9: Using AI for Business Coaching & Consulting with Jodie Cook

Today, we're joined by Jody Cook, the visionary behind CoachVox AI, where the future of coaching meets AI innovation. Using CoachVox AI's advanced training system, entrepreneurs, coaches and content creators can train an AI model in their style to generate leads, build familiarity with their audience, and add value to their clients. Jody's also an author of books and articles about entrepreneurship and artificial intelligence. She currently holds a senior contributor position at Forbes Magazine. She competes internationally in powerlifting and travels the world working remotely. Prepare to be blown away in this episode where we interview Jody Cook. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Foreign. Welcome to the show. And as I mentioned before, we started recording, if you don't mind, take a minute to just kind of let everybody know how you've arrived on this podcast and what you're doing to keep yourself busy with AI.

Sure. Thank you, Chris. Thank you so much, first of all, for inviting me on. So, I am Jody Cook. I am founder of Coach Box AI and we make artificially intelligent coaches based on real people. So creators who are mainly coaches with content, but they could be course creators, podcast hosts, authors, consultants, they train an AI model in our platform with their style and content they already have, and then they use it to generate leads and to add value to their clients. And some of them are charging for access to the AI version of them. And then separately from that, with everything that I learn building coachbox, I try and share as much as possible with other entrepreneurs to help them use AI to turn their businesses into AI, into AI businesses. So I mainly do that in my work as a senior contributor for Forbes. So I write a lot about ChatGPT prompts because we spend a lot of time figuring out the OpenAI API and learn quite a lot doing that. And especially in the field of AI coaching, which I just love geeking out on.

Yeah, I'd actually like to talk more about that. So new users may not be aware of this concept of this digital clone or the AI coach that. That you guys are building at CoachVox. What. What got you interested in that application of generative AI in particular, especially to the point to where you want to pursue it as, like, a startup and. And all the trials and tribulations that come with that?

Yeah, good question. I think that it really started from I sold a business, a social media agency in the middle of 2021. And then part of the reason I was able to sell it was because I'd made myself almost redundant from the company. So even though I owned it, I didn't run it, and I had processes in place and a really amazing team in place. And it was all about kind of, I guess, cloning myself with like, SOPs and Excel documents and other people and. And doing it that way. And so when I. When I sold, I had a lot of people saying, can you help me? Like, can you coach me or can you mentor me? And I was like, maybe, but I've got all this. I've got way more free time now. I don't just want to kind of fill it. So we came about starting CoachBox as a. It's actually a completely different business. Before it was CoachBox, AI, it was a platform for coaching by voice note. And then we had this idea when we were building this platform for coaching by voice note, that one day these, the voice notes or the. Or the conversations that people were having with the AI, with the coaches would actually be AI generated. And we thought it was absolutely miles off. We thought it was like years and years in the future. But then in. So in December 2022, I remember getting a text from my friend Richard, who was like, have you seen OpenAI's new model? Have you seen it? It's like having this genius in your pocket. And I was, is this. And I think I was in New Zealand at the time. And I woke up, I went straight onto it. And I think for the whole day, I didn't eat anything, I didn't get dressed. I was just like, just figuring it out. And I think my brain was just. Just exploding with, like, how, how can we use this? What can we do? Because I don't think I'd ever really seen anything like it. And so the actual first thing I did was I joined a mastermind of business owners who wanted to explore AI. And I thought that what we'd be doing was going, okay, how do we take our businesses and how do we figure out, like, how we can use this within our existing businesses? And I thought we'd be coming up with cool tools and, like, talking about how we could really, really make. Make something of it. And what I found was that in the mastermind, everyone was scared. They were really scared of plagiarism. They were scared of the models, the LLMs using their content. They were scared of Google penalties, and they were scared of freelancers using ChatGPT to write things and to do the work. And Them not knowing. So that was, that was eye opening because I really, I really expected more people to be seeing what was in it. And actually it was, it was just kind of a, oh, no, what can we do? How can we protect ourselves? How can we kind of run away from it? In the meantime, I was very much figuring out what we could do with Coach Box around, around this, this new stuff. And so we built a first AI coach, which was Jody AI, which was based on my books and articles and things just to figure out if we could do it, if we could create this AI coaching experience, text based AI coaching experience, and have it kind of replicate like my methods and if I shared it out with my audience, if they would be like, yes, this is how you coach me or mentor me. And when that worked out and when we got really good feedback and when we took a bunch of people through a kind of. It was almost like a cohort. Like I got people to tell me what they were, where they were in their businesses, got them to check in with the AI version of me every five days for a month and then got their results at the end and found how much of a difference it had made to their business. Having these regular AI coaching sessions that we were like, oh my goodness, we're onto something. And that's when we started creating the platform. That meant other creators could use their content to create AI versions of themselves. And then here we are. And it's only been, it's only been launched for about six or seven months, but we've now made hundreds of AI coaches. And they're not just business coaches, they're in various different, different fields doing different things and it's. Yeah, it's just a really exciting time.

So for somebody who maybe they've worked with a coach in the past, but this idea of an AI coach is novel to them. What's the experience like? What's the feedback that you've gotten back? Has it been. You said it was very helpful for these people after the first month of trying it. What is that experience like for somebody who might be interested in checking out Jody Coach or any of the coaches that are on your platform?

Yeah. So. Well, I guess if you mainly think about it from the creator's point of view, they are people with. They've got knowledge, they've got content, they've got frameworks and methodologies and they've got stuff like people, they're in demand and people want to hear from them, but they probably can't help everyone. They want to either because the price or the availability they have, they would have to, you know, they would have to charge a lot less and be a lot busier, and they maybe don't want to do that. So the idea is that we're taking a kind of snapshot of their style and training a model in such a way that that model can coach them in their style and it can replicate. Like, it's definitely. I mean, it's not going to be the whole experience, but. But it's going to be enough of it that they get the. They get a lot of the benefit. And so in our, in our training kind of platform, there's the. The main thing that will configure the model to start with is what we've called the style sliders. So this is where someone chooses, are they more a coach, which is where it'll ask questions, it'll hold space, or are they more a mentor, which is where it'll give advice and give very direct instructions. And so they kind of choose that. Then they choose whether it's more serious or jovial or all these different things. And then that will mean that the creator's client, the AI coaches, clients then get a wholly different experience that's based on that individual creator's style. But from a client's point of view, I really. We tested this a lot because we had this big thing like, will people really do it? Will they really engage with an AI coach? Like, obviously they know it's a robot. We don't try and hide that. But we weren't totally sure if people would be open to it. And then when we started questioning people about, like, well, you know, would you use an AI coach? They came up with all these benefits like, well, yeah, it's. It's 24 7. I don't have to worry about, like, racking up a big bill. I don't have to worry about asking stupid questions. I can, I can just keep on. I can keep on talking to it. I can. I can say the things that I probably wouldn't actually say to the real. The real person. And all of a sudden they came up with all these benefits, and then we were like, huh, yeah, of course that does. That makes total sense. But in the meantime, I think the magic thing is that, because that it's not just. They're not just talking to ChatGPT, they're talking to someone who is like Jody AI or Alice AI, and it's based on that person while they are getting that AI coaching, they're, they're, like, building up this familiarity and this affinity towards the original creator without them doing anything. Like, Alice isn't there, she's, she's on the beach, she's with clients, she's, she's doing other stuff and, and somehow someone's getting more value out of her work than they would if they were just watching her YouTube videos or reading her book. Because it's actually talking back.

It's fascinating. Are you using any of the AI coaches that are on your platform?

Yes, there's, yeah, there's quite a few of them. So there's one in particular that I absolutely love and it's a, we think it's the world's first AI LinkedIn coach and it's based on a real life LinkedIn influencer, LinkedIn consultant and she's called Lara Acosta. And she built up a hundred thousand person audience on LinkedIn in under 18 months and trained Lara AI to help people with her frameworks and her methods. So Lara AI will use the real Lara's style and all her signature phrases that she says, kind of, she says funny words, she calls people bestie and she says, go slay and she's got all these phrases that she's trained the model with. But Lara AI will roast your LinkedIn content. So you could say to it, okay, I'm about to post this LinkedIn post and like, tell me what's wrong with it and it'll go, okay, great, brace yourself, do it. You'll put your LinkedIn post in and then it'll tell you, you know, improve the hook, make it this instead. It should be more concise, do this instead. Improve your call to action, do this instead. And it'll be very, very specific in what you should do. Because Lara trained it on her frameworks and so the coaches that we're building are capable of following frameworks through in a way that like the human Lara would if she was talking you through your LinkedIn post.

This is fascinating. So I would imagine that if I wanted to engage with Lara directly, hey, I need help with LinkedIn. The price and the availability would be prohibitive for most individuals who wanted to help with their LinkedIn profile. But with something like this, there is no limit to the amount of people that she can support. Her pricing isn't a reflection of trading time for money any longer. So she can provide immense value at a discounted price for her people. Yet they still get probably 80, 90% of what she would do if they were paying her thousands of dollars to actually be there live. That's fascinating.

Yeah. To work with Lara it would be, I think it's around 3k a month because she, she goes right to some clients. She, she kind of roasts people's posts on, on a day to day basis and helps them out with other different things too with Linked Gen, but in her. So she has a cohort as well where she helps people out kind of in a group setting. But at the moment she's got Lara AI as like a value add to her cohort. So it's the people who are in there and she can add, she can actually add more people into her cohort because lots of the day to day queries are taken care of by her AI. But then in a couple of months she's going to roll it out as a separate product. So you could just have it for like $10 a month or $20 a month. And this is just the thing that you use even if you're not in the cohort. So there's, I mean there's lots of different, different use cases and different ways of doing it. But we work quite closely with our creators. I think this is from. Because I used to have an agency. So it was very like we work very, very closely with clients but now we're working very closely with our, with our creators and we figure out with them what the right, what the right use case is and how they should do it and how it fits in with their business.

So one of the things, and this is a common topic, you mentioned that when you joined the Mastermind you were very excited about collaborating with other people who were just as enthusiastic about harnessing, you know, what can we do with this stuff. But you were met with how do we protect ourselves from it? Right. And you know, that's a new concept to me. I was talking to somebody and our company is chief AI officer and it's abbreviated C A I O. And we kind of have this thing where that's somebody's experience. They're frustrated at the computer, somebody that knows this stuff comes up and types on it and goes see AI. And the other person goes oh, they have that oh moment. Right? And to me, I always took that oh moment to be positive, right? Like they're, they're having that. The same O moment I had, which was like wow, this is amazing. But I was talking to a consultant who does a lot of work with, with individuals. They go in and they, they manage the deployment of generative A on the businesses. And he said no, the O A lot of times is them going oh, like yeah, my competition is using this like it's, it's a, it's not a, it's not a, a positive wake up call for them. It's like a, an alarm. Like, oh my gosh, this, this thing's powerful. And others are, my competition's using this, right? When you're dealing, especially with your internal team, you guys were obviously tech forward, you were doing voice note coaching and that sort of thing, which isn't nearly as sophisticated as what you're doing now. Did your internal team or your clients that you were working with, were they expressive of hesitation to use the models? Were they concerned they were going to lose their jobs or what was that like internally for your team?

I think when we switched from Voicenet coaching to creating AI coaches, we didn't convert as many of the original coaches to AI coaches as we thought we would because there were some that were skeptical for sure. But then I feel like it's just where you are in the curve, in the kind of take up curve. And we got, we got early adopters. Like our first few people were like, I have no idea what this is going to, what this is going to involve. It's going to be about, but I trust you, so let's do it. And so now we're finding that those original Voicenet coaches are coming on board and are signing up. But it just, it, yeah, it took, it's a very, I think it's a very specific type of person to see something like that, a change, a transformation, something that's going on and then be like, yes, I'm going to do something with it, or thinking, how can I use this? And it reminded me so much of 2020, when coronavirus happened and when there was like, the world's changed. What are you going to do? You're going to just, you know, sit there and wait for it to blow over or are you going to absolutely change everything and figure out how to make it work? It's just, just the same. But really the only, the only constant is change. So it's almost like you might as well love it. You might as well figure out how to use it and just keep going.

For somebody who had hesitation out there because again, our target audience is small to medium businesses. Whether you're an employee or a coach or consultant or the owner of the business, if, if there is that hesitation, how do you address that? I mean, I don't know if you, you do very often, but with potential clients or whatever, how do you address that hesitation? What do you tell them? We'll be back after a Quick break. Do you want to start your own unsexy business offering a local service or a trade to your local community? Come check out the Owner Ops podcast. We bring on people like Sam, who has built a $22 million roofing company in five years. I've also brought on people like Brock, who generated $1.3 million of revenue in his first seven months installing septic systems.

If you are looking to build your.

Own local service or trade business, come check out the Owner Ops podcast. That's ownerops.com o w n r-ops.com.

I think when I'm talking to entrepreneurs about using AI in their business or figuring out how to move with the times, I guess I'd always encourage them to not think about their business as it is now as being this static thing that can never change. I'd actually encourage them to use, I think it's Elon Musk's favorite method of solving problems. And it's just to go back to first principles, so to say, okay, so you deliver. You, you solve this problem for these people and get them to define that. So we, we help, we help content creators make more money or whatever it might be. This every. Everyone's business can answer. Can fill in the square brackets in that sentence.

Sure.

And then it's about going, okay, well, this is how you do it now. But imagine if it wasn't through those different processes or those different methods, how could it be almost completely reimagined so you get the same outcome for the same people, but just in a different way. And I always think of, like, Uber, like, Uber's a really good example because we're just taking people from A to B, and at one point we were taking people from A to B and it was just like by horse and car. And now it's, we are ordering strangers from the Internet and getting in their car. But at some point, point, we're not going to order the strangers from the Internet. We're not, they're not going to be drivers. We're just going to order the cars and we're not going to even manually do it. We're gonna, it's gonna sync with our calendar or our brains, and it's just gonna. The car's gonna arrive and maybe it's not even gonna be a car. It's just gonna be teleportation. So it's almost like if you keep just thinking, we help people get to different. We help everyday people get to different places, there's like a million ways that that could happen. And then it's figuring out where you can fit into that so that you sort of that outcome for your people. And I feel like if someone's really open to that, I mean, you could even ask ChatGPT about that. You could say, this is what I do, this is how I do it. Give me all the different ways this could be done in a real futuristic way. And then I feel like the real, the real entrepreneurs who are going to make the most of this entire change period will be the ones who attack that solution and who go, who go, okay, find me someone who can build it for me or get me a chief AI officer who can figure out how to put this in place. And maybe they start small and that's fine, but it's like this acceptance that the evolution has to happen.

Very interesting because as you were saying that me, because I've had that O moment, my default now. And for anybody who's listening, once you have that oh moment, your default starts to shift to oh, can Chat GPT help with this? Okay, is there an AI tool that.

Can help with this?

And the answer right now you're going to find is yes. So in example, Jody gave that first principles framework, sit down at Chat GPT if you haven't spent a lot of time and say exactly what she said, here's my business. How would Elon Musk approach this? How would Warren Buffett like anybody that you have access to? But it. The key really is you sitting down and starting to type.

Right.

And starting to, like Jody said the first day that she found out about this, forgot about everything else and just dove in on these models. And I would imagine that by the end of that day, you were on your way to being a power user. Just. It took a day, right?

Yeah, for sure. Was there a longer process? Yeah, probably, because I think I'm quite impulsive and I can just roll with something before I've really thought about it. So it was a. Even before we started Coachbox, me and my husband, who's also my co founder, we thought of like 35 business ideas before we went forward with Coachbox, which was number 22. But that's. But I would have gone forward with number one. But in. But between us, we managed to think about more and slow down a little bit. So I think, yeah, I think there's an element of feeling it out, but then at some point you just have to move forward because you could research and you could, you could do, you could do a lot of the thinking. And maybe, maybe another thing to think about is if you're coming up with solutions based on how your business delivers a solution to a certain audience, don't Google other tools that are out there. Because it's so easy to look out there and be like, oh, yeah, well, we, you know, we help entrepreneurs with contract law and, oh, there's loads of apps that are doing that with AI right now. So therefore it's stupid. We need to not do it. And don't like, because you overestimate the competition and you underestimate yourself. So it's so much better just to not research. Don't even let yourself. Until you've planned it out and you've figured out how to do it, and then trust that you've got enough knowledge of the industry and you've got the right, you've got the people who trust you and that you will make it a success.

Do you have, in your peer group, is everybody like a. An AI literate individual or are there still people that are like, jody, what should I do?

Yeah, yeah, there's a, There's a real mix. I hang out with a lot of location independent entrepreneurs because that's what I am. And a lot of my friends are. And I would say a lot of them are. I, I'm gonna use the, the term pirates, but I, I mean it in the nicest possible way. I mean, like, they'll, they'll hear of something and then they'll go, huh, I can, you know, what can I do with this? And these are the people who were doing affiliate marketing before anyone else heard of it, or drop shipping or do you know all the things where it's like, if, if you started it now, it would be too late, but they were starting it right at the start. So I've, I think I'm lucky to have in my network a lot of people who are just like, right, let's cancel all your plans. Let's just figure this out. But I think it's a really nice. It's infectious. When you, when you have other people like that who are so intent on not being part of the bandwagon, it means you. I sometimes feel like I'm really late, but then I remember that, actually, no, we're. We're way ahead.

Yeah, that's wild. I. You and, and others that I interview, we're in kind of a bubble and we assume that, oh, everybody knows that. Everybody knows that when it comes to this stuff. But then you talk to some individuals and they don't have, They've never even tried the first interaction with a GPT model. So we're pretty early. So anybody even listening to this is early, right? Just gaining your awareness. And I know that you don't do, like, advisory for businesses that are looking to deploy AI, but let's say you're sitting at the coffee shop, you're having a cup with your friend, and they're like, we gotta get this AI stuff figured out in our business. Where do we start? Jody, what would you tell them to do?

What would I tell them to do? Yeah. I'm not a advisor at all. I'm just building my own.

Yeah.

AI SaaS and figuring stuff out. But there are so many people out there who know so much stuff. I've actually shared this on you found me on LinkedIn. I'm Jody Cook. J O D I E C O. Okay. I actually put out a, A post that said, tell me who you are AI consultants to find, like to find lots of them. And to mean that I can kind of send people along to the right person. I would honestly pay someone for an hour of their time and talk at them, talk all your ideas at them and get their thoughts because that's just, it's just so valuable to speak to someone who knows their stuff. And then after finding that out, I would say get them to tell you who should build it and get them to recommend people and then. And just keep, Keep talking to people. Because someone, I mean, AI is such a different area and it involves so many different facets. And you could find someone that could be the perfect person to build something for you or with you, who would be the per. The exact wrong person to start your best mate's AI business. So just keep asking, Keep talking to people.

So that's, that's a great bit of advice because I'm, I'm big on the concept of who, not how. Right.

Yeah.

Who can fix this rather than how do I fix this?

Oh, however.

Yeah, yeah, we do a lot of research on. Because we want to be able to communicate to executives and C suite and leadership teams because they're asking, okay, great, we like this stuff. Let's get started. But the paucity, the, the lack of. I mean, because there's a lot of people out there that are like, oh, I'm a chief AI officer and they know how to use chat GPT well, but they're not thinking about strategic application of the tools across an entire business. They're thinking about, oh, well, you don't have to do that task anymore. Hey, I'm, I'm an expert for those people who are Looking. Where do you send them to find talent?

I would send them to LinkedIn. I would send to LinkedIn now I get them to search and I would get them to ask. But I think what you just said is really important because anyone could tell you five ChatGPT prompts to, you know, be anything but. I think you probably want someone who was in AI before it was cool and isn't learning as they go along. And you would probably also want someone who has got a real commercial awareness, because I think what you probably don't want is someone who has also got shiny object syndrome. Because you will have shiny object syndrome, but if you match up with another person, you'll be like, oh, we could, we could create this and this and this, but you want someone who'll be like, hang on, how does this fit in with your business? Or does this, you know, does this fit with your audience or does this. You want someone to ask those questions?

Yep. So Jodi used a term that if you're not an entrepreneur, you may not be terribly familiar with it, but it's sos Shiny object and it's, it's the entrepreneurs. I, I see it as we're, we're blessed and we're cursed with the ability to see opportunity everywhere. Right. And that shiny object syndrome, for those of you who aren't familiar with that term, it's essentially you're seeing the opportunities and you're pursuing them without stopping, pausing, reflecting and saying, of all these options, which one makes the most sense for my business? So very, very important, you don't want a consultant to come in with shiny object syndrome because they will have you going all over the place.

So shiny object syndrome actually, I think can apply to AI tools because if you subscribe to the newsletters, if you see what's out there, you can, you can just, every day you could be trying a new tool and you're like, oh my goodness, this one can do this and this one can do this. But I, I'd kind of to avoid shiny object syndrome just with all the tools that are out there. I would encourage someone again to go back to their business and say, what are we trying to do? What are we trying to, what are we trying to achieve for which people? And then make sure it fits in first, because I have 100 fallen into this myself. Someone sent me this cool tool for making like shorts, like turning, you know, are you gone podcasts. You can just upload it into this thing and then it creates you shorts and then it's like, yeah, you should just create a TikTok channel. And then it's like, I didn't, I wasn't, it wasn't in my plans before to make one, but now that this tool's around, it doesn't mean I should do it. So it's like taking a step back and not getting shiny object syndrome. With the AI tools that you can create, but also with the ones that you just don't have to use just because they exist, it's like it has to be considered.

Great advice. You know, one of the things you mentioned, LinkedIn is a great resource. I, I've found a lot of, of insight from the Twitter AI environment and I know that you're part of that as well. And in particular, I want to reference something that you posted there. And I found it through Rowan Chung had reposted something and it was a very simple process that you, and for anybody listening, I want you to, to pay attention to this because this is pretty cool and it's a perfect example of how easy it is to get leverage from these models. So in that post that Rowan reposted from you, it was you talking about, hey, if I want to do an sop, I jump on Loom, I record what I'm doing. I take the transcript from Loom, I put that into GPT, I give it some, some guide rails on how to spit out that sop and boom, like that. And for most small businesses, we've done a lot of consulting and advisory on growing small to medium businesses. And the universal issue is poor process, poor process documentation, even just understanding, oh, that is a process. And business owners, I found, are very hesitant to take the time to document those things because they just don't see as much value in it. Where they are today, now move forward six months or six years and their business has grown. If they don't have those in place, it's chaos, pure chaos. Right? And they have to build those processes now. They have to do it with all the chaos going on rather than doing it initially. And what you talked about with that model was an example that the solopreneur can start today. And with one of those, record the loom. Here's how I check my email, here's how I do whatever it is, turn that into run it through an SOP framework prompt that you've got that is off your plate again. And you know, it's. Delegation is not a new concept. But to be able to rapidly document processes and start delegating those out, it was a fantastic example of how you use AI at Work. Now, I'm not going to put you on the spot, but if you have any other, like, nuggets like that, like I said it straight to my VAs. Watch this. Do it right. Anything else like that you got? That's.

Yeah.

That you.

It's kind of like a nugget you love. Yeah. Well, firstly, thank you for sharing that one. And yeah, it's. I'm just. The thing I'm so fascinated about is how we can use AI to do all the boring stuff that no one wants to do. Because once we get all that out of the way, we are free to be like the highest potential of ourselves. Like, we can really see what we're capable of because it's not like, oh, I have to write SOPS. It's like, no ChatGPT can do it. Forget that. Do what you're here to do. So that's why I'm so passionate about it. But so, okay, so two things that I'll share with you. One of them is you mentioned the fact that we think that everyone else is all caught on and everyone else is using the stuff, but actually they're not at all. And one thing I did over Christmas was I introduced my dad to ChatGPT and specifically the image creation side of ChatGPT and that was fascinating because he has a running injury right now, but he has done the London, he's done a lot of marathons and he's got the London marathon coming up and he's trying to rehab himself back to being able to run it really well. And I gave him a visualization prompt that he used in ChatGPT and since shared it online. And I use it to create myself my own desktop backgrounds for my computer. And so, yeah, they're so much fun. So this. So this requires paid chatgpt or you can use it in different LLMs if you want, but it's. Give me an inspirational landscape image of. And then you put you. You fill out these brackets to describe your ideal self. Like what does your, your dream self look like while you can see them from behind? And that's important because it's not always amazing at making faces and you don't want to ruin the magic with a bad face that doesn't look like you. So then we've got they're wearing. And then describe what your ideal self wears while doing and describe something you're doing. So I put doing work I love and living in. And then you describe your ideal city or your ideal AP apartment or your ideal house. And so you put all this scene together, you click go. And then what comes out is so cool. And so mine was me doing work I love. And it was like a. A kind of short blonde. A girl with short blonde hair wearing activewear and she's somewhere high up in an apartment and she's looking over and she can see the mountains and like that kind of stuff. And it came up with something and I was like. And it was just.

That's the one I saw. Yeah, it was pretty cool.

Yeah. And when. And did you see in the post as well? People started sharing theirs and saying what they were doing as well. It's. Yeah, we could, we could share the link to the post because it'. Yeah, it was ace seeing other people's examples. But when I showed my dad, it came up with a picture of him running the London Marathon with his. Because he does it for a charity called Acorns running the London Marathon with his. With his Acorns vest on and with all the crowd there running over Tower Bridge. And it was like it almost. He almost got emotional just even looking at it because it's just this idea that you can visualize your future and bring it to life straight away. So I really love using it for vision boarding especially.

That's beautiful because most people, you know, I'm US based and I know that the US culture is very money driven. Right. Like it's, there's a lot of hustle and Go, go, go. And to use it for something inspirational like that is not an example that's been shared on the podcast yet.

Yeah, okay.

But I know how powerful it is. It's great.

So I've got one for hustle and Go, Go, go that you might enjoy as well. I shared this Today, Today on LinkedIn. So I was. Because, because we do a lot, you know, we create AI coaches so we geek out a lot around. How do you get models to act like a certain type of coach and especially a really extreme type of coach? Because we've got AI. We've got AI coaches for recruitment, law, LinkedIn, like astrology, everything you could imagine. But when you want to create one for a real harsh style, we are figuring we figure out how to train our models to do that and we mess around with ChatGPT before we do it in coach box. So one that I shared today was this. I feel like I'm not achieving everything I'm capable of and I'm sure I'm missing something. This is what you type into ChatGPT. Your task is to help me find it, adopt the role of a tough ex military leader and initiate an intense and high pressure back and forth conversation where you ask me questions one at a time about why I'm not doing more to fulfill my potential. When I answer each question, be highly skeptical of my responses. Search for flaws and notice when I become defensive or make excuses. Take no prisoners. Keep grilling me and questioning my assumptions until I get a revelation. Apply tough love, don't break character. Keep this conversation going until I tap out with the safe word. And then you have to give it a safe word and start with the question what's stopping you from? And then you have to tell it your biggest goal and say you, you can use free ChatGPT for this. You can use any other LLM, but you fill out those square brackets, put that in and it's actually terrifying. Some of the responses back to people who tried it on LinkedIn are just like, oh, my goodness. I, like, I wasn't prepared for that. Like, it's, it really goes to town on it. So yeah, would encourage anyone to try that one out and see what comes up.

The first person I think of is David Goggins.

If you know, oh, yeah, this is a very. Yes. I actually just wrote. Yeah, I just read his book and I. And I wrote for Forbes five ChatGPT prompts to be more David. Really inspired by that. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, very cool.

Yeah, it's cool, like, because all these role models that we've got, it's like, that's exactly what you want. You don't just want to read their book. You don't just want to watch them on YouTube. You want to be like, how do I apply this person's knowledge, this person's experience? How do I just get them at my beck and call the whole time? That's why it's so exciting creating the coaches based on the real people. Because it's like you could actually have this kind of character in your pocket the whole time.

Yeah.

If they have made an AI version of themselves.

So this is interesting and I would like to apply this. Right. So what would the mechanics of that be? I go to chat GPT, I start with a prompt like this. I've got some issues in my life, my business, whatever. I find a celebrity coach or a guru or somebody that I'm familiar with their work and I just go in there and I say, hey, you're now an expert at Brene Brown's, you know, teachings. Here's my life situation. How would Brene address that? You just start there.

Yeah, you could Do. You could take the prompt I just read out and you could edit it so it, so it says like, instead of adopt the role of whatever I've said, you could put someone else in there. They would have to be quite famous for ChatGPT to know exactly who it was. You could, or you could describe, you could describe their style and then you could get that. But the most important thing in this one is that you say, I want a back and forth conversation where you don't stop until I say stop. Because it won't do that if you don't prompt it well. It'll ask you multiple questions at the same time. It'll give you advice when you might not want advice, you might just want questions. And it won't really be a simulated coaching session.

You know, you brought up prompting and I assume, you know, I don't even think about it anymore because I know how to communicate. I know how to phrase things. By learning how to prompt, it's caused me to really think about the words that I use, not only to get the outcome from GPT, but in communication in general. For somebody who. And, and here's the thing. I'm not an engineer type. I'm not a science guy. I'm not a data person. I'm more of the entrepreneur. The. So this idea of a prompt engineer may sound intimidating to somebody who is like, I'm not an engineer. How do I do this stuff? Do you have any tips or tricks for like your coaches or your clients on maybe some basic frameworks to get the best out of your prompting efforts?

Yes, for sure. I've written a lot about this on my. We could link this as well, but on my Forbes column there's like the seven components of the perfect prompt and there's. I actually wrote about OpenAI's own advice on how to prompt, but I'd say overall. Well, in our system we don't require our creators to know how to prompt because we've kind of put a very beautiful interface on top of the prompting. So we do all that stuff behind the scenes and they just have to slide sliders and put information in. But overall, if you're using models like ChatGPT, I would say be as. Be as clear as possible, don't ask it loads of stuff within the same prompt. Try and stick to one thing. If you can specify the format, do that. If you can break it up with lines and spread stuff out, do that. If something's important, say it more than once so it knows it's important. And overall, I would think, think of Chat GPT as like your friendly, enthusiastic Internet. So if it came back with some work, you wouldn't be like, oh, no, that's rubbish, do it again. You'd be like, okay, great. Well, you don't need to. It doesn't need praise. It definitely doesn't need please and thank yous and praise. But you would say, okay, so now what I want you to do is I want you to edit it in this way so it's more something. So it's, it's got this tone or so you remove these words or so you add these words or something. You would probably give it an example. You would probably just be very specific about what you wanted. And so I think about prompting as asking or conversing with someone who was like a junior member of the team. And then keep, like, basically keep going. I think it's the. I always think that, like, large language models show us our flaws. They show them back to us because if we ask a really bad question, it will give a really bad response. And you cannot blame the model. All you can blame is yourself. So we just have to get better at it and keep getting better and appreciate that it's fairly new in the grand scheme of technology. It's a fairly new thing for entrepreneurs to have to learn. So, like, it's okay not to be very good at first, but soon you'll just, you'll almost think in prompts.

So it sounds like the best advice for somebody, obviously, would be to sit down in front of the model and start typing. When you get the crap output, don't say, oh, I tried GPT. It doesn't work. Take responsibility for the crap output and go back and say, what I meant was, or whatever like that. So it's just, it becomes this back and forth. And I love the, this, this analogy of like an intern. You're not going to fire the intern because they made a mistake, right? You're gonna. I mean, not on their first day. Like with Chat GPT. They're not gonna. This doesn't work. I tried it. You're gonna do exactly like you said. Oh, I'm sorry. What I meant was let's keep it over there and let's put it this way. And I'll. And if the users, new users can remember that anthropomorphization, giving the human characteristics to the computer, I think that for those of you who are listening, who are a little bit intimidated, if you treat it like that, the intimidation is going to go away. Because this is an assistant It's a, it's a, an aid for your business. Not something that you need to be intimidated by or compete with, but actually use it as that talented, talented aid. So you've mentioned a lot of cool things that CoachVox is doing. Do you guys have like a, like a place where I could go and I could shop the different coaches that you're working with to be able to get access to their stuff? Or is it only done through the coaches themselves? Like, do you have a marketplace?

We don't have a marketplace. It's mainly through the coaches themselves. We've got. If you went to CoachBox AI forward slash reviews, you could see our top creators. You could see how they were using it and then if you looked them up, you could see how they were. Some of them are behind in their membership groups or they're behind payrolls, but some of them are lead generated, lead generation tools on their site. So yeah, you could definitely find a few like that. But yeah, mainly we look after the creators and then they introduce the AI version of them to their audience and we support them in doing so.

I think it's absolutely fascinating. If somebody's not out there using an AI coach or you're working with a coach who's not using this tool, let them know about Coach Box. Because I mean, I've done coaching, I've done consulting, I've done mentorship, I've done all that kind of stuff. And as much as I, I love the clients, I don't like the client work necessarily. Right. Because that's great output. And the client's like, no, it's not. But they don't, like, they've never done your job before, so they don't understand. No, really, that's really good output. So to be able to have that front line as, I mean, don't even call it Coach Box. Like if, if I'm a dentist, if I'm a whatever, if I can put my, my body of knowledge into something like this and my clients can interact, you know, first stage with the virtual me. A lot of times I can only imagine the bandwidth that would. Requirements that would reduce from my support staff, from my own personal stuff and my clients, for the most part, the questions are never, hey, Chris, can you solve the universe? The, you know, the eternal question of the universe? For me it's how do I do this one simple thing? How would you do this one simple thing? And those, the Coach Box would be able to handle 80% of those, you know, types of questions.

So the right way of Doing it is to know what your audience is likely to ask and then train it to be very good at a specific thing. So Lara AI that I mentioned earlier, very good at roasting LinkedIn posts, not very good at giving you a spaghetti Bolognese recipe. But it doesn't matter because that's not what people ask the real Lara for. So you can, you can find that out by asking people. We, we encourage all our creators, us to do an alpha test and to test it out. And then within our platform, they see, they see the entire. You see summaries, you see transcripts, you see name, email address, how many times someone's visited, how kind of commercial their inquiry is compared to your goals. So, so yeah, you could find out all that stuff and then you would probably be quite surprised at what people talk to your AI about. But once you know that, you can train it even more. And then what we also encourage them to do is on the page where it's embedded or the page where it's shared, we say this is what you should talk to like Graham AI about. Graham AI is trained to do this and to help you with these really specific or certain topics. This is what you should talk about. And then they keep coming back because they know what kind of help they're going to get and they know how to get the best out of the model.

This is so cool.

It is. We're in the future.

Yeah. If people want to find out or go, go use these is where's the best place to send them?

Best place is coachbox AI c o a c h v o x dot AI and then I'm@jodycook.com I've got the bottom of that page, actually. There's, there's like 500 chat GPT prompts for entrepreneurs that are all ones that I've written forms and written based on things that I've tested out. So you're very welcome to. If you subscribe, I think you get them to your inbox once a month if you want new ones, and then say, hey, on LinkedIn as well. Always would love to hear from anyone who's listened to this and especially if you've tried out any of those prompts or if you're thinking about turning yourself into an AI coach, then, yeah, definitely get in touch.

Yes. So LinkedIn's the best channel to follow you on.

Yes, definitely.

Okay, awesome. And then your site was, it was just www.jodycook.com.

Yep. J O-I E C O-O-K.com yeah, great.

And guys, we'll have all this in the, the show notes as well. Jody, again, thank you. And just for reference for everybody, how I got introduced to Jody was she recognized what we were doing at chief AI officer was interested, well, particularly interested in the, the prompting side of the things, reached out, connected with our chief AI officer, and he's had a blast working with you and your team and kind of working through some of the challenges that all startups have to deal with, particularly tech startups.

And if you're in this arena as well, if you are someone who is kind of figuring out how to use this stuff in your business, I don't know what the term is. Maybe we're like, I feel like AI entrepreneurs sounds a bit grand of a term for people who are just trying to figure out how to use AI in their businesses. But whatever the term is for it, definitely get in touch because that's almost what's happening now. It's like I have a WhatsApp group that is called AI Squad, and it's different people working in this field and it's people building, building newsletters and creating tools and creating platforms and marketplaces and everything. And it's like we're just figuring all of this out together and that's why it's so exciting. So if you, if that is, you definitely get in touch, say, hey, and we'll just see how we can support each other.

That's beautiful. I love what you're doing, Jody. This is. I, I, when, when I first heard about the concept, I was like, oh, that's cool. But now hearing all the, like, anecdotal application of it, I'm like, I need one. Right? Like, who doesn't need one, right?

Yeah.

With clients or even team. Oh, and I see an application internally within the business. This is fantastic.

Oh, two, actually, two very cool applications that we didn't realize at the start. One of them actually is a CEO training their AI version and their team using it so that they can get unblocked for things that they need help with. That's very cool. We've actually got one CEO she's trained. She's got three different AIs, and one of them helps her accounts team, one of them helps her tech team, one of them helps her customer support team on various different things within the business. It almost becomes that the kind of company wiki and then another one is. It's just fewer. There's only, there's only a few of our creators doing this, but they have trained an AI version of them. With their principles. So think investors, highly principled investors who've got their rules, and what they want to do is make sure they do not stray from their rules. So every time a new investment deal comes up, they'll go, should I do this? And the AI will go, well, does it fit with these rules? Tell me more about this, tell me more about that. And then they'll say they'll decide whether to invest or not, because all they, all they really care about is being consistent over a long period of time. And so that's what that AI helps them.

I, I know people that spend seven figures per year in the finance space to have somebody do just that.

Yeah. Okay.

Okay.

Yeah. Well, they just need an AI version of them.

That's all they need for 95% of the time. Sure. Absolutely.

Yeah.

It's incredible. You know, and that's. I'm glad you brought that up because the first thing I thought of was, well, I can start to train these bots on roles within a company. It. So that if there's turnover, if Jane from accounts leaves and Joe from accounts starts on day one, he's picking up. He's working with Jane, essentially.

Yeah.

The CEO concept you just shared, was that it? That was beautiful. That's awesome.

She's training the AI. She's trained for the tech team. It knows the entire company's history of TECHN technological changes. It knows how they've built their platform over time. It knows, like, well, hang on, why is this interface not working in that way? Or why does this happen? It's because. Oh. It's because we made that change that we pushed in this month. And so this does that. So it's like a. Yeah. Internal don't make this mistake again type thing. Yeah, it's cool. Very cool.

Super cool. You could think about this forever. Well, Jody, thank you so much. I really do appreciate you. You coming on here. I know different time zones, you're busy. You got businesses and articles and family and all that stuff. So I appreciate it. We're going to make sure that everybody who's listening to this has the opportunity to get in touch with you on, through your site and through the links that you've shared. And certainly follow Jody on, on LinkedIn and any of her Twitter articles. I mean, her Forbes articles are going to be fantastic.

Thank you so much for having me. This has been really fun.

Yeah. Great. Anything you want to say in closing?

Just definitely, definitely get in touch if you're in this arena at all. I would absolutely love to hear from you. Hit connect on LinkedIn, send me a.

Message and say, hey, thank you so much, Jody. We'll be talking soon.

Thank you. Bye.

Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work and a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI Readiness Assessment and AI Strategy Guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. so thanks to our producer Evan Desaulnier for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle usingaiatwork and visit www.usingaiatwork.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.