Writing Captions with AI Is the LEAST Interesting Thing You Could Be Doing With It. Here's How to Use AI in Business [ep. #07]

Everybody's Talking About AI in Business and Most of Them Are Missing the Point

[00:00:00] If you browse through the podcast charts today, you'll see a plethora of episodes around AI. I mean, I can't imagine why you'd want to go and look through other podcasts, but let's just imagine for a second that you do. Everybody's talking about AI in business, whether you are a coach, a consultant, or of course the people that are selling courses about how to use AI in business are talking about it too. It is across every aspect of not just business, but of life as well. And I personally feel like it is one of the most exciting innovations that we have seen for generations. But we are not using it in the right way. The majority of people are not using it in the right way or in a way that really utilises the power of it.

AI Can Be Your Biggest Asset Even in a Premium Business

[00:00:50] In today's episode, I'm going to talk to you about how AI can be an asset, a thought partner, a powerful tool within your business, even when you're building a premium business. When you're building a business that has depth. When you're building a business that is based on client service and client delivery, that is selling high ticket, that is very focused on being client centric. AI for small business owners and larger operations alike is so powerful to enable you to do that, but you have to understand how to use it in the right way. Make sure that you stay to the end, because I'm going to be talking through three very practical ways that you can start to bring AI into your business from today.

"AI Can Write Your Content" Is the Least Interesting Thing You Can Say About It

[00:01:34] The conversation around AI almost universally goes like this. AI can write your content. AI can draft your emails. AI can build your frameworks. AI can help you post more, produce more, more, more, more. That's not AI. That is autocomplete. That is "run my business on autopilot." If that is how you are thinking about AI, if you are debating whether content sounds too robotic, too inauthentic, too generic, that's the least interesting conversation and version of what AI can do.

[00:02:04] AI is one of the most powerful tools that has ever existed in business. And I say that in a positive way because I know there's a lot of scaremongering about AI and I completely understand why. I have two children, young children myself, and I think about what is to come for them in generations ahead. That is always going to be the challenge of new technology developments, new access to data. All that we can do, in my opinion, is really think about how we can use these things in a positive way and become aware of the negativity. Educate ourselves around that.

[00:02:48] So today I'm not focusing on the detrimental sides of AI because honestly, that comes into all of tech and outside of tech as well. It's just human behaviour and the detrimental sides to that. I'm going to be focusing on how we can use the tools that we have at our fingertips in a more positive way, because ultimately the benefit of any tool, including technology, is only as good or as bad as the human behind it.

The Real Power of AI Is Not Creating. It's Understanding.

[00:03:00] When you feed something into AI, the power of AI is not to create. It is to understand. When you feed something into an AI, whether it's a question, a search term, a prompt, you are contributing to the largest accumulation of human data in history. The reason that Google and the major tech platforms are moving budget away from traditional ads and into AI driven search is not because AI writes better headlines. It's because AI can see patterns in data at a scale and at a speed that no human team can match.

AI Was Never About Producing More Stuff. It Started With Pattern Recognition.

[00:03:34] Let me take you back to the original vision for what we now call AI. The version that was being developed in research labs was focused on medical institutions. Before it became something around productivity and content creation, it was never about how we can generate more stuff. It was about pattern recognition. It was being able to look at millions of data points and surface the signal, the thing that matters inside all the noise.

[00:04:03] The earliest applications of AI were in the medical field where they explored how to connect patients with conditions to the right specialists faster. AI could see what a human triage system would take weeks or months to identify. Where can this patient go within the healthcare system? If it was done by humans, it took far longer. It wasn't because AI could write a referral letter. It's because it could see how the data could connect up faster. There's a great book on this called Super Agency, which is partly written by Reid Hoffman, and it really explores the upsides of AI as well as the realistic connotations of it.

The Same Principle That Powers Medical AI Applies to Your Business Right Now

[00:05:12] What I want to suggest today is that the same principle of how to connect data applies to your business right now. Whether you have 10 clients or a hundred or a thousand. Whether you are doing six figures or seven or less than that. You are sitting on data, probably more than you realise, and most of us as business owners are not utilising it.

I Was Using AI 9 Years Ago Inside One of the Biggest Brands in the World and Didn't Even Know It

[00:05:40] Let me explain why I think this way and give you some context for how this isn't something that I am saying is coming in the future. This has been happening for years in big businesses and we're now seeing it come into AI for small business strategy. Frankly, we need to get with the programme.

[00:06:00] When I worked in corporate, one of my roles towards the end of my corporate career was as a business director for a very large company who I won't name, but I will describe. It's blue and yellow. It's famous for meatballs and hot dogs. It might sell furniture as well. You know the one I'm talking about.

[00:06:10] I was working with their leadership team. I would fly to Rotterdam every week. Every week I would go to Rotterdam. I would sit with them for a day because I was responsible for managing how their brand developed through the company that I worked for. That meant I looked at how their brand was tracking and the customer perception of the brand. It would look at how to expand their retail model into different avenues such as inner city shops and e-commerce. But one of the key things that we looked at was customer experience.

The Volume of Data Was Overwhelming and That's Exactly Why AI Mattered

[00:07:00] We ran huge surveys every year across all of their stores globally to understand what the experience was like for their customers. Can you imagine how much data we got? The volume of information was overwhelming. We had real time feedback. We had data when customers came into store, when they were going through the experience, when they were leaving the store. We had staff input, so employees were inputting into this as well.

[00:07:38] The brand's entire model of how they ran their stores and how they developed the brand depended on this in store experience because they were a huge retail brand. That's their bread and butter. They also weren't competing on premium price. It's not a luxury brand, let's be honest, but it is very, very well known for what it does.

[00:08:07] They had to compete on experience. Especially as I'm going back nine or ten years ago, it was when Amazon was really coming through to start to sell furniture. There were a lot of non-traditional retailers coming in to sell exactly what this brand also sold. So the stakes for getting that experience right in store had never been higher.

Then One Colleague Changed Everything With a Machine Learning System

[00:08:30] So here I am managing all of these different teams across the agency that I worked for. We had a lot of pressure on understanding this data, then helping the team I was working with to look at what it meant for their brand and their development. There was a lot of expectation on this and we had most of the agency working on it. This was our biggest client.

[00:09:00] And then I started to work with somebody at the agency. He deserves recognition. His name is Brad. And Brad, if you're listening, I could see exactly what you were doing. You were just years ahead of where everyone else was in the room.

[00:09:12] Brad was my colleague. And back in 2017, 2018, he worked in a machine learning system to process all of the customer response data. Not to produce it. Not to generate it. To read it, to group it, to find the themes in it, to bring out the customer responses that none of our human team could do that quickly.

We Went From Guessing What Customers Felt to Knowing Exactly What They Experienced Store by Store

[00:09:39] What we were able to do because of that system was to understand what customers were actually experiencing in those stores. Not just assume what they were. We could mine the data for insight. We could see the themes that were coming through. We could optimise the experience by individual store, which at that scale was completely different to anything we'd done before. We had never been able to look at the data in the way that we were when we applied this machine learning. I was working with AI nine years ago. It didn't have a term. We didn't actually know what to call it at that time. But we weren't creating content. We were understanding the data.

[00:10:37] When I see content now or arguments online about whether AI is generating the Instagram caption or not, or whether it sounds authentic or not, I just think that's such a small, insignificant way of thinking about AI in business. You're only scratching the surface of what it can do.

You're Already Generating Data Every Day. The Question Is Whether You're Using It.

[00:10:50] So here's what I want to introduce instead. Your business right now, even if you feel like you are not where you want to be yet, you're still building, you're moving into scaling, is generating data every single day.

[00:11:02] Before I go into how, of course you need to have the legal implications set around this. I'm not going to go into detail on this call, but you absolutely need to have all of your data protection and regulation when you are working with any data. Communication to clients about how you're using their data, making sure that your data is stored properly, making sure that you're following all the GDPR requirements. All of that needs to be there and it needs to be really clear in your contracts. If you have not looked at how to use AI in business and that is not clear in your contracts, go and do that first.

[00:11:22] But if that is all there and you are already covering that, then I want you to really think about how you're using AI in business to look at your data.

Your Client Calls, DMs, and Voice Notes Are Data. Stop Treating Them Like Disposable Content.

[00:11:40] Every client call. Every sales call. Every onboarding form. Every offboarding survey. Every comment on your post. Every reply to your emails. Every question asked in a group, a DM, a voice note. That's data. And most of you, I'll be blunt, are not treating it that way. You're treating it as a screenshot that you can put into an Instagram story that's going to expire in 24 hours. But yet you say you want to build a long term profitable business.

[00:12:00] If you are doing what everybody else is doing with AI and you are asking "How do I get more reach? How do I get more visibility? How do I post more consistently? How do I produce more content?" That is a volume strategy. You are not understanding the power of what you already have at hand. The data that you already have access to.

Before You Ask How to Create More, Ask What Your Data Is Already Telling You

[00:12:35] The shift I want to invite you into is this. Before you ask how to create more, ask what the data you already have is telling you. The premium clients that you want, the clients you're trying to attract, are probably already showing up in some form. It's through the questions that you're being asked, the resistance that they're expressing, the objections that are coming through, the language they're using about their own situation. And AI can help you hear it. It can help you theme it. It can help you pull it out because we do have so much noise around us.

3 Ways to Start Using AI as Market Intelligence Not Just a Content Tool

[00:13:00] So let me give you three specific ways that you can start using AI as a market intelligence tool, not as a content tool.

1. Mine Your Discovery Calls and Client Conversations for What You've Been Too Close to Notice

[00:13:15] The first is to conduct market research with AI using your client conversations. If you are doing discovery calls, strategy calls, or market research conversations, record them with consent and then feed those transcripts into AI. Ask it to identify common themes, recurring language, and repeat objections. Ask what questions are being asked indirectly. You will hear things in that output that you have been too close to the conversation to notice.

2. Stop Reading Client Feedback One at a Time. Feed It All Into AI and Let Patterns Emerge.

[00:13:46] The second is to run your feedback through a themed lens. If you have offboarding forms, client feedback, post programme surveys, stop reading these one at a time and ask yourself what they mean or where you can pull out quotes for social proof. Put them together, feed them into AI and ask "What are the most common outcomes clients are describing? What language do they use about their results? Where does the friction keep appearing?"

[00:14:14] Because that can inform how you improve your client delivery, how you improve the offer setup, how you improve the clients that you're bringing in. Maybe there's an opportunity to talk more directly to the right premium clients for this offer. This becomes your positioning intelligence. It becomes how you continue to iterate so that you're not just delivering now, but also getting better and better and better.

3. The Comments, DMs, and Questions in Your Community Are Live Market Intelligence. Use Them.

[00:14:36] The third is to analyse the conversations that are already happening around you. Whether that's comments on your posts, DMs, email replies, or questions in your community or group programme. This is live market intelligence.

[00:15:00] When I say market intelligence, I mean this is what people are saying in real time. The most open, honest, transparent feedback that you will get because they're not overthinking it in an offboarding form. That stuff is gold. Run it through AI to identify what themes are emerging. What are people really asking for? What problems are coming up repeatedly? This can tell you what to address in your content, not from a place of what's trending or what other people are saying you should be doing, but from a place of what your specific audience actually needs to understand.

The Businesses That Win in 5 Years Won't Be the Ones Producing the Most Content

[00:15:28] The businesses that will operate at the highest level in the next five years are not going to be the ones who use AI to produce the most content. What I predict we are going to see is that right now everybody is saying we need to differentiate by our lived experience, our story, our personal brand, our connection.

[00:16:10] I agree for now. But soon that's going to get married up with producing AI volume content. And we're just going to have the same challenge again. We're going to have a lot of volume of content but it's just going to be more storytelling content.

Stop Competing on Volume. Start Competing on How Well You Understand Your Buyer.

[00:16:20] We have to stop competing on the amounts that we can produce and start focusing on the clarity of our understanding that then feeds into high quality content and high quality thought leadership.

[00:16:34] Implementing an AI in business strategy is going to be significant for two reasons. One is efficiency. The way that you run your business, looking at how you can hand off tasks to AI that other people don't need to be doing, looking at how you can delegate faster, looking at how you can connect processes or create standard operating procedures through AI. So the efficiency of your business.

[00:16:58] And secondly, it's going to be through understanding data. Like I said, businesses have been doing this for years. The businesses that you see today that continue to innovate, continue to grow, that have standout brands, are the ones that understood how to understand their buyers, their audience, their consumers, what was being said about them at a deeper level.

I Was Working With AI 9 Years Ago. The Only Thing That's Changed Is What We Call It.

[00:17:18] Like I said, I was working with AI nine years ago. I didn't realise it, but I was working with AI. So we as business owners have the opportunity to stop focusing on these surface level discussions about "Is AI making you sound inauthentic? Is this caption created by AI?"

[00:17:42] As a serious business owner that is building something for longevity, that is building something to be profitable, to create a brand, to work with premium clients, is this really the conversation that we should be giving our energy to?

Your Clients Are Already Giving You Everything You Need. Are You Paying Attention?

[00:18:00] AI gives you an opportunity to understand your clients in a more precise way than anyone else in your space because they're your clients and they're giving you so much data already that you are sitting on. That's not a technology advantage. It is a standards advantage. It is a leadership advantage. And you already have the data. The question is whether you're paying attention to it.

[00:18:24] Get into the download. Have a look at where you can start using your data more intelligently from today and put yourself into conversations that help you understand your buyer. Don't focus on giving energy to conversations around volume of content and inauthenticity. It's not worth your time.

I'm Rachel Pearson. This is Rich Work. I'll see you next week.