How I've used AI in my business in 2024

Hello, and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching Podcast. So today I'm going to be talking about how I've been using AI in my coaching business in 2024. And the reason I'm even putting out a podcast today, which is 23rd December 2024, is because I find that, in fact, during the holiday period, I really like listening to podcasts because I often have more time to go walking, I'm often pottering about, and I like to listen. And I'm really sad when all the podcasts that I listen to get a little bit light on the ground. So I am putting together a few episodes that mean that I'll be in your ears pretty consistently your holiday break, if you are taking a holiday break, and if not, well, I'll still be here consistently, same as always. Now, these episodes are probably going to be short, but they are absolutely going to be practical and they will, you know, have my usual focus on your business. So when it comes to AI and how I use AI in my coaching business, my thinking has evolved in some ways, and in some ways it's pretty, pretty similar. So maybe, maybe it's that my thinking is the same, but the tools that I use have evolved. So my principles for using AI are that anything it produces for me must still be in my voice. So it can't. I can't bear putting out something that is very obviously AI generated. I'm not interested in that. It must be my voice. And what that means is it generally needs to build from my ip. So my podcasts, my workshops, my masterclasses, my coaching, and not from a blank slate. So I'm not ever asking an AI to create something from nothing. I'm always giving it some source material. I also work on the basis that the AI can often do 90% of whatever it is, and the 10% that I do is what really takes it from a solid foundation to something that is really me and is really helpful and has personality to it. And I also don't just use AI for the sake of it. So I'll experiment with things, but if it doesn't really add value or save time or create something better than I could do myself or my team could do, then I'm not really going to use it. So you could say, look, I'm, I'm a, I'm an average adopter, I would say of AI. I am not a massive evangelist for it, but I am a big fan of how it saves me time. So that's what most of the ways I've used AI in my business in 2024 have been all about. So how have I used it? The first way I've used AI in my business is as a writing assistant. And I've used it in a number of ways as a writing assist. And this is mostly chatgpt, to be honest. Although I'm. I'll share another tool that I've started using that sort of sits somewhere between a writing assistant and audio or video video editing tool. But mostly I'm using a writing assistant, ChatGPT to help me to take something I've written or I've spoken. So like a podcast and create another piece of writing or another piece of content as a result. So the tools I use for that, As I said ChatGPT, I've upgraded to the paid version, which is significantly better I think for this sort of thing because you can, you can sort of input it, input more of your content into it. It seems to have a greater memory for the, the things that, that I've done before. I'm also using swell AI and swell AI is helping me to write by taking my podcast, a transcript of my podcast, really I just dump the audio in there and it creates a transcript. And from that it is creating a range of drafts for me so that it creates a draft newsletter, a draft LinkedIn post, a range of posts in other, for other channels it can help me create clips. But really as a writing assistant, it's helping me to repurpose the content that I already have, which is something I can definitely do myself. But whereas it was taking me, you know, an hour or more to create those assets out of a podcast, now I can have those at least in draft form in, in minutes. And then I apply, you know, my 10% so my personality, my, the way I would say things, I apply that to the top. I've also had some success using AI to help me in writing workbooks and, and documents summarizing like course materials. Most recent example of that is in January I' releasing to my accelerator members a brand new course which is called a 90 day quick start. And what that is doing is in the 90 days my members are going to put together or review if they already have them, all of their coaching business assets. So going from, you know, really a deep reflection on your ideal client to your offer and then translating that into a great coaching bio, a great LinkedIn profile, excellent website copy and building their website. And one of the things I needed to put together for that was a website writing guide. And you know, I have all these ideas and thoughts and resources. But asking, asking ChatGPT to help me write that document, it did an incredible job of building my first draft. Now, I made a lot of changes to it, but making a lot of changes to it I think still probably saved me 10 hours compared to writing it from scratch myself. Now, as I said, the source material was mine, but that process was significantly saved me a lot of time. I've also used AI to help me write other types of emails. So not just marketing content, but other types of email. And generally I think that that is one of the ways that AI really shines is as an assistant. And I specifically say not as a copywriter, as an assistant because I really think the difference between using AI successfully and it being almost, almost too shallow or Superficial is the 10% that we do on top of it. So, yeah, I think that that is writing assistance. Brilliant. The next thing is brainstorming. So, you know, I will often, if I'm feeling stuck, if I don't have ideas. ChatGPT and asking it to give me ideas is usually really helpful. And it could be, you know, what could the, the subject line of this email be? Or it could be what could my. What could the topic of? What sort of topic should I have for a webinar I'm running? And the way I make sure it's very focused is I always make sure in my prompts that I'm being very clear about who my audience is, what is the work I do, what is the intention of the thing I'm asking it to help me brainstorm and, and then I will also ask it to give me a certain number of ideas. And because often it's not the first ones that are helpful, it's the ones that are sort of down towards the bottom of the list. And I usually ask for 20 or 50 ideas for it to generate. And then what I'll do is I think it's important to iterate. So then you might say, oh yeah, well, I like this idea or that idea. So I'm going to ask it to give me another 20 ideas similar to those ones. And so, you know, it's a really great idea generator, probably similar to that. I also use AI sometimes as a bit of a research assistant. So if there's something that I need to look up, if I, you know, don't know the process for something, sure, I could Google it. But this is a sort of a more efficient way to aggregate a lot of work from, from Google searches. Now you need to have obviously a bit of a skeptical lens for this one, sometimes it is just blatantly wrong. I, for example, I kept asking ChatGPT to help me with the process of figuring out for my group calls that I host within the accelerator. I need three times during the week that are going to capture a time zone that's suitable for everyone in the world. So the us, the uk, Asia, pac, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. I needed to make sure there was a time that worked for everybody. And I, I kept, I kept finding that ChatGPT was getting it wrong in that they weren't factoring in daylight savings timing. And I would tell it that it's got the time wrong for, for particularly you couldn't get London right. And yeah, it kept, kept getting it wrong. I couldn't, I couldn't get it to work, so I ended up having to do that manually. So beware when you're using it as a research assistant, beware. And also sometimes it does lie or make things up. So you need to have, you know, good sources. It's also great. I've also started using AI for feedback and editing purposes, which is that I will submit something. So it might be a website or a sales page, or it might be an email or it might be something I've written, like a bio or something like that. And I will ask ChatGPT to give me feedback and I will give it some lenses that I want feedback on from. So, you know, give me feedback from the perspective of a coach who is about to start their coaching business, for example, and see what it says about that. And look, sometimes it's gold and sometimes it's less good, but I find it worth doing. If I don't have, you know, someone, a real, A real opportunity for a person to give me feedback, I find that really helpful. And then probably the final way I've been using AI and, and the most valuable way I've used AI in my business in 2024, audio and video editing. Now this is in comes in two parts. Firstly, editing of my podcast. And secondly is editing. I record a lot of video and I record a lot of calls from, in my community or from my live master classes that I then offer to people. And so the AI tools have made this process an absolute dream. So for example, Descript I use for my podcast, it removes the ums and the ahs. So you might not have heard any ums and ahs, but let me tell you, they were there in this episode. I have just asked it to remove it. I should get it to remove ums and ahs from half of the episode and not the other. And then you can get a sense of how much is really in there. And then also, you know, if you have recorded to share later, some sort of workshop or video or recording. But there is, you know, things you want to take out of it. So you want to remove private chit chat, you want to remove any sort of examples shared about an organization, organizational specific thing. Normally it would be a real, a real pain to do that with something like a descript or a tool like that. You can do that all in the transcript. So you upload your video, it creates a transcript and whatever you want to remove, you just literally delete the words and that deletes it from the video. And it's amazing. And it works with audio too. And then, then there are tools that I also use for the podcast which is taking, going from that audio to, to then create various assets out of that. So, so clips and, and posts and summaries and show notes and all of that. Although I haven't found, I'm still not loving the show notes, but I'm going to, going to do it more. I think those things are all, all wonderful. And so the tools I use are descript and I've also started to experiment with swell AI as well for that. So that's mostly what I've used. But there are definitely some other areas where I'm still curious and I think, you know, maybe I'll explore it a little more in 2025. One of those is building my own GPT that is based on my own content. Now I am probably going to butcher this, but my understanding of creating your own GPT is that you load it with enough of your content, enough of your thinking. And I've got heaps of content from my Q and A questions and my coaching calls and my podcasts. You load that into the GPT and then people ask it questions and it will reply based on what you are likely to have said, which is quite cool because I do get some similar questions. And you know, I mean, I'm in two minds about it at this stage. I don't think it's the investment of time is necessarily worth the, worth the outcome that I would get. But it's definitely something I'm curious about. And then the other thing I've been curious about are these tools like Sintra AI, which is where they, their business model is saying that they are replacing a team or replacing a whole bunch of employees with a range of individual AI bots. And so you'll have a social media bot and you'll have a, you know, a PA bot that manages your, your calendar and your emails and you'll have a, a bot that helps you with your SEO and you'll have a bot that helps you with marketing. So definitely check it out if you're interested because I'm super interested. I just, when I looked into it, the limitations of the ones that I would use were probably too significant to make it, you know, worth the development time. It's not even that I would, I'm not worried about the price of it. It's quite reasonably priced, but I think there's a, it seems like there's an amount of time that would be required to, to learn it and I hadn't been willing to do that yet. But I'm going to look at it again because I'm, I'm, I'm curious and I have, I have some, some thoughts around what I'm going to do about building team in 2025 and maybe this is a way to supplement that, that decision. So that's me, that's what I've been doing. That's what I'm curious about. I do have a guide that was created maybe may on how to save time in your coaching business using AI, specifically about saving time. So I'm going to link that in the show notes. If you want some ideas and ways you could start. If you are not very AI savvy yet, I would encourage you to just start small and do a few things to buy back some of your time. Now if you celebrate Happy Christmas, have a wonderful day. If you celebrate something else, I hope you have a wonderful holiday period and for all of you, I'm going to be back in your ears next Monday on the 30th of December as we get ready to close out 2024. Have a great week.