560: Practical AI in Your Business
Brought to you by: Pet Sitters Associates. Use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
Have you ever wondered how AI can improve your pet care business without losing your personal touch? In this episode, we explore the practical ways AI can enhance productivity, client communication, and decision-making while keeping your brand's authenticity intact. From target marketing and content creation to using AI in hiring processes, we share how to make AI work for you—not replace you. We also dive into how to ensure AI reflects your voice and values, and why it's essential to use it as a tool to streamline tasks, not as a substitute for human connection.
Main topics:
Authenticity in AI Communication
Personalizing AI for Your Brand
AI in Targeted Marketing
Using AI for Data Analysis
AI-Assisted Hiring Processes
Main takeaway: AI is a helper, not a replacement. It’s about enhancing relationships, increasing productivity, and helping us make better decisions, while still keeping our unique voice and human touch.
AI is a helper, not a replacement—designed to amplify what makes your business unique: YOU. Use AI to enhance relationships, boost productivity, and uncover insights, all while staying true to your voice. Let the robots handle the repetitive stuff so you can focus on building connections and doing what you love. 💡 How do you use AI in your business? Let us know! ⬇️
Links:
https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/356
https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/388
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
AI in business, client communication, authenticity, snowstorm incident, AI dangers, personalization, client avatar, target marketing, social media posts, SEO optimization, employee hiring, data analysis, company car, fun business uses, AI limitations
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:00
Hi, I'm Megan, I'm Collin, and we are the host of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. We appreciate you joining us today for episode 560 We would also like to thank pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode and our Patreon people for helping to keep the show going. They have found value in the episodes. They have learned something along the way in their pet sitter journey from the podcast, and want to give a few dollars back each month. If that sounds like you too, you can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help out. We have been talking a lot lately about authenticity and relatability to clients, making sure that our communication and our messaging is clearly communicating what we want and in our voice. We have mentioned on several episodes of using AI in your business. We've talked about using AI in your business on a couple episodes, episodes 356, and 388, and it seems as though using artificial intelligence in our businesses is only becoming more important. It's not something that's going to go away, and we really need to leverage it in order to be as efficient as we can in our businesses well.
Collin 01:02
And what really got us thinking about this was, in our town, we were just recently hit by a huge snowstorm, and the road plowing didn't go too well, and there was quite a kerfuffle among some of the residents. And the city put out a statement around the snow plowing and some of the issues that they had, and just asked for people's patience. And I remember looking at and I screenshot it, and I said to Megan, and I said, What do you notice about this? And her first thing was, AI wrote that, and people in our community started to pick up on, well, this, this doesn't sound genuine, or this doesn't sound like they really mean this, and it's because the robot wrote it in a voice that didn't sound familiar to people, and it didn't sound genuine and authentic to them. And that's one of the biggest dangers of getting into AI and using it in your business, is just throwing in a prompt asking for something to be generated, and then you take that and run with it like it's yours and it's your own. And it can really damage a lot of people's perception of you as a business. When that tone sounds cold, or it suddenly changes where you weren't using AI, and now all of a sudden you are and it doesn't sound like you anymore. It sounds too corporate, too professional, too dry, too something. That's just not who you are. Then, as we look to build more close knit relationships, this is a relationship business. As we look to build those and foster those, we have to be present in everything that we create. We have to have a voice that is not just automatically generated, and then copy and paste it well.
Meghan 02:29
And a lot of times, a dead giveaway is emojis as well. You can, you can give the prompt of, use no emojis or use emojis, but a lot of times, the default is to use a bunch in there. And so So when this post had come through and it said, you know, we're trying to do our best as a city, and these are the challenges we face and how we're going to overcome them moving forward, it was very professionally written, and somebody had commented, of, I know they were trying to hire a PR representative for the city, but this sounds a little odd or cold, right? And the big giveaway here was that they used a lot of emojis in the city's statement, it just felt very it was a different voice than what we had heard from the city before.
Collin 03:05
So we want to walk through some ways that we are currently using AI in our business. But first and foremost here this big caveat. We've talked a lot about how you have to change things into your voice and make it your own. The best way to do this, the single best way to make the robots learn who you are is to provide them written texts that weren't written by a robot, things that you personally wrote your best blog, the thing you're most proud of. Give it 2345, examples that and say, write in this style, use this tone. This will keep it consistent with who you are, with your branding, and have a better connection with your potential audience. So don't just let AI generate things for you cold turkey. The best content will come from when you give it data and then it gives you something to work with. So whether that's a CSV file filled with data out of your software or maybe that's, again, several previous writing examples that will help you use the same tone and stay much more consistent. Ai only works as good as the data that it gets, and when you ask it to generate something from nothing, you're going to see that it's really going to shine through. So make sure that you can personalize it in that way. That's really the power of a lot of the most recent AI models is the ability to personalize it, because they retain memory. I actually had to just go through and the memory in the chat GPT was it was full, and I had to go through and delete some things that weren't really that relevant. But it knows, oh, this person does this, and this person does this, and this is what they want, and this is the tone so that everything that's generated after that contains those elements to keep that consistency well.
Meghan 04:42
And we're not writers, right? We're pet sitters and dog walkers that do a field work a lot of times, or we route plan and do admin stuff. So we may not have a lot of writing, but if you've ever sent an email to your clients, you can use that language again with a blog post, even if you've written two in your entire three years of pet. Setting, you can still use those any social media posts, or even if you've never done any of that, just go ahead and write a few that are in your voice 100% you. And then you can not only use that as content for your website or your emails or your social media, but send that into chat as well. So that is a point here of we are going to be talking about chat GPT pretty specifically here. We're not talking about any of the other AI platforms at this point,
Collin 05:25
right, but they all are operating very similarly in their context of writing a chat window, or you can do a voice to chat now, or other different programs are out there that have a similar functionality. And so all of these basic principles apply. And so yeah, we want to walk through ways that we've used chatgpt recently in our business in various ways, and hopefully spur some innovation for you and see how you can use it moving forward. The
Meghan 05:49
first one is target marketing ideas. We've been using this for about a year now. We ask where we would find clients. Once we have our client avatar, we then go in and say, Okay, well, where do these people eat? Where do they like to shop? Where do they go? What are places in our city that they like to frequent? And
Collin 06:06
the key point here, as Megan said, is that you have to come with your client avatar. Who are you trying to serve? Then you can go and say, Okay, what do you know about my town of St Louis, Missouri. Now, given my client avatar, where in my town would I find these people? Where are they shopping? What other businesses might be a good idea for me to partner with to get in front of these type of clients? And then you can further dive into this and add in city growth data that you can pull from the economic development team or from the chamber of commerce that you have, and overlay that with, is this a growing or shrinking demographic? It really gives you a lot of power to now start digging into data that's fully available out there on the web that you can download as a CSV or PDF, throw it into chat, and now start understanding more about your client avatar, specifically where you live. It's very easy to say things like, Oh yeah, I want passionate pet parents who are both working and love to travel and live in the south, southern side of the city, that really want their dog to have adventures, or however detailed you want to get. That's fantastic. But then you actually have to find those people and brainstorm where to come up with and this is where the data that your city has, that local governments and officials have that can kind of be hard to get into or understand how it applies to your business. It brings that in and allows you to fully understand that and then actually work with
Meghan 07:31
it. It's not only great to know who your clients are, where they go, where they live, but also what message you want to send to them, and when you give it the prompt of, I want to serve this person who lives here, who shops here, who works here. Then you can ask, what are their pain points? How can I help them best? And then when chat GPT spits out the pain points, you can say, Okay, what Give me 10 points of how I can solve these for clients.
Collin 07:56
Then with that, you can say, Okay, now that I have my 10 talking points, I need to generate 20 social media posts so that I will post over the next month. Also, please give me some ideas for what kind of photos would be best to go along with these social media posts. You can see we're building here. We're actually getting this huge funnel. We start off with our big client data, our big client avatar, and at each step, we're just asking, Okay. Now give me pain points, okay. Now give me talking points, okay. Now give me social media posts and help with photos. All of this is getting you to understand, how can I be talking exactly to the people that I want to be talking to?
Meghan 08:32
Asking chatgpt questions is also great for if you're thinking about adding a new service or niching down to something it could be useful to know. Okay, does my client avatar want this
Collin 08:43
or how best could I implement this niche service in my area? Do you believe there's a market for this?
Meghan 08:50
Chatgpt can be used for a wide range of market research ideas and strategies. As you're understanding how to speak to that person, that client avatar, you can brainstorm blog ideas that would be specific and target their pain points. Again, it can be really hard to come up with new blog ideas every single week. That's what we like to do, is do one blog post a week so we can include it in our email newsletter. But it is really hard after a while. So just asking chat, give me some ideas. Give me 100 ideas, then you'll have two years worth of content. Even better,
Collin 09:23
you can point it at your website, if you have been blogging for a while and say, okay, given the blogs that I have written about over the last year, what should I continue to write about, or what haven't I written about? And this will help you fill in the gaps of your knowledge, because sometimes it's hard to remember what did I write about, or did I do it as in depth as I should have before this really surfaces. That says, Hey, actually, you haven't written about chihuahuas at all. You should spend a long time writing about chihuahuas again, if that fits your target demographic and your avatar of where you're trying to grow. Now, what we're not saying here is, then just say, Okay, please write that blog. You really don't want to do that. There's a lot of things being put into place for. Or search engines and SEO to downgrade the purely AI content. So still take the time to write the blog, but at least you're helping fast track that process of going, oh my gosh, there's just a blank page before me. What do I write about? Where do I even begin? Chat is a great way to help get you there.
Meghan 10:17
Let's circle back to marketing for a second. I know a lot of people are doing yard signs these days, so what are some efficient and effective ways to market yard signs? Should I just stick them in the ground, or does my city have certain protocols around it?
Collin 10:32
And that's actually what we did. We were very interested in pursuing yard signs, but we wanted to make sure that we're using them correctly. So I actually fed chat GPT the city ordinances for a few of the towns that we live in. And I said, Okay, given what this says about yard signs, what would be the best way to go about implementing yard signs for our business? And it spit out some things that would say, actually, you are not able to do that. Well, here, this was not be a good ROI for your business in this town and this town, but this town, it actually might be okay, and that you can do this by area by area, to help you fully understand because the other way that we use chat GPT here is we feed a lot of PDFs. We recently had some laws passed in our state that would impact us in our ability to operate as a business, and we want to understand exactly what would we need to change about how we operate. So we took the law and we fed it into chat and had a little bit of back and forth. Now, is it legal advice? No. Would it stand up in court? No, but at least it helped Megan and I understand and this word keeps coming up, brainstorm. Get our head around. Do we actually know where we're even starting? What good questions we could ask somebody else or an actual lawyer? We don't even know what we don't know in a lot of cases. So taking these documents, taking the city ordinances, taking all of those things, allows you to have a back and forth conversation with Well, could I do this, or is this allowable? Or what about this? Or if I only did it on Tuesdays, would that be okay? That way you have some really immediate feedback for how you're processing this, and can make sure that you're implementing things and you're implementing them. Well,
Meghan 12:05
say you have $5,000 that you want to spend for your marketing budget for the year. You can ask chatgpt, what are the top five or top 10 best ways that are going to get me the most ROI and bang for my buck? Of I want more clients. This is my intention. I want more clients. How do I use this 5000 to get the most amount of clients given
Collin 12:25
what you know about my company, and if it says, Oh, I don't know what your company is, then you have to feed it your website, feed it some ad copy, feed it some information about what you do and how you do it and why you do it. Then it's gonna ask, okay, who's my client avatar? And that's great. Say, Okay, I've got five grand to spend. What questions do you need to know from me in order to spend this well to get the most ROI back? And it's going to spit you 20. And then you answer that, and you go, Okay, now that you know that what would what would work best given my avatar, my business and where I live and operate, you'll have a full fledged way of at least some ideas that maybe you have never thought of. Or maybe you'll go, Well, look, it keeps coming back to this. And I did think about using yard signs, but I was a little hesitant, but sure, I'll try that here, and at least gives you some unbiased opinions for how to move forward. Something
Meghan 13:11
that's not artificial is pet sitters associates as pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, and that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help. For over 20 years, they've provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you, and get a free quote at petsit llc.com you can get a discount when you join by clicking membership Pet Sitter confessional, and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, check out the benefits of membership and insurance. Once again, at pets@llc.com, we keep talking about websites, so let's dive into that. Chat is great for your website. Giving you ad copy again. This is my client avatar. These are the pain points I want to speak to. How do I best do this on my website?
Collin 14:00
And a wonderful starting point is to give it your website address and say, This is the website for my company. How would you describe my client avatar, giving the branding and ad copy that I currently have, this will really help you understand, because you make stuff, you have ideas. You think, oh, this will attract the perfect people. But feeding into chat, it will tell you, actually, sometimes, no, this isn't anywhere close to what you're on or actually, you're really on point. So please continue doing this. Or here's some suggestions for or color options that you may consider. Or you don't have photos, you don't have videos, it will critique your website and does a really good job. I feel like of giving you some insight for what to do. And I actually recently was working through some job schema. So telling Google this web page is for a job posting. And I went down the rabbit hole of understanding schema and web pages, I don't code in HTML, at least not very well, and we're not up to the level of understanding what to do with this. So I turned to chat and I said, Look, I'm trying to do to implement. To the job schema on my page for my website. I need help coding that. What information do you need from me to implement this? Well, it generated a bunch of HTML. I threw it in an HTML checker. Some of it was wrong. I went back and I had a back and forth continuing to check it. And actually, in under an hour, I was able to get schema implemented on all of our web pages. It was fantastic and allowed us to know that we are following best practices in this. And I was able to do that with chat and an external code checker to make sure that everything was
Meghan 15:31
right. And I guess chat can help you optimize for SEO as well,
Collin 15:35
if you ask it and give it the right information, and especially whenever you tell it what you are trying to be optimized for. And how best can I do that? Given my website, especially, you can even say, look, I use Wix, or I use Squarespace help me with the SEO for my website, because I'm targeting this particular client avatar with these particular services. And how do I best implement those on my website? And it will give you 456, sometimes 10, different things that you should try. And you can have it check and say, Okay, look at this website. What could I improve there? Okay, look at this web page. What could I improve there? And go little by little.
Meghan 16:09
I think one of the biggest ways we use chat is for spelling and grammar and punctuation. Yes,
Collin 16:17
it's me, it's me. I'm the problem.
Meghan 16:18
That's least you admit it, but chat helps. He's our friend, and this is especially true for long documents that we want to send, whether it's an employee manual, a handbook, SOPs that we're trying to write again, even blogs. You can write a book. You can have it generate ideas some of the blog, write the rest in your voice, and then put it back in and say, hey, please format this for a correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, and make sure it sounds good.
Collin 16:46
Well, you mentioned, you know, training or SOPs or a field manual, this can get long and arduous and can get really complicated, and it's especially difficult to maintain consistency from one policy to the next. And so checking it and saying, running it here, and now that they've expanded the memory, actually, this makes it really easy. There were a lot of limitations very early on, of the length of documents or the amount of text that it could analyze. Now it can handle our feel our entire policy manual with ease, and can say, hey, what am I missing here? Or are there any inconsistencies in my language around my policies that would lead to confusion, help me clear those up. This really gives you a second opinion and a third eye or whatever about what you're producing says we believe being to be clear is to be kind. And if there's any confusion, if we have any language in our policies and our manuals for our employees or for our clients that may lead them go. How do you parse this, this, this policy, what's, what's the cancelation policy on this versus that? We never want any of those questions. We want everything to be completely clear and allowing chat GPT to give us some ideas and some insights for where we can improve. That really makes a world of difference. So
Meghan 18:01
throughout all these conversations, how do you know that chat is actually using your voice? What you're saying is you feed it as much information about you as you possibly can, yeah,
Collin 18:11
and then you can, then you check it, right? Then you're going to read it. And you can say, No, that actually doesn't sound like me. So you you copy it out, you paste it into another document. You mess with it, you monkey with it, you you rewrite it, you throw it back in. You say, No, this is my voice, and this is my voice, and that's that's training chat, or maybe within the same chat window, you can say, actually, I don't like the way you worded that last sentence. I would say something more like this, please make that change. I am always very kind. I always say, Please and thank you to the robots, so that when the overlords take over, at least, hopefully they'll remember me. But what I'm trying to do is just have that back and forth, and I feel like that really helps make the process go faster the next time. And I'll tell you one thing that really speeds it up is it can remember processes. So if you do the same thing to every document, let's say you're trying to hire somebody and you want to process somebody's intake documents and parse them out into different things you can in the same chat window. Once you work through that process of saying, Okay, I need you to tell me about what this person's work experience is, or how they would work for this, or what this would be. Then the next time you throw the next application in there, all you have to say is, do all of that to this document, and then all of a sudden it will just start happening almost instantaneously as it's processing that, which really speeds it up so that you're no longer having to do it manually. You're still having to copy and paste at this point, there's, we don't have a way to just have these documents sucked up into Dropbox and then throw it into chatgpt on the back end. You know, maybe that will be coming soon, but it really helps you in those moments of increasing the repetition that you're able to work through those tasks.
Meghan 19:48
That is one of the newest ways that we have been using chat is for our potential hires. So we do a multi stage process of they have to answer questions, then we do a phone interview, and then an in person interview via zoom and. So lately, we have been taking all of those persons answers and the recorded transcript from the Zoom interview, throwing it into chat and saying to analyze this. And
Collin 20:08
what we're saying is we this is the kind of employee that we're looking for, and we give some some characteristics, some responsibilities, the job description, all of that, and say, given this, how does this person stack up against us? And importantly here, we're not removing Megan's and my ultimate decision or our gut reaction to people. We're not just letting the robot decide for us. Recently, what we've been doing is Megan I have been making a decision on somebody, then going through this process and then looking at the data that the chatgpt spits out about the person, and then we take our gut reaction, our intuition. Compare it over here to the kind of this unbiased, dry report that allows Meg and I to really go, Okay, no, we are on the right track here. Or, okay, well, let's give this person a shot and move them forward. But we especially whenever you can narrow this down. And what you're not saying is you're not just going to throw a bunch of data and say, Should I hire this person? That's the exact wrong reason to do this. What you're saying is, how does this person compare to my standards that the chat GP knows because you already gave it the job ad, the requirements, the kind of Avatar for the employee that you're looking to hire for the job for your business that will serve your clients, giving your services. The more specific that you can make this the better outcome that you are going to have and the better comparisons that you're going to get,
Meghan 21:26
because you're right, there is a still our gut at the end of the day, you know, we've had chat spit out yes, that you should hire this person. This person is a great candidate based off of these criteria. And you and I still have gone well, they answered this one way on this particular question that's really important to us. And so we said, No, we're not, we're not going to hire that person, even though the robot said, Yes, you should hire them again.
Collin 21:51
Don't strip the humanity out of this process. What we want to do is increase our relationships, increase our productivity, and allow us to see clearly and help make better decisions. But that ultimately means that we're not relying wholly or 100% on their answers that spit back from this. We still have to process, we still have to intake and we have to give a better output. We're trying to make our output better by using this as an aid, as a brainstorming tool and as a help. Yeah,
Meghan 22:18
it's an asset. It's not a replacement for you. You made a good point a minute ago that this really is a conversation. It's a back and forth. This can seem weird because there isn't really somebody on the other side of the computer. And I know we're used to texting and emailing, but that is a little bit foreign of this, this entity that has all knowledge, basically, or just about all knowledge, and we're communicating with them, and it's a conversation. We're going back and forth, but there's nobody on the other end, really. So it can feel a little weird at first, but once it gets to know you, it starts to become a little more familiar. Another way we use chat a lot is for our social media. After you've posted the same dog or a cat many times over the past year, it can be difficult to figure out something new to say about them, other than, Oh, they're so cute, and I help them on their walks every day, or I change the litter. But once chat knows the person you want to talk to, the pain points that they have, it can really aid in the formation of the captions for your social media pictures,
Collin 23:17
or, better yet, feed it the photo and say, you know my client avatar. How best can I speak to them and add a caption to this particular particular photo? By the way, the dog's name is olive, and it will generate that. What I like to do is first type out the social media post, something that Megan and I, we try to implement in our in our media, in our contacting of potential clients and getting that out there. Marketing is to use the story brand framework. It's something that I struggle to be consistent in and use it well. So writing out a particular social media post for a particular topic, and then saying, hey, I need help putting this into a story brand framework for an Instagram post with this photo, and it will give you a response. And then you take that and you make some changes, you put it back in your voice, and you say, thank you very much, and you can post it. It helps speed up that process. And again, it also helps you be consistent with this as we look to enhance our brand and our brand recognition for what people know us by and know what they know us for. This is part of that in helping us do that, as we just
Meghan 24:16
completed 2024 Collin and I did a company data analysis via chat, and
Collin 24:21
it's really important to know exactly what you are interested in here and come with a very specific question. So maybe you want to know some calculations about company turnover or employee turnover. Feed at data about how many employees you hired over the entire year versus how many open spots that you typically have. How to calculate that for you, or look at general trends and say, Look, this is my company revenue broken out across services for all of the year, and here's the previous year. Help me understand how my company is doing. Am I on the way up? Am I changing? And help me understand what that means and what I can do about it. You can also feed it company. Any data as far as clients booking or the services that you're offering, or maybe you can speed at data about your employee reports for when they're clocking in too early or clocking in clocking out too late, and get a better understanding about your company function and where you have room for improvement. What these really are helpful with are big, massive, large data sets and helping surface trends and information to you that otherwise you might not pick out. Now what you have to do in these scenarios is ground truth them and go look at the data yourself, because sometimes they can hallucinate and pull pretend data and not actually give you truthful information back to you. So always going back to the data and saying, Okay, you told me that in October, that was my biggest month. I'm going to go look at that real quick and say, Oh, well, that's weird, because it was my lowest month. What happened there? Have a back and forth, correct it, give it more data. And again, it at least helps you start looking at your data in a new way.
Meghan 25:56
But chat doesn't have to be all boring. You can use it for fun business things too. It doesn't have to be all about numbers and spreadsheets and messaging to clients. It can also be about whether you should buy a company car or not. Yeah. So this is something
Collin 26:09
that Meg and I are interested in and seeing if it can work for us. And so one thing that I have to understand is what would be the best company car for us, not the best company car, period, but for how we operate given some of our parameters. So what better way to use chat GPT than to understand which electric vehicle would best suit our needs, given where we live, the charging situation, and the amount of driving that we do typically, and this process helped me fully understand what the market was actually like, and that we had way more options out there than I originally anticipated. That again, this this approach of saying I have these specific needs, or I have these specific wants. I need this specific thing help me get there. That's really everything that we've been talking about here. Of I have a specific client. I have a specific employee in mind. I have a specific electric vehicle that maybe, or circumstance, I would use one help me get my brain around this and understand exactly what's going on. Yeah,
Meghan 27:07
because while it's a robot and it knows an infinite amount of knowledge, it doesn't know exactly what you want. So basically, you have to come with the question, you have to come with the data set. If you want it analyzed. You need to come with the samples of writing that says, This is my voice. We don't want all of our businesses to be straight AI with monotone language and they all just sound the same and do the same and post the same thing. That's not what we want. We still want to have our own voices, because AI is a helper and not a replacement. We would love to know how you use AI in your business, or if it still completely scares you. You can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com, or look us up on Facebook and Instagram. At Pet Sitter confessional, thank you for listening today. We also want to thank pet sitters associates and our Patreon people. We will talk with you next time bye. What
