317: AI for Business Beyond ChatGPT

Tired of spending countless hours on tasks that drain your energy while your actual passion-work takes a backseat? Imagine having a brilliant assistant who's read everything about your business, never sleeps, and costs less than your monthly coffee budget.

In this game-changing episode, Master Coaches Steve Haase and Erin Aquin reveal how to leverage AI beyond basic ChatGPT to transform your business operations and finally get back to doing what you love.

Get ready to discover the secret weapon that's helping small businesses compete with industry giants - without hiring an army of employees or working 80-hour weeks.

Key Takeaways

• The concept of AI "agents" goes beyond simple prompts - they can handle complex, chained tasks autonomously while still maintaining human oversight
• Smart calendar management and email enhancement through AI can free up significant time for relationship-building and core business activities
• Process automation using AI should be vision-led and authentic — avoid using AI for relationship-building tasks like social media engagement
• You don't need to be "technical" to leverage advanced AI tools — if you can use LinkedIn or follow a YouTube tutorial, you're technical enough

Resources Mentioned

• Lucrative Business Mastermind - Starting January 2025: besuperabound.com/mastermind
• Agent.ai - Platform for building AI agents: agent.ai
• The Newsjacking Agent that Steve mentioned

Connect With Us

Ready to stop drowning in busywork and start scaling your business with AI? Join our upcoming mastermind where we'll show you exactly how to implement these tools while keeping the human touch that makes your business special.

Learn more and apply for the mastermind here

Full transcript:

Steve Haase  0:00  
Welcome to the super abound podcast with master coaches Erin Aquin and Steve Haase, where spiritually minded entrepreneurs learn to build a generous business without sacrificing what matters most. You are listening to episode 317 AI for your business beyond chat. GPT, Okay, today we're going to geek out on all things AI, which lights me up, because it's kind of one of the main things I've been thinking about lately. But

Erin Aquin  0:28  
don't worry, it won't be boring, because I'm still here.

Steve Haase  0:32  
Keep it interesting. Keep me on track or off track, or whatever the case may be. Okay,

Erin Aquin  0:37  
so Steve, um, we did a Steve and I did a class all about growing a sustainable business in 2025 it is still available for sale. We will point to that in the show notes for you if you're interested. But he asked a really brilliant question when we were talking about one of the keys that you definitely will need in order to be a more successful business in the next 12 months. Do

Steve Haase  1:09  
you want to ask it? I love it. It's my favorite question. So if you could hire somebody who read every single thing you had ever written in your business, including your entire book, or any other books, all of your podcasts, but also has read most of the internet, never gets sick, never complains, has no ego, is very coachable, and can do exactly the job that you ask it to do, and cost you 20 bucks a month. Would you do it? You'd probably think that's the best hire you've ever made, and that essentially is a great way to think about AI. If you think about it as a software tool that's going to magically solve your problem, you're going to be disappointed. And I think that's why a lot of people have tried and said chatgpt is kind of minimally useful for my business, but if you think about it as an employee, that you can coach, that you can train, that you can give feedback to kind of in different ways than you would for humans, but you still interact with it and you use it as a partner for your business. Suddenly, the sky's the limit, and we're going to go into some of those next level things on today's show with something

Erin Aquin  2:20  
that's really interesting, we have a mastermind coming up in the new year where we are using AI as one of the time saving tools, one of the you know, resources that will definitely help you grow your business in a way that is sustainable to you, the human and your team of humans, if you have them. But something that's really interesting, I've noticed in various industries, it's not just in the industry we are in. There sort of seems to be two camps of people when it comes to using AI. One camp are those that do not they don't understand it. They or they've kind of played with it a little bit and found that it works just like an untrained employee coming into your business for one day, and they're not amazed and astonished that it didn't work like magic. And then there's another group that is really only familiar with using prompts, getting responses, and pretty much only uses AI for like content creation or meeting summaries, like they really haven't scratched the surface of what is possible for their business using different AI tools. They're familiar with chatgpt or some one of its companions, friends, others, competitors, not friends competitors. But they don't know like what really is possible. And as I am learning more about how we use this in our business, and I'm helping my clients kind of set up their own tech stack, and I know that that's a big part of what you're doing, you showed me something very cool about what was possible, and we want to just talk about some of the ways that you can use AI that are not just asking a question in chat, GPT getting an answer that you still have to do a lot of work on.

Steve Haase  4:37  
The name that all of this falls under is agent. You might have heard about AI agents, and if we kind of get to the root of what agent means, there's autonomy, there's authority, it's able to carry out activities. So it's not just your partner over here that you ask things. And then you're still the one doing the activities. The idea with an agent is it's the one doing the activities. No, you still want to be in the loop. You never want your AI auto posting to social media, or, you know, sending out emails to your customers or anything horrible like that. You must always be there as the overseer, at least for now. But that being said, you can chain together series of prompts, series of activities that often people don't think about. In fact, my experience building my first agent, which was just a couple weeks ago, actually, maybe even just last week at this point, was that the hardest part about it was thinking it through, and then beyond that, what else is possible when we chain together these requests and this information and this searching of data to help us do things that maybe are way on the back burner, or that we think are just too difficult or too advanced for our business given the stage that it's at,

Erin Aquin  6:08  
it's really interesting. Because the way I'm kind of thinking about it, if you're not a super technical person, you know I am. I am in our business, I am definitely more the person that works on the relationship side of things, the mindset side of things. I can work a website. I can create landing pages and templates, but I wouldn't consider myself somebody who goes really deep. I don't know how to code. I don't know any special computer languages or anything like that. However, the beautiful thing about what Steve is talking about is you don't necessarily have to be a computer programmer to work with these agents, and it's the difference between having like chat. GPT is kind of more of an assistant. You ask it a question, it gives you a response. Ask it to do something, it will do its best to create that thing. An agent is more like an independent co worker, where you give them a task, you give them a project, and they go do that.

Steve Haase  7:20  
So the example that I'll use is the agent that I built last week. It's for news jacking. And the idea came from David, not scary,

Erin Aquin  7:28  
just so everybody knows I said, like, news jacking, you're not taking over the news,

Steve Haase  7:36  
but you could, you might, yeah, that's the idea. Is you're trying to get into that news cycle. And so what the agent does it was the idea was created by our friend and book coach, David Meerman Scott, and he wrote a book entitled news jacking. And the idea is, you take a current event, a current news article that is related to your industry, and you share your take on it, because the media is looking for more news to share about that topic. If there's something that is rising in people's awareness, reporters and outlets are going to want as much info as possible. So you share your take on it, and then you get more visibility. Your business grows as a result. And so I created an agent that when you type in your browser, when you type in your business URL, it I'll just walk you through the steps real quick, because it's super fun. It finds out what business you're in based on that, who is your likely persona, who are you trying to reach, and then it uses the what business you're in question to search Google News to say, what are some new articles or stories related to this topic based on the top five? What are some blog posts that you could write about them based on those posts? What are some social media shares that you could create from that as well? And then it puts the whole thing out in a formatted version at the end that you can then copy and paste, that you can edit and just kind of use as a thinking partner for a project that would have taken a human maybe an hour, maybe a couple of hours, to have that starting point is next level, and to be able to do it by just pressing a button is ridiculous. So that took me about an hour to build, and it's something that anyone can use. I'm pretty sure you'd be able to get it for free when you sign up. We'll put the link to it in the show notes so you can play with it. But it blew my mind as to how much work I could make the AI do on my behalf, on your behalf, just by thinking it through and asking it to do it, and kind of chaining it together which is, which is the essence of what that agent is. You're kind of chaining together different commands to get the final output that you want,

Erin Aquin  9:58  
and the. This is not just about getting work done faster. This is actually going to change the way that we do business, especially if you're a lean business, lean team, a solopreneur. You know that? You know when I started my very first business I was shocked and dismayed to learn that I got to do the thing I thought I was signing up for about 10% of the time. The other 90% of the time was doing a whole bunch of shit I had no idea how to do I was not very good at, and I know that a lot of business owners feel this way. If you have a store, maybe you love selling certain products, but did you know that in order to have that store, you have to pay rent, which means you have to make sure that you are marketing, that you are selling, that you were watching your inventory, that your margins are right, that your accounting is done well, that you have insurance, that you are, you know, shoveling the walkway in the winter. There are so many components to having a business that actually thrives for the long term. And it's something that, of course, we coach about, we talk about there are so many ways to kind of work on that, but the AI piece that I'm so interested in for all of us is Something like news jacking might help you elevate your presence, it might do all the marketing that you don't want to do. You have now freed up time, energy and space to maybe start putting 20, 3040, 50% of your time into the thing you really love. And that's something I get really excited about, because we've figured out in the last few years there's very few things that happen in our business that we don't personally enjoy. Anything we have to do in our business that we don't love. Most of it is automated. We have other folks that, of course, work on some of the pieces that we're not experts on. But this is really changing the game from the entrepreneur having to be a jack of all trades. You, you just and to you to something that you said, Steve, this really stuck with me is, and this is the worst AI is ever going to be. It's the

Steve Haase  12:48  
worst one you're ever going to use today,

Erin Aquin  12:52  
and it's so good already. Yeah. So I'm very excited about this. I'm very excited that we are going to be teaching folks how to build things like their own. Agents. AI is amazing for content creation. We've we've talked about that. It's an amazing thinking partner to help you with any aspect of your business that you don't love. But again, most people are aware of those things. What else do you like to use AI for that people may not, that may be more advanced, that maybe people don't know so much about. So

Steve Haase  13:26  
one thing, even just sticking with the content creation, there are a couple layers deeper than just putting in a prompt and hoping you get something decent. I'm going to share three things related to that. The first is, make sure that you input as much relevant content as you can. So decide on the tool that you want to use. Maybe have a couple that you can choose between, but when you set them up, set up your space so that it has access to all the important information about your business, so that it can have your tone, it can have some of your proprietary approach to doing business in the material that it that it creates. So whether you are uploading files to a private workspace or, you know, sharing your URL in the prompts, make sure that the machine has as much context as possible to really personalize it for you. Again, this employee, in quotes, only wants to please you desperately. So if it's not pleasing you, and this is my second point, let it know, give it that feedback. If it gives you something that's way too cheesy, and you know, over the top you say, less cheesy, less salesy, whatever that, whatever words you want to use, it'll interpret that, and it will give you something different. So you work with it to see what does it need to get exactly what I'm looking for a couple of rounds, and it will probably get there. So that's the second point. Is. Offer iterations, offer feedback. And the third is, don't just use it to create content. Invite it into the planning process too. The first part of any prompt, here's here's my lesson on prompt engineering is to tell the AI what role you want it to play. As business coaches, we often work with leaders on being clear about the roles on their team. If it's just you, it can be easy to just kind of run around like crazy and think, you know, I'm getting things done, but if you put on a different hat, maybe not literally, but if you're aware of the role that you're playing, you become more empowered to fulfill that need for the business. Same thing when you're coaching a teammate, what role are you expecting them to play? What are the requirements of that role? You need to do the same thing with the AI. So you start your prompt with you are a expert copywriter, you are a business strategist. You are a expert analyst, and then ask it your question. Maybe you are preparing for a launch. Maybe you are analyzing data from a past launch. Any of the things that you sit down to do for your calendar, bring AI in, it might not be any better than what you would do. It might be much worse than what you do. It might it might be better, but what it will be is different, because it's going to look at all of those data points. It's going to look at what you do, what you give it to think about, and it's going to do its damnedest to please you. And so it's just going to think about things in a different way. It's going to reference different data, and you will have alternative things to think about that weren't necessarily in your mind when you sat down to do that job. And

Erin Aquin  16:50  
if you tend to be a person make hopefully you have enough self awareness to know this, if you if you are this person who just kind of has already decided that AI, it's too robotic. It doesn't ever do what I wanted to do. It's not helpful. It never comes up with good ideas. And you just kind of cross your arms, you're like, I'm trying this begrudgingly, the mindset opportunity that I'd like to offer you is AI is going to also very likely be able to articulate something about you and your business that you didn't know it is going to reveal maybe some of your blind spots. So like to the the idea of act as though you are this person, you could say, act as though you're a brand designer and tell me what, why my website isn't converting at this rate. Why? What my brand voice is. Tell me who my ideal client is from reading this page, yeah, and you're going to see, even if the answer is like, Oh, that's not my ideal client at all, this is what the analysis is, and it's an opportunity for you to not just fold your arms and say, Well, that didn't work, and that wasn't helpful at all, but to say, Hmm, I wonder what would make this more clear, and then maybe tell your maybe the prompt next prompt is my ideal client. Is this person? How can I make my landing page more relevant to them and see what it comes up with? I like to assume that there's always one, at least one gold nugget of wisdom in whatever it gives you. Because this doesn't necessarily it's 100% a thought expander for you. You know, it's a way of seeing things you didn't see, of trying something maybe you hadn't thought to try,

Steve Haase  19:04  
which gets to a really important point about how you use AI at a level deeper than just asking chatgpt A question. Your own curiosity, your own direction of what you want to explore, is the factor that kicks off the whole process to your point about who is my customer persona based on this page, how can I have it convert at a higher rate? Those are the questions that only you as the business owner can be passionate enough about to seek insight for and so it's your own creativity. It's your own vision for, how can this be better? How can I better achieve this vision that will allow. You to use AI in a way that really empowers you, because it can serve in all those roles, but you need to kick it off. Yeah,

Erin Aquin  20:10  
yeah. You have to which is, which is cool, because then you're also putting yourself in the headspace to receive that feedback, because you're not going to get you may be a people pleaser, but you're going to get pretty direct feedback from everything that whatever system you're working with knows, so you have to kind of be prepared for it. So that's even kind of a more advanced way of using prompts. We've talked about agents, another place where you can go beyond just chatting with your your AI is really using AI for smart scheduling and managing your calendar. I will just share it took me so many years to find myself a calendar system and routines and cycles that really work for me, for my energy, for our business, I probably spent more time on getting organized, because I'm not a naturally organized person. I have to be very thoughtful about how much I schedule and how much margin or white space I give myself. AI is really great about that as a tool, you can say these are the five things I need to accomplish today. Here, here's when I don't like to work. Here's when I do like to work. Here are my meetings. And you can actually there are places, there are programs that you can actually have your calendar there, where it will optimize your schedule according to your needs and according to your human needs. Even though it's a robot,

Steve Haase  21:57  
that's the eeriest thing about it. It it was trained on human data, so it understands the humans, even though it's not a human. Understands, understands, basically it gives helpful responses to humans because it's been trained on our information. This calendar one is fascinating, because, again, depending on the input that you give it can be ridiculously helpful on the output. It doesn't have your same hangups. It doesn't have your sunk costs. And so if you say, here's where I have the best energy, here's why I have pockets of time, here's what I want to create, and here's how much time I think it should require. Help me set up a schedule that will get it done. You will get at least a good thought expander on that schedule, and with some feedback, you can probably get something that will really be tailored to how you do things. I put something similar to that in for I'm training to do a bicycle race in April. And I said, here are my constraints. Here's what I want to achieve. Help me with a training plan that I can kind of stick to over the next four months, five months. And it just spat something out. And I'm like, I'm doing this because it's much better than my previous approach, which was, I don't know, worked out.

Erin Aquin  23:26  
So we're gonna help people kind of find their groove with that, whether it is working within a whole system for your calendar, if that's something that you need, or it is letting a plan be created for you that you can tweak, that actually supports what you really need and is sustainable. That's really helpful. You'll probably even notice this in your email platform right now, but email and communication enhancement is another way in which AI is saving us time, saving us energy,

Steve Haase  24:05  
and this includes things like creating templates for emails that you send a fair amount if you're in sales outreach, customer success, the amount of typing that we need to do is going down, and If you don't have anything in place that is helping you do less typing, then you can, and you can save your fingers, save your time, save your brain, especially for things that don't require a lot of thinking, just some care and editing. And that really is at the heart of what we're talking about with the AI revolution is, as the human take a look at the suggestion, offer some care, offer some editing, and that should be your bar for you know, your contribution on a lot of tasks in your business,

Erin Aquin  24:57  
yeah, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna scold people. People for a second here, lovingly schooled people. We have seen how people are taking this idea and using it to respond on social media. We've seen a huge uptick of like bots responding on LinkedIn to people's comments. I feel like, yes, use email AI for your email, for your communication enhancement to help bring more care, more quick connect with your customers, your clients, your team, all of that, totally amazing, but don't use it as a replace like it should be freeing you up so that you can actually respond to humans in social places with a human response. I think it just looks so terrible on the person who has clearly set up an an AI response with no thought and no editing on someone's post, we see you. We know what you're doing, and you're not going to be someone I would ever do business with. So people who send me AI comments or AI DMS, you can stop, because I already, I already know I don't want to work with you, because this is supposed to be helping us free up our time and our space to create relationships, not build relationships on our behalf. I actually that's kind of where maybe I draw the line a little bit yes, to content creation, and I know there's people that take issue with that, so I just want to speak to this for a second. We do use AI to help us create content for social media. So why am I getting up in arms if someone uses AI to comment, to respond or to initiate a conversation on said piece of content. I will tell you why. Whenever we have used AI to support us to create a piece of content, that piece of content comes from our own brains. So the way we have set up our kind of AI tech stack at the heart of it is our own internal Superabound AI that has Listen, has you know, has our book, it has our podcast episodes. It has hundreds of things that I have personally written, that Steve has personally written. It is trained in our voice, just like I would train a social media manager. I've tried this, and I've never done it successfully, until AI I will, just as an aside, it is trained to write things on our behalf, and there are always human eyes and human typing that happens to make sure that that is something that we agree with, and it's really us, but when someone posts an asinine comment that makes no sense on that, it isn't building a relationship, and maybe it does boost our exposure. Thanks for that. If it does, I don't know that it does, but it's not creating a connection. And if you don't have to, I've said this before on the podcast, so I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself to you, but if you don't have time to actually make a human connection, if you're that busy because you're that successful, just don't bother. If you do have the time and you are struggling and you're trying to build your business, it makes you look like an amateur. It makes you look like someone people don't want to work with.

Steve Haase  28:54  
So along those lines, no, this is great. Laughing hands. I want to pull on that thread, though, because there is a vision led authentic way to use AI for your process automations. That's basically what that is. I want to automate my process of engaging with people and commenting. I'm going to send a out there to AI out there to do my bidding and leave disastrous comments on people's posts. Not what you want to be doing with Process Automation. This is a topic that we're going to go much deeper into. All of these are topics we're going to explore in much more depth in our upcoming mastermind, which you can learn more about at besuperabound.com/mastermind, and it's mindset tools, it's AI tools, and it is really walking through the success spiral, the Superabound success spiral from all these different angles, using your own self warmth, your own business vision to. Propel your growth, and that's going to be happening starting in January. So if you're listening to this when it comes out, go ahead and apply. See if there, there should still be some open spots at besuperabound.com/mastermind, so for process automation, this is a way to take things that you are doing each week or each month that are wrote and letting the machine do them. This is a perfect place for agents to come into play, and the one that I'm using, we're going to link to it in the show notes. It's called agent.ai but there are several other agent building platforms out there. And when it comes to process automation, again, the main factor is going to be your own creativity, your own ideas for what it is you want to get off your plate and allow the machine to help you with. And the second one is your own static about either the AI tools themselves, or even probably more more appropriately, or more more likely, your thought that you're not a technical person. I was listening to a conversation this morning, and it struck me one of the one of the most unhelpful pieces of static roaming around in many people's minds these days is I'm not a technical person. I'd like to build an agent. I'd like to do some process automation. But if only I were more technical, there's a kernel of truth there. Maybe you can't write or read Python code or any code, but that thought,

Erin Aquin  31:48  
if you're listening to this podcast, you're technical, right? That's what

Steve Haase  31:52  
I was thinking. I was like, Wait, if you're on LinkedIn, like you're technical, you're technical enough to get on the internet, create an account and Google things and study them and play with them until you understand them, at which point you are no longer not technical.

Erin Aquin  32:08  
If you've ever used a YouTube video to fix your dryer, very technical, technical.

Steve Haase  32:13  
And so if you have that idea, if, if you're suffering from that static of I'd like to be part of this AI revolution, but I'm not technical. That is the one to just give a nice big hug to understand that. It's mostly fear self protection, not wanting to get in over your head, not wanting to look foolish and acknowledge that and get your hands dirty.

Erin Aquin  32:42  
Yeah, yeah. So good, okay, and just to, just to wrap up, because I think we could talk about this all day. This is literally the tip of the iceberg. So these are tools beyond chat, GPT, tools beyond just like simple, basic prompts. These are just the beginning. Steve, tell us about a couple of the other ones that you are seeing. I, I'm I'm going to build my first agent, just for everyone who doesn't think they're technical. I'm going to do it. If I can do it, you can do it.

Steve Haase  33:26  
So again, the limitation is just in it's funny, there are two limitations. One is your imagination, what you can dream, that you could build, and the other is in your expertise around what the systems can do, particularly around querying your own data and documents. So like Erin mentioned, we have a whole workspace set up so that our data and documents go in there. So when we ask our AI, it will just automatically query those I highly recommend setting that up if you're not at that place, or if you want to use a different system, just know that when you're using AI, it should have access to all relevant information about your company to give you the best response. And I was just listening to a conversation this morning in the agent builder community where that was a big topic of discussion, whether it's interviews with customers who recently signed for your product or that you recently lost who did not sign for your product, to understand who is your customer persona, and then take all of that information, feed it into the AI so that you can Ask it, what are your thoughts on this marketing campaign? What are your thoughts on this idea? How does this product positioning sound to you? And you are querying your ideal customer persona without needing to spend 10s of 1000s on focus groups to query the actual customer personas. So.

Erin Aquin  35:00  
Yeah, so many exciting possibilities. And you know, if you're if part of your response to that is, I wouldn't even know what to ask for, what to do, or I don't have that kind of imagination. I'm just so used to doing everything manually or using really limited automation, that is what our brains are for so part of what we're also be doing in the mastermind is a deep analysis of your business to find out what particular tools are going to be the most useful. We are, of course, going to be working on your own mindset and creating a sustainable, successful business for the future, but really doing that in partnership with all of these fantastic tools that are now available, and making things that you used to have to be a multi billion dollar company to do some of these things, and now you and I, with our small businesses, with our Lean teams, can do them in a matter of an hour. So we can't wait to share the possibilities with you and work with your unique business. Please head over to besuperabound.com/mastermind to apply for the lucrative business mastermind, which starts in January 2025 have some spots left. It is by application only, but it's short and it's sweet, and it's meant to for us to get to know you and make sure it's the right fit. So we will be looking forward to hearing from you, and we will talk to you again soon.