Transcription
If you want to use AI in your business in 2026, there is no skill more valuable than learning how to process map. Most people are trying to jam ChatGPT or seven other AI tools into their business, yet they don't even know why. So, in this video, I'm going to share with you my inside out AI framework, which is going to show you exactly where to use AI in your business, where process maps fit into your AI strategy, a simplified strategy for process mapping, and I'll put it all together for you with a very common business use case.
But before we dive in, if you're new here, my name is Rick Malry and for almost 12 years now, I've run successful online businesses. And today, I run an AI community specifically for online businesses called the AI Playbook, where I help online businesses learn how to leverage AI in your business so that you can streamline your business, make it way more efficient, increase profitability, and also add additional revenue streams to your business by using AI. And if you'd like to join us inside the community, we have over 600 online businesses in there currently. I'll leave a link to the community in the description below.
So to figure out exactly where you can be using AI in your business, I recommend using my inside out AI framework. And as we start to look at this, the biggest mistake I see people making is they try to use a tool. So they know say ChatGPT for example, and then they're trying to figure out, well, where can ChatGPT fit into my business? But the problem with that is is we don't even know what problem we're trying to solve in our business. We're trying to force fit an AI tool into the business rather than looking inside the business first.
So in step one here of the inside out framework, we start by identifying the problem i.e. you want to make something more efficient, something is takes a long time every single week, it's repetitive, draining your energy, etc. Also on the flip side of that, we're looking for opportunities in our business. And then in step two, once you've identified the thing that you want to make easier, then we create our process map. And even better, if you already have an SOP or a standard operating procedure, if you will, for that specific task or workflow, it'll make creating a process map way easier. But that's okay if you don't have an SOP. Step number three is we select our AI tools. We're matching the right AI model or automation tool to the specific documented task or workflow that we've created in step two. And then in step four, we build it out, we test it, and then we're always iterating on it. We're always trying to improve it. So with this framework, instead of chasing the latest AI tools and trying to find uses for them, you start looking inside your business to identify a specific problem or opportunity and then you find the right AI tool or tools to solve it.
Another way that you can do this, and I've talked about it in a different video here on my channel, is to do a three to five-day time audit. So you track what you're doing every single normal business day. And the next part of it is you're looking for three specific patterns. Number one, what are those repetitive tasks? Social media posting, email responses, data entry, research. And the next pattern you're looking for is clear documented process, clear SOPs, like we talked about in the inside out AI framework, even if it's just in your head. Then the next pattern you're looking for in your time tracking is what are those draining but necessary tasks for your business? What is the soul-sucking work that must get done, whether it's by you or somebody on your team?
So, let's begin to put all this into action. Let's say you follow the Inside Out AI framework and you've discovered that your email inbox is something in your business that drains your energy, takes you a lot of time, it's repetitive, but yet you do need to process your inbox because there could be important emails in there or potential business, etc. Well, this is where you can create a process map for processing your email inbox. And a process map, just like it sounds, is something that's visual. Now, how you put this together, completely up to you. You can do it on a whiteboard in your office. You can use a tool like Miro or Whimsical, for example. You can draw on your iPad. You can use sticky notes and move things around. For me, I like to use Whimsical. And by the way, I'm on the free plan.
So, to start our process map here in Whimsical, we can just go up here and click on diagram shapes, for example. And the first step, we're just going to make a simple box, right? So, we want to look at what is the first step or trigger of your workflow. So, for the first step or the trigger in processing your email inbox, you get to decide. Is it when you get a new email? Is it once a day? Is it multiple times a day? You get to decide, right? So, let's just say that our first step or our trigger is every weekday at 8:00 a.m. and again at 4:00 p.m. After you have the first step, then what does done look like for this workflow? So, we're going to add another step here. I'm going to add another rectangle or square here, and I'm going to put it at the end. And let's just say that it's inbox zero. So that is our definition of done. This is our final step. So once we have the first step and then once we have the last step, then we want to go back to the first step and start thinking through what happens next. So we can just add another box here. And so we begin by opening up the our email client. So let's just say it's Gmail. And then we start reading emails, right? And then again, what happens next after that? Well, I would imagine that decisions need to be made based on the emails that you've gotten. And in general, when you're process mapping, a diamond is a decision shape when you're creating your process map. And again, we can type in here. So then once we've categorized the emails, well, we need to figure out what categories that we want to be categorizing them into. So let's just say that you get customer service emails, you get personal emails and you get um collaboration ops. So collaboration opportunities. So once the emails have been categorized, we again get to ask ourselves what happens next. So for example, if we get a customer service email, well you respond to the customer service email. If you get a personal email, maybe you answer at that time or you put it into a special folder. For example, collaboration opportunities. Well, let's just say that you have a, you know, a thought process for how you think about collaboration opportunities coming to you and decisions are made based off of that. Well, again, you want to add this to your process map. So then you would just repeat the process here for personal emails and then also for the collaboration opportunities.
So some things to think about as you are creating your process map. So number one, one task, one box. So for this one here, for example, this box here to start the entire workflow is check email, one task. Next task, read emails, one task. Another thing to think about is who's currently doing the task? Are you doing the task? Is a VA doing the task? Is somebody else on your team doing the task? So what you can do, for example, in Whimsical is you can color code the different things. So let's just say that the customer service part is being done by a VA on your team. name. So you can click yellow and yellow signifies that it's being done by your VA. Let's just say that you are reading emails for whatever reason. You can click on that and click gray. So you can see who's handling different parts of your workflow within the process map. The next thing you want to think about is and not a lot of people do this unfortunately is how much time does each of these tasks normally take. You'll be able to see oh this workflow used to take me whatever 90 minutes every single day. And then two weeks later after I've integrated AI and I've been testing and iterating and so forth, now it only takes me 10 minutes a day because I'm only focusing on the most important emails. And the last thing I recommend thinking about is as you go through creating your process map, look at where will context be helpful within the workflow or within the process map. So here's what I mean by that. Customer service, for example. Well, if you have an FAQ document or files or what have you, if you got a knowledge base that will help answer customer service related questions, context is going to be really important in this step. So then we can do a couple different things. We can add a sticky note at this step right here within our process map. Or we could add like a a comment for example. So I can just click on the box and I can choose the little comment option and I can say context, you know, knowledge files, super helpful. So all somebody has to do or all you have to do is click the little um little circle here with the initials and you'll see the comment. Obviously you you're going to want to get more specific there like what specific files are going to be most helpful.
Okay. So, I've just finished the process map here. And I mean, it looks complicated, but it's really not, right? I mean, you might have more categories for your emails, you might have fewer categories. Now, the next step in this is based on the process map that we've created. Now, you can see where AI can help. So, what tool or tools could be helpful here? So, what is the first step? Well, it wakes up, if you will. This workflow wakes up every weekday at 8:00 a.m. and then again at 4:00 p.m. So that is a trigger that we can schedule. The second step is going to be reading the email. So this would be an AI step, meaning we want to assign an AI model to it. So whether it's Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude, then after it reads the emails, we need an agent to make a decision based on the emails that it is analyzing. So what category does it fall into? So, what I recommend that you do is you color code each of the steps that AI can make easier or do for you. So, let's just say that we are going to do this in um blue. So, we're going to look at that. We're going to look at categor uh categorization of emails. We're going to look at blue again for this step here. Does it know the answer? So, we're going to look at blue again. And then all these steps here are going to be blue as well. Again, personal email, send to Slack, that's just an automation. So it's not necessarily AI, but collaboration opportunities. We want to be looking at does this make sense? So this can be an AI. The AI is making the decision for you. And that's why I added, by the way, another comment to the collab ops step in our process map here where checks doc that shares collaboration criteria. So the AI here is checking the document. And does it make sense? Yes. Okay, great. Reply with the rate card that I have. And then also if it's no, you know, reply with a nice thank you but no thank you. And again after looking at this, I know that this looks like an automation that has AI steps within it. And I'm looking at the tool that I use the most in my business. So I can then go and create this in Relay.app. And before I show you what that will look like in Whimsical, for example, they have an Ask AI step. So a generate with AI. So you can click on that. You can click on flowchart. You just describe the steps that you want to include in it and then it'll build this out for you. But again, I think it's super important to know exactly how to do this yourself before going on to using AI to create it for you. By doing it manually, you understand on a much more deeper level how to process map.
So now we can take our process map, go over into a tool like Relay.app. You can use whatever tool that you want to. I'll link to Relay.app uh in the description below, by the way. But there's a few different ways that you can build out a workflow here in Relay. So, for example, one way is to create an agent and we can call it a personal assistant. You can call it whatever you want. And you know, it starts off with the defaults to you're Rick Mal's personal assistant, your responsibilities include. Then you can create bullet points for each of the things that you wanted to do as an email inbox triage agent. And then down here, you can select the tools that you want to use. So for me, it's going to be Gmail and Slack, for example. and create the agent. The other one here is I've already built this out. You can also build it by from scratch, right? So you don't have the AI build it for you. So as you can see here, again, we're using this process map to build our workflow. So check emails weekdays at 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. I've just set it up for 8:00 a.m. So right here, trigger at 8:00 a.m. work days or weekdays. Next step, find emails. Look over here, read emails. Next one, categorize emails. Next one, classify the email into it's actually three categories, but here's our classification stage. Then once it categorizes the emails, depending on what category it falls into, then it's going to take an appropriate action. So, for example, customer service, do you know the answer? And so, as you can see here, I just put general question, and it's going to prompt uh in this case here, I put Gemini 3 Flash, brand new model, draft the email. I would be putting I would be adding my FAQ document to this so that it knows what to look for in terms of it can match the question that is coming in from the email and then finding the the appropriate response and then I just I just continue following along just building each of these steps out. So personal email send to Slack. So if it's a personal email send message to me in Slack.
So, as you can see, creating a process map makes it so much easier to see where AI can truly impact your business. Don't do what most people are doing, looking for the tool and trying to force fit a tool or LLM into the business. Use the inside out AI framework, then process map. Put together a process map. And don't forget to when you're process mapping to include context, resources, and any specific instructions that are going to be most helpful for each step in our process map. And now you know what the 1% of business owners are doing with AI and doing it smartly in their business. Start with something that's going to give you a quick win. Don't go too big too fast. Okay?
All right, my friend. Thanks so much for watching today's video. So, if you're an online business owner and you're looking to leverage AI in your business so that you can again streamline your business, create workflows like we're talking about here today, add additional value, and create new revenue streams for your business, I want to invite you to join me inside my AI Playbook community, which I'll link to in the description below. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next.