23. Stop Fearing AI. Start Running It. | AI and Technology

Most service business owners have tried AI at least once. But when the results come back flat and generic, they quietly close the tab and assume it just is not for them. The real problem is not the tool. It is that nobody has sat down with them and shown them how to actually use it in a business like theirs.

In this episode, Ginny shares the five checkpoints she taught live at the New Bern Chamber of Commerce AI Workshop, and she brings that same practical session straight to you. She walks through how to prompt AI so it stops sounding like everyone else on the internet, how to use the free Google tool NotebookLM to build a private searchable knowledge base for your business, and how to start thinking about agentic AI safely and strategically. She also covers how to make AI a real habit instead of something you try once and forget, and wraps up with a quick tour of tools like Napkin.ai, Gamma.app, Descript, Flux LoRa, and Perplexity.

This episode is especially useful if you have been curious about AI but have not found a starting point that fits your actual workload. Whether you run an appliance repair company, a plumbing business, a lawn care operation, or any other local service business, the checkpoints Ginny covers here are designed to meet you exactly where you are.

Hit play and let this one be the starting point you have been waiting for.

Here's the Chat GPT Intro Video mentioned in this episode: https://www.outcomeacademy.com/chatgpt

Thanks for listening to The Outcome Academy Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode and want to keep learning how to work ON your business with systems, strategy, and practical tools, here are a few ways to stay connected:

Website: https://www.outcomeacademy.com/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ginny.outcomeacademy 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ginny.outcomeacademy/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@outcomeacademy 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/outcome-academy

If this episode was helpful, be sure to follow the show so you don't miss future conversations. If you know a local service business owner who could use this, share it with them.

Your outcome isn't a wish. It's a decision.

Transcript

I stood in front of a room full of business owners last week, and I asked them how many of them had tried using AI at least once. Almost every single hand went up. Then I asked how many of them felt like they actually knew what they were doing and could master their AI tools. A good portion of those hands went straight back down. If you just pictured yourself in that room with your hand down, this episode is for you.

Welcome to the Outcome Academy Podcast. I'm Ginny Seeley. I'm a business strategist and longtime process improvement expert, and I also co-own an appliance service business and a co-working space with my husband Joe. So I understand what it looks like to tackle growth, leadership, family, and life all at once. If you're a service-based entrepreneur or executive who wants to stop putting out fires, work on your business, and build momentum with systems, smart marketing, and practical tech, you are in exactly the right place.

Well, hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Outcome Academy Podcast. I am so glad that you're here for this one, because I just got back from teaching at the New Bern Chamber of Commerce last week, and I came home with a head full of things that I want to share with you. A little context first, because if you listened to Episode 22, you know I recorded it from a campsite at Hammocks Beach State Park while both of our businesses ran without us. We had just gotten back from that family staycation with Connor, Logan, and Alyssa when I walked into the chamber the next day to teach the workshop. I went from picnic tables and birdsong to standing in front of a room full of local business owners. I mentioned that because this podcast is about building a business that actually works for your life, and that week was a pretty good example of what that can look like in practice.

This workshop was the second session in a three-part series, and I titled mine "Stop Fearing AI, Start Running It." The first session in this series was taught by a gentleman named Brad, and he did a really solid job introducing the room to what AI is and how prompting works. So I was building on a foundation that he had laid for me, and that meant I could really get inside the tools, show real examples, answer real questions, and make it feel a little less like a technology lecture and more like a workshop. And that is absolutely my jam. I like to get people with their laptops open, trying things and building confidence with the tools that I can share with them.

What I found in that room was something I find pretty much everywhere I go when I talk about AI with people. People are curious, but the gap is between trying it and really feeling confident implementing those tools in their business. And that gap can be really frustrating sometimes, because a lot of people assume that they're somehow doing it wrong or behind the curve. The real issue is even simpler than that. The real issue is that nobody has really sat down with them and shown them how they can leverage AI in a business like theirs. And that's what I want to do for you today.

So I broke the workshop into five parts, and I'm going to walk you through those same five parts right here. I want you to think of those five stops as little checkpoints. You don't really have to tackle all five of these things at once, and you absolutely don't have to have everything figured out before any of it starts helping you. But it is useful to know the terrain before you start jumping right in.

So let's get started with checkpoint number one, and that's about laying your AI foundation.

The first thing I always say when I introduce AI to a room full of business owners is this: AI can only help you at the level that you communicate with it. That sounds really simple, but it's the most important thing I can tell you, and I think it explains almost every frustrating AI experience you've ever had.

Here's the most common failure. Somebody opens ChatGPT or Claude and they type something in, and then they get something back that's kind of generic and flat. It might be okay, but it's really not that impressive. So they just quietly close the tab and draw the conclusion that AI doesn't really work or that it's not really for them. What actually happened is that the vague input and the vague instruction that was put into the AI tool resulted in a really vague answer back. The tool didn't fail. The person didn't fail. It was just a bad combination. It would be like hiring a new team member and then just telling them to have at it. Just go ahead and write something for me. Well, if you did that with a new team member, they would have no idea what you wanted them to write, what you wanted it to sound like, what you wanted it to be about, or what kind of audience they were targeting. They would be missing a ton of information.

And so that piece is the prompt. I have a really great introductory video for ChatGPT. It's kind of an old video, but all of the information in there when it comes to prompting still applies. I'm going to go ahead and link that in the show notes for this episode so you can pull up that video and watch it if you're not quite sure about prompting.

What prompting is, is just giving the tool a really clear instruction. That is all it is. And the way to get better results is to give it better context. One of the things I walked that room through was how to frame your prompt by telling the tool what kind of thinker you want it to be before you ask it to do anything. So instead of saying something like, write me a social media post about my appliance repair business, you might say, act as a marketing strategist who specializes in writing for local service businesses, and then you can go ahead and make your ask. Now the tool is approaching your request from a very specific perspective instead of a generic one, and the difference in the output you'll get is significant. The fix is not just using a different tool. The fix is giving more context for the tool to work with.

One of the most powerful ways to do that is to get AI to actually know you. One of the things I demonstrated was a custom GPT that I've used with some of my students called the Write Like Me GPT. What that is, is a specific bot that I've created that asks a series of questions to really get to know you. Then it will go ahead and make a summary that you can download, and you can take that summary and cut and paste it into any of your AI tools to let it learn all about you. You can achieve the same thing by telling your AI tool to ask you a series of questions to get to know you and your business. Then you can tell it to go ahead and summarize all the information, and you can do the same thing. Cut and paste that, upload it into your tool whenever you're asking it to do something, and you have a really good summary all about you that teaches it exactly who you are, what your business is, the customers you want to serve, the offers you have in your business, your mission, vision, and values. Literally all of the things you can think of to share with that tool about you and your business will give it all of the information it needs to do a way better job giving you a really great output.

Now, before we go any further, I want to say something that came up in the workshop because it's important. AI absolutely does make things up, with one exception that I'm going to get into in a minute, because there is a really cool tool that doesn't make stuff up. But most of these tools are built to generate a response. If they don't know something, they will fill in the gap rather than admit that they're not sure. They will sound completely confident about something that is completely wrong.

This is where I will very much push back on the fact that people constantly say that AI is going to replace humans. This is the piece where we need humans. We need subject matter experts to scratch their heads and push back on the AI and say that something doesn't look right, doesn't feel right, isn't acting right, doesn't reflect the real truth about something. In my talk, I used Cavalry Appliance as an example. I'll use AI to draft a blog post, a very first rough draft, about an appliance topic. Then I bring it to Joe, and he reads it and tells me whether it's correct or not. He might add a customer story, or he might tell me that is completely not true, or that's not exactly what he would do. Here's the thing: AI is pulling from all the knowledge that's out there in public. That includes all the questionable advice that people give on YouTube about how to fix appliances. Joe's expertise, his almost 40 years of time that he has spent honing his craft as an appliance technician, that is the important differentiator.

So this is the difference between very curated, educated content that somebody can put out with the assistance of AI and what people have come to know and disdain called AI slop. AI slop is taking something that AI spits out without you feeding it all the context and level of expertise that you have, cutting and pasting it, and throwing it out onto the internet. That is absolutely the opposite of what we want to be using AI for.

The next piece that I went into in the talk, and that I want to share with you today, is the tool that does not make stuff up, and that is called NotebookLM. This is where things get really interesting, because this is the one that always blows everybody's minds. It's a free Google tool. If you have a Google Business Suite or Google account, you already have NotebookLM right in your tools. You get to it through your Google account the same way you would go to open Gmail or your Google Drive or a Google Doc or Google Sheet. What you want to do is go into that same little area where you see all the little icons, and scroll to the bottom for the icon that looks kind of like a little black rainbow.

What this does is so different from every other AI tool that I've shown. NotebookLM uses only sources that you provided. You might ask yourself, why do I want to get information from something that I gave the information to? Well, stick with me for just a minute.

In NotebookLM, you're going to upload sources. You can upload documents, PDFs, links, YouTube videos, and NotebookLM is going to create a notebook based upon all of the different documents and things that you feed it. If you think outside the box a little bit, you'll come to realize how useful this is pretty quickly. Think about creating a notebook full of all of the policies and procedures for your business. Then you give that notebook to your team members and they can go ask questions. If they want to know how to do something, they can consult the notebook all about your administrative procedures. If they want to know how to handle a phone call or use a special script, they can query that notebook.

But it doesn't stop there. If you are researching something and you have a whole bunch of articles that you found online, you can create a notebook filled with all of the different resources you found on a piece of subject matter or a topic you're researching. Then you can ask NotebookLM to summarize all of the information. You can ask it to create a podcast episode for you. You can ask it to create a video summary, a quiz, note cards, or even a presentation. It is absolutely amazing, because you can talk and talk and talk like I'm doing right now, create a huge transcript of all of the information that you want to share about a topic, and then put that transcript in there and ask it to create a presentation for you. That is bananas, right? That is why it is the exception to the AI makes things up rule. The information it draws from is only the information that you give it.

There's another really cool thing you can do with NotebookLM, and that is a special Chrome extension called YouTube to NotebookLM. Once you install this extension, you go to YouTube and you'll see the little NotebookLM icon there. When you click it, it will begin to create a notebook of the videos that you upload into it. So you can go find your favorite resource on YouTube that you learn from. For example, if I wanted to compile a bunch of videos from Alex Hormozi, I could create a whole library in NotebookLM of all of his videos on a certain topic. Then I could ask that notebook to summarize everything. I could go into the chat and ask it to help me create ten steps to sell something in Alex Hormozi style. The sky's the limit here. You can have so much fun with this, compiling information specific to a certain topic for each different notebook.

One of the final really fun things I want to share with you about NotebookLM is that it can create an infographic from the information that you give it. One of the ways I like to use this is to take these very podcast episodes, get the transcript, upload the transcript into NotebookLM, and then ask it to create an infographic about the topic I talked about. And it is really fun. You can give it all kinds of instructions on the style that you want that infographic to be in. You can ask it to use your brand colors. You can even ask it to include your logo. And then if you still want to tweak it a little bit, you can download the infographic, pop it into Canva, and edit away.

The third thing that I talked about in this workshop series that I want to share with you is agentic AI. So what is agentic AI? Agentic AI is where we move beyond just having a conversation with our AI tool, and we actually give it an instruction and then set it free to carry out a specific task that we want it to do. Basically, it can take an action on your behalf, not just answer your question. It can actually do things. It can scan a platform, it can analyze a website, it can organize your files for you, it can create responses to emails coming into your inbox and draft those responses and put them into a folder for you. It can go ahead and run a process from start to finish while you're working on something totally different.

The desktop version of Claude has something called Claude Cowork, and this is where I've been experimenting with this. Now, when I started talking about AI today with you, I mentioned that everybody's at their own level of where they feel comfortable with AI. Some people have just dipped their toes in and they're experimenting, and maybe they're still skeptical. Some people are fully all in and super excited about what it can do for them. That is exactly how people are with agentic AI. I will say I'm somewhere in the middle. I am very interested in experimenting with it, but I also don't want to go all in and give it complete control of my computer.

Here are a couple of ways that I have used this functionality in Claude called Claude Cowork. I downloaded the app to my computer. Then what you can do is set up a specific folder on your computer that is only for Claude Cowork, and you only give Claude Cowork access to that folder, not every folder on your computer. A lot of people use a specific laptop or a different computer altogether that doesn't have anything important on it, and that way Claude can't accidentally do something to any of their important files. That's also a way to use agentic AI safely.

I have asked it to go out and look at somebody's YouTube channel and study some of their hooks that are performing really well, and then see if we could adapt that marketing strategy within our business. I've also had it scan local Facebook groups, in my Facebook account that I'm already logged into, to see if there's anybody asking for appliance repair.

Now, Claude uses something called tokens, which is kind of your allowance that you have each day for use on that platform. When you ask it to do some of these complicated things, it burns through tokens rather quickly. So I'm still playing with how useful it is versus the cost associated with running it and using all those tokens. I have encountered some people in the space where I learn about AI tools so that I can bring it back to you. One of the things that they have shared is that they are just investing in the $200 a month version of Claude because they found it is so useful, and investing $200 a month into their agentic system is worth it because they don't have to pay somebody to sit there and do some of these very boring tasks. I'm just throwing that out there. I'm not saying you should do that. I'm just saying there are people using it to that degree already, and it's worth taking a look and just seeing where this goes and how it's evolving. Then you decide for yourself whether this is something you want to pursue and learn about or not. No pressure here.

I really think my job in this whole thing is just to let you know what's out there and what's available, and then try to help you understand it so that you can choose the most useful tools for your workspace. The business owners who learn to use these tools very thoughtfully are going to have a meaningful advantage in the next few years. I want you to think about how you want to approach this and do it really smartly and carefully so that you can take advantage of some of the technologies available without putting your business or your assets at risk.

Part number four of the talk was really about making using AI a habit in your business.

One of the points that I think matters most for the long term: you can leave a workshop or finish listening to an episode like this one feeling genuinely energized and excited about AI. And then you go back to your regular week, the calls come in, the jobs pile up, the to-do list does what it always does, and the thing you were going to try keeps getting pushed to next week. That energy can fade away, and then the tools just sit there unopened.

So making AI a habit isn't about using a new cool tool every single day. It's about training yourself to ask one simple question on a regular basis, and that is: can AI do this thing for me? That's it. That's basically the whole habit. It's just a question.

When you're sitting there scanning a spreadsheet and you just can't figure it out, ask yourself: can AI help me with this? When you're stuck with a tech issue, like Joe trying to install a barcode reader for his parts, really frustrating experience, he asked himself: can AI help me with this? And the answer was yes. He was able to go in and talk to ChatGPT, ask questions, push back at the answers, and arrive at a really efficient way of using his barcode system. ChatGPT makes a really great thinking partner when you're trying to figure out tech issues. I've used it to help me put things on my website, or when an online instruction tells me to do something and I just have no idea what they're talking about. An online instruction might tell me to go ahead and adjust something in my website and I don't know how to do it. I'll just go in there and ask exactly how to do it. I'll even take a screenshot and upload that into the chat and ask it what this means and help me take the next step. Those kinds of things were really useful ways that AI can help you without worrying that you're going to do something wrong or send something out into the world that you're not proud of.

So I want you to start to keep a mental log, or even an actual log if that works better for you. Take note of the tasks that you repeatedly do that take real time but don't really require your highest level of thinking, like responding to Google reviews, drafting follow-up emails after an estimate, summarizing what happened in a team meeting, writing a job description, brainstorming, coming up with advertisement ideas, coming up with social media post ideas. These are the kinds of tasks where AI can step in and give you a strong first draft in a fraction of the time it would take you to start from scratch.

And this is what I mean when I say it compounds. You're still reviewing it. You're still applying your judgment and your expertise to it. But you're not starting from a blank page every single time. And if you do that repeatedly across all the different tasks you do day in and day out, the time you save starts to add up in a way that actually changes what your week looks like.

One of the questions that was asked during this workshop was: well, if I'm reviewing everything and I have to do all this work, then what's the point? Why do I even want to use AI? Is it really saving time? And my answer is yes. Do I think that I work fewer hours because I use AI? No. But if you think to yourself how we act as entrepreneurs, we aren't always chasing just working fewer hours. What we're chasing is getting a whole lot more done in the time that we have. Using AI can really level the playing field for us as small business owners, because now we can get about five to ten times more work done in the same amount of time. We can really scale to a point that we've never been able to do before. We're able to accomplish things that took teams of people months to do, and we can do it within half an hour to an hour.

So those are the kinds of things I want you to think about. What can I do to save myself time doing all of the little tasks that I do all day long that will open up time for more meaningful connection with the people I love and my clients, and for doing meaningful work that I actually do have to think about? Things that only I can do, not all of the little meeting summaries and task lists and things like that. Those are the things you can start to delegate to AI.

I don't want you to sit there saying to yourself, what is the most impressive, amazing thing I could do with AI? That is a little bit lofty and it also feels intimidating. I want you to ask yourself: what is one thing I do every single day repeatedly that takes way more time than it should? Start there. See if you can delegate even part of that task to an AI tool just to speed things up and make it more efficient for you, and then build from there.

The last piece of the workshop was just kind of a fun section. I'm going to rattle off some of the tools that I shared in that part. I'm only rattling these off to inspire you to go check them out and see what kind of fun things you can do with them, because maybe, just maybe, one of these tools will make your life a little easier this week.

The first one I want to share is called Napkin.ai, and this one is kind of fun. It takes a section of text that you give it, so you can share a blog post, a summary, a paragraph, something you taught, or a transcript, and you can cut and paste it into Napkin and it will make an infographic that's a little simpler than one that NotebookLM will create for you. This one is really good for creating diagrams out of written words. It's fun. Try it out, and you can even use your brand colors in there too.

Another one is called Gamma.app. Joe had to give a presentation at BNI, and he took about two hours building his presentation for the talk. Then we took his content, gave it to Gamma, and it created a clean, professional slide deck in like three minutes. Amazing. You can do this in NotebookLM as well, but Gamma.app will produce really cool presentations, kind of PowerPoint style, in no time at all. I would encourage you to not do presentations the long way anymore and just try and see how this works for you.

Descript is the one that I use to edit my podcast audio. This is also really great for video, so you can record video of yourself and then edit the video by editing the transcript, and that is pretty neat. It also can help you create reels and all kinds of edited content using the AI tool inside of that tool.

Another one I mentioned is called HeyGen, and that is H-E-Y-G-E-N. This will create AI-generated video content. I'll just be really honest here. AI-generated video content is not my favorite use of AI. I'm not here to try to trick people into believing something that isn't really real. I prefer to use AI to help me be a very efficient business owner so I can spend time making genuine connections with people. So I want you to know that it exists, and I think there is a use case that could be really good for something like HeyGen, and that is creating training videos for your staff. That's a really good way to use HeyGen, where you can clone yourself as a video and then upload transcripts and it will go ahead and do it in your voice and your likeness. I don't like using that to try to trick somebody by creating a video that isn't real, but it is really good for a bunch of repeat video training tools or something like that.

Then there's an image generating tool called Flux LoRa that is really fun. I would direct you to the master of some of these tools, and his name is Jonathan Mast. He has a YouTube channel with a free Flux LoRa image training. For Flux LoRa, you can train the tool with existing photos of you, and then you can create some really fun images with all different kinds of backgrounds.

I also mentioned a couple of other tools. Perplexity, which is good for research. Also Gemini, which is Google's tool. There's also a tool called Manus that you can try, and X, formerly known as Twitter, has its own tool called Grok. There are just tons of different kinds of tools that you can use. It's sometimes fun to just create a request and then put it in all different ones and see which one gives you the best results.

So here's what I want to leave with you before I close out this episode. I have heard people say that AI is going to replace small business owners. I've also heard people say it's overhyped and it doesn't even work. What I actually believe, after a few years of teaching these kinds of tools and how to use them in small businesses, is that AI is a tool. Like every tool, it does nothing useful in the hands of someone who has not learned how to use it. But in the hands of someone who takes the time to learn and maximize the output of the tool, it can really become a multiplier. It doesn't replace your judgment, your expertise, or most especially the relationships that you've built with your clients and the people around you. But what it can do is extend your capacity so that you can do more in the same number of hours.

One of the attendees of the workshop said something near the end that is kind of a cool way to look at it. He said, you know, I don't think AI is ever going to save me a half a day's worth of work. I might disagree with him, but let me go on to the rest of his point. He said he could see how it could save him ten or fifteen minutes on a task that he does five or six times a day. And so maybe that means he gets home an hour or two earlier, or he could use that hour on something that actually grows his revenue. That's it. That's the whole game for him. It's not about the dramatic transformation. It's about compounding the small efficiencies and how that can start to reshape what your day looks like.

If today's episode opened something up for you that you want to explore a little more, or you want to sit down and look at how it can impact your specific business and you're feeling a little intimidated or you want some extra guidance, I just want to let you know that I do have a page on my website dedicated to this: outcomeacademy.com/coaching. If you go there, you will see some different opportunities to work with me and get help diving into the tools to maximize how they can be used in your specific business. If you want to do something like build a custom GPT or create a skill in Claude that can help you with something that you do over and over again, I would love the opportunity to sit down with you and figure out how we can save you that fifteen minutes to half an hour for each task that you're doing and see how that can compound in your business. You don't have to figure any of this out alone. I'm here to help you, and I'm super excited to hear from you about how you have tried something new and saved some time in your business so you can do things that really matter to your heart. Thanks so much for being here. And if this was helpful and you learned something, I would love it if you would share it with somebody else and make a difference in their life too. Thanks so much for being here. I'll see you next time.

As you think about this week, notice where this shows up in your own business. If you want to go deeper into this work, including the mastermind and other ways we support service-based business owners, you can explore everything at outcomeacademy.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.