Transcription
Over the past few years, I've coached more than a thousand business owners on using AI. Course creators, coaches, agencies, service providers, people opening cloud for the first time, people running it across their entire operation. And when you've worked with that many entrepreneurs, you start seeing the same split every time.
On one side, there are people getting tangible results and making more money with AI. On the other hand, there are people busy using AI all day, but going nowhere. And what separates them comes down to seven things. The same seven every single time at every revenue level in every kind of business. And I'm going to give you all seven here in today's video. Some of you can go implement today as soon as you're finished watching this video. A couple will change how you think about using AI entirely. Let's get into it.
The first one is the number one issue I've seen over the years, and I still see it today on almost every call that I have with my students. The most important skill in AI is not prompting. It isn't knowing which AI tool to use. It's being able to say exactly what you want done, and then break it into steps. That's it. And that isn't even an AI skill. That's just being clear. That's just being able to clearly articulate what it is that you want, because everything else you do with AI sits on top of that. If you can't explain the steps to somebody else, you can't explain them to AI.
So, what I like to do is start somewhere else entirely. Before any tool, any prompt, any automation, we find the biggest constraint in your business. The one thing that if you fixed it would move your business forward more than anything else. Then get super, super clear on what fixing that constraint and breaking through that constraint looks like. Then break it into steps. Then, and only then, do you bring in AI if necessary at that point to help overcome that bottleneck.
And here's a prompt I like to use to help determine what the bottlenecks are in a business, and I also use this in my own business as well. So, the most important part of this entire prompt is these first two sections here, the role and the purpose. So, I'm telling it, "You're a seasoned business strategist with deep expertise in the theory of constraints to digital businesses. You personally diagnose bottlenecks for hundreds of course creators, membership operators, coaches, content creators generating between 10 and $500,000 per month. You think like a systems thinker, etc., etc." And then in the purpose, and obviously this is super, super important to this prompt, "Identify the number one constraint or the bottleneck in their online business. Understand why it is the constraint in plain language grounded in the theory of constraints. Walk away with a specific actionable plan to resolve it mapped to the theory of constraints five focusing steps." Then I've got a series of questions written into the prompt here that I want the user of this prompt to have to answer in order for the AI to help them identify what their business bottleneck is. So, again, clarity first, AI second. You have to be able to clearly articulate what it is that you want AI to help you do. Most people can't do that. It sounds very simple, but it's actually kind of a hard skill. I know that I struggle with that a lot.
So, now once you're clear on what you want, there's a second thing that trips people up, too. And this one might be the most expensive habit in all of AI. And that second lesson is most people are still trying to prompt their way out of a context problem. Here's what I mean. Somebody gets a bad output from whatever AI model they're using. Their first instinct is that the prompt wasn't good enough. So, they go hunting for a better one. They go buy a prompt pack from somebody. They watch the prompt engineering videos. They spend an hour rewording one paragraph. The prompt was almost never the problem. The AI had no context. Your output is only as good as the context that you give it. Think about it like a new hire, right? You'd never sit somebody down on day one and say, "Go write our email sequence. No examples, no information about B offer, no sense of what good looks like." Nobody would do that, right? Well, some people might not get good results. This is exactly what most people do with AI every single day. So, treat it like the new hire. Give it the files, your brand guidelines, your writing style, past work you were happy with. Do that and the output jumps so much that people assume you've got a secret prompt. There's no secret prompt. You gave it context.
So, if the context is what actually makes AI good, where does all that context live? Well, that's lesson number three. And this one is the center of everything and I call it your information hierarchy. In fact, I did a whole video about it right here. If you've not yet watched that, make sure you watch that video after this one. Essentially, it's one place where all of your business information lives in one organized folder structure. Everything about your business, about you and your voice and your clients. The same folder structure for every project and every client if you work with clients. Identical every single time.
Now, here's an example of my own information hierarchy and I have it right next to my cloud code. I'm using VS code, but all these files live locally on my computer. So, you can see here I have my business here, about me, about my business, about my voice, my offers, etc. And then that's the top level. And then after that, I have my project folder. So, marketing for example, then I have examples, instructions for like marketing manager, etc., notes, outputs, references, voice. And then as you can see, I just repeat those same folders, not the same information inside necessarily, but for each project I have in my business. So, newsletter for example, again, instructions, examples, notes, references, voice, etc.
And here's why this matters so much. When your information sits in one structure, you can point any AI at it. It isn't tool reliant. It works with Claude, it'll work with ChatGPT, works with whatever launches next month, right? The tools change every single week. Your information hierarchy does not. I mean, you keep updating it. That's the beauty of it and that's the power of it. And so, every new model that comes out makes your setup that much more powerful, too, because the context is already sitting there, organized, and ready to go. So, again, I made an entire video on this concept and this structure. So, I'm not going to go deep into it here on this video. I'll link to it again right here. If you don't have it set up, this is the highest leverage thing on the whole list here in the video today.
So, you've got clarity, you've got context, you've got a home for the context. Next is which AI to point at it. And this is what I find myself helping people with all the time, if not every single day. And that is most people pick one AI model one time and then run everything through it forever. And here's the part that they forget. Every model has different strengths and different costs. I'm laughing because that is something that I used to do, too. I'm like, "Oh, cool. I'm going to go use this one model and use it for everything." No, don't do that. You don't need the most powerful, most expensive model to write a simple email. That's like hiring a heart surgeon to put on a band-aid, right? Flip it around. If I'm doing deep strategic planning across the whole business, I don't want the light, fast model built for quick everyday tasks. So, the skill is knowing what each model is good at and matching it to the task. Sometimes that means two models in one workflow. One does the research, another one does the writing. That's not advanced, that's just knowing your tools.
Okay, so those first four are the mechanics, right? Clarity, context, structure, right model. The next one is where I watch really smart business owners leave hours on the table every single week. By the way, if you're ready to build an AI operating system that handles your reoccurring sales, marketing, fulfillment, and operations work, the AI Builder Bootcamp is built just for you. Over 7 weeks, I'm personally going to help you build and launch an AI operating system in your business that takes over those reoccurring sales, marketing, fulfillment, and ops, and the busy work. You get the output of a team without hiring one after that cohort. We start with a small cohort, right, in August. So, click the link below in the description to learn more and apply.
Okay, here's lesson five, and this is exactly what I was talking about, exactly why I created my AI Builder Bootcamp cohort. Most people don't have a system for how they use AI. This is the single biggest thing people are doing wrong, period. Here's what that looks like. They go into Claude, they write one email, or they research one thing. That's it. Yay, AI. Nothing is scheduled, nothing repeats, nothing connects to anything else. And so, they tell me, "Yeah, I'm using AI, but it's not really saving me much time." Right, one-off usage gives you one-off results.
Now, picture the other version. The reoccurring parts of your business, your content, your emails, your customer service, your client research, your weekly reporting, all running on a set process. AI plugged in at set points, right? Pulling from your information hierarchy, the right model on each step. That's when the time savings stop being a few minutes here and there, and start being hours every single week. Same tools, completely different outcome.
And here's a perfect example of what I'm talking about, using AI as a system instead of one-off thing. And this is a very, very simple, yet powerful, uh workflow that I've set up with Claude. So, every day at 7:30 a.m. Pacific time, Claude delivers me a daily brief, is what you're looking at right here in my X Tiles app. And it has all of my tasks based on everything I've been talking about during the day. It links with my Google Calendar. It has action things that I need to be aware of, has mentions uh like Slack messages and so forth. It reviews my inbox and tells me what needs action, what is an FYI. And then at the end, and I love this, probably my favorite part of the whole daily brief, is that it reviews my entire day. Again, I didn't write any of this. This is based on all the different things that I've been working on today, and it gives me a complete wrap-up and the results, and it lists them all out. I set this up once in Claude. I ran it through and kind of iterated on what exactly kind of information that I wanted it to pull in. And then, once I got it to a point I'm still refining this, right? But, it's really, really good. I go into it every single morning, and it's all right there for me. And again, this is scheduled. It's a repeating AI process that saves me a ton of time, gives me great information at a glance. And this is just one small, very small example of what we'll be building in the cohort, for example.
Now, once people see an example like this, the temptation, and hey, I've been there, too, is to go automate everything in sight, right? But, that is exactly the trap that you want to avoid. This next lesson changes how you decide what to point AI at in the first place. And I call it amplify versus automate. Most business owners only think automate, right? Make this easier. Make that automatic. And look, automation is great, right? But, I watch people build automations because they felt like they should be using AI somehow. They spend a whole weekend wiring up something that saves 4 minutes a week on a task that was never the constraint in the first place. Which is exactly why lesson one that we talked about earlier comes first, right? If you haven't found the real constraint, you're going to automate things that don't really matter.
So, here's the reframe. The point of automating isn't the automation. The point is that it frees up your time so you can amplify. Amplify what makes you you. The thinking, the teaching, the relationships with your clients, the parts of the business that only you can do. Automate what saves you time to amplify what makes you valuable in the marketplace.
And that leads straight into the last lesson because it's the one that's quietly on everyone's mind. And that is the question is always some version of is AI going to replace what I do? Well, here's my answer. The tool that you're using is not the moat. Your IP is the moat. AI can't think like you. It can't make decisions like you. It doesn't have your experience, your judgment, your relationships with your clients, your emotions. What it can do is process information at a scale that you never could. And so, the businesses winning with AI aren't the ones handing everything over to it. They're the ones using AI to make their own way of doing things more powerful.
This is also why I say AI is a data point, not the decision maker. A lot of business owners are trying to hand their decisions over to AI. Just tell me what to do, right? Do that and you lose the human element of your business entirely, and your business starts sounding like everyone else. Instead, use AI to gather better data, faster than you ever could on your own. Then make the call yourself through the lens of your own expertise. AI brings you the data point, you bring the judgment. Your IP amplified by AI. That's the moat that no tool crosses.
So, those are the seven lessons that coaching over a thousand business owners have taught me. And here's the thing, everything that I just walked you through, all of this and a whole lot more, this is exactly what we're going to build together step-by-step inside the AI Builder Bootcamp cohort. We kick off in August. If you're ready to build an AI operating system again that handles your reoccurring sales, marketing, fulfillment, and operations work, the AI Builder Bootcamp is built exactly for you. Over 7 weeks starting in mid-August, I'm going to help you step-by-step through the entire thing. So, link in the description below. As always, thanks so much for watching today's video, super appreciate it. I'll see you in the next one.