AI Tools for Professionals and Business Owners in 2024

Everyone, welcome to the Meaningful Revolution podcast. I am your host, Sean Button. Now, this month in March is AI Month here in the Meaningful Revolution, because it's something I'm super passionate about. And continuing with that theme, before we get into some amazing interviews we got for the next couple of weeks queued up for you, it's talking about tools that I've been using and I think will be important in 2024. Now, I know a video like this talking about particular tools in AI. Like, things will change by probably next month and the end of the year. But what makes this episode special in that regard, in that most of these tools that I'm going to talk about, I've been using for over a year, year and a half. These are things that I found very impactful in helping me accelerate certain processes in my business and in life in general. If you're a content creator, if you're a business owner, if you are someone that has been using some AI tools in your life, practically, this episode is for you. Now, before we get into the actual tools, some things that I always keep in mind with technology in general that I think are helpful are the following. So I have these assumptions and beliefs about technology, the first one being that tech is tools, meaning it should be helpful. And this leads me to my second point, that tools help you, toys distract you. So if you're experimenting with AI and it's just like a shiny thing that you're playing with, cool. I've done a ton of that myself because you get a huge feel for the power of these different kind of tools and how they work, and that's great. But this episode is focused on how can AI tools help you create, help you in your business, help you in your profession? And that's something to pay attention to, right? So a tool helps you, a toy distracts you. Also, our passions, our meaningful revolutions, our missions, our purposes can be accelerated with the right tools, right? If you are trying to build a house, it's going to be really hard if the only tool you have is a hammer and you don't have drills or screwdrivers or anything like that. And in different phases of building a house, different tools become more or less important. And the same is for any tool, and the same is for software, social media, and these AI tools. So keep that in mind that these should help you and should be accelerating your missions, your purposes, your life in very practical ways. And then let's not forget, this stuff is fun. I have been nerding out about this stuff for over a year. I've been really enjoying seeing how useful and impactful these tools can be and thinking through like, how do we keep the human thumbprint on the things we create with these AI tools? But mostly this is cool and fun. And fun, especially as a high performance coach, to be more efficient at creating podcast episodes, at writing emails, taking notes with an AI bot so that I can be a better coach, things of that nature. So we'll get into all these different areas coming up real quick to tell a story about this. So talk about. Before I started using AI tools in my business, it would take me about half a day or more to complete a podcast episode from recording it, getting it transcribed, editing it, trying to find clips to post on social media and that whole thing. And so it was time consuming and someone that just wanted to coach and someone that just wanted to help people. I didn't really envision myself being a video editor, so that whole process was a bit of a drag for me. And so it was this tension of you gotta do these things to get the business notice, to get people to get to know you a bit more and do this work that's not like the most fulfilling, but it gets to the fulfilling work, which is coaching, which is helping people with content. About a year and a half ago, two years ago maybe, I, I've heard about descript, which, if you don't know Descript, I'm going to talk about. This is one of the main tools that I've been using in my business for a while and I absolutely love it. But descript is a text based video editor that creates transcripts and has some AI tools that they've been baking into it that are super awesome and I'll get into at a very high level here in a second. But that cut down, I could in three hours and set. So instead of six hours, in three hours I could get a podcast episode up or I could in two hours record a YouTube video and then get that whole everything processed and ready to go. So that's the power of these things in a very practical matter. And I also feel like I need to say that there are, there's been a lot of talk out in the world of how dangerous these tools can be. And with any tool, it is dangerous if used improperly. I'm making the assumption if you're here listening to a podcast called the Meaningful Revolution, you're trying to go out into the world with a heart of service and a heart of helping people and a heart of doing good and not evil. So I just want to address that real quick too with. Yeah, so I know you're good. I know you're going to put these tools for good use. Please don't destroy society with them. And that's a little hyperbolic, but yeah, just have good intentions and just serve right. Everything we do, whether we admit it or not in business, in our life, is connected to relationships and people and we need to honor that. And the more you can focus on those relationships and helping others, the more passionate and fulfilling your work or your life will be. And that's something that I believe here on the meaningful revolution. All right, that all said, let's get into the meat of this. So I have six tools that I would consider right now in 2024 in March for a small business, A content creator. Someone that just wants to have, you know, a more effective note taking system or more effective workflows out in the world. Okay. The first tool that I already talked about is descript. So again, it's a text based video editor. Creates transcriptions, clips, show descriptions and more. And I love, love, love descript. I will edit this episode that I'm recording shortly after I'm finished recording in descript. And what this does is imagine you had a pages document or word document, so just a bunch of text. So basically a transcription. Right? Okay, getting ahead of myself. So the first thing that happens when you upload a video or audio into descript is it will take three minutes to transcribe it and it does a pretty amazing job. So websites like Rev.com that used to do this by 10 cents per word or whatever. The crazy thing was this makes it super quick and super cheap and I love it on top of it. Since it's a text based editor, if you have a video or audio, so you get the transcription, if you cut out a word in the document, it will edit the video and cut that out for you or cut that out in the audio, which is really powerful. Now some of the AI functionality that we've baked into it, which is super helpful for producing a podcast like this or YouTube videos or any type of other video content or audio content, is they have an AI cleanup function for studio sound. So it'll help make the sound better. I just said sound. But yeah, it improves the audio quality quite a bit with a click of the button and you wait five minutes and it sounds like you're in like a podcast studio. So that's amazing. If you goof up, you can train it on your voice so it'll create an AI voice for you. So you can actually like type in to the document and fix it up and it'll generate your voice and it'll seamlessly put it in, which is crazy, right? You talk about the dangers of some of these tools. It's, oh, someone can copy your voice and someone can get it to say anything. That's a consideration. We could talk about AI security stuff here in a bit, but that's something I would be thinking about just to be aware of that the things that you listen or see could be digitally manipulated. It's just a good call out. But when you're producing a podcast and you know, it's really powerful to be able to tweak a couple of things. If you just have a couple of things wrong and away you go. Super, super powerful. I also want to say that in my community space@imr.seanbutner.com I do a deep dive into my complete workflow, editing a podcast episode interview in that space. And if you're interested in that, you can go to mr.seanbutner.com, which is meaningful revolution, and either ask questions about this episode. So if you're like, hey, I'm really interested in AI and I want to know this and this, or what do you think about this, Sean? We can answer that question in the community space and that's free to access. And then these AI tools that I'm going to be going through once a month here for the rest of the year will just basically show you the workflows or the use cases I found most useful for each of the tools we'll talk about today. And if you're interested in that's paid. But if you go into the community space, you'll see a spot on the left for the AI calls. Just click on that and you can get learn more and get set up from there. So if you're interested, see me there. If you have any questions on today's episode, hit us in the community. Sign up for that free account comment in the discussion session and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Cool. All right, Eric. First tool is descript. Second tool I've been using for about the last year and a half so is ChatGPT. And ChatGPT the use case, like a lot of the tools that are quote, AI enabled, use ChatGPT on the back end. So meaning that they built functionality on top of that core technology, meaning that if you know how to ask ChatGPT questions, if you see a prompt, ask AI a question in another tool, it's going to be very similar how the structure works. So if you needed to learn how to make prompts and stuff, I'd use ChatGPT. And the great thing about ChatGPT is you can ask it questions and so it acts more like a research assistant or an artificial teammate and it can help you clarify thinking and so use cases that I've found very effective with ChatGPT are, hey, act as an expert marketer and trying to figure out my target market. Here's what I do. Here are my programs, Here is the copy on my webpage. What am I missing or what do I need to think through to make this even more effective? And you can spend hours just going back and forth having ChatGPT ask you a question like have you thought about this demographic? Or what are you doing over here? Okay, great. And then have it generate a report for you at the end. It's super fun. It's way more engaging and I feel like the act of writing and asking questions or responding to questions gets your thinking clear. Right. Things to watch out for with ChatGPT is sometimes it can lead you straying. Sometimes there are quirks in anything. You have to have an editor's eye and a skeptical eye of is this really true or not? Um, but. Cause it can trick you into thinking of sounding really smart and it's really nothing. But that act of critical thinking and analyzing again can sharpen your thinking or open up an idea and help you brainstorm another avenue of checking it out. Super, super powerful, super super cool. The third tool that I had for you that I've been using when it comes to particular like market research or comparative searches on the web is Google's Gemini. And I know they were in the news for some crazy stuff recently, but what I've found is if you're trying to test out a marketer, I have an idea for a course on taking notes or on being productive. Go on the web, search for courses that are at least $300 that have good reviews and tell me the marketing angles, tell me the marketing psychology they're using, tell me how they're delivering the course so and it'll generate a report for you. So it's super, super helpful in sounding out in business a particular market or seeing if things exist out there already and comparing that and then compiling that for you. Gemini is pretty cool in that way. So anything search on the web related, I think Google's just a powerhouse and it's just going to get better. Or chatgpt I think can help you brainstorm and clarify your thinking. I think Gemini can help you pull and organize things on the web a bit better. That's how I'm thinking about it right now myself. The fourth tool is something that I absolutely love and it's like the backbone of my business. And that's an application called Notion, which is really great for as a writing assistant. Summaries, brainstorming, note taking. You can make databases on the fly and it's really powerful. But since this is a episode on AI Tools, and although I've found them to be super useful, really, the writing assistant can be great. So when I do marketing emails or write a newsletter, I can write it in Notion, have all my emails organized together so I can see all the ones that I've sent out to my audience in one place. So it's a little bit more organized. I could do some analysis on it. I can track podcast episode statuses. So there's like a Kanban board where this episode is now in the. I need to edit it after this recording is done and then I can move it through all the way to release. I have a calendar view. It's super awesome. But the writing assistant of okay, here's my email. And then you can just play around like, how does the sound more concise, how does it sound? If it was more playful, how does the sound? It was more motivational and it can get a couple of different versions of an email and it just helps inform your writing, right? Or helps correct spelling and stuff like how Grammarly works. But I just like Notion because it's way easier to organize. It's if you took Evernote and Grammarly and combined it together so you can organize, take notes, really great. They have some other AI things where if you can say, summarize this article that I pulled from the web and it'll generate an AI summary, which is helpful. Again, like any of these AI tools, you have to be very critical and double check that it's saying the right thing. But I think it opens up your brain. Since you're looking for that, you end up learning deeper. I love Notion. I have some more stuff on that coming probably in the next couple months, so stay tuned for that as a little teaser. And if you're like, what are you talking about again? In our community space, in our AI Monthly calls, I'll be going on a deep dive in this in a couple months. So if you're interested, post a comment again in the community, in the free space or sign up for our AI Tools Monthly. Love to walk you through How I'm using Notion. It's great. Okay, the one last two tools, right? So I said I had six. These are ones that are more recent. So the first so number five tool on this list is Deli AI, which is an AI clone. And so if you do content or you have presentations or a lot of speeches you've recorded, Delphi is great to create an AI clone that can one help you find when you say stuff. There's another service called Searchy IO that is awesome like this. But Delphi is way more conversational. And so as a coach, I've been testing out having this as an option for clients to be able to ask me ask my AI clone, Hey, I just went through a breakup. How do you recommend going through a breakup? And since I fed a bunch of my YouTube videos and newsletters and stuff into it, it will find when I talk about relationships and it's really conversational and really great. I was playing around with this, I was asking it about grief because years ago I lost my mom and it brought me to tears. This stuff really can connect and is really powerful. And in my view for therapists, for coaches, for probably medical professionals, we're going to see a lot more of these AI clones as like the first level of engagement. Because one, if you know you're talking to a robot, you might feel a little bit more free to talk and not be judged. And so I think it's really good for getting you used to sharing things that might you might need to with a health professional or coach or medical professional. And I also think that if you have some low level thing around, like I'm feeling anxious, like here's a couple of exercises you can try to do, deal with your anxiety and that solves it. And you're good, you don't need to sit in a session and you can have that more on demand. Delphi is something I'm more playing with. And if you're interested in checking out and trying out my AI bot, you can go to shawbutter.com and at the bottom of the homepage you'll find my AI clone. So you can ask it some questions and see what comes up for you. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that. So if you do that, make sure you join us in the community. Let me know your experience because that'd be cool. But yeah, it'll basically reference YouTube videos and stuff for whatever you ask it. So I'd love for you to check that out. And then the sixth tool I think is that's overrated and something I've been using a bit more recently, it's been around for a while is Zoom has a built in AI note taker and as a coach when I'm in a session it's really great to have someone else thinking about or a process that is pulling out all the big points, pulling out commitments, pulling out high level ideas so I can actually focus on the conversation more. And so I think if you run any type of Zoom meetings for your profession this could be super helpful for you. And then pair that with a note taking app like Notion or taking the videos and throwing in the description. There's so much more you could do. Anyways, again, so the tools that I think will be really important this year and ones that I've been using mostly for the last year and a half except for Delphi and the Zoom AI which is a little bit months since found out years are descript, ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, Notion for writing assistance, Delphi AI and then the Zoom built in note taker. I hope you like this episode. Let me know what you think in the community. Again go to mister.seanbutner.com just linked in the notes and sign up for a free account. Leave a comment in the discussion area on any questions you have or things that you found super helpful in the AI space and I'd love to hear about that. Also, if you're interested in these tools and more a continuing discussion about AI tools. Once a month I am posting a live meeting webinar, I don't know what to call it, training on each of these tools that we talked about today and more, just going through how I'm using it, how I think about it, and then just really getting into any questions you all have. So if you have questions, make sure you sign up for that in the community space. And with that concludes this episode of the Meaningful Revolution podcast. Next week we have an amazing guest who's a psychologist and has built an AI coach to supplement her psychology practice. I think you're really going to love this or love that episode, so stay tuned for that. After that we have a an expert copywriter who's also been dipping his toe in using AI in that profession. Both of these conversations are with people that I would say have very relationship based professions, therapy and copywriting. Because you're trying to engage people's emotions, you're trying to get people and move people into action to improve their health, to buy the thing, to be aware of this message or whatnot. And so it's very interesting to see how these folks are practically using this, these tools in their lives, too. So really excited to share those with you. And then at the end of this month, for the first time ever in our community space, I'm going to do a live version of the Meaningful Revolution podcast. So if you are interested in being live, ask questions and whatnot, make sure you join us in our community space link again below in the show notes. We'd love to see you there. So with that, this is Sean Butner signing off. And we'll see you guys next week on the Meaningful Revolution podcast. Hey, and real quick, if you missed last week's episode of Meaningful Revolution, which is about how I'm thinking about AI tools, make sure to see the link in the show notes or go over here on YouTube to check out that episode. I know you'll love it. Okay, see you there, guys.