How to Actually Put AI to Work in Your Business

Quick heads up before you read this. I got introduced at this talk as the AI expert. I'm as much of an AI student as anybody in that room. Everything I said up there could be totally wrong, because nobody knows what the future holds with this technology.

What I can say is I've leveraged it quite a bit in our business. It's improved our efficiency. It's made us more money. I've also run into a lot of pitfalls and made a lot of mistakes to get there. That's what the talk is about. The video is above, so this is the short version.

The document I reference is at tekkii.com/brief. It's got the prompt, all the steps, everything.

What AI is not

It's not a search engine. It's a brain. They fed it all of the internet and said, "You need to learn this. You need to understand it."

It's not a robot that runs your business. You can hand it tasks, but it is in no way gonna run your entire business without you at the helm. That's a misconception that's out there.

It's not a person. It has no memory of you. It knows nothing about your goals, your customer, where you wanna go. You're not gonna say, "Hey, you're a dog training expert, give me a business plan." It's not gonna happen. You don't wanna execute that plan either.

It's a very well-read junior hire. It's smart, but it's also kinda dumb. It only knows what you give it, and it's very general. So if you take what it gives you verbatim, you're gonna be general and generic too, especially to your customers.

The 2 AM trap

I asked the room how many people had been up until 12, 1, 2 AM using AI during the week. A lot of hands went up.

It's the new way to feel productive. It's telling you all this cool stuff, giving you all these great ideas, and you're like, "I'm doing work. I'm getting things done. When I get this figured out it's gonna make my business so much better." Then you look up and you never actually moved the needle. You didn't implement anything. If you did, what difference did it actually make?

That's the biggest trap I've seen businesses get into this year. I'm guilty of it. That real picture of me on the slide was a lot of nights.

Here's some things to know. The Remote Labor Index gave AI about a hundred real freelance tasks off Upwork. It outperformed the human 2.5 percent of the time, which means it failed over 97 percent of the time. Forty percent of the productivity gains from AI get lost to going back and fixing what it got wrong. Two in three companies that cut staff for AI have been rehiring this last quarter, and you better believe those people asked for a higher salary.

It knows nothing about you

The AI has read the general internet, but it knows nothing about you. That's the foundation. You have to build that information and give it to the AI. Otherwise you're just gonna go in circles.

Here's what that looks like. You say, "Write a Facebook post about our fall special." You get something any business could've written. Pair it with a stock image and it gets passed over. You do that over and over and wonder why your social media isn't going anywhere.

Give it context about your business and it calls out your phone number, where you're located, your special, and it tailors the language to your customer. The outcome is only you could have written that post, because nobody else is getting that output.

Build your business brief. It takes about 20 minutes.

1. Paste in the prompt from the brief document.
2. Talk into the microphone. The AI interviews you. Just answer it like you're rambling to a customer.
3. Correct what it gives you. It will make mistakes because it doesn't know you yet. Add a bit of yourself.
4. Save it and give it to your ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. It'll remember it on every prompt from here on out, even in a brand new conversation.

That's level one context. You can give it so much more. Paste in transcripts from YouTube videos by people ahead of you in your industry and say, "Add this to my business brief." Feed it your phone calls, which means you need to be recording your calls, and I highly, highly encourage it. Feed it your reviews, good and bad. The biggest one is your SOPs. If you ask it to do something and there's no SOP, it's gonna make something up, and you're back in that death cycle of fixing it. It can even help you write the SOPs, and then you give them right back to it.

Your brief should live and grow as your business grows.

Slop

Slop is what you get when there's no context and you don't modify the output. Your customers are getting better and better at detecting it.

Here's a real example. A restaurant posted an AI-generated picture of a sandwich. It got 127 comments and about 45 likes, and the comments were people raging at the business. It wasn't real, and it hurt trust. Then they posted a real photo and the comments flipped to, "Okay, that actually looks good. I'd come eat that."

Edit the input, edit the output. It's the intern, you're the editor. Use it to get 80 percent of the way there, but the 20 percent is the most important part.

Three jobs to give it this quarter

Win back the customers you already have. Export your customer list from the CRM, feed it in with your brief, and have it write the messaging to re-engage them.

Turn your reviews into your marketing. Pull your Google reviews and feed them in. The best marketing is what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself. Most of us are sitting on a goldmine and just say, "Thanks for the review," and go about our day.

Find the leaks keeping you under 3 to 1. At a minimum you wanna be getting three dollars back for every one dollar spent. A lot of times the leads aren't the problem. Plenty of businesses miss 30 percent of their calls during business hours. We had a client where everyone calling in from the ads was being told, "Oh, you can book on the website." Over $40,000 was lost that way, and AI showed us the trend because it read all those calls at once.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should

A chatbot on your website when you only have 50 visitors, automating something you do twice a year, having a bunch of agents running before the brief exists. All of that is wasted time.

AI also can't take accountability. If it's running willy-nilly and makes a mistake, that's coming back to you. You still own your ideas, your process, the review, and the output. You should use it. It's great, but you need to be in control. Don't let it run you.

Build the brief, then put it to work. Grab it at tekkii.com/brief. It'll take you fifteen, twenty minutes, and that's the foundation for putting AI to work in your business.