260 3 ways to AI-proof your course business (using AI!)

You know what? Most course creators are making the biggest mistake with AI, they're either ignoring it completely or thinking it's going to replace them. But here's the truth. The course creators who thrive over the next few years, they won't be the ones who avoid AI. They'll be the ones who use it strategically right now to become irreplaceable. And the best part, you don't need to be a tech expert to start right now. Hi, I'm Kate from HelloFunnels. I've made over $6 million in online course sales, and I've helped thousands of thousands of course creators make more sales while working less using funnels. And today, I'm sharing exactly how to AI proof your business using AI itself. Look, real talk time, right? AI is here. It is not going anywhere. And the speed in which it has already come in and changed so many things is just wild. And it's only going to get faster. Now, we could all decide to go and stick our head in the sand, but eventually we're gonna have to come up for air and we're gonna look around and we're gonna be like, damn it, I missed out. And I don't want this for you. I don't want this for me. I don't want anyone in our industry. So the thing that we need to do, the thing that we need to, after we've had our brief panic, right, is we need to stop for a second and that we need to make a little bit of a mindset shift. And that shift is the AI isn't here to replace us. It's not coming for our jobs. It is right now. It is actually here to be a competitive advantage. And when used correctly, it is going to help you to grow faster than ever before. So let's talk about exactly how you can do that. All right? First of all, the very first thing, before anyone sort of even looks at anything long term, the very first thing we should all be doing right now with AI is using AI to help to increase our profitability. So what does this mean? Well, it's not always what everyone wants to hear, but, you know, the fact of the matter is that AI can do a lot of things that we were paying team members to do. It can do it faster, and oftentimes it can do it better. So, you know, what you can potentially do here as a. As a great way of building yourself a bit of a buffer, right, is figuring out how can you use the AI tools available in a way that works for you. I'm not saying go fire your whole team because no one wants to do that. And I'm not going to put people out of jobs. But how can you use it to work smarter, to work faster and to work more efficiently? And that should allow you to be able to be more profitable. So whether it is, you know, maybe replacing some of your contractors or whether it is just giving, you know, setting up tools and resources for your team so that they can actually, you know, have a higher level, faster level of output, both of these things are going to allow you to be more profitable. And that would be the very first thing. And it was the very first thing that I would be doing. And you don't have to be an AI expert at all to do this. Like they've gotten, they're so easy to use now, as long as, you know, you understand the fundamentals, which don't take long. If you want to find actually about how to understand those fundamentals. We've got a great mini course called Course GP Team. I'll link to that below, go check it out. It's walks you through all of it, like how to set up your own little custom agents for different parts of your business. But once, yeah, once you've done that, I would be looking at, okay, what are the tasks that are just taking too much time for me and for my team and how can we use AI to do them faster, do them better? And with that freed up time, you have two choices. You can either say, all right, well, I'm going to reduce my team cost by reducing the hours, or you can say, well, actually I'm going to use those hours for more revenue generating activities and use them to actually help you to make more money without spending more. So that is, that's number one, that's the very first thing, and my dog's coming to join us. Number two is once you've done that, once you've been able to give yourself a nice bit of a buffer, we don't be able to start seeing a bit more profit. So you can take a deep breath and not panic. The next thing I would be looking to do using AI is to really dial in and enhance your client experience. So there are tools right now, AI tools right now that take a few hours to set up that cost about a hundred bucks a month and you can use them. It's kind of scary, but also really cool if you embrace it. You can use them and train them to basically be a coach, just like you're a coach or, you know, to be able to give advice really, really closely to how you would give advice. And I know no one wants to hear that because we all think we're special snowflakes. But basically, like, and there will always be, obviously, like, your nuance and your years of experience can never be fully trained, but just the knowledge, like the stuff where someone comes to you with a problem and you're like, oh, yeah, I know how to fix this, do this, this, this, like that stuff, that stuff AI can do now and it can do it exactly how or damn close how you would like to do it. It doesn't take long to train them. You literally just upload. Like if, for example, you can take all the videos from your online courses, if you've got podcasts, YouTube videos, whatever, take all of those and you just upload them into a Google Drive folder and that's it. That's all you need to do. It is now trained. And then the best part is that you can also actually monitor these conversations and, you know, go through and if it says something you don't want it to say or it's not quite right, you can, you know, go in and edit it. It will notify the person that that was having that conversation of the updated advice and it will also learn that that's the better response. So now you might be going, all right, how does this help me to be able to do this? And this is just really just one example, but I would really encourage you that if you have a course business, have a coaching business, so sit down and think, how can I use AI to make my experience better or to, you know, maybe fortify out my office suite? So one of the examples of this, because I'm not like, you know, we don't want to use this to fully replace you, unless, of course, that is what you want. Maybe you have a very low ticket offering and you're like, you know what if I could do that? And that could answer all the questions in my community rather than me spending hours every day answering them, great. Another way of freed up some time and profitability. And also it's probably going to get people a better experience. But the thing is we, what we want to do is sit down and look at like, all right, this is my current setup. This is where I'm doing things hands on. This is where people are maybe having to wait to hear back from us. This is like, where can we actually just iron out some of those wrinkles and some of those speed bumps. One of these I found crazy. So what we've done with ours, I just Give you a real life example is we now have this coach available as an option for people. We still have our calls, we still have our community, but we have this extra coach. It's available in our premium program. And what it does is it allows people to get immediate responses to their question. And one of the things I found so interesting about it is that people are asking questions in there that maybe they wouldn't have thought was worth asking in the community. Maybe they would be a bit embarrassed to ask it. They're also having full blown conversations back and forth, back and forth, refining ideas like it has actually been brilliant. People still asking certain things in the community. They're still coming the calls to get my specific expertise and you know, overview of things. But it's just added another layer which is just allowing people to move faster. It stops people from having that, you know, that 24 hour delay in between asking a question and getting their response. So that was just one way we've been able to use it to make a better experience for our clients. But there's so many other examples of this. I know some people who are actually breaking this off and creating it as its own little separate standalone thing is like, would you like to buy some 24.7ai coaching? You know, you can pay for it as an upsell on their DIY programs. Now all of a sudden those DIY programs have support without them having to monitor a community. So that means that again they can be creating a better experience but in a more scalable way. Another great version I've seen is people again and still just using this one example here. And there's, and there's so many of using the AI version of themselves to actually create a more premium. Like they create the gap where it's like okay, if you want to spend this amount but still get support, this is the AI. This is how much is the AI is worth. If you want to speak to me, that's really, that's the premium that's really exclusive. Only a very small number of people can actually speak to the real version of you and they've been able to put their prices up and create this real different differentiation. So, so either, you know, yes, you can still get great support and it's affordable and it's really scalable but it's created this extra level of which I think is really important of going right, but me actual, you know, actual access to you, an actual one to one is now even more valuable rather than less. So that's just one example of a way of using AI to enhance your client experience. And, you know, right now, the reason why this is so important is because one of the things that's going to help you to kind of buffer this AI storm is, is by having really, really loyal clients and as many as possible. So if you can be serving more people in a way that's not going to burn you out, that's brilliant. The other thing to look at, so it's not just, you know, obviously turning yourself into an AI bot version, but the other thing to be looking at is again, is how can you add some, like, surprise and delight moments using AI? Because that can be done now. So simply, for example, you know, if you have clients and they come in and they complete an onboarding form, when they join, you can use that onboarding form to then create all kinds of customized personalized things. You could create a customized gift that you send to them. You could create a customized, you know, kickstart plan that gets popped into Canva and turned into a beautiful checklist or like, there's so many different options, right? And so that hopefully has given you a bit of food for thought, but the overall goal is just to make like, how can you wow as many clients as possible? So you really start to build that brand, start to build that reputation of being, you know, the place to go, the trusted source, the go to expert. Because that brand, that's something that I can never replace. Now, if this has been sort of like helping you, like things are starting to bubble away and you're sitting there going, look, you know what, this all sounds brilliant, but where do I actually start? Don't worry, I've got you covered. I've created a really comprehensive AI guide for course creators. It breaks down everything I'm using AI for in my business. That's daily, weekly, monthly, yearly tasks. It's basically a roadmap to get you started without the overwhelm. And you can grab that totally for free. The link is below. And honestly, it's the perfect starting point to dive in and actually begin using AI strategically in your business. All right, now let's move on to number three. And that is using AI to work faster, to stay competitive. Because, look, everything that is happening that is changing, it has never changed so fast and it is actually just going to get faster. And like I said, if you need to go away and have a little bit of a panic about that, that's all right. But come back, reframe it and go, this is your opportunity. Because not everybody is going to keep up or want to keep Up. A lot of people are going to get freaked out by this. They're going to stick their head in the sand. The ones that don't are the ones who are going to be able to not just survive but thrive. So what you need to be thinking about is how can you use this opportunity and the fact that you can now create content 10 times faster, actually come up with like come up, refine, create ideas, create sales pages, create new offers, test things so much faster. What used to take months like, like realistically if you were sitting here and went, oh, I just had a great idea for an online course. Now you put out your to do list to get out into the world. There's, you know, there's mapping it all out. There's sales pages, there's emails to be written, there's content to be created, the setting it all up, there's all of this stuff. It would take weeks if that was all you were doing. If you're 100% dedicated now, most of that stuff, if you again, if you have the right AI set up, as I said, go grab our course, course GP team if you don't, because we'll show exactly how to do it. But if you have that right AI set up, then it's becomes easy. Like I have actually created courses that are ready to sell and I say ready to sell. I'm a big believer in, you know, going out there, testing before you actually create the full modules, but read yourself. Sales page ready, you know, workbook ready, emails ready, all done. While I was on in a walk, like I go for long walks but like it was two hours and it was all done when I got home and then I was just able to copy and paste it where I needed to pop it into our templates to create the sales page, record the first couple of videos. So there was something there when people actually bought and, and then I sent out the emails the next day and I started making sales. Like that is the speed we can move at and we're going to need to be able to move fast because I think things are going to change. Offers that were resonating are not going to resonate as much anymore and we need to be able to go, okay, well my, I think the reason that it stopped resonating is this. I'm going to try this tweak. I want to get it out there and see what happens. We need to be able to do that. We need to do it fast. And if you can, and if you can go out there and you know, do enough tests Quickly enough, you're going to get yeses, you will get no's, but you'll also get yeses. You start stacking those yeses and that's where real growth comes. So guys, like I said, I think that AI, yes, it can be scary, it can also be a real opportunity and there's always going to be, there are gonna be things that actually AI is never gonna be able to replace. So and these are what we wanna be able to free up. The resources, the time, the energy to really go all in on. So your personal brand expertise, really focusing on building that, becoming known, becoming the go to, that is all going to help you to ride the AI wave. Building genuine community, human connection, focusing on that, layering that in to your offers while outsourcing some of the more time consuming stuff to AI and allowing that to free you up to do this, to show up and be more human again. It's all going to help really making sure you've dialed in a really like high touch customer experience where you surprise and delighting people where they, you know, they all of their speed bumps have been removed and they're able to get in to get momentum, to get results. Those are going to all help you to come out the other side of this in a couple of years time and have a bigger, better, amazing, profitable business. Now I don't recommend that you jump in and try to do these all at once. I would just sit down and think of one of these three areas and sit down and start brainstorming, Just let it bubble away. And as I said, if you haven't already started playing with AI and you're like, I'm not really sure where to start. You know, it's the goal here isn't about becoming an AI expert overnight, it's about, you know, starting, becoming familiar, starting to see how you can use these tools strategically so that you can stay ahead of the curve and not get behind it. And if you want that exact blueprint that how I use AI in every aspect of my business, just make sure you grab that free AI guide I've mentioned. Link is below. It breaks it all down from daily tasks to yearly planning. So you've got a clear starting point. All you need to do is grab a link below, grab your copy and until next time guys, keep doing it online. Bye.