How to turn your expertise into AI-powered leverage

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

In last week’s episode of The Intentional Money Show, I talked about the idea of uploading your brain into AI and why I really don’t think that’s a great idea. So today on the podcast, I wanna talk about how to turn your expertise into AI powered leverage.

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.

At the moment when you hear business owners talking about AI saving time, it can sound like the goal is just to get AI to do the job for you, and that’s not really how I’m thinking about AI. For me, a lot of the value in AI is removing the friction that happens before I get to the part of the work where my expertise really matters.

So for example, when I am creating content, at the moment I’m creating a lot of carousels on Instagram, and I have a very particular way that I like to see them structured. I don’t want some generic hook followed by five generic tips that could sound like they’ve been written by anyone. I really want the idea to develop originally from my brain.

I wanna hear my point of view and I want the amount of information on each slide to feel right. I want it to feel like something I would actually say So what I’ve done, I’ve created a skill in Claude which is giving really clear instructions around my carousel process. I’ve effectively taught Claude what a good carousel looks like to me.

I’ve given it examples, and I’m refining the skill and instructions over time so that now when I have an idea, I don’t start the whole process again, it already has a framework to work from. And it means that the first draft is so much stronger, so much faster. And the same is happening when I’m preparing for, you know, a workshop or analyzing financial information or, preparing a podcast episode.

I’ve already done a lot of the work before. I’ve been analyzing financial data for years, and the way that I do it, the tools that I use are what makes my analysis. What- it’s what makes me. And historically, the way that I used to do this was, you know, I’d grab a body of financial data, I’d export it, play around with tables, create graphs, find different ways to make the financials visual.

So I do a lot of things like creating pie charts and visual charts so that my clients can understand what the numbers are saying. And the cool thing is, some of this functionality is now being integrated directly into software. So I’m using Xero as my financial software tool at the moment, and inside Xero, the AI is getting better and better.

We can actually create these graphs natively inside Xero now, which means that I’m spending less time wrestling with information and more time actually interpreting it and explaining it to my clients. And this is the part that really excites me. I don’t want AI to take over the part where I look at numbers and decide what they mean for a business.

I don’t want it to replace the conversation where I say, “Okay, yes, technically revenue is growing, but look what’s happening to margin.” Or, “Yes, technically I could tell you that you can afford to make this investment, but knowing what else is going on in your business I wouldn’t do it yet.” This is the work that I love to do, and this is the work that I want more time to do Be taking that complex financial data and interpreting it and explaining it to my clients in an easy to understand way.

So the shift for me is less what jobs can AI do for me, to what can AI take out of the way so that I can spend more of my time doing the work that actually needs to be me. And that’s a very different question. And this is why I think people who have a lot of deep experience in their field are struggling with AI because if you’ve been in business for 10, 15, 20 years, chances are that you’ve got all this knowledge that you don’t use because it’s kind of scattered everywhere.

You might have, you know, the way that you prepare a quote for a client. You might have the way that you deliver a sales pitch. You might have your way that you answer your phone. But all those bits of data are sort of all over the place. And having information doesn’t mean that it’s easy to use. In fact, the more material, the more experience you have, probably the harder it is to find all of those bits and pieces.

And this is the cool thing about AI. It gives us a way to make that work so much more accessible and bring it together.

So again, as I shared in my last episode, this doesn’t mean dumping your entire business into an AI platform and hoping for the best. You should be really selective about what you upload, particularly confidential information, commercially sensitive information. Because, you know, we’re still learning where all this information is gonna go.

But what I am talking about is the things that you know you own, the processes you undertake, the things that you repeatedly refer back to, and developing tools and frameworks of how you can execute these things more efficiently.

The other thing to remember is the quality of what you get back is dependent of the quality of the context that you give it. I’m sure you’ve heard that saying, “Garbage in, garbage out.” If you want to get great outputs from your AI tools, you have to be putting in great inputs. I now set up projects. So when I’m working on something new, I will create a body of background information so that I’m not starting from scratch every time.

Again, if you’re a Claur user, you will know what I’m talking about. There are projects that you can set up where you can provide background information, background context, and share the way that you wanna see the outputs created. So again, you- I can upload information about a client, explaining who the organization is, of course not putting anything confidential in there, and share examples of previous similar type work that I have done for a similar client.

I set very clear instructions around what I like and don’t like, and what I wanna see and not see for this particular piece of work. So for example, I’m gonna prepare something very different for a corporate organization than I might share for a local trade business. There’s gonna be different languaging.

There’s gonna be a different kind of angle. Yes, it’s still, Clare Wood branded but it will be tailored to the specific client or audience.

And even when I am doing this background, I’m briefing it, I’m putting great instructions and frameworks and examples in, there are still times when what comes out is, quite frankly, garbage. I’m sure you’ve had the same experience too. So when you do get rubbish outputs, these moments are actually really useful because they remind me that speed doesn’t automatically equal quality.

This is why, even though you’ve got all that information faster than you ever received it before, you still have to know what good looks like, and you still have to apply your own judgment and make sure that you are just not taking things as gospel, the things that are coming out. This morning I was at a, a workshop with a bunch of lawyers, and they were all cringing at what their clients are sending them, the agreements that they’re seeing that people have clearly pulled out of AI without even having read through or having that legal expertise going over the top.

That lived experience. People who’ve actually worked in commercial law are saying what’s coming out is really not good.

And this is the biggest opportunity sitting in front of you as an experienced business owner and expert right now. Instead of looking at AI and thinking, “How much of my job can this take over?” Or, “How many team members can I get rid of because this job can be done by AI now?” The more interesting question is, how much more could I do with the expertise if I could access it faster, organize it better, and remove some of the manual work surrounding it?

Because this is the opportunity at the moment. AI isn’t here to replace your expertise. It’s here to give your expertise leverage.

And that, my friends, is the exciting opportunity that sits ahead for you today.

I can do one-to-one mentorship with your senior leaders or yourself, and I can host workshops to explain what your numbers are telling you and importantly, how you can leverage this information to make better decisions as a business so that you can be making more profit. Because ultimately, that’s why you’re in business, right?

 To find out more, send me an email via the link in the show notes for today’s episode, clare@clarewood.com. And don’t forget that Clare has no I in it. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week’s episode of the AI series, and I can’t wait to chat to you again soon.

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