In this instructional YouTube presentation, serial entrepreneur Chris Donnelly, who has built three businesses with over $10 million in annual turnover, shares the six AI tools and associated workflows he relies on daily to generate revenue and save time. He begins by critiquing the flood of AI tools on the market, asserting that 99 % are wasteful, and then outlines his core playbook. The first pillar is customizing a large‑language model (Claude or ChatGPT) via projects, custom instructions, and a memory base to act as specialized assistants (sales manager, operations manager, scriptwriter, etc.). The second pillar is automated meeting capture with Fathom (or Granola) to record, transcribe, and aggregate customer insights, which he feeds back into Claude for high‑level trend analysis. Third, he positions Notion as the company’s single source of truth, integrating it with AI to generate proposals, answer client queries, and onboard new hires quickly. Fourth, he describes Klai (and Clay) for contact enrichment, adding phone, email, company size, and intent signals to prospect lists scraped from LinkedIn. Fifth, he advocates using Atio as a CRM to store enriched records and track multi‑channel interactions. Finally, he introduces Na'An (NAN), an orchestration layer that stitches together multiple AI agents—research, knowledge‑base lookup, email drafting—into sequential workflows, exemplified by an automated sales‑email pipeline. Donnelly concludes with a practical adoption tip: dedicate 15–30 minutes each day to experiment with Claude projects and make AI native to one’s workflow, emphasizing that AI fluency will become a baseline skill in future workplaces.
Chapters
There are thousands of AI tools on the market, and I have used most of them within my businesses, and 99% of them are a complete waste of time and money. There are 6 tools that I come back to almost every single day in my business, and I can break down the reason why into 2 clear categories. One is revenue generation, and two is time saver. My name is Chris Donnelly, and I have built 3 businesses to north of 10 million turnover, and today I'm going to give the exact playbook on of how I use AI in my business. I have seen quite literally hundreds of creators talking about AI tools that I guarantee you they've never used. I've used every single one of the tools I'm going to talk about, and I'm going to tell you why they're useful for your business. So the first tool, and it's kind of the backbone of your business, it's the backbone of your use of AI, is taking one of the major LLMs, so ChatGPT or Claude, and then customizing it towards what you need it to do. And so the example I'm going to use is I created a sales manager for myself within Claude, which means that anytime time I'm ever sent a message from an interested customer, someone who's interested in buying one of our products, I can copy and paste their message straight into my Claude project and it will give me a perfect answer based on hundreds of responses I have given before. And so if that sounds valuable to you, just think about how many times you could apply that to how many different processes. So in a Claude project you have custom instructions and then you have memory base. And so the memory base you can fill with whatever you want, and that will be the information that the Claude project goes and consults with. And so for my sales example, I upload to it quite literally hundreds of examples of me replying to customers during the sales process. And then with the custom instructions, I gave a very clear breakdown of exactly what to do, which is to create me a response, make sure that you reference the customer website, make sure that you reference your knowledge base, and make sure that you write a polite and professional email. Which means that every single time now I use that specific Clore project, I get a perfect answer to any sales query. And to expand your thinking on this, I have Clore projects now for my sales manager, operations manager, YouTube scriptwriter, my book writer. And so I have created it for so many different instances within my business. And so for you, that is the underlying number one tool you want to be using today. So a lot of people are probably asking, why am I choosing Claude over ChatGPT? And the obvious answers are, I think that ChatGPT, in the use of things like em dashes or just sounding very robotic and non-natural language, feels like ChatGPT is a less professional product than Claude. The other really powerful reason is that Claude has a much better, like, report generation or, you know, output from the tool. And so, for example, I do my investor updates on Claude because it produces a perfect canvas of what my investor template looks like, whereas if I do that on ChatGPT, I spend forever going back and forth with the system. That said, you can use ChatGPT, you can use Claude, but my advice is just customize the instance that you're using with the AI. So the second tool I want you all to think about is Fathom, which is an auto-record and auto-transcribe of all of your meetings. So if you're sharing your screen within a meeting, if you're talking to someone in a meeting, if you're demoing anything, it's going to record everything that takes place on that call and it will just silently join in the back of your call. You will see it join the call and what that gives you is just complete clarity over every discussion you've had with every single customer. It will be able to summarize for you what the key points of the meeting and get that as a summary follow-up. And if you want to take it a step further, what we do at our work is we take all of the calls with all customers, we then run it through Claude and we ask it what are the aggregated core insights that have come out of all these customer meetings and then suddenly you get given this incredibly valuable list of what your customers keep repeating to you. Now some people say they don't like when Fathom joins calls and that's completely fair enough. And so if you need a call recorder, you know, something that's gonna get an overview of what you've covered in meetings but you don't want it actually to join, then you wanna be looking at Granola instead. So if you imagine my company is now having dozens and dozens of calls every single day, lots of our staff members talking to lots of different customers. Because we have all of those videos now, like I say, we get aggregated insights, which means it's super valuable for, for example, sales calls. I get to see how much of the call my team are talking. I get to see how much of the call the customer is talking. I get to see the key points that the customer is interested in talking about. I then can match up, for example, are my team talking about the right things when they're having a sales meeting, which is super valuable information. My product team is able to take all of those videos, download them, and get a sense of like what is important, what they should work on next. We are able to identify bugs from a, an aggregated view of calls as well. Because if dozens of the customers are suggesting that things don't work, we're able to quickly pull that insight from say 25 calls rather than just one bug. And it gives us an idea therefore on prioritization within the business. What should we be fixing first based on how many customers it's affecting? And so if you are able to capture all of that information from all of your calls, even if you're a one-person startup through to a much bigger business, that information is gonna be so valuable to your business. So the third tool I want you to think about is having Notion as your workspace. Now, Notion is going to effectively act like your home base. You can integrate Notion with Fathom, which we spoke about before, with Granola, we spoke about before. You could have within Notion all the different aspects of your company information, your internal documentation. That's where your company work. And so, for example, if two team members want to work on a specific document, I encourage my team to work exclusively on Notion. Why Notion becomes so incredibly be valuable to you as it becomes your source of truth. And that is a really important lesson to take away from this, is that the better that you work on your own AI and the information and knowledge that sits behind your AI, the better you're going to be able to utilize it to save yourself time and to drive you revenue, as we spoke about at the beginning. Now, you could ask it to create a proposal for a client, and it will source all the information from your database and your knowledge set, and it will do that. You can ask it, for example, what are the next steps with a client? And importantly, I've done this recently in one of my businesses— any new team member who joins the business, we can give them access to Notion and they can query Notion for any question they get from a client. And very quickly they are able to upskill themselves to the point where it almost seems like they've worked with the client forever. And that's because they have perfect context within the Notion database. So if you could only pick 3 tools to use every single day, those 3 tools alone will be a huge level up for you. However, we can go much deeper into this and we can become much more sophisticated in how we use AI for our businesses day to day. So the tool that I use most every single day is Klai, and I use it manually to enrich data, but I also use it by connecting it with lots of other systems I use. So in its basic form, what does Klai do? Klai enriches contact details to provide you with phone numbers and email addresses, but the utilization of it can go much, much further. And so I'll give you a breakdown of a workflow that I use every single day in my business that you can take away from this. So step 1, let's say that I have a social media post about SEO. So I know that the people who comment on that post and are interested in that post are interested in SEO, and I want to sell to people like that. So what I will do is I will scrape the information on someone's LinkedIn profile, and I'll use something like Triggerfy to do that. But there are dozens of those tools. And once I've got that information, I can export it into a table, and then I use Clay. And Clay comes in at that stage to give me not just the contact details, but the size of the company and the intent layer that the person actually has. And so So now when you're thinking about reaching out to a customer, you're not just reaching out blind, you're reaching out with size of the company, whether they're interested, and all of their details. And that will feed into creating a much more effective outreach message. And that brings us nicely on to Atio, which is the CRM. Now, for those of you out there that are thinking like, do I need a CRM? Is it important to my business? Unfortunately, the answer is yes, and it's very worth investing in. The CRM is gonna capture every stage of the experience with a customer. And so you get to see, you know, have they interacted with my email, have they given an intent signal that they're interested in the business. And what you can do is connect the tool we were talking about before, Clay, to enrich someone's data so you have a perfect customer record of exactly who the customer is and their interaction with your marketing and with your business. And why that becomes so important is as you market to these people, you get to market to them where they are. And so I know, for example, who are the people that have interacted with different parts of my product, who are the people who have interacted with my LinkedIn content, my email marketing. And that's where the CRM becomes so incredibly valuable, and you can use it to reach out to all of the people that you're enriching through Clay. So the final tool that I'm going to talk about solves one of the biggest problems that we have with AI. An individual instance of AI tends to be very good at doing a very specific thing, but if you ask AI to do multiple things, it's actually going to fail to do that very well. And so Na'An is a bit like a tool that stitches together different types of AI doing different things. That's the simplest way of explaining it. And so I'll give you a really good example of a few AI instances that we built and we used NAN to stitch together. So in my last company, I had someone called a sales manager who was on $60,000 a year, and she would receive my emails, she would draft up a response, research the customer, and email them back. Whereas now we've built an NAN workflow where if someone emails me, the agent, that's the first step of the workflow, will receive the email. It will research the person, it will consult my Notion database and my information, and it will come back and it will write an email to that person based upon Clay enrichment, my Notion workspace, and therefore it writes an incredibly well-researched reply to that person and that company about how we can help them. And it then puts that into my drafts. However, it does each individual part in a sequence. It doesn't do it all at the same time. And NAN is the stitching. That allows the system to work. And so someone emails the company, it hits node number 1, starts the research, finishes the research, sends the research into the email writer, writes the email, and then sends it into my drafts. And so that's why you need to get quite good at things like Naan, is it allows you to stitch together lots of different instances of AI. Like I said at the beginning of the video, there are going to be hundreds of different people trying to convince you of the value of lots of different tools. These are the tools that I use in my business every single day. To help grow our revenue or to reduce our time. Now, if this is overwhelming, my suggestion is I want you to put a small time block into your diary. Maybe it's 15 minutes, maybe it's 30 minutes, and I want you to start upskilling yourself on using AI. My suggestion is start with Claude, start with trying to teach yourself how to create Claude projects. My advice generally is that the way technology is going and the way businesses are going, you will experience that the vast majority of the entrance into the workspace are going to be very AI savvy. And therefore, as we develop in our careers, we have to be conscious of the fact that, that is gonna impact work. And so my suggestion is try every single day, 15 to 30 minutes. I want you to become comfortable using the tools and I want them to become native to your day-to-day workflow. So if you've enjoyed this video and the steps that I've given you, you should definitely check out this video that I've created on how to get to your first million in turnover in 2026.
