What to do next if you’re feeling overwhelmed by AI

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio

I’m guessing that you’ve seen the absolute explosion of AI that’s happening right now. And if you’re anything like most of the business owners I’m talking to, you’re probably already doing something with AI, but every time you take a couple of steps forward, there seems to be something new launching and you’re just feeling completely overwhelmed with what to do next.

If this is resonating, today’s episode of The Intentional Money Show is for you.

Welcome to the Intentional Money Show, where we talk business growth, profitability, mindset, and building a wildly successful creative or digital business without sacrificing your life in the process. I’m Clare Wood, business profit coach, speaker, author, and unapologetic believer that you can build wealth and freedom doing work you genuinely love.

Each week on the podcast, we dive into the strategies and honest conversations that will help you scale sustainably, increase your profit, and build a business that actually feels good to run. Let’s grow your profit.

As I said in the intro for the episode, most business owners that I’m talking to are using AI in some way, shape, or form in their business already. So maybe you’re using ChatGPT to ask questions. Maybe you’re getting help with ideas for content creation. Maybe you’ve even started playing around with some agents.

But overwhelmingly what I’m hearing from a lot of people is that it still feels really piecemeal. You’re doing a bit of this over here. You- you’ve tried a tool there. You’ve watched someone on Instagram show you some amazing hack or something they’ve built. But you don’t necessarily feel like you’re making true headway into how AI’s actually being embedded into your business and actually helping you in your business.

And I totally understand why, because there’s a tsunami of information coming at us right now, and every single day it feels like something is changing because quite literally it is. But if you’re not sure of what to do next, I wanna give you a bit of context around, at the time of recording anyway, what AI can actually do right now.

Because I think sometimes when people hear AI, they’re still predominantly thinking about that chat function, about ChatGPT, and having those little back-and-forward conversations. So if you’re thinking, “Yeah, I know how to go into ChatGPT and Claude or ask a question or get some help to write an email.”

It’s obviously a, a huge part of how a lot of us started using AI, and of course, that’s still really helpful, but there is a lot more that’s happening right now. So now we’ve got agents where AI can actually go away and undertake tasks for you, rather than you just sitting there having a back-and-forward conversation with it.

There’s also skills, which is where you can teach AI how you like a particular activity to be done. So what you’re doing is you’re giving it the context, instructions, your preferences around how you personally like to do that task. So rather than it starting from scratch every single time, it starts to understand the process of how you want it done.

The one particular example of how I’ve been using this is that I built out a skill around designing a carousel to look a really specific way. I spent time showing it the nature of how I like it to look, how I want the copy structured to make sure that the text doesn’t go into the border, the style of fonts I like, and all these little nuances that were really just inside my head.

And I- it was really a journey of sitting there going, “I don’t really like it like that,” or, “I don’t like the- I don’t like that you’ve put an outline around the text.” It took time, a bit of an upfront investment. But now that I’ve put that time in, rather than me starting again every time, trying to give all of that specific context, my skill now has that context.

It can pick it up and run with it. We’ve also got plug-ins, connectors, and integrations, which basically means where different platforms and programs start talking to each other. And I think this is where it starts to get particularly interesting for small business owners because you’re no longer looking at AI as this separate tool that you go into and ask questions.

You actually start thinking about how it fits across the systems and processes inside your business. So something I’m personally playing around with a lot at the moment, and I’m having a lot of fun with this, is that I’m actually seeing whether AI can replace some of the external systems and subscriptions that we currently use.

So rather than having different pieces of software that do one tiny job, and you’re paying a subscription here and a subscription there, there are things that you can actually do to build that functionality into systems and tools that you are already using. And in some respect, this is really exciting, but it’s also probably the exact reason why so many business owners are feeling so overwhelmed.

Because suddenly there’s so many possibilities. We’re hearing about agents, skills, coding, automations, vibe coding, plug-ins, workflows, integrations,

custom tools, and all these incredible things that you see other people building, and naturally start to think, “Oh my God, I should be doing all of this as well.” So what I want to do in this episode is actually bring it right back to the foundations. Because one of the biggest mistakes I’m seeing people make is using AI for AI’s sake.

Everyone’s talking about it, people are using it, and suddenly you’re watching someone online telling you that they’ve automated their whole business and you should be apparently sitting on a beach in Spain, sipping on a margarita with, Claude running your business without you involved at all.

So, before you think, “Which AI tool should I be using now?” Or, “How do I use more AI in my business?” I actually wanna ask you a much more important question, which is, why do you actually want to use AI? What is the business problem that you are actually trying to solve? Is it that you wanna save time? Is it because there are repetitive jobs inside your business that you don’t want yourself or your team doing anymore?

Is it because you want to reduce costs? Do you want to create a better client experience? Do you want to be producing more content? Do you want more information, more data, so that you can improve the quality of your decision-making? Or do you want to become less reliant on particular roles and people inside your business?

This is the starting point. What is the actual outcome that you want? Because, “I need to be doing more with AI,” isn’t actually a strategy. And I’m gonna share with you a really practical example from my own business. One of the big reasons why I’m investing so much time into AI is that ultimately I want it to save me time.

But recently, as I mentioned before, I was building out my skill of how to create carousels, and honestly, it took me easily 10 times longer to do it using AI than it would’ve just taken me to do it manually the old-school way. There were definitely points in the process where I’m thinking, “This is ridiculous.

I could’ve finished this ages ago if I’d just gone and done it myself.”

But the reason I kept going, because I wasn’t thinking about how much time it was actually saving me on that particular day. I was looking at it as a short-term investment of time for a long-term gain. I was learning. I was working out how to give better instructions. Gosh, that’s been a huge lesson, I’m sure for all of us on our AI journey. What I thought giving clear instructions, I’d then see, oh, that wasn’t working. It was misunderstanding me, so I’d need to give extra context. And this whole journey was helping me to build a process that was actually repeatable. So that next time, this is gonna take me less time, and then less and less again.

And I think that this is something that I really wanna remind you when you’re getting started on your AI journey. Because if you wanna use AI to save time, respectfully up front, it’s probably gonna take you longer. It’s like implementing any new system into your business. There’s that upfront investment.

There’s the time learning it, trying something, discovering it doesn’t work. There’s the back and forward, tweaking, changing. Going, “Nope, that’s not what I meant. Let me explain this differently.” And then hopefully you start to build things that become repeatable and scalable over time. So this leads me to another really important question, which is, do you actually have the capacity to invest into this area of your business right now?

Because sometimes I think that people are adding AI into an already completely overloaded to-do list, and then getting frustrated with themself because they aren’t making progress with it. For a lot of business owners, implementing AI is gonna mean deliberately stepping out of your day-to-day business and making space to actually work on this I think about it a little bit like hiring a new team member.

When you hire someone, generally they don’t w- walk through the door on day one and magically deliver an extra 20 hours of your work week back. Usually they actually create more work up front ’cause you’ve gotta train them, explain things, answer questions, give them feedback, and, you know, give them the context they need to do the job properly.

But like a good new team member, if you’re willing to make that investment because you think there’s gonna be a long-term return, it’s gonna be worth it. If you want the upside, you’re gonna have to invest some time into learning and implementing it. So if you’re listening now and thinking, “Yes, I know I need to get onto AI.

It sounds lovely, but I genuinely don’t have the time to figure this all out,” this is where I really think getting support will help. I’m working with my own clients right now about how they can be better utilizing AI in their business, and if you work with someone who understands this space, they can help you shortcut some of that trial and error.

There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t wanna spend 50 hours trying to figure this thing out on my own.”

I know that when I first got started, I used to get completely paralyzed because I didn’t know where to start. And I think sometimes the more content you consume, you think, “I’ll go to a webinar, I’ll go to training,” you can actually become even more overwhelmed because it feels like there’s more and more things.

And from my experience, the best way to learn is by actually doing it. If y- even if you’ve got someone training you, it’s getting in, getting your hands dirty, and learning about it yourself. So this is the key thing that I want you to take away from today. I want you to stop thinking, “How do I bring AI into my business?”

And instead, actually look at the core problem. What are the things that you are doing repeatedly? What is something that’s taking up too much of your time? How are you wanting to create a better experience for your clients? Whatever that pain point is, start there. And I think that there’s a really important mindset piece here, because I know that a lot of business owners are feeling this enormous sense of urgency.

It’s almost this feeling of, “Oh my God, everyone’s so far ahead of me. I’ve missed the boat. How am I ever gonna catch up?” Here’s the thing. Yes, I know there’s a lot to learn, but everyone is learning, and there are obviously people who are much further ahead technically, but, you know, this isn’t a race.

Remember, the goal of AI is to save you time and be able to make better strategic decisions to actually help grow your business. So rather than looking at someone else who’s built all these agents and thinking, “Oh gosh, I need to build agents,” just come back to that, “What am I actually trying to achieve here?”

And I’m gonna throw something controversial out there right now. Maybe the smartest thing that you can do right now is to not use AI for something. It isn’t automatically the right answer just because it exists, and I’m saying this purely from a commercial perspective. What’s the business problem?

What’s the return on investment? And how much time, money, effort do you need to put into it for this actually to be a smart investment for you in the short term? Before we wrap up this episode, there is one last thing that I have to touch on, of course, which is please make sure you’re also using AI responsibly.

Don’t start dumping confidential client information, financial information, commercially sensitive information, or personal data into whichever tool you happen to be using without understanding what is happening to that data. Make sure you do research around the platform, understand your contractual obligations to your clients, understand the privacy and security settings available to you, know the difference between different plans, and understand what information you are comfortable sharing and what you aren’t, and where it is appropriate or not appropriate.

You don’t need to be terrified, but you do need to be sensible. So, for the next steps on your AI journey, start small. Pick a problem, start using the tools, and potentially look to work with someone who is using these tools and can bring you up to speed faster. Continue to immerse yourself in the energy of what is happening, ’cause I do think that is the best way to learn.

So keep listening to podcasts like this. I hope that you keep listening to this AI series that I’m recording, because I’m gonna continue to bring some fantastic guests on, share my own learnings along the way to support you on your own journey.

If you want some support with strategic thinking about what your business goals are and how AI can support you on that journey, I’d really encourage you to check out one of my strategy sessions. There is a link in the show notes for today’s episode, and inside one of these, we sit down and really map out what your business goals are, what your challenges are, and then we talk about the best way to get you from where you are now to where you wanna be, including if that involves utilising AI.

This is fully tailored to your business, and we are actually getting our hands dirty inside both your numbers and the tools that you’re using. So it’s not some vague high-level chat. This is tailored specifically to you. And before I wrap up today’s, if you’ve got a biz friend who you know who’s currently feeling pretty overwhelmed by AI and what they should be doing next, please send them this episode.

Hopefully, they’ll realise that they haven’t missed the boat, they don’t need to know everything, and they can start with just one thing. 

Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of the Intentional Money Show. If you’re ready for more profit, come find me on Instagram at clare_wood_coach. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast, and I’ll chat to you again next week.

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio