310: Building a More Human Business With AI

As business owners, we often find ourselves juggling multiple roles, from content creator to customer service representative. This constant multitasking can lead to burnout and detract from the core aspects of our business that light us up.

Today on the podcast, we're exploring how artificial intelligence can help alleviate these pain points, allowing us to refocus on the human elements that make our businesses unique. Join us as we delve into the practical applications of AI in entrepreneurship.

Key Insights

• Time-saving potential of AI in various business operations
• How to use AI to make your business more human
• How AI can adapt to your unique voice and style in content creation
• How to identify tasks for AI so you can focus on genuine human interaction
• Why adopting this new co-worker (i.e. AI) matters so much in the rapidly evolving technology landscape
• How to align AI use with your business vision and core values

Exploring Further

If you want to learn more about integrating AI into your business while maintaining its human essence, join our upcoming Lucrative Lifestyle Business Mastermind. We'll be discussing these ideas in depth and providing practical strategies for implementing them in your business.

For more information, visit besuperabound.com/mastermind

Full transcript:

Erin Aquin  0:01  
Welcome to the Superabound podcast with master coaches Erin Aquin and Steve Haase, where vision led entrepreneurs learn to build a generous business without sacrificing what matters most. You are listening to episode 310 building a more human business with AI. All right, so I'm gonna admit it, I'm a bit of a Luddite. Takes me a little while sometimes to adopt new technology, even though I love tech, like I, you know, I I wear. I have wearables. I am very into fun, fancy things. I don't have like a shopping preference, except for when it comes to tech and gadgets. I do love that stuff, but I am not always an early adopter of I don't buy the latest phone until it's been tested by other people. I just take my time with a lot of technology, and that was very true for me as a business owner with things like chat GPT with all of the people proclaiming that AI was the way of the future in business. I just kind of tuned that out for a number of years, knowingly nodding. He's like, Yeah, it's really annoying.

Steve Haase  1:33  
It makes sense. The early versions of it are really vanilla, really bland. They can, you know, do AP Chemistry, AP Biology, which is impressive, but can they do your business? And the answer for most people is No, not at all, in fact. And so it's very tempting to look at chatgpt like the new NFT and you're like, Okay, well, you know, where are all those newly minted Tony Hawk nfts, that everyone was so excited about three or four years ago is is a tech hype cycle, um, but I think it's different with generative AI. And there's a number of reasons, and we're not going to go into all those reasons, but the thing for this podcast that we want to focus on is how that potential breakthrough that this represents can really help you create the business that you love, a business that allows you to be even more human.

Erin Aquin  2:31  
Yeah, and I will say that I've really come around on this recently, because there were very many years, you know, my first kind of foray into business coaching was really trying to help people get back time in their week. I had this free guide teaching you how to get back four hours a week in your four hours a day. What was it? The extra hour, an extra hour like the extra hour workbook. It was a great workbook, but it was very mindset focused and productivity focused, which I think is very important, but now we actually have tools through AI that will actually save you time. So just a really simple example that probably a lot of you know about. You can now feed your entire voice, your entire website, every blog you've ever written, every podcast you've ever recorded, every program you've ever run into, chatgpt or one of these AI tools, and ask it to write something in the style of your voice, and this would take a copywriter probably 20 hours to really get a full analysis of what you're doing. We've had, we've worked with people who what we hired to write our social media posts in our voice. And, you know, we worked with one person, I think, for four months, and he never really got it, but the AI can do this in literally 30 seconds. And it's not perfect. It's not going to be something you can just publish immediately. It will still need your human eyes. But man, I spent, I used to spend 20 hours a month with my copywriter person trying to get them to sound like me, whereas we spent the other day 15 minutes with the tool that we are using and experimenting with right now, and created an entire landing page for an upcoming program that we're doing it got close, and then we took it over the finish line. And I just think that there is so much potential that many business owners don't know about because. Is, first of all, they think they're listening to the hype that says, like AI is taking everyone's business away, and it's terrible, and we can't trust it. I think there are definitely trust issues, and we need to know more, and there's going to be privacy regulations and all of those things that do come into play, but a lot of folks also just don't know the potential power of getting really good at your prompts, getting really good at working with this tool in your business.

Steve Haase  5:36  
Yeah, this opens up a whole world of exploration. Really, one thing that we focus on with leaders is helping you grow your capacity to lead. It is a skill that no one is really born with, despite what you know, some people may say leadership as a whole is a craft and requires cultivation and growing so that you can take new people to your business and point them in the right direction, so that they feel it for themselves like that's a whole art. There's a whole, you know, area that you need to invest in, and that's one of the things that we help people do with our business. Working with AI is similar, but different, because you're not dealing with humans, but the ability to take this tool and have this machine do what you want it to do. It's not going to do it just with a sentence, but with the right coaxing, with the right investment of time. And it's not a ton of time, but it is some time. It will be like having that other extra person on your team, that extra several people on your team, because the AI won't just be a copywriter for you. When you invest in the you know, the training and guidance of it, it can be your copywriter, it can be your strategist, it can be your sounding board. It can be your first draft on any kind of documents that you want to create. Maybe it's a job posting, maybe it's a terms of service, any of these kinds of things that would otherwise put a big block of time between you and the finish line, that block of time gets shrunk, and the investment that you need to make is, first of all, your belief that it can be done for you and your business. And then the kind of playing around the back and forth, maybe studying what some effective prompts that other people have used are. It's a whole kind of art and skill set unto itself, kind of like leadership is,

Erin Aquin  7:45  
and I think that that's also a barrier for a lot of people, a lot of business owners, a lot of leaders just feel like, I don't really have time to mess around with these AI tools. I don't totally get them. You know, maybe in your industry, there hasn't been a lot of imagining about how this can work. So we are trying our best in our business right now to take some of that guesswork away, some of that whatever feels like wasted time playing around a way, and we are actually going to be leading a mastermind that teaches you mindset tools so to help your business grow, but also teaches you how to incorporate some of these automation tools, AI tools, getting your own kind of custom tech stack really set up for your business, because I know a lot of folks are using AI right now for Customer Service, you can program or create a really amazing chat bot to deal with customer issues, but if you don't have a product based business, that's probably not going to be the most helpful thing for you. Maybe what you need is quicker response times to emails from your clients. Maybe what you need is some more help in prompts for your content. I know I get very annoyed when I see people using AI to do things that are what I consider, in my opinion, my judgmental opinion are like the job of the human So we've seen a really weird uptick lately in people using AI to respond to social media posts. You go to LinkedIn, you read the comment section, and anybody famous is or any viral post, you will see these benign, irrelevant posts or comments that word salad, yeah, just or like, they just regurgitate the post. And I just think, like, okay, that is not using AI to create a more human business. Ai shouldn't be having genuine responses for you. It should be giving you the time so you can actually. Engage in the building relationships that you need for your business. So AI should be helping you with your scheduling process, with your drafting process for your content. You should not be ideally, sending out your opinion that you popped in the chat prompt from chat GPT, so it's really a way of figuring out, according to your vision and your values, what don't you like doing in your business. I have a client who definitely, right now, when I think about her business, her business would definitely benefit from having an AI chat bot deal with some of her customer service issues. She all the time, has people who, like, can't find their password, who don't understand how to log into the platform. She's a really big business. A lot of people in there something where someone could instantly get an answer to their question would save her and her team 10 hours a week. So that's something we're going to be playing with in her business.

Steve Haase  11:17  
And so when you think about the idea of creating a more human business like Erin just said, focusing on those things that you want to be doing, as well as those things that you would rather not be doing, and then finding ways, finding tools or prompts or processes that will help You do more of the human stuff, more that lights you up and that creates those real relationships with your current customers and future customers, and less of the things that do not light you up, that actually make you question whether you should be an entrepreneur at all, whether this business is worth it, all those things that are kind of like sucking and soul draining. Find ways for the AI to help you there. They absolutely exist. And so if you take one thing away with this whole how to use AI to make a more human business, it's bucket your activities into the things that enhance your humanity and the things that degrade it and see if the machine can do more of the latter. And

Erin Aquin  12:24  
you may not know where to start. I realize we're using words that we know the definitions of, but you might not learning how to spend time with your prompts is something we're going to be covering in the mastermind using AI to do the things you don't love so much so that you can spend more time building real, authentic relationships with your current clients, with your past clients, with your future clients. All of that is going to be something that we really focus on. But I think where I get very excited about the rapid advances that are happening in this world of machine learning. Is about five years ago, the sort of very common thing that all entrepreneurs believed was to get to a point of being successful, to get to the point of being profitable, you kind of had to learn how to be an expert in a whole bunch of things. It wasn't enough to have a great product. It wasn't enough to deliver amazing service. You also had to learn how to market, how to sell, how to do the back end, how to do a whole bunch of shit that you probably didn't want to do, and you just had to sort of grin and bear it and learn it. And most of us were running businesses doing things that we were not very good at, to try to get to the the sweet spot of getting to do the thing that we wanted and getting to do the vision aligned work. The beautiful thing with all of this AI automation, machine learning, is that it is no longer true that you have to be an expert in 17 different arenas in order to be successful. You might have to learn to be an expert at your tech stack. That's still probably true, but you don't have to be everything and wear all of the hats in the same way that you did even five years ago. So I find that very exciting, because as as business owners ourselves and as coaches trying to help people actually enjoy the lifestyle that their business affords them, having time, saving tools, really helps the mindset. Piece is very important, thinking about your time in a different way, treating your life and your sacred energy really well. It's very important, but it also helps. If you can take a process like creating marketing content that might have taken you 2040, 60 hours a month, and we can whittle that down into maybe an hour or two, that is groundbreaking, and that opens up so much more potential. So for everyone who listened to our CEO Friday episode, this is how you get that CEO Friday. You start to become a little more friendly with these new tools. And you don't have to do this alone. We are going to be teaching you all of this in our mastermind, how to use AI for your sales and marketing, not in a scammy, sleazy DMing people or irrelevant comments on social media way, but actually how to draft in your voice better content and a better, more vision aligned sales process. We are also going to be teaching you how to make better decisions with the plethora of information that something like chat GPT can hold,

Steve Haase  16:10  
it really is a new world. I mean, the the capacity for super human intelligence in these

Erin Aquin  16:18  
intelligence right, is

Steve Haase  16:20  
is extraordinary. And the the reason I think it's important to spend time with this and find how it helps you create a more human business, is because we are not at the high point yet. This is not, you know, this is not a slow moving technology. It's not like, you know, if you look at an automobile now, it's not that different from an automobile 20 years ago, right? Cars change over time, kinda It was basically a car. These models improve so quickly and are capable of so much more over just six months, 12 months, that if you start learning how to use it in your business, now, your ability to gain that extra power is right there at your fingertips, whereas if you wait, you're going to be starting from scratch. Then. So now is the time to do it, because it's only improving at an unbelievable clip.

Erin Aquin  17:21  
Yeah, and we are here to hold your hand. You know, you don't have to do this alone. You don't have to add this to your plate. You don't have to figure this out as you're figuring out everything else. One of the things we are very committed to with our mastermind is helping you do this in a way that means something to your business. You know, it's not just going to be a formula where every single person in the mastermind gets the same tech stack. We are actually going to be going through your business and doing an analysis and seeing where AI would be helpful and helping you gather those tools. And they're going to probably be new tools by the time we start this in a few months, but we are going to do the legwork for you in a really big way, while we coach you, while we support you. This is going to be like a mastermind, like we've never done before, and it is called the lucrative Lifestyle Business Mastermind. We only have space for a few people, because it will be very hands on. So if you're interested in that, you can head over to besuperabound.com/mastermind to learn more and be there when we open the doors next week. Yeah, to sign up, very

Steve Haase  18:37  
exciting. So I hope you join us there, and thank you for listening.