster without them having to learn AI. Like I am just creating the custom GPT for them and all they have to do is go in and use it. That's it. I'm also about to launch an AI coach. So a 24, 7 question answer assistant trained on all of my coaching, my frameworks, my question vault. As if we already don't have so much support inside my high level mentorship because we literally have support every single day of the week. We have six live calls. We have a one to one coach for each client. We have a copy coach, a marketing coach, a mindset coach, a business strategy coach, a paid advertising coach. But right now you just go to the coaching calls. You ask your questions or you post in the Facebook group or you're listening to the course curriculum, you go to your one to one coach. Did I already say that? Or you can check the question vault, but once I launch this AI tool, you can just go to the AI assistant first. And this is going to make the coaching calls even more streamlined because if your question hasn't already been answered, then you bring it to the call and we can workshop it together. So it's going to make the live calls more valuable. We can really focus on high level strategy instead of just Repeating the same questions over and over again. It's basically just going to be like having me in your back pocket at all times. I'm just so excited for that. So let's recap and do just a few pro tips for using AI. Because like I said, if you're thinking, okay, Carly, like this sounds great, but I'm overwhelmed. I really just don't even know where to start with AI. Start simple. Open up ChatGPT and just ask what can you do for me today? And then feed it context. So the more you tell it, even about your business, your niche, your audience, your style, the better it works if you just hit the little microphone button. Because maybe it's easier for you to just talk. Nobody really gets talking block, but sometimes we get writer's block, right? So if you can't think of what to type and type and type, just go on a rant and just spit out anything and everything that you can think of, using the little microphone button. Save your best prompts so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Like keep a note on your phone with your. Go to questions that you use AI for. And then I also want you to think about collaboration, not replacement. Let AI do the heavy lifting. But people can very easily tell these days what is AI generated and what is not. And you need to protect your personal brand. You need to keep your voice and your personality in the final product. We really want to stay with integrity with what we're offering here. We want it to be your voice, we want it to be your brand. We don't want it to be a robot AI brand. Use it as a brain dump process to help you organize your thoughts but not replace you. Okay, so gamma for turning notes into gorgeous presentations. Freepik AI for instant brand images and videos. ChatGPT5 for everything and anything else. I used to have the free version. I did upgrade because I ran out of memory. I only pay like 20 bucks a month for my chatgpt, but. But if you're just experimenting for the first time, you definitely don't need the paid version. You can just use the free one. And then also know that you can take it a step further and you can create custom GPTs just like I have done for myself and for my clients to help them get faster results. AI has saved me dozens and hours a month. It's allowed me to serve my clients better, spend more time with my family, focus on the parts of my business that truly light me up. It can do this for you as well. So if you have been hesitant to try AI. Just start small, pick one tool, play with it, have fun, see how it can make your life easier. And if you use up any of these tools you're liking it, you find a new one that you want to tell me about. Just DM me on Instagram at carlyhillcoaching. Tell me what you've created. I love to see what you guys are up to. My love is with you and I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much. Watching for for listening to the thriving Therapeneur podcast. I hope that this episode has inspired you to reduce burnout, work smarter and see the freedom potential you have as a therapist. We would love to have you inside the Therapist to Coach Accelerator Facebook group where we have live trainings and cheat sheets on all things marketing, sales and adding coaching ethically and legally. I am here cheering you on and I'll see you around. Sam.