#292 - Diary of Building Our AI Assistant (Part 2): The Business Brain

I was spending the first 20 minutes of every single AI conversation just giving it background information. Here's how my funnel's going. Here's what we launched recently. Here's why this thing worked. Oh, and ignore that other thing because we made a change 3 weeks ago. I was doing this every single time, and that's exactly what broke me enough to build the thing I'm going to walk you through today. Hey, hey there. I am Kate McKibbin from hellofunnels.co and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. This is part 2 of my diary of building out our AI agent team. Last week in part 1, I walked you through how we set up our content system. And if you haven't listened to that one yet, I genuinely recommend going back and starting there. Not just because it gives you good context for this episode, but because I think content is the best first place to start with AI. Everyone needs content. Everyone either doesn't do it enough or spends way too much time on it. And most people's content could do with some improving. Setting up a really smart content process is going to instantly save you time and just make every other part of your business better. As long as you set it up right. That was what we talked about in part 1. Today, I wanna talk about the other thing that was truly game-changing for us. Setting up our business brain. So here was what was happening before we built this. Like I said, every time I opened up ChatGPT or Claude, it was like talking to someone with amnesia. It didn't know the latest updates to my offers. It didn't know the latest stories and testimonials from my clients. It didn't know what we'd launched last month or what was working or what we just changed. So I'd sit there for 20 minutes, voice noting out all of this extra context. This is how my funnel is doing. These are our current programs. This is what we're promoting right now. This is what we just promoted. Oh, and by the way, we changed our pricing last week, so please don't reference the old pricing. And then I would get a decent output, but the next day I'd have to do it all again. Now with some of the recent changes in Claude, things were starting to get better. Some of our tools had direct connections, which meant that when we were setting up our skills and our agents, we could have them pull in certain information automatically. But it wasn't all there, and not every tool had a direct connection. And even the ones that did, they weren't always set up in a way where the AI could easily see the right information in the right context. So the output was better than starting from nothing, but it still wasn't amazing. So I kept thinking, what if our AI just knew everything all the time? That's when I decided to build what I call the business brain. So the business brain for us is an Airtable database. It doesn't have to be Airtable, but that's just what made sense for me. And I'm going to be honest with you, setting this up and planning it out nearly broke me and my team. We are big nerds. We love a spreadsheet. But database architecture is an entirely different beast. Figuring out exactly what to track, how to structure it, what connects to what— it was so much testing and tweaking, and we're still refining it. We're still adding things in, but where we've landed is something I'm really proud of. So let me walk you through what we now have full visibility over, and so does our AI. First, we have all of our contacts and not just a list of names and emails. We can actually see all of the activity that each contact has taken. So now we've been building this out since the start of the year. So we've got almost 4 full months of activity data and it just gets better and better. The more we collect, we can see their purchases. We can see what funnels they've gone through and when, and what they did in them. We've seen what they've opted in for. That's the front end stuff. Then it goes deeper. We can see any support tickets raised, any emails, any DMs they've sent through. And if they're a customer, it goes a level deeper again. We can see the conversations and posts they've made in the community, summaries of their one-on-one calls, what we discussed on our group calls. All of it is assigned to that contact or client's profile. And what this means is we now have this incredibly rich, deep understanding of every single person in our world, not just our clients, which was game-changing enough on its own, but also the people who are new to our world, the people moving through our funnels. And this is where it gets really fun because the business brain on its own is just data and some pretty dashboards. What matters is what you do with it. So let me give you a few examples of just some of the things that this has enabled us to do automatically. So every week I now get a list of people who are showing all of the invisible buying signals, the ones who've been opening the emails, clicking on the sales page multiple times, watching the webinar twice, engaging with our content. As a business owner, you can't easily see these signals without manually diving into data and tracking 1,000 spreadsheets. And let's be honest, nobody does that. But now our AI can see all of it and it flags the people who look likely to buy, and then it goes one step further and it even crafts the perfect reach-out strategy for that buyer. So we're not guessing, we know exactly who's warm, what they've been looking at and exactly how to present the best offer to them. That was just step one. The next thing was probably one of the most underrated, but most impactful. So previously, when we would sit down to plan out our promotions for the month, our marketing messages, our content angles, even the offers themselves, we used to be guessing, or at best would be going off a gut feel or whatever we could maybe remember from recent client conversations or things we've maybe seen come up in our feed a lot. Now our AI agents go into that business brain and pull out exactly what people are saying and what they're doing. What are our customers talking about right now? What are people who are applying for our offers saying is their biggest pain point? What's that thing that they're currently trying to solve in their own words? What's coming up in our DMs and client conversations over and over again? We now have this incredibly rich picture of the exact words our ideal clients are using to describe their problems, today. And that means when we write a sales page or plan a launch or craft an email sequence, we're not sitting there trying to imagine what might resonate. We're literally speaking their language back to them because they told us in their applications, in their DMs, in the community, in the support tickets. We're now just able to listen at scale. And the difference that makes to our marketing is massive. Now I want to jump in here for a sec, because I know some of you are listening to this going, okay. I'd kind of like to see this, like, what does this actually look like? And I've got something for you. So on our Cash Money Content Upgrade Workshop, yes, I know that's a mouthful, that we ran just a couple of days ago, one of the bonus sections was me actually walking through our AI systems beyond just the content. So the client delivery, our lead scoring, our marketing, our sales, the business brain, our dashboards, all of it. And honestly, I think it was people's favorite part of the whole training. So I've actually pulled that piece out on its own and turned it into a little mini, totally free training called our AI Playbook. It's basically a behind the scenes walkthrough of the exact AI systems we're using in our 7-figure coaching and course-based business. If you wanna start thinking beyond prompting, beyond just content, if you wanna see what's actually possible when you set this stuff up properly and how fast you can do it, grab the link in the show notes below. It's only going to be valid for a limited time. Okay, back to it. Next, we dived into client delivery, and this one is another favorite of mine because I love all of our clients. I truly do. We have such amazing people in our communities, and I want every single one of them to feel genuinely looked after. But the fact is, there are hundreds of people across our programs at any one time, and it is really hard to keep all of that information in your brain. Who you spoke to last, what they're working on, what came up 3 calls ago, who's gone quiet, who's crushing it. So here's what we built to solve that problem. First of all, our pre-call briefings. Now, anytime I jump on a client call, before the call even happens, our system checks my calendar. It sees who the call is with and it does a deep dive on that person automatically and sends it straight to me. So it pulls every note, what we talked about last time, what's been discussed in the community, anything that came up on other calls or from other mentors, where they are against the game plan we set for them. I can skim that in a couple of minutes. And then I walk into that call and we don't have to spend the first 10 minutes getting me all caught up. I'm just there. I know where they're at. I can serve them better. On top of that, we added our post-call workflows. So when the call finishes, another system kicks in automatically. It summarizes the call, sends those summaries to our other coaches so they're across what we discussed, feeds everything back into the business brain so it's recorded and ready for next time, and then creates a beautiful PDF of the exact game plan we discussed, the key metrics they need to focus on, and any other resources they need. Plus, it drafts the follow-up email and even organizes to send them some flowers. All of this used to be something I was seriously considering hiring someone for, and not just anyone, someone at like $40 to $60 an hour part-time. Now it happens automatically because we built the infrastructure behind the prompting. And it doesn't stop at calls. We've also set up fully automated weekly client care. This means every single person in our program is looked after every single week without it all having to live in my head. Before this, it just couldn't happen. There literally aren't enough hours in the day to personally monitor every single client's progress. Now it happens and our clients can feel it. Here's what I want you to take away from all of this. Most people are using AI to write a caption or brainstorm ideas or plan out 30 days of content. That's the equivalent of buying an iPhone and using it as a torch. The real power is not in the prompts, it's in the systems, and in particularly in the systems that learn and grow as you use them. It's in building the infrastructure so your AI actually knows your business, knows your clients, and can do genuinely useful specific things every single day without you having to type out 20 minutes of context each time. Content was the best place to start. I still believe that, but it is just the tip of the iceberg and the coaches and course creators who are figuring this out now, they're gonna have an absurd advantage over everyone else. If you wanna see exactly what these systems look like, make sure you grab our AI playbook. Mini workshop. It's a behind-the-scenes walkthrough of every AI system we've built so far. Client delivery, lead scoring, daily briefings, sales, the business brain, all of it. Just click the link in the show notes now to grab it. It's only available for a limited time and it's totally free. And if you missed part 1 of this series where I walked you through how we set up our content system, go back and listen to that one first. It is the perfect starting point. All right, that's it for today, guys. I'll see you all next week.