How to Build AI Employees to Get Work Off Your Plate

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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 Stelzer, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators, and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. Today we'll explore how to train AI employees to take work off your plate. My special guest is an AI educator who helps business owners and their teams scale with AI. She's the founder of The Uncommon Business. Her course is Automate to Accelerate. Callan Faulkner, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

I'm so excited. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. Well, share a little bit of your journey into AI. Where'd you start and bring us through the journey?

Oh my gosh. Uh, you know, I've had kind of a funny journey with AI. I, I've been in sales my entire career. My, both my parents were in sales. I was a college athlete, so I got out of school and I was like, I'm gonna go into sales. And I got into random tech sales job. I did everything from selling SEO services for websites, digital marketing. Then I landed my big sales job, uh, which I had for about 7 years, which is, which is CRM sales. So I was doing big Fortune 1000 Salesforce implementations and HubSpot implementations. And as a part of that, I started seeing all of this crazy inefficiency in businesses. And I would go in and I'd watch them work, and I would go into customer service departments at these massive companies, and they're writing things down in their notebook. I'm like, what are you doing? They just didn't know any other way of doing it. They're like, this is my job. I write down all the customer support issues in my notebook. I type it in the computer at the end of the day. I'm like, oh my God, what a waste. of time. And over the course of that, I started to see inside of all these different businesses— hospitals, manufacturing, real estate investors, you name it, I probably have gotten inside it and saw the inefficiency. It also hit on my design. I don't know if you're familiar with Human Design, but I despise taking the long route. I despise inefficiency. It makes my— it honestly makes me like my body curl up when people do things that take a long time that could take a short amount of time. Long story short, laid off during COVID back against the wall, started my own business. I got into real estate investing. I started my own tech consulting business, helping people automate their business with CRM and lead generation and Zapier and all that kind of stuff. And I saw ChatGPT in July of 2023, and I thought to myself, wow, this is going to change everything. And I shut down all of my other businesses, which was really difficult at the time. I had partners in the business and making money and shut them all down and went all in on AI education because I just felt like it was gonna be the future.

So bring us to the present. So now what have you done since you started that journey?

Well, uh, thank goodness I have friends that forced me to do it. Uh, I will say that I have some incredible women in my life that said, you have to go all in. April 2024, um, I hosted my first— I, I started using AI in my business. I started using it to automate everything. I was like, this is amazing. My people are doing less manual work. This is incredible. So I started teaching what I was doing. And, uh, I started that in April 2024. And 2024, we did about $1 million in revenue in the AI education side. Last year, 2025, we did around $4 million. We've, we've, um, scaled quite dramatically. This year, we are on pace to do 10x that. Um, so it has been, we've trained over 20,000, uh, businesses and their teams, and we are, yeah, on track to be the, the fastest growing AI education company in the world. It's been a fun journey.

Nice. So, well, and you don't get there without really good systems. And really good support. And I know that that's what we're here to talk about today.

Incredible. There's a lot of keys to success for that. And AI is definitely a part of it, but incredible humans is the other part.

I'm with you. I think like AI-enhanced humans are really the way to go. When it comes to using AI from your perspective, you're working with a lot of people. What do you see as some of the kind of misconceptions or lies that people believe about AI?

First is I'm using AI every single day. My average avatar is a founder of a business somewhere between $1 and $10 million in revenue, and we have people much, uh, uh, further above that. But the average person is a founder, uh, and they come in and they're like, you know, my team says they're using it every day, so I'm not sure if we need this. And what I'm seeing is the team members— let's just say, for example, you have a sales rep on your team. They're telling you they're using it. Mm-hmm. Well, they're using it potentially. Let's say they, you know, got off the phone with someone, they need to build a sales proposal, they go into Claude or ChatGPT or whatever their large language model is, they prompt it, they chat back and forth with it for an hour, and they end up with a great sales proposal. And people are doing this all day long. They spend all this time back and forth with AI, back and forth, and look what I built. Look, my God, I'm so proud of it. Then the next time they go to build a sales proposal, what do they do? They do the exact same manual thing over again. They start from scratch. They didn't save a skill. We don't have a knowledge base anywhere of past proposals and why some proposals do well. How do we handle our objections? How we actually even put a proposal together. They are not training AI to actually be an AI employee that supports the proposal generation process. That is a very different skillset than anyone. My mom, well, actually my mom's incredible at AI. I shouldn't say that. She's been in every single one of my trainings. Any person in the world can go in and use AI to build something. But are you actually building repeatable systems that are available to you at your fingertips that can do the work for you as good or better than a human?

So the misconception is, I got it all figured out, I'm using AI to the fullest. And the truth is, you're barely tapping the surface. Is that kind of what I'm hearing you say?

100%. Yeah, people have no idea the understanding. And that's why if anyone's ever come to any of my boot camps or masterclasses, I actually, when I was a kid, I grew up doing magic. I loved magic shows. And that is what I do now, basically for a living, is I'm like, You think you know what AI is, right? Like you've done this, you've done this. Have you seen it take over an entire bookkeeping department? Have you seen it fully automate recruiting and onboarding of a new employee? Probably not. Do you wanna see how we do it internally? And that is what we train and teach on, and people's minds are just completely blown.

Love it. Okay, so we're kind of using the phrase, uh, AI employees, cuz we have real employees and then we have AI employees, right? So for the sake of this discussion, When we train up AI and we do it well, what's waiting for us on the other side? What's the carrot? What's the benefits that happens when people pay attention to what we're about to unlock today?

Oh my God, it is absolutely insane. So if you actually take the time to step back, and I want to make a caveat here, the idea of an AI employee is that it's AI that does work as good or better than a human, and every AI employee works for A human. If we put AI employees in place to support our humans, 2 things are going to happen. Number one, we're going to need less human work time to get the things done that we need to get done. So, we're on pace for about $40 million in revenue. We will do that most likely with about 50, 40— we have 40 employees, humans right now, and we're probably going to have about 50 humans. That is almost unheard of with most businesses. To do $40 million in revenue, you would need a significant more amount of humans. I think you, you and I talked about this a few weeks ago. You're in the same boat of if we went back 20 years ago to do the revenue we're doing now, we would've needed a lot more humans. But I wanna be very clear about something. I have never fired a human being because of AI. I have repurposed them. The second thing that's gonna happen is we are gonna activate humans to their higher potential. We probably have humans, you probably have a human working for you right now, not you, Mike, but maybe, maybe you're a listener here that is doing a job that is not actually activating their soul. It's not lighting them on fire. It's not their highest potential. It's not where their brain is in their most creative state.

I think everyone can say that. I mean, I think you and I could even say that sometimes, right?

Totally agree. And that is the work. And I'm sure you and I do it every day subconsciously. We sit down to do something and I'm like, why am I, why am I doing this in general? why am I doing this? But second, why am I doing this manually?

Right.

You know, the other day I was building, um, I have— I'm so fortunate I have a house manager at home that helps with some of the cooking. You know, I'm doing this, you know, a couple months ago I was like manually writing it out like I do. I'm like, what am I doing? And I just took an hour and I built out a Claude project that knows everything about my food protocol, what I love to eat, my— what's in my pantry. Then I built a skill that generates a Perfect PDF overview of all the things I want to eat for the week, and then I turned on the Instacart connector to Claude, and it just fills the grocery cart, and I press order, and I'm like now you just it's like with anything you step back. That's why my main program is called Automate to Accelerate. It's like you have to step back to speed up, and I think we're gonna see a very well we can talk about this if you want a very very cool evolution of humans over the next. Uh, 10 years, cuz humans are not gonna be allowed to stay in roles they know they hate doing jobs they hate. Um, they're gonna have to elevate, they're gonna have to activate that creative side of them, the strategic side of them. For many people, it's been dormant for a long time, and I'm actually really excited to see what happens over the next few years.

I'm gonna double down on some of the stuff Callan is saying. Um, first of all, when you have AI supporting you, regardless of what your role is, you're going to be more valuable because you're going to be able to do things that you're excellent at, and you're going to be able to let AI do things that you are not excellent at. And the truth of the matter is, like, Callan and I have gone pretty all in on AI, and I'm not working less hours. I'm actually working more hours. And the reason I'm working more hours is because I'm actually loving the work that I do. And this is really important for people to understand. A lot of people, you know, are looking, especially if you don't, if you're not the boss, you might be thinking, oh my gosh, I'm going to work myself out of a job. No, I think the is true, I think you'll actually become indispensable. Because if you can provide so much value to your employer as a marketer, or any other role that you're in, then all of a sudden, you're going to be the one that they're going to want to hold on to the longest because you figured this stuff out. Don't you agree?

Oh my God, I had someone the other day, and I'm a big believer of whatever you believe is true. You know, there's people that are like, the job market is so hard right now. It's like, I absolutely could not disagree with you more. And the reason why is I know personally, I will, I would ask you, Mike, are, are you hiring for any roles?

No.

Right now?

No.

So you're okay. Well, I'm hiring for 20. I have 20 humans that I need to hire for. Um, I personally have friends that are hiring for roles, but what, what do I know for sure? If a human comes into my organization, I actually have a friend, we were just talking yesterday. She had a marketer come into her organization, not AI trained, and she was waiting for weeks. for sales pages, weeks for simple artifacts, simple images. And my friend has been in every single one of my sales or AI trainings for the last 2 and a half years. And she called me and she's like, I am now seeing this insane gap between my employees that have been through your training and they're pure, they're true AI architects. They are pumping out 10 times the work in a single day without breaking a sweat than this marketing person. And this marketing person's refusing to use it. She doesn't like it. She, you know, whatever. What are we gonna do? She has no other option than to let her go. But is it AI that is taking her job? Absolutely not. We desperately need someone in that role to be the strategic visionary and bring life to the messaging. AI is not there yet to create, you know, from scratch. No, and that I wouldn't even want it to, cuz humans buy from humans. So anyways.

Excellent. Okay, so folks, uh, here's the deal. Uh, we're here to talk about how to actually create some AI staffers, if you will, to help you in whatever role you're in. Let's start with what do we need to be thinking about before we get started? Because I know there's some general concepts and principles that are foundational for what we're about to talk about.

Yes, if you're taking notes right now, I know some people are probably not, you're probably cooking or driving. But there's 3 things that are really, really important. Number one, women that are listening, anyone that holds more of a feminine energy. I am finding that many women Prove their worth through doing things themselves. I have a lot of women in my life who, you know, they plan the whole party, they cook everything soup to nuts, and, and then at the end they're exhausted and they're like, why did no one appreciate it? It's like, you don't need to do all the things to be worthy. And that instinct is now a liability because with AI, we're in a paradigm where Finding shortcuts is actually the secret to not falling behind. And so we need to— shortcut seeking is the new work ethic.

And by the way, be clear what you mean by shortcut, because some people think shortcut is bad, but in this case it's not bad, right? Explain what that means.

No, I mean, let's, let's throw an example out there. So right now we're ramping up our organic content creation. So we're going all in on my personal brand. We're creating a lot of incredible, valuable content. So what's one of some of the things we have to put out? We have to put carousels out on Instagram. Now, historically, we've had, uh, a Canva designer. It takes a few days to get the carousel back. They're tweaking every little thing, making sure the spacing is right. Well, we went into Claude Design last week, built a phenomenal skill because skills are now inside of Claude Design. Thank you, Lord. And we built a skill that generates Instagram carousels, and we put screenshots of our past carousels that are absolutely gorgeous and beautiful. I can get a banging carousel out in 8 minutes. Now, by just from a transcript, I can get 10 out in the next 30 minutes. Is that a bad shortcut or is that an extremely efficient use of my time and energy? Who wants to be building carousels? Nobody. Who wants to be thinking about what goes in the carousel? Now that's what I'm hiring for.

Well, and here's a good metaphor, cuz I love metaphors. If you're used to going a certain route every day and you have a smart mapping system that will tell you there's traffic, go a different route, or here's a faster way, you would always do it. Right?

Every time.

And this is what we mean by shortcuts. It's like, hey, if you can get to the same desired outcome faster and even better, this matters, right?

Shortcut to an A+ output. And that's what most people are doing with AI and why they don't like it is most humans settle for a B- or C+ output from AI. Right.

You said there's 3 things. That's the first one. What's next?

Great, Mike, you're the best. Second thing, business brain. You're gonna hear me talk about this concept if you've come into any of my trainings. We are in a new paradigm where your business cannot live with a messy Google Drive anymore. You have to have your pricing, your process, your standards, your brand voice, your ideal client, your past wins organized and centralized and up to date because your AI employees are only as good as the data that they can access. So we are in a place where you could hire a human right now and maybe they could go figure out, you know, where's everything documented. But if you hired a brilliant person on Monday and you needed them in 30 minutes to get up to speed, if they can't read what you have documented, they won't be able to do their job, and neither can AI. So, when I say the business brain, that's what I'm talking about, this central repository of the most important documentation that is actually organized. We've historically been able to get away with it. The third concept is kind of underneath the business brain. Your AI employees are only as good as its training. Anyone in the world can go into Claude right now and say, write me an Instagram caption, or write me a LinkedIn post. Now, if you go on LinkedIn for 2 seconds, how good is the Claude LinkedIn posting? Horrendous. If it's not been trained on what is the standard for writing a LinkedIn post, who owns that inside of your company, what is the goal of the LinkedIn post? How much value are we putting out there? What's the brand tone and voice? If you do not document those things, AI has nothing to operate on top of. So, you're, even let's just say for you, Mike, you have a framework around how you produce and execute your podcast. If I was you, I would be documenting every single detail of that process because your AI employees need to know it to be able to even think about doing that work for you. Love it.

Okay, 3 things you said. Number 1, shortcuts are okay. And if you have any kind of thing tied up in doing equals worth, you got to reset your mind on that. Number 2, business brain, you got to have some place to document the most important things about your business. And then training equals great output. So now let's say we're ready to start creating our very first AI support person or employee, where do we start?

First thing we have to do is take an audit of yourself. Now, if you're a founder of a business, I would start with you because a lot of times you earn trust around these things when it actually helps you specifically. So I would ask these questions. Number 1, what do you do every day, every week, every month that makes you money, but you don't like doing it? What are those things? It's not like that you don't like doing it, it's just more manual or it's less than $50 an hour work. What are those things?

Or it's laborious, right? It's, it's tedious. Okay.

Designing and editing content, creating my, uh, the outline of my, uh, presentation for next week, whatever. What are you actually doing right now? So for example, one of my, uh, employees, Nick, he is a copywriter. He's a human copywriter and he manages, trains, and oversees a roster of AI employees. But how How did he start building those? Well, we just started watching what he was doing. And one of the things he spends the most time on is writing our sales pages. And he started documenting how he thinks of sales pages. He took our best sales pages and reverse engineered all of the little details of what makes them great. And then he started training his AI employee that builds sales pages. And then he started training the designer that designs the sales pages. And now he has this tool, this, this suite of copywriters and QA. AI employees and hook generators that work for him. And it started with him just watching himself work and saying, you know what, I'm not gonna do that manually anymore. I'm gonna start training an AI employee to do that work so that he can elevate into the next version of his job.

Okay. So what I'm hearing you say is whether you're an entrepreneur or even a marketer like Nick, you know, or someone who's working for an entrepreneur like Nick works for you, go through all the things that you do that you know you're good at, but maybe don't light you up. Right. And I would also add, even the things that you're excellent at, you might think you're excellent, but AI might be better. You know, like I've learned this the hard way. I thought I was really, really good at doing certain things. And then all of a sudden I trained AI on how to do it and I'm like, oh, it's way better than me. And actually I can now be an editor instead of a creator. You know?

Let's be honest, though. If you're excellent at it, then you can train AI to be excellent at it.

Good point.

So that's probably why your AI is so good. My AI at whatever, you know, your You're an incredible marketer. Mine's probably not as good as yours because you have how many years of experience doing all these things? You have the brain inside of it, and that's what makes yours so special.

So once we've figured out kind of the thing or things that we want to actually use AI for, like, how do we actually make it? You know what I mean?

Let's get tactical. So we would open up. I am a Claude fan right now. You know, any day I think Google's gonna drop some crazy stuff that's gonna maybe give Claude a run for their money. Whatever. Go into your LLM.

For the record, you are not alone. Like Claude is. is, uh, right now I've got some research I have not released yet, but everybody and their mother is, is moving to Claude. So, um, there's this trend there.

I've been a Claude fan since the, since the beginning. I just love what they stand for. You know, at some point you have to choose as a company. We're scaling so fast, I can't have some stuff's in Chat, some stuff's in Gemini. We're, we're a Claude shop. So I'm going to speak in Claude, but just know that means Chat, Gemini, whatever. Okay, so I, I would open up Claude. I would seriously go into a brand new chat. And I would say this, I'd say, you know, my name is Mike. You know, I run a company called Social Media World. We are planning this upcoming conference. And one of the things I'm excellent at is generating sponsorship packages and sponsorship proposals. And I really want to generate an AI employee, which would be a Claude skill eventually, to help me generate all of the sponsorship packages for my conference. I want to have it be able to send emails to potential sponsors, research potential sponsors, These are all the things that I do on a regular basis. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. Let's start with the first task, and I want to take a stab at you doing this extremely well. But before we start, I want you to interview me with a series of 5 high-impact questions to extract out my exact process, and we'll work together in this chat to complete this task. I want to see you do it. Once I see you do it extremely well, then we will package all of that up and turn that into either one Clod Skill or multiple Clod Skills. depending on your recommendation.

Okay, let's talk about the interview because I don't think everybody knows this, but all of the AI models, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, have really good voice mode. And you can, with Claude in particular, you can pull out your phone and you can load up a project or a chat thread and you can just flip over to audio and then you can, you can talk to it. Now, I love using that interview format because it allows me to process things differently than typing. Talk to me a little bit about how you do the interview, because I just feel like sometimes the way you say it and all that kind of stuff might matter because that's how you would train a human anyways, right?

So I think people are different. Some of my clients are so— they love writing and they hate speaking. They're not verbal processors. You and I are 100% verbal processors, so you won't find me using my keyboard. I don't. I do not at all. So what I do is I'll have it ask the questions and then I actually use WhisperFlow.

Yeah, me too. I love that.

I will just pop WhisperFlow on and I can absolutely get way more in a groove when I'm WhisperFlowing in sync with that. And I will just brain dump everything. I think some people, they, they still have Google brain when Google brain to me is like, they're very short with AI. They're like, best restaurant New York. And AI's like, for what? How many people? Do you like steak? Like what? You know, they, they don't give enough context or information. And so I absolutely agree. with you, Mike, flipping either the microphone on or, um, if you guys don't know what WhisperFlow is, it is a non-negotiable tool in my opinion. Uh, just search whisperflow.ai. Phenomenal. It just allows you to have a shortcut on your keyboard.

Well, and it works on your phone too, um, which is awesome.

Exactly.

Quick question for you. Have you ever thought, I'm not technical enough to build an AI agent? Well, I'm here to tell you that that's not true, and we built a free interactive guide to prove It's called Build Your First AI-Powered Business System with Claude Cowork. You don't need to know anything about coding. You go from a plain language description of what you need to a working system that runs real parts of your business. Grab it free right now at socialmediaexaminer.com/cowork. That's socialmediaexaminer.com/cowork. So, so far what we know is that we're getting interviewed by AI, and we're basically just, you know, play back the recording to hear all the questions Callan talked about.

But the key thing is like, take the transcript and then pull the transcript out, say, hey, she did a prompt at minute 24:47, can you extract that out so I can use it?

You had this board of directors thing you were going to share because when we were prepping this, I think this would be a really cool example to just help people understand this.

In our training, we have a— we have an 8-week AI architect training, and in week 0, I go through like my 15 power moves of getting The most out of AI. And one of my power moves is when I'm starting the process of either making a decision or doing something inside of AI, I say, hey, here's my pain, here's what I'm struggling with. You know, let's take the sponsorship package, for example. You know, I need to get 10 sponsors that give me at least $5,000 in the next 60 days. My problem is I have no capacity to do that. I know exactly how to do it, but I don't have time to do it. Before we begin the process of figuring out how we're gonna do this with AI, I want you to build a board of directors, and I want you to build a team of 3 to 5 thought leaders that are experts in this process, and I want them to battle it out with each other to figure out what really is the best way of approaching this process. The board of directors is phenomenal when you're also dealing with a conflict internally, you're making a decision. Like when I originally hired my team of executives, I had no idea how to build an executive comp package. I didn't know know what— how to do the bonus structures or the pay bands or the KPIs. So I said, I need to build a board of directors, and it brought in, you know, Mark Cuban and, um, Sara Blakely and some of the best executives in the world, and it used their frameworks and concepts to coach me versus just whatever Claude found on Google.

That's super cool. Okay, so we've talked about a couple different kinds of quote-unquote AI employees. We talked about the board of directors, we talked about, uh, creating employees, for lack of better words, to help you take some stuff off your plate. Let's get down to the, you know, what do we do after it's interviewed us? Like, what's the next part of the process?

When you're coming into AI to do something, let's say you're building a sales proposal, everything typically starts with a prompt. And it's a single prompt. You, you say, hey, I'm looking to do XYZ. Maybe you say, I want you to be a board of directors. Maybe you say, you know, I'm building a beautiful sales proposal. I want you to act as the world's best sales coach. And build— help me build this out. Okay, great. You work back and forth with AI to get this incredible sales proposal. Then you save it as a skill. You say, hey, I want you to save this as a skill. And a skill is a saved, reusable set of instructions. It's kind of a prompt on steroids that's available anytime, 24/7, always connected to Claude, and it drives your entire organization. A skill is an AI employee. Now, the next thing I want you to ask yourself is, or even ask Claude, hey, skill, hey, Claude, what information or data would you need to increase the output and improve the output of this skill? What files would you want in a perfect world? What knowledge would you want? And there are times, definitely for a proposal generator, where this skill would operate a lot better if it sat on top Of some of your business brain, maybe it had past proposals that were winning, past proposals that were losing. Maybe it would be better if it had all of your pricing information. Maybe it would be better if it had your top 15 objections and exactly how you handle them. If you guys are in sales, you totally understand. So, in if that the answer is yes, it would operate better with a knowledge base. That is when we start to build a Claude project. Claude project. If you go into Claude over on the left-hand side, there's a little button called project. Hit create new, and that's where you would set the instructions of that project. I like to call them kind of projects, workspaces, and I would start loading in the files section all of your sales knowledge. And in the instructions, you can say, this is the sales workspace where I run things like building a proposal. I, I do email responses for sales. I do all of my sales activities here in this Claude project. And The last thing that we ask ourselves is, wait a second. Okay, great. The skill is building a great proposal. Now, are there any apps outside of Claude that I would want this skill to be able to talk to? Now, let's say that every time a sales proposal is created, you actually save that sales proposal in your CRM system and you add it in there. Maybe it's HubSpot. Then you can turn on something called a connector. To Claude. If you're listening to this and you're like, I have no idea what this chick's talking about, it's hard to do it without visual. But there's these things called connectors where Claude can now talk to your CRM, it can talk to Slack, it can talk to Google Drive, it can talk to Notion. And this will help if that's part of the process. Hey, I do this sales proposal and then I email it in my Salesforce environment. We can turn that connector on and now that skill is operating on top of a knowledge base with a connector turned on. And then I would make sure that your entire team is trained on how to use the skill. And we're now, we're ready to go.

Let's talk through a couple things here just because, Kellan, I think you and I are pretty advanced Claude users here. It's really important, something I've discovered, that when you are working inside of a project, projects have their own invisible skills, believe it or not. So when you ask it to create a skill, you want to put like workspace skill or main skill. And what that'll do is that'll work across all of your projects. And the idea is whether you remember to go into the project or you just just happen to be in a regular chat, it's going to pull that skill up. And it's really important to kind of update your skills. Let's talk a little bit about that because that's kind of like correcting employees when they make mistakes, right? So you have any tips on that?

100%. Oh my gosh. Well, let's talk about one of my skills that took me 15 hours to nail, which is my Calend Voice Copywriter. So this is one of my favorite AI employees. It writes exactly like me. And so many people come to me and they're like, oh gosh, AI can't do content. It's, it doesn't sound anything like me. And I'm like, well, how long have you worked on it? And they're like, I don't know, 45 minutes. I'm like, buckle up, soldier. You are just getting started. You, you think an intern is gonna be able to learn your copywriting voice in 45 minutes? What are you talking about? Even a world-class copywriter, it took 3 months of me working with my human copywriter multiple times a week for him to finally get my voice. It's the exact same thing. And this is why AI is so amazing. It is gonna reward the people that do not stop until it is perfection. Most people stop when it's a C+ or a B minus because they're okay with mediocre, but you and I are not. And so that's why our AI employees are so much better because I'm going to sit with it and go back and forth. So let's do an example. So once you get the first bones of your AI employee, your skill, you have to test the living effing daylights out of your skill. So I'll come in and I'll say, all right, here's a transcript from a leadership call I had with my team earlier where I was talking about, you know, how to get a promotion at The Uncommon Business. I want you to take this transcript and I want you to write my email newsletter for the week. So it takes the transcript, all my key points and ideas, and it builds an email newsletter. I will sit there for an hour and I will rewrite that newsletter the way that I would write it and my intuition would write it. And I'll go back to it and I'll say, you know what? I absolutely despise this paragraph. I just rewrote it like this. This is how Callen would write it. How would you update the skill? to reflect the new paragraph that I just wrote? And then I also want you to tell me what are the major differences and what was the miss inside of your current instructions that did not allow you to write the paragraph like that?

Well, and I have a little tip here. If you're in a thread and you're going back and forth and you're kind of getting frustrated and you have a skill, you can ask AI, what have you learned from my interactions? Okay, just like you would an employee. And then you can say, update your skill to ensure that this doesn't happen again. Now, this is really important. Inside of projects, they have a thing called memory. Okay? It'll update its memory, but it may not update its skill. So it's really important that the skill is updated.

You have to say that. You update this skill and then you actually have to press the save button again. It's not going to auto-update. You have to press it. Yeah.

It'll say, oh yeah, I've updated the skill. But if it doesn't actually prompt you and you don't see a little alert coming up, it didn't do it.

Correct.

It'll get confused again because it has these hidden skills that I've discovered that are inside of projects. So this is really important. A little bit more about projects. Another reason you might want to use projects is because if you're using Claude all day long, you got a million threads and you have to try to find the old chats and stuff and it's impossible and their search sucks. So sometimes you can use projects and you can just say in the instructions of the project, reference the skill. For example, reference my Instagram caption writer, you know?

Yes.

And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then sometimes I have to tell it, cross-check your memory up against the skill. The skill wins. You know what I mean? Update your memory, right? It's just kind of like these silly little things that we're learning on how to work with AI.

Back to, Mike, I use AI every day. And we're just like, yes, but the— yes, I know. Oh God. And if you're sitting here like, oh my God, this is so overwhelming. Can I just say something? AI is— look, is there like machine learning in data analytics and all this crazy stuff that is technical. Sure. But when you are operating it inside of a business for 90% of how a business operates in HR, operations, finance, sales, marketing, this is not a technical skillset. It is 2 things. It is communication.

Bingo.

Are you able to communicate properly? And second, creativity.

That's right.

And resourcefulness.

That's right.

Can you be creative? Can you think around the— can you think outside the box? AI is telling you one thing, it's lying to you. You push back on it. It gives you, I mean, How many times, Mike, have you been like, I know you can do this, Claude. And let's pretend your life is on the line. What would you do if your life was on the line? It's like, well, in that case, I would do it like this. And you're like, that's exactly what I wanted you to do.

And folks, I just want you to connect a couple of dots. Sometimes it's way easier to just say it than it is to type it.

Oh, yes.

And that's why I am constantly using WhisperFlow and I'll just speak it out. I won't even care if WhisperFlow got it wrong. Because AI is smart enough to understand what I meant. But the problem with typing it is you're always looking at it as you type and you're self-correcting. And it's like, no, you wouldn't type to an employee who's physically in the other room. You just walk over there and talk to them. And I feel like that's the better way to work with AI. Do you agree?

I can't tell you how much time typing takes and the energy of typing. The other day I was on my on a plane and my, you know, my Whisper, I'm like pulling the laptop up to my face, like on the plane, 'cause I'm like, I'm not using, I'd rather watch a movie 'cause I'll crank this task out in 10 minutes if I can do Whisper Flow versus having to manually type. And once you do it, you'll never go back.

How do we know when we should make a skill? Because obviously we could have thousands of skills or we could have really smart skills that do a couple of things really well. And let's talk through that a little bit because this is gonna be the challenge a lot of people get into. Like they'll say, oh, maybe this should be a skill. And then some of your skills might contradict some of your other skills because you have so many darn skills, right?

Well, I actually think skill management is one of the biggest issues inside of Claude right now. And I know it's on their roadmap, but it is a very difficult— it's difficult with the current setup that they have. Every time we create a skill, we have a copy of the skill sent over into Notion. So we actually have a skill that does that because of that exact issue. I need a repository that shows me who built it, when was it built, what's the version, What's the purpose of it for? And then we have a skill that runs through our skills database and identifies overlaps. And if they're, you know, oh my gosh, there's 2 Calendly voice skills. Okay, well, that will land on my desk to decide which one is the real one, delete the other one. And we have a person that spends a couple hours a week just overseeing and making sure, just because of the pace that we're growing at. But each department overall is over— is responsible for their skill repository, and we bring that up on every single person's quarterly review. So, when we're doing a quarterly review, one of the questions is, you know, show me the AI employees that you've built, how you've automated your job, because that's part of working here. And then, you know, are your skills up to date? Show me the ones you've built. Where are they? So, everyone's responsible. Now, when do I build a skill? We build a skill when you are doing work regularly, when it is a repeated process that needs to get done, I would build that as a skill. If that's something that's gonna have to be done again and AI is crushing it and it's doing as good or better than you, I think that should be saved as a skill. Um, and I would work, you know, if you're an employee of a team, oh my gosh, what a gift. If I was an employee of a team right now, I'd be like the number one person coming to my owner being like, I wanna help steward this. I wanna have a plan for my department. Maybe you only are a part of your own department, and you start to be that person that starts to steward the organization of these things. Because anyone can build a skill, but are you having it organized, managed, maintained? That's a whole nother beast.

Okay, you kind of alluded to this, but scheduling— talk about this, because right now the way skills are set up is they're only activated when you activate them, unless you do what we're about to talk about next. So talk to me a little bit about how to actually get a skill to get into a pattern of doing Yes.

Yes. So this is something we really teach heavily, especially in our operations week of our program. Once a Claude skill starts to get really good, so I always say you always run it manually first for a while. You train it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The moment you're like, dang, this thing is really good, then we can put it on a schedule to run autonomously. You can do that with something called Claude Claude Cowork. Right now, Claude is— what is it, July 30th? By the time this episode goes out, you may have Cowork in the browser. I don't know yet. But right now, right now in this moment, you would have to schedule that skill. It's called a scheduled task. And the only way to do that is on the Claude app on your computer. What you can do is you can go under the— because you have to download the Claude app to your Mac or to your PC from the App Store, from— go online and search Claude for Mac or Claude Cloud for PC, and you go into the scheduled tasks on the left-hand side. And what, let me give you guys an example. So I have a skill that visits all of my competitors' Instagrams, reports what is going viral in the AI education world, the AI hack world, what angles are being used, what hooks are being used, and it feeds it straight into my Notion content creator. And it actually looks at my transcripts from the week prior and it pulls in ideas for content based on What's working? I use it as my intel. It's called my Instagram researcher. I used to just run that manually. I used to just have my social team run that on Monday morning. It started getting really good. Now, every Monday morning at six a.m., that thing goes out and runs on its own, drops all of the content into Notion, and my team logs in and they choose the one that they approve manually. And it is so slick. So these are things again: start as the prompt, build the skill, train the skill over and over and over, back and forth, back and forth. It's perfect. Then you would put it on a schedule if it's something that runs at a specific time or day.

Yeah, and folks, I'm kind of new to Cowork and it's infuriating sometimes because I thought I created a chat and then I go into the web app and I can't find the darn thing because it's not there. You know what I mean? And it's like, oh darn it, because it defaulted. Like now when you go in on the app, it's got an option that says chat or Cowork, right? And for some reason on the app, it defaults to Cowork for me. So I'm just thinking I'm in a chat, but I'm not in a chat. And then I can't find it in the chats. You know what I mean? So like, they're going to solve for this, but what are the options on scheduling? Like, just talk to us a little bit about like, how often can you run a schedule? Is there like a limit on how many schedules you can have going on?

Oh yeah. I mean, you can have technically infinite skills that are scheduled. You get to choose what day it runs, what time it runs, and the frequency of that. So I have a skill right now that runs every Every hour, and it takes every transcript that I have from Granola. So in an hour, it will take the transcript from this podcast, it will add it into my transcript database in my second brain.

Which is Notion for you, is that right?

Thank you. Yep, into Notion. Yep. So it takes the transcript from Granola, adds it into Notion, and then my second brain— well, technically Notion to Google Drive to have the folder access, a little more advanced. But yes, that's something we run every, every single hour. Now the trick is your computer has to be on right now. Now again, it's July 30th. This is what happens in our world. Claude could release something next Tuesday that suddenly, you know, Cowork's available in the browser and they run autonomously. I'm not sure how that will work, but right now the caveat is the computer has to be on. So we've gotten around that. We have an office computer that's logged into our, you know, hello@theuncommonbusiness.co email. And every, uh, person in our company, if you do want to schedule a skill, they'll log out of their personal Claude and into the company Claude, and then that, that scheduled task will just run on that computer that's always on.

Okay, this is pretty mind-boggling. I've not yet scheduled any tasks inside of Claude Cowork.

Oh, you're gonna, you're gonna freak out. It's unbelievable.

Folks that may not use Claude might not realize, but there's usage limits on Claude, and it resets like every 4 or 5 hours. Do you find that the scheduling stuff takes up a lot of your usage?

Let me just caveat and say our company most likely will spend around $100,000 with Claude this year.

Yeah. So you got everybody on max plans or something?

100%. Oh my God. Yeah. I'm like, blow it up. Because think about it, we have 40 humans. What's payroll? $300K a month. Okay. You're telling me Claude to make all of my humans 5x more productive is $10,000 a month, no problem.

Yeah, it's $100 a month for the Max plan, which is what I'm on, and I've got a bunch of my employees on the $20 Pro plan.

Yes, sure. And at some point you may decide to bump them to $100 a month, right? I give my people keys to the kingdom, so we do pay for extra credits.

Do you find it's not an issue though, or what? You got any tips on scheduling or whatever?

In relation to the revenue that most people are making, I don't think the AI expense— I do think people need to start preparing for it. Like, I just think it's, it's weird. People are like, oh my God, this is such an expensive software. It's like, I just think we need to back up and understand what this is doing for our organization. If you have 50 scheduled tasks that's doing work that humans used to do, and it costs you an extra $2,000 a month, I mean, you know, our, our mind, our, especially if we are kind of not used to spending money and investing money, goes to, that's expensive. But to me, that's the greatest investment I could ever make. So yes, we are buying extra credits for sure to operate like this, but it's just the, the expense is so worth it. it every single time.

If the people that are listening to this right now do only one thing, what would be the one thing you would have them take from today?

Come into this with a curious mind of don't assume anything. Like, what do I mean by that? You might be thinking here, listening, saying, well, this is all great for, you know, manual tasks like, uh, you know, bookkeeping or content creation, but Gosh, it'll never be able to cut videos the way that I do it. In the last month, the video editing pro— with AI has been absolutely insane. It has blown my own mind.

We've got some great episodes coming up on that, folks, by the way. The last couple episodes. Yeah.

Incredible. Like, I just, I have to come in every day pretending like I don't know anything because that's, that's how fast this changes. We had an interview last week with a CFO. 2 interviews. So we, the final 2, one of them, 20 years of experience. She's an absolute bad A, she's amazing. Her first order of business was hiring 5 humans to report to her, accountant, bookkeeper, admin, you know, payroll person, whatever. Second guy is actually one of our students who's been in our program for 2 years. And we told him like, what about this? What about this? He's like, Cal, that's all AI. That is all AI. Maybe I'll need a part-time admin person to like chase down things and like go into the state portal and like do some stuff. Yeah, sure. But we do not need to hire those humans right now. We can do a lot of that with AI. I will eventually build a team, but they're going to be strategy. They're going to be— they're not going to be doing the dirty work. AI is going to be doing the dirty work while the humans are elevated into a strategic position. And I was like, immediately he got the job. 'Cause I'm like, he is actually pushing my understanding of what's possible. And we're really, we're responsible for being the frontier. It was amazing. So come into it with a creative mind, just totally open to hearing anything and being dumbfounded every single day about what's possible.

Callan Faulkner, this has been really fascinating. If people want to connect with you on the socials, do you have a place that they should go? And if they're interested in possibly getting into your program, uh, where do they go for that also?

Yes, I love it. Find me on Instagram. Uh, my handle is Callan, C-A-L-L-A-N Faulkner, F-A-U-L-K-N-E-R. So it's just Callan Faulkner. In my LinkedIn bio, we, we have tons of free low-ticket masterclasses. We have a bootcamp coming up in September, the AI Employee Bootcamp. It's a 3-day experience where you get to see under the hood of our business. We have over 200 AI employees Stories at this point, and we're going to show them all off. Well, not probably not all, but our best ones off. So come, come join us. I would love to have you guys. Thanks for having me, Mike. This is so fun.

Kalenn, thanks again for bringing your fire and wisdom with us to us today.

Thank you. Absolutely.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com/a120. Be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcasting app. And if you've been a listener for a little while, We would love a review. And also do let your friends know about the show. You can tag me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and/or X. 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.

The AI Explored Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.

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