Clone Your Knowledge: Getting AI to Truly Sound Like You

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welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.

Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. AI can look like you and AI can model your voice, but can't AI model your insights and your knowledge with the right training that can? In today's episode of the AI Explored Podcast, we'll explore how to train AI on your knowledge. My special guest is an AI educator who helps businesses develop AI enhanced marketing strategies. Her membership is called Click Engage Convert Academy and she runs AI Marketing Megaclass. Lauren Bartley, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

I'm absolutely awesome. Thank you so much for inviting me on the show. This has been on a bucket list of mine forever. So I'm just so excited to be here.

Well, I'm really excited what we're here to talk about today. Let's start with your journey. How did you get into AI?

Well, I suppose it all kind of started back when I started my digital marketing agency back in 2011. And so I originally set that up around the time that social media was, you know, becoming a thing. And it was originally just to teach people how to use social media in their business. And I did that through courses, workshops, and had a conference at the time called Click Engage Convert. And that evolved into more of teaching all of the digital marketing strategies as things evolved. And I've always been one of those people that are evolving with the market, and I've always been passionate about teaching people how to do their own marketing because I really think there's so much power in being empowered in that way. But what actually happened is I had all this constant pressure from people who were saying, yeah, that's great, but could you just do it for me? And at some point in that journey, I kind of caved and became like an accidental agency owner that was offering the full suite of all the digital marketing things. And to be honest, I really didn't like it. And then what happened when Covid hit is that my workshops got shut down, my conference got shut down, and I pivoted my conference to become the Click Engage Convert Academy so that I could support businesses 365 days of the year, rather than just the two days of the conference. So that was a major positive. Another major positive was that we got this government funding to be able to give 8 hours of free digital marketing mentoring to any Victorian business that was impacted by Covid. And we had some of the worst shutdowns in the world. So that was awesome. So we were teaching businesses. There was lots of businesses that were coming online and needing the agency side of the business. And so I scaled really quickly to a team of about 20 staff members, and we were delivering the done few services. The mentoring, the training, it was absolutely nuts. But I was loving it. But I was a real bottleneck in my own business. And I remember saying back then, oh, God, I wish I could clone myself, but the tools kind of weren't around, but I definitely wanted to do it. So then what happened is when late 2022, that mentoring that was funded by the government just wound up, and then almost overnight, I had to reduce my team from a team of about 20 to almost 6. And I found myself back running a traditional agency model that I really didn't enjoy. Yes, I still had the Academy and I still loved it, but my capacity had shrunk, but these tools had become available to me that allowed me to increase my capacity, regardless of the fact that my team had shrunk. And I knew straight away that businesses needed to learn how to use these tools themselves so they could start doing this. And it also allowed me to kind of go, well, I don't really like the agency side of the business. I can kind of see that the agency model is going to be majorly disrupted by these tools. And so what I effectively did is I made a kind of courageous decision at the time and said, I'm stepping away from the agency, I'm just doubling down on teaching and teaching AI strategies in particular. And over the next 12 months, 12 months, I transitioned all of my staff out of the business. I made sure they had other jobs before they left and got rid of most of my clients and just went all in on the teaching side of things, the learning, and a lot of it came out of necessity for me as well. So I was kind of teaching as I was learning because I was now a solo operator basically. But I was still doing all the things. I was still running the academy, I was delivering the workshops, I was supporting the few clients that I retained and I couldn't do it all by myself. So I started to build up my own team. And that really started with cloning my knowledge. And that was a big thing for me. I was like, finally I can do this thing that I've wanted to do forever. And so I started capturing my knowledge, feeding into AI tools, building role specific positions in my business, and treating my team as what I was calling my AI dream team. And so my capacity improved, the quality of what I was putting out there improved, and then I started seeing massive results for the people in my academy that were using it as well. So off the back of that, I then launched the AI Marketing Mega class, which is a quarterly online immersion event that we do and we actually help businesses set up their own AI systems and teams as part of that. And somewhere along the line, I also launched an AI enhanced all in one sales and marketing platform called Lead Activator. And I did most of this myself because I built a team of custom GPTs, projects, automations, a little bit of dabbling in vibe coding on the side. I'm a massive AI tool junkie. I spend way too much on tools. But I am more than happy to do that because I see the positive return off the back of it. So what ended up happening? In August, about 12 months after I transitioned my last team member out of the business from the old agency model, I started hiring again. But I was only able to do that because I cloned my knowledge first and I built my AI team first. And I think that I'll be hiring more people. But the AI team and my physical team now work hand in hand. And interestingly, the person that I hired, her main role is to help set up the SOPs that I use to train my AI team. And then she kind of orchestrates my AI team to do A lot of the work.

I love your story. I love the fact that you effectively created this first for yourself and now you're teaching other people how to do this. What are some of the misconceptions because you've done this and you've taught other people how to do this. When it comes to training AI on your knowledge, what are some of the things that people believe that aren't really true?

So a lot of people kind of think that they don't have to, to start. They think like a prompt is enough. So I just put a prompt in and put a bit of background information in there and that'll do. Or they assume that I already knows everything and that what more knowledge have I really got that I can put into this? But what they don't understand is that AI has access to all of this knowledge out there, but they don't know the bits that are completely relevant to you. And they also don't know about you to the level that you know about you. So we need to take those things out of ourselves and put them into knowledge bases so that we can really make the AI a digital clone of yourself, a digital clone of your knowledge. And that will allow you to not so much get the AI schlop that often, often comes out or having to rework things over and over again and have lots of frustrations because it's talking as you and it's producing outcomes along those same lines as what you would. And also in some cases with some of the tools I've built out, effectively becomes your sounding board or your digital partner that can really make decisions and do things in the same way that you would do it as well.

I love that. And you may have already answered my next question, but I'm going to ask it anyways. When people pay attention to what we're about to talk about today and do exactly what you recommend, they properly build their insights and knowledge into some sort of a system that is now accessible for your team or members or whatever. What are kind of some of the maybe not so obvious benefits that you found that come from this?

Yeah, so there's the real quick ones is the quality and time, which is what happens anyway when you're using AI. But it takes it to the next level because things just become more accurate. And as I mentioned, you know, you don't have to rework as much stuff. And it sounds like you. So because of that, things become faster. So you've got better quality outputs, things become faster. I've been able to get back into swimming which is something that I'm really passionate about and love. But the most important thing I think is just the long term leverage that comes with it. So your IP isn't trapped inside your head anymore. And if you're doing this for yourself or even other members on your team, it reduces that key person risk and the bottlenecks that I know that so many businesses experience and your thinking and your knowledge, all those things they can now work without you being present. Which is so, so important for us as business owners who are overworked and want to have a little bit more quality time that they can do some of the other things or leverage more high value tasks in their business. And kind of the biggest game changer for me was when I built, and I know we'll talk about this more, what I call Lauren's leadership lexicon, which is effectively a digital clone of my knowledge that I use to help keep me accountable in everything that I do in my business. And when I need to make really important decisions and I'm stuck and on the fence, I can go to that tool and get it to help me.

Okay, so I'm just going to ideate on some of the advantages here. Also for folks that are listening that work for people that have special insights and wisdom, maybe your boss is well known, has written some books or is a super high paid consultant or expert in the category, you could build this, what we're about to talk about for that person so that when they're not busy because they're out doing this or that you can effectively get access, for lack of better words, to the equivalent of that person. For those of us that actually maybe are on really stressful jobs where there's certain times of the day where our creativity zone opens and closes, but we have to work at all times of the day, having access to this might be like your level headed version of yourself when you're not in a healthy space. For a people that have big teams, like I have a pretty decent sized team and I'm not available, I could see the advantage to having my team say ask my clone first and then if you don't get what you need, then come to me. So I can see it as like a intermediary step in standard operating procedures. I mean there's so many cool things that you could do with what we're about to talk about today. Now, before we get into cloning your knowledge, we should just acknowledge that there is. We've talked on the show about clones before, we've talked about audio clones, cloning your voice. And we've talked about video clones, which is cloning your look. But the thing that we're talking about today, where a lot of these fail is cloning your knowledge. Right. So we're going to dig into that right now. But my first question related to this is, before anyone who's listening decides to clone their knowledge into AI, are there any kind of mindset shifts, groundwork that we need to kind of like consider before we begin?

Yeah. So first of all, you just have to be open to it. So I know that there's a lot of people out there that would be really protective of their ip. And they're like, I don't want to share my IP with this tool because then I might be out of a job or it's going to be leaked and everyone else is going to have access to this. So one of the things we have to realize that having fully ring fenced knowledge is no longer realistic.

Having what knowledge? What did you call it?

Fully ring fenced. Like this is my knowledge, only I know.

It's kind of locked in behind a gate kind of thing.

Yeah, locked in. So it's already out there, out there through your blogs, it's out there through presentations that you might have done. It's out there just through, you know, in a lot of cases, you're not that unique. And I'm sorry. And so also what's happening here is because AI now has made, you know, it's really democratized the information that's out there. Your knowledge is probably already searchable, it's already accessible to other people. So why not bring it to the forefront and make it really accessible for you and your team and maybe even your clients. If you want to build this into products that you might be want to either put within current things that you've got going on or perhaps another product that you want to develop. But I do say also those people who are concerned about this still put protections in place. So be intentional about what you train and where you use it. And within a lot of the models, you can turn off AI training. If you're really concerned that this might be fed back up for other people to use or even within some of the tools that you're using internally. If you don't want it to bleed across some of the other aspects of what you're doing, then you can ring fence them within some of the tools, let's say inside a project, and tick the box that says, you know, don't use this across other projects in some of the tools will allow you to do that. You can put it into custom GPTs, gems, or any of those other similar tools that then have permissions as to who can use it and who can't use it, which will help protect you as well.

I think the key thing that you said is to be open to it. I think people that listen to this podcast are probably more open than people that do not. But giving it a lot of your insight and knowledge has such huge benefits that transcend maybe the risks that it might be worth an experiment. And what I tell a lot of people is, why don't you just try and see what happens? Because my guess is once this is set up, this could be used for years. Right? Am I right on that?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So where do we begin? With the process.

Okay, so before we do the process, I'll just kind of acknowledge two different types of knowledges that there are. There's the core knowledge. So this is who you are. So this is your identity, your values, any frameworks you might have, how you think. And then there's the task knowledge. So the task knowledge is what you do or what other people might need to do with the AI tool that you're using. And so they're more the role based skills like copywriting, or it might be customer service, creating ads, those kinds of things. I really want to focus on the core knowledge today, but I want to acknowledge that you still need to do the same process for the task based knowledge, but it's going to be slightly different because in some cases, I know, Mike, you're an expert copywriter, so part of your core knowledge will include your expertise in copywriting. But for someone who's not, they're going to need to get task based knowledge that they find from another source that goes into that type of knowledge. But we're talking about cloning our own knowledge today. So how do we find our own stuff?

Just so I'm clear, I and you, we have knowledge about certain tasks that kind of falls into our core knowledge. If I am a copywriter, would that go into my core knowledge or would that not just so I understand what we're talking about here.

So you would still collect it and it would be part of your core knowledge and a part of who you are. But then the real details of what it is might be in the task based knowledge. So you can put that in task based tools.

I see. Okay.

But for some other people, it's going to depend. It's going to be a bit of a blend. But you are going to have. It's the core knowledge I want to focus on here today.

Okay, so when you say core knowledge, just give us a little bit more of an explanation of what that really means. Maybe you can just explain for yourself what it means for you.

Yeah. So I have this document that I build out for myself, and in my training programs, two of them. So one of them is the. My personal DNA and the other one is my business DNA. And so this is all the things around. Let's start with the personal DNA, the things that are really important to me. So these are, as I said, how I think. This is my stories. This is a whole heap of things that are really specific to me. So that's kind of the how the core knowledge does. And I'll be able to go through some more examples as we go.

Okay, cool. So here's what we've heard at this point so far. We're at the very beginning of the process, and we acknowledge that what we're trying to do is collect stuff about you, whoever's listening to this podcast. So keep going.

Yeah, great. So there's a six kind of step framework that we can go through for this. And the first one is collecting the information. So this is where we're capturing the raw knowledge and we're just capturing it. There's no level of perfection here. It's just like, here's a file, dump it. Here's a file, dump it. And so I have my computer, what I call my AI brain dump. And so basically, whenever I'm doing something, I think this is really important. I need to put it into one of my AI tools. I put it into my AI brain dump. And I know when I'm next reviewing what's going on, that that needs to be incorporated. So it's just really having somewhere to put things. And this could be like, think of them just like organized buckets. So it might be a Google Drive file, for example, or folder, and you just go and drag things in there, or if you don't want to move them, you know, you can just link to it into that particular place. So what you want to do is focus on what is your unique content here. So not any generic information, but things that are around, you know, what I said before, your identity, your values, your opinions, your frameworks, how you think, how you show up, stories and lived experiences. These are all the critical things that need to go into your core knowledge, as well as things like your blog posts, your emails, any transcripts you might have from training that have your key frameworks in it, your training materials. But don't overthink structure at this stage. This is just, let's find a single place, let's dump it in there. But let's also look at how can we do this a little bit easier. So this is where we can start using AI right from the start. So, for example, if all your blog posts on your blog, which is, where else would they be, you can go and scrape them off your website if you don't already have them saved as digital versions in documents already. And so one of the tools that I love for this is Manus. I don't know if you've ever used Manus in this regard, but it is, it absolutely blew my mind the first time I did this. I basically said, go to my blog and copy all my blog posts and put it into a a document. And it does. This doesn't take over your computer, it does it all in the cloud and then it comes back and it delivers just the most amazing formatted documents that if I'd have gone and cut and pasted that myself off the website, which I have done in the past, you get all that rubbish in the side column and all the links and all the other stuff that you don't want and it just delivers it back to you. So that's a really super tool, like helpful tool for doing that kind of thing. Another place, I actually have a whole heap of notebooks that I had over time where I would put all of my planning in, all of my ideas, all of those things. And what I developed is I actually developed a custom GPT which I call Sammy snapscribe. And what Sammy does is I just open Sammi up, open up my notebook, take a photo, take a photo, take a photo and take all the photos I want to capture to put into this knowledge base. And there's a limitation because I use ChatGPT where you can only do 10 at a time. But I've trained it to know that whenever I put a photo in here, create a new canvas and copy the transcript of whatever from the photo or transcribe what's in the photo and then put it in in order of the date stamps of the transcripts. And so there it is, it's deposited and then I can just go and put it off to the side to go, great, I've got that for when I want to, you know, move to the next step. And then I suppose the other thing that a lot of people might be thinking at this stage is I don't have a lot of that stuff, Lauren, like, how do I actually still collect this knowledge? And this is where we can use AI again, where we can prompt an LLM to interview and extract your knowledge as well. So all of this just gets dumped into one repository.

Oh, I love that. Just give us a sense of what kind of prompt we would ask it so that it would collect the right kind of information. Like you can just free flow a little bit. What would you ask it?

Yeah, so you would tell it a bit about yourself and you would say that I'm looking to develop my an AI knowledge clone. This is my expertise. Ask me some questions so that I can accurately put together some information that's going to accurately represent me. So I do have. I actually have a prompt for that and I'm going to share at the end with you guys some of the tools that I'm mentioning today. And I'm happy to put that prompt in as a resource that they can use as well.

Very cool. And just a little tip for everybody. Chat GPT, Gemini and Claude on the mobile phone all have the ability to talk to it. So if you're stuck in traffic, you can actually just connect it to your car or whatever and have it interview you and it'll all show up as kind of a text transcript. I mean, I think ChatGPT is probably the best at this, but I like the idea you can ask it to ask you one question at a time. So so far what we've talked about is that the collection of knowledge about you can be retrieved if you're a writer from your blog or if you do write on the social platforms, like, you know, like I post on LinkedIn and Facebook and X all the time, you could collect all that information. Or maybe you've been storing all your writing in a Google Doc, or maybe you've written a book like I have or a couple of books or whatever. Maybe you've even just done podcasts and, you know, you could even bring those into NotebookLM. But Manus IM is a tool that was acquired by Meta Facebook. So that's the tool that Lauren was talking about earlier. So the key here is to have it collected a lot of information. And as people are thinking about the kinds of information they want to collect, you just briefly mentioned the kinds of information. Can you just give us like a. Just one more list of, like, these are the kinds of things that you want to collect just so people understand?

Yeah. Okay, well, the next step is where we process it.

Oh, it'll come up in the next step. Okay, perfect. Every year, the gap widens. The marketers who understand AI are pulling ahead, creating better content faster, automating strategic work, and delivering results their competitors Simply can't match. 2026 could be your best year ever because you finally embraced AI. Now you're listening to this podcast, but why not join us for two days of systematic mastery at AI Business World, April 29th and 30th in Anaheim, California. Here's what Melanie Miller told us. Quote, the AI teaching was mind blowing. I'm so far ahead of so many people that claim to do what I do because Michael Stelzner only brings the best to teach, unquote. Here's what sets apart this from random tutorials and scattered learning, which I know we all use. You're going to get complete workflows, not isolated tips, strategic frameworks that connect everything, implementation plans you can execute immediately, and 20 sessions dedicated to build comprehensive AI mastery. These are the best of the best that I have recruited. By the end of the event, you'll have all the AI skills that took others years of random implementation to figure out literally at your fingertips. The gap is widening. Which side are you going to be on? Learn more at aibusinessworld Live. Grab your tickets today at aibusinessworld Live. So, so far we've talked about collection and we're going to talk about how to process the information. And in that, you already mentioned your personal DNA, so I'd imagine that's going to come up in the next step. So go ahead and go to the next step. That's great.

Yeah. Cool. So the next step is really where we're curating, cleaning, and aligning. So we're taking what we had just collected and then we're processing it into something that's going to be more usable for our knowledge bases. And this is probably the really unsexy but most important step. And also it's something that's going to take a fair bit of time. And so we have to acknowledge that and just not rush it. And this isn't just tidying up the documents. It's deciding how your knowledge should be grouped, interpreted and used. So the documents that you kind of mentioning there, so the personal DNA. And I created again another custom GPT that helps me and my students do this. And I call this one the Perry Personal DNA Producer. And what Peri does is Perry goes through and effectively interviews me to get that information out of me, and you can input all of those documents that you've already collected into this and it might pick up some additional things that you haven't already thought of. So this is where we're talking about, you know, our vision and our stories and some other things in here that are really important for it to truly understand who we are and the way that we communicate and what our editorial mission is. So what we actually do and don't talk about those types of things as well. And you can do a similar thing for your business so you can create a business DNA, which is a snapshot of your business. And I've created Brandon Business DNA Builder, who helps you with that as well. And this is more where we're putting in. What are the goals for the business, any SWOT analysis you might have done? There's so many things that can go into this side of the business that really makes it really clear as to who you are, who you're serving and how you're doing it. Then obviously we have things like Brand Voice. And I know that you've had a lot of people on your podcast before that have talked about brand voice. If you've already done that, which I hope a lot of people have done, you can add that in as another knowledge file if you've got your ideal customer avatars. So again, I've created another GPT, which I call Eyelet Ideal Customer. And she basically helps you determine who your ideal customers are if you haven't already done that before. And then just some really simple things like your products and service lists. And a lot of people think, I don't need to do that. It's already on my website. But the AI tools are not going to go and search your website, in the most part to find this information. You need to put it in and you need to be keeping these things up to date as well. When you add or remove products from your offerings so that it knows at any point in time which are your current products. And the same thing comes with pricing lists and those types of things. If you do want to use any of the AI tools that you're developing to, let's say from a customer service point of view, you're going to be telling people how much things cost, then this is where I'd be starting to say, okay, let's split some of that information out, because the products and the services might not change that often, but your pricing might. So that's where we start going. Let's get a bit more granular and let's split out how we have these so it becomes easier to update over time because we just update the price list. We don't have to go through Every product and the whole big document that might have all the details of the products. And then we've got other things like our limiting buying beliefs and positioning statements. So if you've got. Your customers often have concerns as to, you know, I'll. But it might not be right for me because. And so what are the positioning statements that you'll have off the back of them so that your AI tool knows how to overcome any of those objections in the content it might create. And we've already mentioned our content asset libraries. So your podcasts, your courses, your blog posts, those types of things, part of the groups that we want to be grouping this knowledge into, but really distilling them. So we don't want to just have the full transcript of your training course, which might have lots of ums and ahs in it. It might have a little bit of a preamble at the beginning and maybe you've got a Q and A at the end that goes a bit rogue. And so what we want to do here is we want to start compressing them down so that we're not having these massive knowledge files. And in that case, I created a custom GPT which I call Trinity Transcript Transcriber. And what she does is whenever I finish delivering one of my trainings within the academy or in any other training that I do, I basically give her the slides for the presentation so she knows what the structure is. And then I give her the transcript from it, and then she goes through, takes out all the waffle and really condenses it down. So it is just the core knowledge that's being captured that then becomes relevant and more succinct in how I'm training my AI knowledge. And one of the other things that's super important, and I think I mentioned this before, is story banks. And so in terms of what a story bank is, a story bank is where you tell it a little bit more about the stories that are important to you. And so, for example, my leadership lexicon that I've developed that has my story bank in there, she knows that I do parkrun every Saturday without fail. She knows that I love swimming, I love stand up paddleboarding, I want to buy an RV and travel around Australia. She knows that I've met the Queen and I offended her. And all of these things are really interesting information that can be built into what comes out. So when I ask for an analogy, they might use an analogy that's related to stand up paddleboarding, for example, because it's part of who I am and that's how I would have talked anyway. So if I don't tell it these things, it's just going to give me some analogy that might be talking about coffee. And I don't even drink coffee. So this is where it's really, really important. Some other things we could put in here is our frequently asked questions, testimonial reviews, any sops that we've got. It really is unlimited as to what we can put in here. But the is that, and I have mentioned that we use AI tools to help us collate this, but human judgment is super important here. So this is where we really need to play a really active role. We need to remove any duplication and any outdated information or outdated thinking. We need to. Often we might have multiple documents and they might contradict each other. We need to do a sense check over that and say, okay, we need to take this bit out because it contradicts with this. Otherwise you're going to confuse your knowledge and we need to decide what's core and cut out the fluff. Because when we overload AI with irrelevant information, it basically struggles to prioritize what matters. The important information that you might want to get across is just going to get drowned in the noise and you lose the precision side of it and the effectiveness, which then is kind of the opposite of what you're trying to achieve by doing all these things. So I can't stress enough how much human's involved in this process.

Okay, I want to ask you a couple quick questions. First of all, you've been talking about a lot of custom GPTs and folks, Lauren is going to give some of those to us at the end of the interview. So stick around for that. We're collecting all this information and we're grouping them into these different categories like personal DNA, business DNA, brand, voice, and many of the other categories. And I heard you say that obviously the easy way, especially for those of us that are in the Google ecosystem, would be just to put them in a bunch of Google Docs. How big are these documents? Because obviously it sounds like it could be hundreds of pages. Is the objective to try to get this consolidated to like 5 pages in each one of these documents? Or does it matter? Just what's your thoughts on this?

So the simple answer is it depends. So it depends where you're going to use it, and it depends on the tool you're going to be putting it into as to how much of a context window allows you to actually put up into the knowledge file side of things. But I would Say as succinct as you can make them is the important thing for every document. Acknowledging that we're not going to use every single document in all use cases. So this is when we get to the build phase that this becomes important. Yeah.

Okay, we're going to talk about that in just a second. Okay, cool. So we're creating all these different assets that we can selectively use depending on the application. That's really important for people to understand. So if you don't have all these things, it's not going to be the end of the world. Right. But if you have a lot like some of you do, then you have a lot more applications where you can apply all this stuff. Okay, so another thing is when we're collecting all this data, a lot of this stuff tends to be kind of evergreen, with the exception of maybe pricing models and all that kind of stuff. Or maybe we have products that come and go. Do you find that the personal DNA stuff tends to be kind of. Once you built it, you're pretty good. Or does it change depending on if you change your opinions or what's your thoughts on that?

Yeah. So Personally I do 90 day sprints in my business and I do business planning around those 90 days. So I align my knowledge refinement on those sprints and usually what happens is I would go in and update my goals and those things on about a 90 day cycle, which I think is sufficient for most people.

Love it. Okay, so so far we've talked about stages one and two. Number one is collect, number two is process. And in this process stage we kind of elaborated on the kinds of documents that you're going to collect and process. And the key things that I heard you say on the processing side is we're trying to make it more succinct. Right. Because we don't want too much information and that requires human oversight. So this is the one part of the process that takes the most amount of time. Is that outside of maybe collecting.

Totally. The only thing I'd add to that succinct and also into distinct smaller chunks because what we don't want to do is build one giant brain.

Yeah, when you say smaller chunks, elaborate. What do you mean by that?

So basically like one knowledge file needs to be about one thing. So we don't try and have all of what I've just mentioned in to one document.

Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. So like the personal DNA can be one document. The brand voice can be another document. Okay, cool. Let's talk about the next stage. You you mentioned build. So what do we do with, now that we've got all this information?

Yeah, so right at the beginning I talked about the core knowledge and the role based knowledge. And so this is where it becomes really important to distinguish which is which, because the role based knowledge is the stuff that we will use in any of our AI tools that we're developing specific for that, that particular task. Whereas the core knowledge is, and so the personal DNA or the brand DNA and the brand voice, those types of things should sit across most of the tools that you're using or at least parts of, within some of them. So this is where we need to get a bit of discernment around for the particular purpose of the thing I'm building. And when I talk about the thing that I'm building, we might be building a custom GPT, we might be building a project, we might be building some sort of automation or even an app, right? Or even an app. Yes, definitely. And so the idea here is now we make the decision, okay, based on the outcome of what I'm trying to build here using AI, which of these knowledge bases is going to be important to me. And so you would, at this stage, you would have your core knowledge, you would have some sort of task specific knowledge, but then you would add another layer in here which is the instructions. So this is the prompt to some extent, but it's instructions that are going to inform which knowledge to use, when to use it, why it matters, and what are the boundaries that you need to have in regards to how it's used as well. So the guardrails around it. So that goes into whatever tool we're building. Most tools, they will have a section for instructions, they'll have a section for knowledge. And then you basically just plug and play it into whichever tool that you're choosing to use there. And this is where, you know, for some people it might even be that next step of where they go, okay, okay, I'm going to use this to create, to effectively be the brain so that I can create a walking, talking digital avatar of myself. And that's where we could use tools like maybe hey Gen to do your visuals or 11 labs to do your voice or even, you know, put it together in a tool like hey Gen where we can put it inside a membership or a course. So you could then a lot of people who might have membership, they might have a VIP tier where previously the VIP tier meant that they had one on one access to you. You might open up an option that is a VIP tier where they have access to your clone. So this is where I come back to that leveraging. So suddenly because you've done this work, you don't have to do all that one on one work. Or maybe that's the next tier. So you've smashed a tier in between where you've got, here's you get support in the Facebook and the next tier is you get access to my digital client and then the next tier is where you get access to me. So suddenly you've freed up a whole lot of time for yourself. You've made more value inside the products that you're already offering because they don't have to wait for you to answer in the Facebook group or wait for you to answer on the next Mastermind call or those types of things. So this becomes super, super powerful in that regard. And I've mentioned a few times Lauren's leadership lexicon so I can talk a little bit about how I actually use that myself. What I use this one for is as my digital sounding board. I've built this out using all those documents that I talked about before and I've basically in the instruction side of things, I've explained why that knowledge exists and how I want Oren's leadership lexicon to use it. And for me I use it for strategic planning, prioritization, decision making. I use it for accountability and alignment. When I'm trying to get clarity on my thoughts or organize my thoughts, I bounce my ideas off my leadership lexicon and I also use it for operational insights so I can ask questions. I mentioned bottlenecks before about where's a potential bottleneck in this type of thing. So it really helps me. And part of those instructions I say what the transformation is that I want it to achieve for me at the end of it. So yeah, another example I've got is from a customer support point of view. I have a client called Beauty and the Bees in Tasmania and they're an eco friendly hair and skincare brand and they've got really unique products and ingredients that are sourced from Tasmania's pristine conditions. And, and when they bring on new staff, they have to train them on what the ingredients are, which shampoo bar and conditioner bar will be right for all hair types. And it just became so difficult. The business owner effectively said I'll just do it myself. So she had like notes on her phone, she had frequently asked questions on the website, she had all these different things, she had emails, product lists, price lists, ingredients lists, informational blogs and her brand voice. We went, these are the important knowledge files, let's put all of them together, create a custom GPT for that and basically share it with the team. And now she's no longer responding to all of the Facebook messages and everything because they basically cut the email or the Facebook post, the Instagram post, put it into the custom GPT, and because it has all of that knowledge in there, it spits out the result. And now she's no longer having to do all that work. So I suppose that's the benefit of building these tools. Tools for your business.

I love it. Okay, so so far we've talked about collecting information and then we talked about processing the information and then we talked about building. And on the build side, presumably we're using custom GPTs, or we're using Claude projects, or we're using Gemini Gems, or we're using some other tool like base 44, you know, these other kind of tools people have talked about on the show. But the easiest tool for public facing, I would imagine, is a custom GPT.

Is.

Is that fair to say?

Yes, definitely.

Okay, so what comes next?

Okay, so next we basically need to test it. So we've built it, we'll put it out there, see how it goes. And depending upon the tool, we want to test it for different things. So it's not just a case of saying, we test it to say, is it accurate? We want to ask things like, you know, from my leadership lexicon, as an example, is this what I would say? Is this how I would say it? Would I make this call in terms of if I'm asking it to make decisions on my behalf and does it align with my values and priorities? So we just need to go and, you know, for an example of that one, we might say to them, okay, you know, what are my core values? And get it to reflect those back to you and see whether or not that is accurate.

What if it's wrong? Yeah, I'm curious what happens if it.

Yeah, if it gets us wrong, that's where we can then go in and go back to the knowledge and see why that must be the case. And because the training really happens through the feedback. So our goal here is to get as accurate as possible. It's never going to be 100%. And so we still do, through the outputs, have to do what we do with all AI things. And that is the human in the loop sense. Check it. But the more accurate we can get it through testing, then the less of that you're going to have to do.

Love it. What's next?

So Then we have to use it. So this is where we embed it into our real work and this is where the actual value shows up. And unfortunately I've seen way too many people that have built these things out and then they just never use them or they don't use them enough. So I'm using mine. I have about 50 custom GPTs and projects that I use each week. I've got even more that I've built. So we use them for any of the task specific knowledge areas. So, you know, it might be content, it might be email decisions, planning, like just use it. That's my tip. Use it.

Okay, perfect. Keep going.

Actually, can I give you a little bit of an example of that I use my leadership lexicon for and it's related to you. So I was trying to decide whether or not to go social media marketing world this year. This happened the last couple of years. I bought the ticket and never went for two years in a row now. And it was, I did that through indecision because I kept going, oh, should I go, should I go? Should I? And then I just got too late, flights got too expensive, accommodation booked up and I didn't end up going this year. I was like, I'm not going to not make a decision so I'm going to use Lauren's leadership lexicon for that. So I said, should I go to social media marketing world in 2026? And then it spat back to me some answers and I've actually put them on my screen here. Do you want me to tell you what a couple of them are? Sure, sure, yeah. So it basically said first it reminded me of what my personal goals are and what I'm trying to achieve and question whether or not it aligns and then it says the potential upsides. So the upsides were around visibility and credibility, especially around AI marketing, which is where I'm positioning myself, networking with people who can open doors. Because one of the things that I'd said, and it specifies this, is that I have a desire to be in better rooms and that's going to happen when I go to this event. Content inspiration injections. And then it kind of talked about how I can embed this in my social media content that I'm creating, my academy, those types of things. It knows that travel and wellness is a big priority for me. So it's going to tick those boxes and also even came back and because I've told it about going in the past and how my friends are there and all this and I'm going to get to see my friends. So that was really interesting. But it also gave me the downsides. So it says it's going to be time away from achieving my revenue goal. A high cost versus what is your measure? Roi. And it questioned me on that and my energy costs. And then it gave me a checklist of if you're going to go, these are the things you need to do. So it says I need to secure, actively pursue speaking spots at events like this. I need to plan to create content while I'm there. I need to treat as a strategic networking mission. I need to build partnerships that are going to help with my programs. I need to schedule it properly so it doesn't blow out my health and all this kind of stuff. And all of these are really specific to me. And then it kind of told me the reasons I shouldn't go as well. Well, which I kind of went. Well, that's not a real reason, you know, because I've always wanted to go. Well, I've been there before, so that's not the reason. You know, if I don't have bandwidth, I do. Like, and then I was like, yep, yep, yep, okay, they're all fine. And so it says at the end, ask yourself, does this make me closer to being the well known leveraged AI enhanced digital marketing thought leader I'm becoming? If the answer is yes, then let's map out an ROI plan to make sure that you get the most out of this event. So that is, see how powerful that can be.

It's super powerful. And I mean like it's the very first time we're ever doing AI business world and we have 22 AI sessions. I mean, that's huge, right?

Totally.

I love it, I love it. And you're coming all the way from Australia. Thank you. So, okay, enough about the conference. Let's get back to the next step because I know that this is not the end. So we got to use it. That's really important. Right? And we can't use it if we're not confident that it works. So you have to test it before you use it. So that's a great example of how you use it it. But there's one more step. So what is next?

Well, we've touched on this already and that's the refinement. So we need to refine this. We need to evolve it over time. And as I said, I do this every 90 days because your knowledge, like it does change, it does evolve with you. I said before that my business has changed. So as your business model Changes, you need to update it. So update things whenever your positioning shifts. Maybe you have a shift in belief or maybe you've developed new frameworks. All of this stuff needs to go in. Your knowledge needs to be living files so that your AI tools can get smarter and more aligned with you over time. And then you'll get compounding results off the back of that.

Now, folks, we're going to get to Lauren's custom GPT in just a second. But I do want to say, if you're listening to this podcast, which is coming out in the end of February, it's not too late because the conference is not till the end of April. So I just can't not say that it's the marketer in me speaking. Please forgive me.

Yeah, and I'm looking forward to seeing people there.

Yeah, exactly. And by the way, if you listen to the show and Lauren convinced you and you see her, be sure to say, hey, thanks for convincing me. I'm here because of you.

I would love that.

So there's plenty of people that are interested in maybe learning more about what you've got going on if they're interested in joining these different services that you have to offer, or if they want to connect with you on the socials, where do you want to send them? And then let's for sure mention where they can find those custom GPT.

Yeah. So the best place to find out any information about any of the products or services that I have to offer is my website, which is impactivate.com and I do have to spell that out. So it's impact I vforvictor and then the number8.comau if you add a forward slash and an SME to the end of that, then I'm going to put in there some of the things I mentioned today. So the instructions on how you can build your own leadership lexicon that will clone your knowledge. I'll also put that prompt in that I mentioned before where it can interview you and I'll give you access to some of my AI dream team, which I've built out as both GPTs and gems so you can use in either of those environments. And so this is where you'll get, you know, Brandon Perry, Brayden, Sammy, Trini, and I'll even put in there Naomi namecrafter, which I haven't mentioned yet, but she's the reason I come up with all those ridiculous names.

Very cool. And then if people want to connect with you on the Socials, what's your preferred platform?

Yeah, so LinkedIn is a great place to connect and also follow me on Facebook if you want. But yeah, they're the main two places that I hang out. I will mention that I also do need to spell my name, which is L, O, R, E, N, which I call the correct way that you spell Lauren. So it's Lauren Bartley.

Lauren Bartley, thank you so much for. I'm going to use a big word, elucidating, exposing your insights and knowledge to us today. I know we're better because of it, folks. There's a lot of great stuff that she mentioned here and it's going to have a big impact on the work that you do. And I strongly recommend you get a chance to check out Lauren. It's impactiv number eight.com au SME. I'll say it one more time, folks, check her out. It's impactiv8.com au Lauren Bartley, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Mike. I look forward to seeing you in Anaheim this year.

Yeah.

Yes. I was about to say San Diego.

Yeah. In Anaheim, California. See you then.

See you then. Bye.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com a95. Be sure to follow the show on your favorite podcasting app. And if you've been a listener for a little while, we would love a review on whatever platform you're listening on. And do be sure to let your friends know about this show. And do check out my other show, the Social Media Marketing Podcast. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful.

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