Speaker 1 (00:00): Hey, small business heroes, it’s your host, Gloria Chow. Welcome back to Small Business pr, where we make PR and marketing super accessible. Now, as you know, the AI race is on. Everyone’s figuring out how to make it into their everyday workflow so that we can save not just five, but up to 50 hours a month. Right. So that’s really the real unlock. But I’m still finding that most founders are simply using AI wrong.

Speaker 1 (00:21): And it’s because no one has ever made a distinction of using AI not as just a chatbot, but kind of like a, you know, what you have in ChatGPT, you’re typing something, it spits back, kind of like having a conversation, but moving on from just using it as a chatbot to where it not only learns your business and voice, but connects to other parts of your business and executes tasks autonomously. So at the time of recording, Claude Cowork has absolutely changed the game for so many small businesses. And I say that, you know, it has really replaced so many different software from design. So there’s, you know, it, it’s killed Canva, it killed figma, but I also killed a lot of the automation software.

Speaker 1 (00:59): And what Claude Cowork has been able to do is take an everyday small business owner with no tech skills, no just like me, and graduate myself from using AI as a chatbot or a text message app all the way to having it work for me in my business as a data analyst, as telling me a dashboard every week of my social media analytics, and then tying that to actually create the designs for me based on what worked and what doesn’t. It could help me reschedule things, send emails on my behalf, send follow ups, comb through messages for missed sales conversations. And that’s what I want to talk about, which is that 90% of people are still using AI as Google. And that in and of itself will not be the greatest unlock.

Speaker 1 (01:41): And for a lot of people, they’re like, well, isn’t this what we’re all doing? Or no one has made it accessible. So I’m going to try to break it down to three different levels of using AI. For a small business owner, that is an absolute must in this day and age if you want to scale your business and not be caught up as the bottleneck doing all of the administrative, the annoying things that we all hate to do, right?

Speaker 1 (02:02): The whole point of building and scaling a business and leveraging these AI tools is that it gives us back time so that we can do things that only we can do, things that I call the $10,000 an hour tasks such as partnerships, PR pitching, speaking in front of an audience, figuring out new offers and ideations, and doing things that only I can do, like speaking on a podcast. But a lot of people are still stuck in the $10 or $5 an hour way of using AI, which is copy and pasting, generating content, which honestly, AI should do. So if you are doing any, any of these things manually, I’m going to list them out. This episode is for you.

Speaker 1 (02:39): So if you are still scheduling on your calendar, moving appointments, if you’re doing email follow ups, if you’re still doing daily admin, if you’re chasing invoices, if you’re still creating carousel reels, if you’re still creating a social media calendar, if you’re still digging through data to try to make sense of how your analytics are performing, how your revenue stream is, all of those things can be done now with AI. The other day I made 196 slide deck, a brand new training on how to go from chatbot to coworker for my get featured accelerator members. And it was so beautifully designed with animations. I remember paying a designer $500 to create a slide deck on Canva and I swear it wasn’t half as good as what this created. So level one is input output, right?

Speaker 1 (03:24): Every time you have to start new, you’re maybe copy and pasting the outputs from ChatGPT or Claude into whatever it is, whether it’s an email, that’s level one. Level two, which a lot of people have already, you know, done, is AI. That sounds like you. So that’s training it. Whether it’s a custom GPT or in Claude, it could be project knowledge under different projects. So for me with Quad, which is my marketing engine, customer facing copy, I had different projects and within each project, let’s say social media versus email, newsletter or sales page, I have a set instructions and I have certain project knowledge that I upload so that it can understand my context. Right? You can also create a skill which is something that Claude needs to read every time before giving you an output.

Speaker 1 (04:09): And so that’s really level two, which is creating content that sounds like you. I also give an AI jargon words to avoid for every person who comes through the accelerator program or does an AI setup session with me so that it automatically knows not to say any of those words that are really AI red flags that immediately make you go, oh, AI wrote it, right? So those that’s really level two is creating content caption, sales page things, you know Maybe it’s a carousel post, maybe an email blurb that sounds like you and that’s level two and that’s where you start saving more time. That’s when you start maybe saving anywhere from five to 10 hours a week.

Speaker 1 (04:47): But level three is really the biggest unlock and I think a lot of people have not gone from level two to level three. And that is where it becomes your coworker, where it connects to the different hubs in your business, it connects your payment portal for Shopify, it, it knows exactly what your revenue is. It, it connects to a social media analyzer to tell you what your performance metrics are without a data analyst and then it spits out the patterns on what worked and what doesn’t to create brand new design. So that’s really level three and that really is the unlock that Claude cowork. Again, Claude cowork is separate from regular Claude. It is for desktop only.

Speaker 1 (05:26): So if you download Claude, make sure you download the desktop version and you can toggle between Claude, regular Claude cowork and code. I don’t use code, I’m not a coder. But right now I’m just using the regular Claude chat. Again, that’s where my projects live. That’s my outbound marketing copy. That’s anything customer facing for writing and then cowork, cowork. I think of it as a actual coworker that tells me my daily schedule. I can have it run automations where every Monday it shows me a dashboard of all of my social media analytics, all of the payments, all of the incoming payments.

Speaker 1 (06:03): If you have a business where you have a lot of customers and payment plans, it can tell you how many more payments you have, what what is expected, or if you have someone with a failed payment, it can also tell you that as well. So that’s really where it is very powerful. And with Claude you can connect natively to so many different integrations. You simply go to Claude, to the bottom left hand corner, select your initials and then select settings and then go to connectors. And you have a lot of native connectors such as Fireflies, that AI or Fathom, which are the two AI meeting note takers that everyone needs to install. Because again, using AI is all about giving it context and there’s no richer, no fuller context than it having sitting on all of your meetings.

Speaker 1 (06:46): So for example, for me I have it sitting on hundreds and hundreds of sales calls that I have. I have it on all of the coaching calls that I have. And so it trains automatically my voice, how I perceive it how I deliver value. What are the objections that my customers have that are pretty much like the same type of objections? And after it is crawling through all of that, it can give all of my sales pages marketing copy. So much clear insight, more than a copywriter, right? Because it’s again, it’s pulling from the actual conversations. So that’s why the first, first order of business is going into the connectors and connecting it to one of those AI. AI note takers.

Speaker 1 (07:23): Another hack for you is that if you are even having a conversation with a friend at brunch, let’s say I get a lot of ideas while I’m in motion walking my dog, turn on your voice recorder like a voice note app and just start recording. And what you can do is after you’re spitballing or after you’re, you’re talking to it, it records whatever that session is, whether you talking to yourself or you talking to a friend over lunch. And you can copy that transcript and paste it into Claude, which then gives it more context to your ideas. So again, AI really works if you can integrate everyday recordings into it. Instead of thinking, oh I gotta, you know, take three hours out of my day to train.

Speaker 1 (08:00): You don’t need to train AI, you just need to connect it to the things that you’re already using that it’s constantly pulling data and that data then compounds over time. That’s, that’s the first thing, right? The next thing with cloud Cowork, which I do also on a, on a co working on a one hour setup session is just connecting it to all of the things you already use. So for example Gmail, your calendar, your drive, your Google Drive, all of your documents, maybe Canva, maybe it’s Shopify or Klaviyo. So instead of you thinking oh I have to train it on how to write my emails, it actually pulls your best performing campaigns, analyzes them and applies that filter or pattern of across new emails.

Speaker 1 (08:37): It also helps you become a better manager of your time because it replaces an admin assistant. So instead of you being like oh, I’m late for this call at 3pm, I wish that you know, I could tell that person. While you’re basically in the chat window on Cowork, you can say hey, tell my 3pm that I’m actually five minutes later, update the calendar invite and send them an email. Boom, you can do that automatically without even leaving the window of Claude. So how beautiful, how amazing is that, right?

Speaker 1 (09:05): Another use case, which is why it becomes your coworker and your sales agent and it replaces, you know, four to five team members and unlocks not only 20 hours back in your schedule, right, which is two weeks every, every, every month back is that it also helps you hunt for hidden sales conversations. So how many times have you had an email? Whether it’s you sending an email or someone reaching out to you, but you just didn’t know what to say, or maybe you were, you know, in between a meeting and you’re like, oh, I gotta get back to it. So there’s so many hidden opportunities in our inbox right now that we just haven’t gotten back to. And for us to comb through and scrape through and come up with a reply would take forever.

Speaker 1 (09:43): But if you connect Claude cowork to your Gmail or whatever email you use, you can literally say, hey, can you comb through my email for all of the possible opportunities that I missed, whether it’s for sales or partnerships or visibility? And it will actually do that and then draft a response. And the great thing about it is that after you have something like Fireflies or Fathoms meeting note taker, it then knows your voice and it knows how to respond. And so responding becomes easy because it’s already trained on how you naturally would talk. And anytime that Claude comes up with an output that you like, you can say, hey, I like this output. Please create a skill or update my current skill.

Speaker 1 (10:19): And so you don’t even have to create a skill, you can literally just type into Claude and say, update the skill. Right. Again, skills are files that Claude has to read every time before giving you an output. Kind of like a rule. So that’s why skills are so powerful. And as a person who’s not really systems oriented, I’m definitely not ocd. I’m definitely more of a big picture thinker. Systems were always kind of a weak point for me because creating SOPs and all that stuff just seemed like such a, such a drag. And what AI has allowed me to do is not spend time creating the SOP or creating a system. It becomes my system because it already can read and do all of those things.

Speaker 1 (10:58): So instead of me having to train an intern, do this first, do that. Claude is already going through my emails and Claude is already going through my calendar. Claude is already going through my Stripe portal to see who are the failed payments or out of the hundreds of people in our get featured accelerator who’s expiring soon that I need to connect with, that I need to, you know, support them so that they can renew and stay on with us. So all of these things are compounding. And the beauty of going from chatbot all the way to level three, which is co worker, is that it all compounds so that all of the context, all of the recordings then feeds into all of your sales and marketing copy. It makes all of my emails so much more enriched.

Speaker 1 (11:36): It becomes my sales trainer. So before any calls I have with someone, it already tells me what points I need to hit on and here are the patterns and what I need to say to make sure that person is a resounding yes. And I make the I help them make the best decision. So that’s really where the biggest unlock is for me. And you can tell there’s like a lightness in my voice. I was so bogged down in my business doing all the things. I mean can you imagine we create anywhere from 40 to 50 pieces of original content every week and I don’t have a single full time team member.

Speaker 1 (12:06): And so before, can you imagine like me spending my time writing 30 different captions or even my VA doing that and then me having to reread and double check, right? So again, Claude has single handedly because of the cowork function and it connects to all of my business. It takes me from telling it to do something to actually doing it for me. Things like after I have an amazing coaching call, we touch upon so many things, maybe I bring a top tier journalist to come in to coach us. So many tips, so many insider things. Even writing the follow up email to my accelerator members would take forever. Format it. What did this person say?

Speaker 1 (12:44): What are the upcoming dates now because it has the transcript of the call, it formats it beautifully and it has sections, it’s even color coded, it’s got bullets, it’s got italics, it’s got hyperlinks. And we do the same thing for our weekly announcement newsletter as well. So unless you’re using AI in a way that connects to other hubs and spokes of your business, you’re never going to be able to unlock that 20 plus hours a week of time saved.

Speaker 1 (13:07): So just audit what you’re doing right now and if you’re still doing any of these, these things manually, like I said, scheduling emails, chasing after payments, looking for opportunities, looking for miss sales conversations, you are literally doing things that you should not be doing because AI can take care of that for you so that you can do more of the things that only you can do. Speaking on a podcast, creating partnerships, right? Advocating for your business or going to conferences. And those are the things that we really want you to do. And you cannot level, you cannot rise to that level unless you’re freeing up your time from doing other things. So that’s really the point of, of, of what I want to talk about today is kind of the, the three tiers of AI.

Speaker 1 (13:47): And that’s why a lot of founders are still stuck at level one, because they think that’s all there is. They think it’s really complex to go from level one to level three, and there needs to be some complex coding ritual. And here’s a little secret. I am teaching people how to use AI. And I am not someone who ever learned how to prompt. So I never learned how to prompt. I never took a course on how to prompt. I just started talking to it. And from trial and error and the fact that it’s become so much user friendly every single week, that the barrier to entry has never been lower for small businesses.

Speaker 1 (14:18): There’s never been a better time for small businesses to leverage the tools that big companies have access to if you know to use AI the right way. And so this is what I just want to leave you with, is are you still using AI in a way that’s still kind of manually and using it as a chatbot, or are you graduating all the way to level three, where it absolutely goes from chatbot to completing the task for you? The other day I had a cloud cowork fix a hundred YouTube titles for me. It actually went into YouTube. It opened up the screen. Obviously I had to log in, but it changed the titles for me based on the data, click through rates, suggested new titles.

Speaker 1 (14:56): Once I approved it, it went in and changed it and pressed save all autonomously without me having to do it or delegate to a va. So think about how much more elevated your time gets, how much more value you can create, not only for yourself, but for anyone that you hire if they are using tools like this. So again, stop using AI as a chatbot. Please connect it to other areas of your business. Start thinking of it as an actual coworker so that it can actually do things for you without you ever leaving the window. And if you want me to set it up for you again, I’ve figured this out from having a need to do it again. Creating 50 plus pieces of content, serving hundreds of customers and not a single employee that’s full time.

Speaker 1 (15:36): I’m happy to do that for you as well. Go to Gloria Chow pierre.com aisystem that’s AI-System and I’m happy to figure it out for you where we literally turn on your screen, I tell you what to click. I create workflows automations for your business and that way it is ready for you to basically sit back and just click. You know, employ without or deploy without you having to figure out how do I do this again? Or what do I connect? Because sometimes it’s just so much easier to have someone on a screen share with you who sees the hood of your business and connects it for you in real time instead of you watching a hundred hours of YouTube videos like I did. So again, thank you so much and I hope that this episode was helpful.

Speaker 1 (16:14): If you’re someone who is also new to AI or thinking oh my God, this is too overwhelming. Again, you are not alone. There are so many reasons to feel overwhelmed. But at the end of the day just know that there are tools out there like Claude coworkers that can really take you from level one to level three and save not just one to five hours a week, but really save you 20 plus hours a week. And that’s absolutely possible without you needing to know how to code or being an expert prompt engineer. So go to gloria chow pr.comai system and I’m happy to set that up for you. Until next time.