Build an AI-Powered Business That Actually Works

0:01 Being great at what you do doesn't automatically make you great at business. The skills that got you here won't get you there. This is Path to Mastery, the raw and real business podcast for service-based entrepreneurs, consultants, and practitioners ready to stop chasing tactics and start building foundations that scale. Hosted by Ryan Lang and Brooke Bishop, co-founders of Empire Partners. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the Path to Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Lang, CEO and co-founder of Empire Partners, alongside my co-founder and co-host, Brooke Bishop. What's up, brother? What's up? Long time no see. I know. Okay, so AI has been a hot topic for a long time now.

0:44 Not any, you know, no news there. However, here's the thing. A lot of people are using AI. A lot of companies are talking about AI. But the truth is that not a lot of people and not a lot of companies are making money, growing revenue with AI at this point. You said something to me the other day that I thought was really interesting. You dropped some stats on me the other day that you heard somewhere. What were the stats? There's actually two different reports that actually somebody had sent me. One was from McKenzie and the other was MIT. So the first report from McKinsey was showing that 88% of companies have adopted and they're bringing in AI to the company.

1:25 You know, there's so much in the news that's talking about like AI is going to take everyone's jobs, right? And there's a lot of fear and there's a lot of things going on. There's also a lot of stuff going on Wall Street where there's a lot of money going into AI right now, like nothing else in the marketplace. So here's the crazy piece. So 88% of companies have brought AI in. Less than 32% of actual employees are adopting. Wow. So that alone is a crazy stat out of the gates. And then here's here's the crazy one. Less than 5% of the companies who have brought A.I. in are actually seeing any form of R.O.I. Was you 5% less than 5%? 88% of bringing in. Less than 5% are actually getting an ROI.

2:07 So they're spending way tons of money on bringing in all these different tools, all these different softwares, Agentic, setting up their own stuff. But very, very few are actually getting anything in return in terms of revenue. Wow. All right. So I'll be honest with you. Before you said that to me, I knew there were problems. But I would not have guessed that five percent, less than five percent are actually seeing positive ROI. So if that's the case, the question is, why? Why is that the case? And I think there are multiple reasons. But I want to start with the one that I think I think is front and center.

2:47 So you and I have talked about this. I mean, I don't. I don't consider myself an AI expert. However, what I have realized is after working with, training, mentoring, even just in casual conversation in my own personal life, I know that the way that you and I use AI is far beyond probably 95% of the world at this point. I would agree with that. So... What's interesting, though, is when I when I've thought about this and we've done a lot of training sessions, you know, at Empire in the mastermind on AI at events on AI.

3:27 And what I find is that people are not thinking about AI the right way. Especially when you're talking about, we can talk about corporations all day long, but when you're thinking about individual people, solopreneurs, small business owners, practitioners, coaches, whatever, they're not thinking about AI the right way. Right now, they're thinking about ChatGPT or Claude as their buddy that they're having a friendly chat with on a fucking Friday night. That is the wrong way to think about using AI. So for me, and I want to hear your take on this as well, the big shift for me personally that I would say in terms of my AI use, and I would say that my AI use and my knowledge and my expertise with AI is changing and shifting and growing every day.

4:19 I would say the big turning point was when I stopped thinking of it as a chat buddy And I started looking at it as a strategic partner, as an actual agent, as I mean, not less than a true employee in my business. How do you think about it? If it's any different than what I just said. Very similar. You know, we talk about the quality of our questions dictating the quality of our answers. And I think that this is really comes into play heavily. I mean, well, not to mention the quality of the questions you put into AI is going to dictate the quality of the answers you put in there, too, or that you get out of it. I think for me, what I'm seeing is spot on with what you said in terms of most people are using it as like a glorified search function or a conversation buddy or.

5:08 Yeah. I think just in our sector of the coaching space, most are just using it as their copywriter without any level of putting their own twang or twist to it. So what I'm seeing where we're getting really good returns and results or impact from it is shifting that core question. So to your point, it's like, okay, if this was my personal assistant or if this was a specific role, I think the true value comes in when we step back and we go, okay, if I had, let's say I had $200,000 that I could throw at staffing up, who would I hire? Yep. What would I want them to crush? Yep.

5:48 What would it free me up from? Yes. What's the stuff that I'm doing right now that I don't really love doing that I wish I could hand off to somebody else. If I could, if I could put an expert and sit them right next to me and go, great, I'm going to train you for this next week. And I want you to do all this shit that I don't like doing go. I think that's where we're seeing some really big, powerful moves because that's at the Yeah. I love that. And I love I love thinking of it that way. I think that if you so if you've never done something like a true time audit, you know, or sat down and like brain dumped all the different things that you're doing in your business right now, you should.

6:31 I like Dan Martell has a really nice framework on that. I'd highly recommend checking that out if you've never done that before. But I think it's just like if we were to start with, if we've talked about this many times, like hiring, right? How do we make our first hire? How do we make the right hires? Like what sort of the, you know, step, what are the stepping stones, so to speak? And I think at the very beginning with AI, where people are, are getting it wrong is think of AI as if you had a dedicated executive assistant or chief of staff or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Um, what would you give that person to do right out of the gate?

7:14 And those are the first things that you should be looking to AI to, to, to handle, because here's the interesting thing. I think that from what I found, and I want to hear your take on this as well, but what, from what I found, I've actually built a pretty damn good chief of staff through AI. Like, it handles the majority of my inbox. It handles the majority of my calendar. It grabs and organizes all of my meeting notes and things of that nature. It adds stuff to do on my ClickUp board. You know, it does a lot of the things that a personal assistant would do.

7:54 And quite frankly, when we talk about like VAs and things of that nature, a lot of especially your lower level VAs, a lot of those tasks can absolutely be handled through AI at this point. Yeah, I'm looking at it as through the lens of what are all the things that I spend time doing? Yep. And this is, I think, where there's probably a misconception of AI at this moment for people who aren't like deep in it. AI is not doing the whole shoot match yet. Right. Right? Now, in a couple – A couple of months, a couple of years, maybe like with robotics of how quickly that's going combined with AI. Yeah, we're we're between now and 2030.

8:35 We're going to see an entirely different universe, like beyond our imagination right now. But currently, like the way that I'm leveraging is I'm going, OK, what are the tasks that I do on the given day? How long do those tasks take currently? Yep. Yep. If I were to bring AI into the fold, like my expectation is how can I reduce that time by like 75 to 80 percent? Yes. So something you mentioned, you know, preparation. Right. So for me, one of the things I love doing every morning, I know you have your process for this as well, but I love to do a walkthrough of my entire day. Right. So when I wake up, I look at my calendar. I look at all the meetings I have, the different tasks that I have in the given day.

9:15 And if we went back a year, two years ago, that would take me probably around 45 minutes to an hour before I actually started my day because I was intentional with everything I was doing right now. It takes me about five minutes having a project and having it structured as like my assistant that I can bounce off of. And it has a structure in there that just literally saves me. It literally saves me 55 minutes every single day. Yep. So to anyone who's listening, if you had an extra 55 minutes every single day, like think about that. That's roughly, let's just call it an even seven hours per week. Yep. Okay. So how many people are out there that are going, oh man, I wish I had more time so that I could learn a new language.

9:58 Or I wish I had more time so I could learn that instrument. As I'm saying this, my wife's going to be like, why aren't you practicing? But, you know, that's literally one task that used to take me an hour. Now it takes me five minutes. Yep. Okay. So that's one thing. So is it possible that there's three things in the given day, whether it's debriefing at the end of the day, whether it's preparing for meeting, like before a coaching call, is it, again, not letting AI write all of our copy? But how much time do we spend writing email responses or Slack messages or text message, all these different things? So, again, it's not to get the AI to do all of the shooting match. It's how can we just reduce that time by 75, 80 percent?

10:39 Because now when you start to really and you and I've done this, but when we go through our week and we just take a mental note of like, oh, I could have had AI help me with that. And we start to weave it in. If you had 75 percent of all of your time back. Yeah. that makes the mind kind of go, uh-oh. What do I do with that? Yeah, I agree. So one of the things I love about what you just described, by the way, is at the crux of what I believe is partially wrong with people's thinking around AI. They're thinking of it as a tit-for-tat back and forth. You just described a system, though, right? So what's interesting, and I'll say mine in a second here, but in your daily brief, What are the different things that are connected in that project?

11:26 What different platforms are part of that system? Great question. And for those that are not super tech savvy, if this melts your brain, forgive me in advance. So I'm loving Claude. So Claude's the buzz. It's the rage. Part of what makes it so magical is its ability to connect to everything. It can't connect to everything, but it can connect to pretty much everything. So I have Claude connected to my calendars. multiple calendars. I have Claude connected to all of my files on my computer, as well as all of my files on Google. So my G drive, Google Drive. I also, and this is a really fun one. So I run Fathom. So anytime I'm on Zoom, I've got my every meeting I do online is transcribed, and it drops into a folder.

12:14 I'm also running a plod, plaid, plaid, plaid, plaid, plaid. So it's a little physical dealio that hooks to the back of my phone. I know you run that as well. So every in-person meeting is now transcribed and dropping into a folder. Every online meeting, every single conversation is dropping into a folder. So here's the beauty. When I go to do my brief, it's looking at my calendar. It's looking at all of the meetings I've had in the past. So it starts to pick up on who have I met with before and what were conversations, what were things that happened. And it's looking ahead at everything that's in the future based on my click up, which I didn't mention, but of like tasks and stuff that's moving forward. So now I have AI woven into the past, the present and the future.

12:56 And then I have a conversation and I have a structure for how I want each of those meeting briefs to be laid out. So instead of me just having to think through all of that in real time, whereas before I would have to like literally ponder and go back and like analyze and do all these things, it's doing all that for me. And it's going, hey, I've got all of it. Here you go. Yes. So I love this and that is the system. Yep. And similarly with, with my morning briefing, I run something very similar. I have my, I, for my email and this will blow your mind by the way, if you're listening to this, uh, superhuman is the way I use my email. It's actually an AI based email tool for both email and calendar.

13:38 There's no cost for superhuman. Is there? Oh yeah. I was there. Yeah, there is, but it's, it's, it's small negligible. Yeah. It's, I think it's 20 bucks or something. So I use Superhuman. So it's connected to Superhuman. It's connected similarly to Fathom. It's connected to Plaud, P-L-A-U-D. Clod is the engine behind the entire thing. It's also connected to Google Drive. And similarly, I have it go back, you know, reference everything that is sitting. I have a... a system regarding email where it's like, Hey, we're going to go back the last 48 hours and just figure out, is there anything that's sitting in the inbox that doesn't belong there?

14:22 Is there anything that people are waiting for a response on that? I haven't responded yet. Um, and, uh, and we're going to tackle that. Is there anything that came in new since the last time that we ran a briefing? Um, Um, then similarly, we're looking at meetings. What's on the calendar today? Uh, what happened in the past that influences the, the upcoming calendar appointments? Um, what do I need to be aware of? Uh, what's coming? I don't mind. I don't go too far out in the future. Um, I, I, I focus on what happened yesterday and what's upcoming today. Um, But then what I do is at the end of the day, I do a daily wrap up and that previews the next day, essentially.

15:06 And I close shit out, close loops at the end of the day. So one thing that I found that's really interesting about this is you just talked about the amount of time that you get back. And one thing that I underscored is the amount of time. Think about all the different platforms that we just talked about. Whatever your mail platform is, whatever your calendar platform is, whatever your meeting platform is, all of those different things, you would have to go into each one of those and look and search and grab data and the amount of time. that you would spend going from one platform to the next to then going into a document to lay yourself out a daily agenda.

15:50 Like, I mean, I'm fucking worn out just talking about it. Like, and that's where I think, to your point, we get back so much time. And here's what makes it even better. I believe that... I don't believe that AI, there are certain jobs that AI 1000% has already replaced and is going to replace, no question. However, even in the case of an executive assistant, I still believe that a human is, I want a human at the end of the day. But think about this. If it's your time, it's your time. But how much more productive is your executive assistant if they have a system like this where they don't have to go reinvent the fucking wheel every single morning in order to hand you a daily brief?

16:42 Errors go down massive too, right? If your executive assistant's out sick for the day, well, then you're like, oh, now I'm skunked. So there's some other interesting ways that we've just, in the last week that I thought was fascinating. So we actually have one of our clients, she's in the UK, she has a farm. And she's like, oh, I don't need AI because she's a farmer, right? So it brought up plot. I'm like, hey, if you just put this little thing, just clip this on your lapel of your flannel when you're out working on the farm, like just let it run all day. She's like, why would I do that? Like all the things that you're carrying in your head, all the things you're talking about without using your voice, but you're actually having a conversation with yourself of like, oh, I've got to buy more hay for a little sunshine over there. And oh, I've got to go shovel the shit over there.

17:24 And oh, we've got- Little sunshine. I don't know, whatever. I was having more names in my head that I didn't want to bring up, but right. Like all the sheep are coming in and the trucks are going, but all these things that they have to order feed, like just have the conversation out loud and talk to yourself. And lo and behold, she gets the tool and she goes home and she starts running it. And she's like, oh my God, I get a summary at the end of each day of all the things that I need to do. And it saves me from having to carry all of this knowledge bank and always be thinking and always running, which guess what it does to us? It kills our freaking adrenals, which I know you know this. But like so this is there's clever ways we can start to weave it into our daily daily play.

18:04 And there's one other one I'll just bring up that I thought was super cool. Huge shout out to Emma Garrick over in Scotland. So she showed me that you can now connect Claude to your web builders. Oh, yeah. So I know you're playing with this stuff in a whole different level. But just for our let's call it our average AI user. This was wild. So go into Claude. I go, hey, can you just run an analysis on my personal website real quick? And can you give me the good, bad, and the ugly of what you think is amazing, what you think is terrible, what you'd redo, yada, yada. 20 seconds later, here's the analysis. I go, cool. Can you go run that against my top five competitors? Sure. I'm like, do you have any recommendations of what you do with my website now seeing the competitors?

18:47 It gives it to me. I go, cool. Can you just go straight into Canva and update my website with all your recommendations? And can you weave in the SEO? And can you do all the cool, fun things to make my website that much better? It literally took five minutes. Here's the crazy part for anyone who's out there. My website takes forever and I don't understand my technology. Like literally I had a five minute conversation with Claude. And then I hit a button and it updated my all the things on my website to optimize it. What? Like for real, a year ago, how long that how long would that the research alone would have taken us? Hiring an outside company. How much would we have paid them? 100%. Going and finding a web guy that we had to find trust, which God forbid, like those are few and far between.

19:30 But then actually going and making the edits and actually translating the knowledge into changes on our website to actually going into the website and updating the shit and knowing that it loops back and it actually did the thing. It took five minutes to do that. Like this is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It is insane. And I think one of the things as you're listening to this right now and you're thinking, okay. Yeah. How did you guys figure out that this could happen? Okay, let me give you a really simple hack. And the hack is this. Ask. Like, here's what I want you to do. If you're not doing any of this right now, if the only thing you're doing right now is what most people are doing, which, by the way, there's no shame here.

20:13 If you're listening to this right now and you're like, oh. Yeah, I'm just – it's my buddy on Friday night. It's okay. And by the way, it can still be your fucking buddy on Friday night if you really want it to be. Just don't let it be your boyfriend or girlfriend. Yeah, let's not – let's not turn this – this could get weird real fast. But here's what I want you to do. I want you to do the thing on, you know, go through the time audit, go through the audit of the things that you're doing in your business that you shouldn't be doing, that you don't want to do. And brain dump that out. And then go into your AI with that fucking list and go, OK, here is the list of things that I don't want to do or I think I shouldn't be doing in my business.

21:00 Help me choose the first three that you can help me with and then help me one by one develop a system where you can help take this over for me. And watch what fucking happens. And here's the thing that I think we got to think about is if we think about AI as an employee in our business, you actually said this earlier, what are the different things that I would need to hire for in my business, right? And we think of AI as an employee in our business. Where this gets even better is when you start developing several different projects, which is the way that we run our AI is, you know, yes, we'll use CloudCodeWork and CloudCode and things like that.

21:54 But, you know, inside of Cloud or inside of ChatGPT, A great first step is to start using siloed projects. So I actually had the chance the other day, my dad, who I was in business with for a really long time in my previous company, and he's now, you know, very, very successful in real estate space down in South Florida. Yeah. We were together in Arizona recently, and I was asking him, how are you using AI? Because he was telling me, well, I asked ChatGPT about this. And as I suspected, it was exactly like what I thought. He asked a question, he gets an answer, right? So I spent three hours with him, helping him develop his very first project inside of ChatGPT, which was a marketing project, because he's having somebody redo his website.

22:46 didn't love it. And I wanted him to learn how to get some feedback on it. And so I took my chief marketing strategist project in Claude and customized it for him and his business and all that good stuff. And what was interesting at the end of the day was for the light bulb to go off for him when he realized, because he said, well, okay, great. This is awesome. Like we got some traction. We did a whole bunch of stuff. And he was like, oh, my God, I can't imagine how long this would have taken me. And he's like, okay, so what do I, you know, what am I going to use this for now?

23:35 uh, some of the, what should I ask in strategic questions about what my partner and I are doing in our business? And I'm like, dad, would you go to, if you had a head of marketing, would you go to your head of marketing and ask them for strategic advice on where you're going with your business? Um, No, of course not. It's kind of like, would you go to your executive assistant and ask them to write sales copy? No, I fucking hope not. Right. So I think one of the switches, too, is to I think about every project as a job.

24:19 And I don't like, you can, but I don't like to go outside of that function. And in fact, I don't know about you, but I actually like to have different jobs in, you know, Ryan's little business world of AI working together. So, for example, I have a chief marketing strategist, but then I also have a copywriting auditor. Okay. where I will say, okay, chief marketing strategist, we're going to design the strategy for this funnel, but you're not writing any of the copy. You're just going to tell me what you want in the copy.

25:00 So that happens. Then I write some copy. Then I go to my copywriting auditor with a prompt that I got, by the way, from my chief marketing strategist. And I say, please review this copy. And give me any tweaks that you would suggest, et cetera. And then I go back. But it's just like having employees in your business. Yeah. I do very similar dynamics. Obviously, you're way more in the marketing bucket of things. What I do... Many of our clients, they may not know this, but every single client that we interface with, I have a project specifically for them. So as an example, like spring, spring Benson, who's one of our clients.

25:41 So I have a specific spring Benson business strategist that is my partner. for everything that we do with her. So anything we create or we co-create, it gets put into that project. Any conversations we have, it's hooked into my transcriptions so that it knows all the dialogues we're having. So the whole purpose of that, it's fascinating, man. The amount of people we ask, like, man, if you, and this goes back to the very first part of our stats, 88% of companies have brought in AI. Less than 32% are adopting it. Less than 5% are making money with it. What percentage of people do you think if we went into a company and said, hey, if I can hire you a personal assistant right now, would you want one?

26:24 What percentage do you think would say yes, please? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Probably 100%. Probably 100%. Right. Unless you're one of those people that's like, I don't like managing people. I'll do it myself. I'm a control freak. That's not me. Right. But when you start to think of it, if I have infinite assistance now that have a specialty to every single thing that I do, because here's the other part. How many times have we hired assistants? We're like, oh, my God, they're really good at this particular task, but they're not really good at this other task over here. And they're really good at that task, but they're not really good at it. And so then we start staffing up and we hire different people to do all these different things. With one Claude membership, you literally have infinite assistance for every single thing that you do.

27:05 And I love the fact you brought up the process piece because at first it feels funky because you think with an assistant, you go, hey, go do this thing. And you let them go do it. And then you either like it or you don't. You do have to think differently with AI where you have to think like actually strategically think through what is the outcome? How many times do we ever talk about that? But what is the actual outcome I want to have? How do I want you to behave? How do I want this process to go? What would I do if it were me doing it? Like think through these things as – Like, do you remember Weird Science? Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Such a great movie. So we're not creating The Girlfriend. However, like put the pieces into the puzzle of what you want to create, like as if it were weird science.

27:48 And now I want to break out in song. I'm not going to do it. Uh, but play it that way. And again, there's so many fun tools that you can just start to explore within it. You mentioned something, uh, that was really important. You said, just ask, and I want to clarify, don't come asking us. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. No more late night text messages. Uh, but what I would also say is this, I was actually super scared. Like I was, I felt really comfortable in projects. I felt really comfortable in the chat side. Coworks scared me. And it was one of those pieces. And now you guys, for anyone who's sat through one of my value chain trainings, or you've watched me breakout process, you're gonna be like, why are you scared?

28:29 I was scared because it was it was unknown. I thought I had to have all this technological knowledge. And I took your advice because you're like, hey, just ask it. And so I was like, okay, it was like a Saturday morning. I didn't have any meetings that were back to back. Like I had time in case I got lost in this thing. And I literally went in and I said, okay, I use my morning brief as the first thing that I built, by the way. I go, okay. So I spend about an hour every morning walking through my day. I want to build a process. Like, what do you need from me? What do I do? And it goes, oh, what is your disc? It literally walked me through what it needed. And I go, well, here's the piece of technology I'm using. And it extracted, it pulled it out of me. And I go, can I connect that to you? And he goes, why, yes, you can.

29:10 Here, just click this button. I'm like, blip. And I had to put in my username and password. By the way, I saw one of our clients this week. This is wild. One of our clients, we were helping set up their Claude. And when you add your software, yes, you have to put in your username and your password. And you have to give permission for each thing that you connect. By the second one, they're like... God damn it. My freaking password. I don't know what it is. And they're throwing stuff around their desk. And this, this is what happens once you connect everything though, you don't have to go do it again. So kind of going all the way back, it took me what I thought was going to probably take me half of the day on a Saturday. It took me like 15 minutes. And I set up that whole process that now saves me 55 minutes a day.

29:51 But again, it built, it built the whole thing. Like it wasn't me going like, Oh, connect this and do that and do this and do that. Like it, it literally served it up on a silver platter. And I just hit approve, allow, allow, here's my username pass, like go. So I just want anyone who's sitting there that's going, I'm scared. Cool. I was too. And then now I'm like, give me more. Like what else can I throw in this thing and let it do for me? And I think that's got to be the attitude is thinking in – you literally do – at the risk of using a cliche phrase, think outside the box. Like what can it do for me? And then ask it. And I think one of the things too to your point that I think is really important for people to understand is when you – I actually believe that great use of AI requires a great leader.

30:45 Here's why. Follow me on this. If you are the type of leader who you hand a task to somebody and they come back and it's not what you want and you just, you know, lose your shit or fire them. And I know a lot of people that do both. I have so many stories going through my head. Well, if you do that, if that's your behavior and you act that way with AI, then. your your your outcomes are going to suck period end of story and this is the thing i think still today the biggest complaint is like well i'm just gonna throw chad gpt out the window because it just it just won't give me what i want user fucking error i hate to say it but it's not the ai it's you boo And so I think like you've got to think about this.

31:42 And by the way, if you wouldn't act that way as a leader, don't act that way with your AI. When the AI comes back with something, one of the most valuable things that you can do is to have a back and forth until it gets it right. Do not accept an outcome other than exactly what you want. Because if you do, then it's just going to stop there, and it's going to assume that that's what you're asking it for. If you're willing to take the time to say, hey, you know what, this was great, but this color is not quite right on this document, or you went way too far down this road instead of going over here, Have some back and forth just like you would with a human and then do that until you get the outcome that you want.

32:30 I think the one other thing that I'll mention on this because I want to hear your thoughts here too. I think one of the other really valuable things that you can do is when you're in this exploratory process of can you this, can you that – One thing that AI will do, not always, but at times, unless it 1000% cannot do something. It oftentimes, if you say, Hey, can we this? It'll be like, okay. You know, like a very eager. It loves to say yes. Yeah. Like a very eager, you know, virtual assistant. Okay. I can do that. Sure. Yeah. Um, yeah.

33:12 I get in the habit of when you're asking it if something is possible, ask it if this is the right tool to be using. or if there would be a better, more effective tool to use for what it is that you're trying to accomplish. Love that. Because I have found that when I do that, I can get a much straighter answer from my AI instead of it doing something half-assed, maybe not being the proper tool for something, and me getting an outcome or a result that I'm not happy with at the end of the day. the day. I want to double click on something within what you just said, because I think this is so pertinent for anyone who's using AI right now, because I just want to highlight one of the red flags to the red flags.

33:59 One of the things we're seeing and we've had we've had to tell quite a few people in the last few months about what not to do with AI. The big one being don't you? And not review it and not make it your own and just go, oh, that looks really good. I'm just going to paste it because I need to put some content out there today because somebody said I need to post four times a day. So I'm just going to keep putting out mass quantities of content. And it's not really truly your authentic voice. The second one that goes with that is please, dear God, people, I'm looking at you. Stop using AI to make images of yourself because you can shed like 10 to 15 pounds or you can make it look like the skin is a little bit softer or you can get the lighting all nice and perfect.

34:42 We don't like those images. Not just when I say we, I'm not just being like me and Ryan. I mean like the pervert. Why are you being critical of it? The proverbial we. Nobody wants to see AI images of you. Stop it. All right. So while I'm bringing this up too, we have an interesting moment in time right now where we have consumer confidence that is literally in the toilet. And we have consumer knowledge that is sky high. It's never been higher, partially because of AI. So we have people who don't trust. who have way more information to make buying moves. Well, why is that critical? Well, if everything you're putting out there content-wise is all AI-generated, people aren't going to think that that's your expertise.

35:24 They're thinking that you're just being lazy and you're using a computer to do your heavy lifting. And they're also going to think that you're cheap or you don't have really good people on your staff and you're doing it the easy, lazy way now. Don't do that. So take the time. When you go through it, Don't just trust that AI is more intelligent than you. It still has to be your heart and soul. And this is why we're also seeing some staggering numbers. IQ is starting to fall off a cliff for a lot of different sectors. Why? Because people are depending on AI to think for them. Don't use AI to think for you. Use AI to do the stuff you don't want to do. Yeah, I have a lot of agreement with this. And here's the – I've been having this conversation with a lot of people recently.

36:07 And in fact, it reminds me of the episode that I recorded with Mike Samuels, our head copywriter and one of the biggest badasses that I know as a copywriter. He's pretty freaking amazing. Yeah. And by the way, if you haven't heard that episode, go fucking listen to it as soon as you're done with this one. But I've been talking to a lot of people about this in the context of our own true thought leadership, our copy, our sales. Here's what's really interesting right now. I actually believe that right now is probably the single biggest opportunity we've ever seen, ever, ever. To be authentic and win that way.

36:49 So many people that I know right now, I'm sure you hear this from people too, are going, oh my God, it's so hard to stand out right now. Here's what, here's, no, it's not. No, it isn't. And in fact, I actually think it's easier to stand out than it's ever been because the truth is people are fucking lazy and they don't know how to properly use AI. To your point, where people are losing interest and getting pissed off and tuning out your copy, your sales stuff, your thought leadership, is if you're doing it all through AI, everything is sounding the same.

37:32 Everything is looking the same, right? When people are just pumping it out that way. And so I think that. There is – I think that we've got to think of AI as a strategic partner, not as our brain, all right? And I think that when it comes to – first of all, I mean I'm not going to drone on about this. Just go listen to the Mike Samuels episode. But when it comes to your copy – Fucking write it yourself and then use your AI to help you audit it or, you know, make the tweaks, not, you know, not AI, write my copy and just blow it out there. That worked at the very beginning when, you know, when nobody knew what was going on.

38:16 I did it. You did it. I did it at the very beginning, but it ain't working now. Nope. It's the opposite of what's working now. And I also think this, I think that right now is the single biggest time with all the things that we've talked about today and the ways that we're using AI. Notice one component that is missing. Not once have we said that we're using AI to replace human connection. Please fucking listen to that. We are not using AI to replace human connection. And if you're doing that, you are losing. I guarantee it. This is the opportunity for you to make more money, close more sales, make more impact, truly put yourself on a pedestal above your competition with your thought leadership.

38:58 If you will just be willing to do it authentically and not try to use AI to replace you in that capacity. Normally I would say, oh man, I wish I was there with you and I could high five you. Now I can. A couple other quick pieces I want to just stack into the fold just because I think there's some really cool tools that people – would use, and I want to give a couple of shout outs, actually, John Barbera, one of our, one of our members, he recommended a tool called Whisper. So for those listening, if you're not familiar with Whisper, it's W-I-S-P-R. We can actually put a link in the, in the show notes. We'll put a bunch of shit in the show notes for you. But Whisper is an amazing tool. So I know many of us use talk to text, right?

39:39 The cool piece with Whisper is it's talk to text that has AI built into it. I Oh, yeah. Okay. So why I bring this into the fold, we're all used to doing it on our cell phones and kind of going like, hey, like, let me do talk to text and send text message. The thing that's killer with whisper is it natively hooks into your whole computer system or your iPad or your phone. And so, like, I rarely write any of my emails anymore because I just hit the button on my keyboard and I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Buttons it up, cleans it up, does all the editing, all the grammar. Ryan's mom, who's an English teacher, makes sure everything's spelled properly. Right. But I also use it in Claude. So I don't sit there and very rarely am I finger typing anything into Claude anymore.

40:19 I just go, great, hit the button and I just start talking as if it were my assistant. Uh, the other cool piece, just, again, I know we mentioned plod P like potato plod for anyone's wanting to pick up that tool. Check it out. It's like, what, 150 bucks or something. Well, they have different, they have different physical tools. Yeah. And, and you can definitely, I think you can, the first one starts at under a hundred bucks. So yeah, they're super, super cool. P L A U D by the way. P as in PETA. Uh, definitely pick up one of those, just get started with it. Um, there was one other thing I was gonna say, Oh, we have another person in our world who has, he's a wizard with AI. So Dave Fox, so Brittany was our member, her husband, he is creating LMS.

41:05 So for learning management systems. So any, any of you have gone through a course, the software that your course lives on is called an LMS. He's creating AI driven LMS. This is slick. So again, you guys, thinking of like where the future and where we're going in these next couple of years, what Dave has created is an LMS that's AI related or AI driven. So every single client that comes into your coaching program has their own unique experience inside of your members portal. So instead of it looking the same and every single person gets the same video and the same communication. Like imagine your customer experience coming through and they've got your profile beforehand and they've got all of your language patterns because they've gone and researched your social media and they see all the different things you like.

41:50 They see all the political things that you are participating in or all the different charities you participate in. And it will custom tailor your entire experience engaging with your coach. And the content gets fed to you custom based on what we're, we've got stuff from a knowledge bank and like where education is going for not just, not just students, but we have to think this way. Absolutely. For our clients, not just how do I create like, you know, uh, Brooke and Ryan AI that we can just have a chat back and forth, like with a chat agent, but like really thinking through these custom worlds that we can now create for people that serve them the way they want to receive it. Very cool stuff that's coming.

42:30 I totally agree. And while we're on the subject of, you know, as we kind of come to a close here and we're sharing some of the tools that we use, and we've thrown a few of them out already, but I mentioned earlier Superhuman. That thing is an absolute godsend. It takes in all of the emails that you've ever sent that are still in your Gmail or your Outlook or whatever email platform you use. And it now has all of the emails that are in your sent box as examples of how you write.

43:16 And the thing that was so wonderful the first time I used Superhuman – was that usually if you're going to use a chat GPT or a cloud, there's like an iteration process of like, okay, I'm going to feed you some samples, and we're going to go back and forth, and I'm going to tell you I would never say this, and, you know, whatever. Yeah. With superhuman? Oh my god. Like, the first couple emails it wrote, I was like, uh, send! Did I just write that? Send! It's phenomenal. And it has a beautiful integration with Claude, which makes it even better. But... superhuman is incredible amazing for email writing for triaging your inbox it will also act just like an assistant to create calendar appointments and by the way this is exactly how I use it I use whisper I open up whisper I go into the AI portion of superhuman and I say hey Create an appointment for Brooke and I to record a podcast on Saturday at 8 a.m.

44:19 Invite Brooke Bishop and make it one hour. Boop. Gone, right? So superhuman is super cool. It's superhuman. It's superhuman. I think the one other thing that I – you talked about Claude. We've already talked about Claude. And I think one of the things as we start to come to a close here is somebody who's early on in the process going – Oh, okay. So I'm going to give, I want to give something to number one, somebody who's early on in the process. And then number two, somebody who's been a little deeper, but kind of wants to take it to the next level. If you're early on in the process and you're either very lightly using AI, it's your Friday night buddy, uh, or not using it at all.

45:02 God forbid. I know there are still a few holdouts out there. Um, okay. My personal recommendation, I want to hear your thoughts too, but I've used all of the big primary AI tools at this point pretty heavily. Personally, if I absolutely had to choose one, and by the way, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that you go out and sign up for 10 AI tools right now. Do one, two, if you're just getting started. For me, it's Claude. I don't know about you, but, you know, would you agree? I would agree. Yeah. Yeah. And I would agree just purely, I mean, the pieces we've been talking about, the fact that you can just connect it to all the other tools you're already using. And it's pretty dang easy. I mean, there's literally not – it would be pretty hard to fully screw it up.

45:46 And yes, you can. But it's just such a simple tool that you can get into Momentum. Yeah, I think one of the things that I love about Claude is that while ChatGPT, by the way, also connects to just about everything. But one of the things I love about Claude is I love co-work. And yes, ChatGPT has Codex, you know, which is sort of its co-work, you know, version. But it's also got Claude code, which is fucking wicked. Literally, you just think about anything that you want to create, go into Claude code, tell it what it is, bloop. Um, we created a calculator two years ago and it took, so this is wild. We had created a calculator eight years ago with when, uh, working with Tony Robbins, you guys, it took me nine months with an entire dev team.

46:33 Like this is how fast things are moving. Like, and I'm not exaggerating. It was nine months with an entire dev team to create this calculator that did these functions that would live on a webpage. It cost us at the time at the company, it cost us $40,000 to create that calculator and nine months of an entire team and back and forth in this whole shoot match. You and I created a calculator, similar dynamic. What was that? Two years ago? Yeah. So two years ago, we spent... three grand, I think, to build that calculator. I think it was like three grand, four grand, maybe somewhere in there. And it took us three months. Now, we already had knowledge from nine years prior, and we had all these things. It literally takes 30 seconds and no cost to build it in Claude like that.

47:15 It's crazy. So, yes, I'm a very, very big fan of that. But what was the other one for those that are deeper into the well? Well, yeah, if you're a little further down the rabbit hole, I just want you to start thinking again. The shift is thinking in systems. This is really where the jump is going to be made. And by the way, I was curious about this. So I went out and researched a little bit on statistics of like if we're talking about small business owners, solopreneurs, stuff like that. Most business owners report absolutely zero return on investment in terms of time or money until they shifted into systems or agentic-based thinking with AI.

47:56 Yeah. When you make that shift, it changes absolutely everything. And so I want you to start thinking about the different systems that you can create, whether you're a cloud user or if you love ChatGPT. And by the way, I just this week got a little deeper playing around with the new at the time of this recording, the 5.5 model of ChatGPT. It's wicked. It's really good. Yeah. But regardless of which one you use, what are the different systems I can create? How can I use my core AI base, whatever that is, to integrate with other tools, to create a system that will work in my business.

48:39 And then to take it one step further, how can – and not all of these things are able to be automated or should be automated for that matter. But how can I automate systems that I don't – that can run without me? And automation is not new, right? I think it's very overwhelming for people who don't fully understand it. But again, all you have to do, you have everything that you need literally in front of you. And it's just ask the AI. If you think about something you want to create, ask the AI how to do it. If you want to integrate with another tool, ask AI how you could do that.

49:23 And ask AI how, like, hey, here's this process in my business that goes on right now. How could we systematize this with the tools that I have? I have tool A, tool B, tool C, and you. Great. How could we systematize that, you know, that kind of thing? If you can start thinking that way, I guarantee you, you will get back gobs of your time. You will get back more opportunity to do the authentic connecting activities that actually generate and grow revenue in your business and create and cultivate trust and putting your thought leadership out there and all of that kind of stuff. And at the end of the day, I actually believe that if you can think more in systems, you will also generate more revenue.

50:04 Can I share one more strategy? So this is just one fun one that I've created. I want to say it was two weeks ago. I don't know. Maybe I told you about this one. So David Meerman Scott. So if anybody doesn't know who David Meerman Scott is. So he's in the marketing sector. He's really big on this concept called news jacking. So it's like, oh, something happens in the news. How do you relate either your opinion or your content or your product? Like, how do you relate it to the thing that's happening in the news so you can ride the wave and the aftershocks of whatever that thing that's happening? Right. So it's just a clever way of putting your content out there. Yeah. So what I set up with Claude Cowork is I go, okay. Every week I have everything being transcribed, all the meetings I'm in, all the client engagements, like I've got my plod in my pocket, like recording everything.

50:51 So pretty much my whole world is being transcribed and dumped into a folder. So what I set up on cowork was I said, okay, once a week, I want you to go back into the previous week. I just want you to scour everything that's going on. And I want you to go look in the news right now to find the top three things that are trending in the news and see if any of the dialogues or anything that I've had in the course of the week would be really good content that would relate to those top three topics. And then I want you to go in and look at all the copy that I've written over the past. And I want you to give me like three different outputs of copy to get me started on drafting something once a week so that this way I can either take, you know, I agree frames or a contrarian frame.

51:33 And it gives me something every single week to look at. So this way, everything I'm putting out is time relative. It's stuff that's trending in the media currently. And then I get to take a position on it. but I don't have to go do the research. So every Sunday morning, all of that happens. And then I get, Hey reminder, here's the piece that you wanted from us from this week. Which route did you want to go? It takes me like three minutes to create. So I just, just kind of a fun one that I'm using that. I don't know. Anyone who's listening might find it like, Oh, that's cool. Like I want to have very timely content that I'm putting out there and I can speak to the stuff that's happening here now. I love it, man. I love it. Well, all right. We've given you a lot. I think that we're possibly in brain melting territory with some folks right now.

52:19 So we're going to wind this down. But, you know, just leaving here today, what I want to leave you with is this. AI is not going anywhere. Newsflash. So I think that those of you that are still lagging behind, those of you that are still kicking and screaming with this, you got to fucking let it go. You're going to get absolutely annihilated by your competition if you don't. Secondly, shift your thinking around AI. Start thinking of it less as a chat buddy, more as a systems generator. And if you're at the very beginning, choose one tool. Start creating some employees, some projects in your business right now. And if you're a little further along, start looking at how you can start daisy chaining some of your tools together.

53:01 and starting to create systems. We're going to do far more on this because I think it's really important right now in the world that we're living in. But dude, this was great. This was awesome. I think it was a good episode for us to kind of kick off this conversation because it's a really important one right now. And thank you for listening to this episode of the Path to Mastery podcast. Pee like potato. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Path to Mastery podcast. Until next time. Thanks for listening to the Path to Mastery podcast. If you got value from this, leave us a review and subscribe so that you never miss a single episode. And if you know another entrepreneur who needs to hear this, do us a solid and send it their way.

53:46 We'll catch you next time on the Path to Mastery podcast.