AI Assistants: How To Level Up Your Work

Key Takeaways

if you've got a document a living document that has information about your business or a clients or whatever the case might be and then you go to use your gem in a conversation it's going to reference that living Google doc whether that's a sheet or a presentation slid today I'm very excited to be joined by Mike Alon if you don't know who Mike is he's the founder of the AI hat a consultancy that helps St Louis businesses put AI to work his podcast is the AI hat and his ebook is called the AI marketing primer Mike welcome to the show how you doing today I am doing fantastic I am so thrilled to be on here with you you and I have had very similar Journeys which I know we're going to talk about but it is exciting just to have this conversation with you well I'm stoked that you're here today and Mike and I are going to explore how to use AI assistance to improve your work but before we go there um Mike tell us a little bit about your story how you get into AI yeah so as you know I've been in digital marketing for over a decade I've been blogging about it writing about it and I tell people all the time one of the things that I'm used to doing is telling businesses not to jump on bandwagons not to jump into the you know latest social network and I was treating AI that way in 2022 2023 I was keeping it at an arms distance but then late 2023 probably november-ish or so I was listening to to a mutual friend Paul ritzer he was talking about Ai and he was specifically talking about something that Sam Alman the founder of open AI said which Sam implied that 95% of marketing jobs are gonna be replaced by AI in the coming years and that stopped me in my tracks I was immediately afraid for myself but I was also afraid for you know mutual friends and colleagues in this space who I knew many of them like me were not thinking about artificial intelligence they were not thinking about how they might need to upskill or res skill or transition their roles so I started reading more started listening to more podcasts started writing more I started to devote myself to creating content and by mid 2024 launched a whole new podcast and have had a really great time talking to gosh 60 70 80 people uh experts and and and you know fellow marketers like yourself who have really embraced Ai and really illuminated for me what AI can do to help me and the other folks that I'm trying to help so kind of bring us up to speed on kind of what you're building now what are you doing these days yeah so I started off by publishing a lot of content to the social media which is the blog that I've had forever and at first I was talking about how I was applying AI to marketing and I was bringing other marketing folks on and I decided over the holidays late 2024 I needed to really refocus myself on helping businesses here in St Louis where I'm at and go beyond just pure marketing because I saw a lot of businesses that had opportunities to bring in AI to you know make themselves more efficient and increase their ability to compete in their market and there was there wasn't a lot of people here in St Louis helping those kinds of businesses so I rebranded the podcast I launched the new site the AI hat and and that's one of my focuses right now outstanding okay so there's lots of marketers and entrepreneurs that are listening to the show and obviously creators as well um we're here to talk about an AI assistant um what if it's done well uh what is the upside what is the value why set another way why should the people listening today um consider using AI assistance well let me throw it back at you for a second and ask you have you ever paid for a consultant of course yes right and and when you did that how long were they working with you uh typically it depends you know but usually it's a short-term deal for sure like most of the Consultants that I've been working with are like 30 60 90day kind of situations yeah that's been my experience I'm sure everybody listening has been the exact same way they've probably been in that consultant shoes right to turn around the other way right we've all been Consultants to others and we're not available 24/7 those Consultants weren't available to US 24 hours a day day seven days a week there was a finite window in which they were available to us there was a finite amount of information and assistance that they were able to give to us and that's one of the things that I keep coming back to that I like the most about having an actual AI assistant because I can turn to them day or night any question I have now we're talking about and we're gonna get into the details of how to do this but we're talking about an assistant that's been trained on our business that is like a consultant they're an expert in the industry they're an expert in our role but we can turn to them anytime we want and we can ask them questions and unlike human beings they're not going to get impatient with us and frustrated because we keep asking the same questions over and over again they're happy to help us happy to reans those questions and this costs what 20 bucks a month depending on what llm and system you're using so that's one of the things that I like the most about this idea of having an actual AI assistant not just an AI chat that you talk to but one that's been customized and personalized and for the business owners listening just imagine if every single person in your organization had an AI assistant walking alongside them a consultant a mentor that they could turn to whenever they needed help whenever they wanted not only to do something in their business but when they wanted to think strategically about where they could go with their role with their business in the next 6 12 18 months because I don't know about you but most of the people at my level and below because I'm not an executive I work full-time for torul I've got a just I'm a doer right I'm a Content producer toor pulse it's been really hard for me to think strategically about what I'm doing long term because I'm so in mesed in what I'm doing today but when you've got an assistant who can take some of the busy work off your plate and then sit alongside you as a strategist that opens up so many doors yeah and I want to add some some thoughts to this as well um depending on who you are that's listening right now you might actually be really strategic like I am very strategic it's my number one strength and strength finders and I often tell myself this story well I'm pretty strategic I can figure it out but the reality is that I've got so many things that I need to do as the CEO and founder of this company and I've got all these people that work for me I actually often am kind of out of energy when I'm needing to be strategic in my thinking and having a sparring partner as of a referred to it or having a strategic Ally that I have trained up that I can interface with just kind of helps me for lack of better words like it gives me like a pickme up I don't know how else to say it right it's like a boost all of a sudden the synapses in my brain start connecting and I'm like oh that's a really good idea and I just keep working it and and I find it's really valuable my guess is when you did your Rebrand you were using AI to help you with that is that a fair assessment oh absolutely I was having long conversations with Gemini back and forth we were talking about M strengths we were talking about my goals and objectives for myself personally we were talking about the problems that the people I wanted to help what kinds of actual problems were they having not things at a high level like oh we're overwhelmed by AI That's not really a problem what the problem is they are trying to produce more with less within their business they're trying to stay competitive and profitable in an era where that's really really hard these days and we had really deep conversations back and forth and I loved it it was so much fun well there you go folks uh the upside to having an assistant or multiple assistants as we may be talking about today um could be very valuable so let's let's set the groundwork like where do we actually begin if we want to create something like this the first step I think is you have to understand how to have a conversation with the AI with an llm we're talking about chat PT or gemini or claw something like that and if you aren't experienced in doing that I recommend that you use a framework and uh we can walk through the rice framework r i CCE and the concept there is that you don't necessarily have to use a framework in every conversation but like training wheels it helps you get started on the right path and make sure that if this is something that's new to you talking to an AI giving it the the information it needs giving it context that framework will make sure that you know exactly what to give the AI through that conversation and this is important for two reasons one in every conversation we have with AI whether they're trained as an assistant or not it's still important to know what we need to tell them and what we don't necessarily need to tell them but then secondly we're going to talk through how to actually build your own AI assistant and in order to do that you have to talk to the AI it's not going to necessarily inherently know what you want to accomplish so you've got to do some of that ground work okay so let's get into um some of the things that we talked about when we were prepping for this was to um Identify some of the kinds of tasks that AI can do talk to me a little bit about that and then talk to me about this concept of a custom instruction yeah so most of us are probably familiar with some of the what I would call Basic uses of AI creating blog posts creating social copy creating email campaigns answering questions some of us maybe even using systems like perplexity instead of Google for search where instead of a whole list of results we get the answer that you can do with most of the LMS out of the box but as you start to personalize and customize them then first of all the results that we get can be so much better instead of a vanilla blog post that sounds like AI wrote it because it's using all kinds of high valume words like Dell that we weren't really using colloquially before it can be personalized to use our brand voice and our brand style and it can know not only how to speak through that blog post but it can know who we want to talk to and help us address those Target audiences those pain points help us Focus as businesses and marketers on benefits over features because it's really easy to fall back into that hey let's just talk about how great we are when you've got that AI who's been trained to know what you want to accomplish and who you're talking to it can give you those guard rails like we talked a moment ago about how I'm focusing on St Louis businesses right now well my AI assistant knows that and now every time I go to brainstorm an email campaign or a blog post it is inherently trying to interject oh Mike we should talk about St Louis businesses we should talk to St Louis businesses we should find examples of St Louis businesses that have adopted AI That's a great reminder it's not always appropriate if I'm sending an email to my wider newsl audience most of them are not in St Louis so we're not going to do that but it's still that helpful reminder that sitting next to me digitally right and it's telling me look these are some of the things that we need to do so those assistants can be brought on to do much higher level tasks than just create a blog post create a tweet right they can help us map out entire marketing campaigns they can help us translate content into different languages maybe even push that cont content into different systems those are the kinds of things that I want us to be thinking about when we talk about AI assistance again like I said before those strategic partners that we could sit next to before we even get to the point of creating a blog post let's strategize what should our content strategy be for Q2 who should we be talking to what have we done before and what worked what didn't how should we think about and approach then our next quarter's content what might that look like what are some example blog post or what can we do that's not just a blog post those are the kinds of highle conversations we could be having and then drill down into the actual machinations of creating those marketing assets talk to me about this concept of a custom instruction that we were um exploring when we were preing yeah so this is where we start to personalize the AI you can do this in a prompt you can open up chat GPT or Gemini and you can tell it who you are what your business is what your goals and aspirations are what your challenges is who your target audience is you can give it all that information in the prompt if you want to and then have it help you draft a blog post or an email or whatever is that you're trying to accomplish but imagine if you didn't have to do that every single time imagine if you could personalize the AI so that it already knew who you were who your audience is what you're trying to accomplish or any other specific things that it should know about the task that you're trying to do so all the major large language models chat GPT Claude Gemini they all have this ability in the settings where you can go in and you can create what are called custom instructions now in cat GPT they're called custom gpts it's something you guys have talked about on the show before in Cloud they're called projects which I know you guys use and talk about in Gemini they're called gems they all work the same way you give your instructions a title you can describe it if you want to you can even give it an icon if you want it to stand out from your others and then you set about writing the instructions now the cool thing about AI that's different from everything else we've done as marketers technology wise if we don't know how to do it instead of going to YouTube or reading a book you could just ask the AI so if there's something we don't cover today you can open up chat GPT or Gemini and say Hey I want to create a set of custom instructions can you help me this is what I want to accomplish I've done this so many times so in the custom instructions you're going to tell the AI what the role is that you want it to serve as is it a Blog writer is a copywriter is it an email strategist is it something more than that you are going to give it all the context it needs to know who are we writing for what is this that we're doing right what are the channels that we're exploring if it's a marketing role you know maybe it's a a product marketer well then you're going to give it all the information about your product links to the website all the features that you have your pricing you're going to give it all that information so that it knows and then you can set about giving it any other Specific Instructions so these can be used for very specific tasks like I have a podcast so I have a showrunner GPT for every single one of my shows I've got four with the gor paulse and then my AI show and each one of those has been trained to Go step by step we have a new guest what's their name I give it their name and it then ask me in return what's their LinkedIn and I do that we go back and forth and we build together a pre-show document and I programmed those steps in the GPT in the instructions or you could just have it be more General like I have an AI chief of staff that knows everything about my business and what I want to accomplish and it just has been built with that information and I can ask it anything I want and it can be a strategy assistant to me and a consultant what I love about this mic is that um and we're going to get into the the tech stuff in just a second folks and we're eventually going to get back to this rice thing that he talked about so what I love about this is that um most people are using just the threads for lack of better words inside of chat GPT or whatever thing and they don't really understand the value of creating what we're calling a custom GPT or a cloud project or a gem and we're going to get into this kind of functionally in just a second but it is a absolute GameChanger and I would imagine if you don't really know how to write a good set of instructions the AI as you mentioned could assist you like the idea of a chief of staff is is cool and like this is what I want everybody to start thinking about like you could create an assistant for quite literally any role you can imagine and if you've never had that kind of role is it true that you could have ai write the description of what something like that is like it is right 100% absolutely cool all right so now let's get into the um I let's let's talk about the tech stack now let's talk a little bit about the platform let's you kind of already hinted that you're using Google Gemini so let's let's kind of dig in on that cuz I've not really dug in on that with any of my guests before yeah I love Google Gemini I'm literally using it every day similar to how other people would be using chat GPT every single day and as llms go it is very similar to chat GPT so if you're already using chat GPT a lot don't change there's no reason to but if your organization is a Google workspace organization you're already paying for Google then you should be using Gemini you don't need to pay extra for open AI chat GPT because and I does almost all the same things that CPT does it's very similar I think to social networks you and I Mike we've been watching social networks evolve over the years and you know we go back five or 10 years they were all very specific in what they did Instagram you posted images Square images and that's it Twitter you posted text messages and that's it and I've been saying for years you know what they're all going to become ubiquitous they're all going to have video they're all going to have multiple image formats and live videos and communities and sure enough they pretty much all do the AI llms are the exact same way so don't get enamored with one particular feature like open AI recently released deep research which was cleverly named after Gemini's deep research tool they're very similar open AI has some additional features and benefits which is pretty cool but if you're already using Gemini don't worry about it if you're on chat GPT and you see something that Gemini can do don't worry about it opening ey is going to release that soon well and let me just let me just make the case as to why everybody ought to pay attention to Google um first of all the concept of a GPT was invented by Google okay they were the ones that wrote the original white paper open AI was the one that went and exploited it and Google didn't know what they had in addition uh Google is a massive company that owns YouTube and everybody forgets that okay third their models have been trained uh their Gemini model has been trained multimodal from the start what that means is it's been trained to see to hear to speak and all the different mediums right so even though today it's seems to be just text I was listening to an engineer at Google and the the new model of Gemini that's coming out called 2.0 is going to have the ability to do audio video images text all the things okay and there's a lot of smart people that we follow like Chris Penn who said if I had to put my money on something I'd be putting my money on Google we might even look back a couple years from now and say oh do you remember that thing called chat GPT so um you know so how do we get to Google Gemini and let's talk about what the heck a gem is yeah so it's just gemini.com you'll also increasingly see to your point when you're in any other app of the Google ecosystem you'll see the little bluish star thing in the icon that's Gemini and they're increasingly building it into other apps it's still limited it's not like you can just click the Gemini and say I want to I want you to do this not necessarily true today but there are certain things that it can do and I love that it's integrated just the other day I was in Gemini and I wanted to come up with a playlist to play during a workshop that I was doing and there was going to be like a 10 or 15 minute break where people were literally going to be workshopping and I just wanted kind of AI inspired music to play while they were silently doing their stuff and so I asked Gemini for some songs that kind of made you feel like artificial intelligence in the future and that kind of thing not only did it give me a list of songs it automatically without me asking it I didn't even know I could do this created the playlist in YouTube for me oh wow and gave me the link in the chat and there it was on YouTube I was like oh that is pretty cool and we'll keep discovering those kinds of things so you open up gemini.com and then the left side bar this is going to be very similar to chat GPT you'll see a link towards the bottom that says manage G gems I think is what it says and you click there and that's where you can create a new gem of your own now here's one of the big differences and distinctions between cat GPT and Gemini cat GPT has an entire GPT store and you can go and you can see other gpts that people have created some are free some you can pay for and you can also share gpts that you create with the rest of your team you can't do that yet with Gemini but I think that's another example of something that will probably change fairly soon so when you go to manage gems you'll only see your own and they're completely private and exclusive to you but that's where you would create a new one and again you just put in the name of that gem whatever it is you want it to be and you'd start to fill in the instructions and you could already have another chat going on with Gemini member about how to create the the gem that you want to create the custom instructions and then just copy and paste whatever it comes up with into this new window interesting and is it functionally very similar to Cloud projects or custom gpts like are the Fields virtually identical you're just putting in like the various things like once you create the gem you're giving it a title and I would imagine you're giving it some sort of a description right and in the description is all the instructions that we've been talking about that you've referred to as custom instructions is it that simple is that all there is to it yeah yeah basically two other caveats I would add first is that I'm I'm sure that they all have a a file field option and and they're going to call it different things but this is basically where you can attach files to the custom instructions and this is important to know because if you're creating a custom instruction that has to do with creating marketing copy for instance well then you should attach your brand style guideline and your voice guideline and a PDF that talks about your target audience or your target ICP that way it's automatically informed by that information you don't have to copy and paste that data into the instruction field just attach the files but one of the big difference is because I know you guys use Claude you talked about Claude Claude doesn't have internet access right so you want to think about that before you you know start to dive into creating CLA projects because depending on your need it might not have that ability to access the internet that you might want for that particular task well and I'm sure it's coming out because I've heard from their founder that it's coming out but what what I'm curious about is can you attach a Google doc to it and if the Google Doc changes is it smart enough to know to reference the document does that make sense what I'm asking yes yeah okay talk to me about that yeah so it's not going to automatically know that you changed the document right but if you've got a document a living document that has information about your business or a clients or whatever the case might be and then you go to use your gem in a conversation it's going to reference that living Google doc whether that's a sheet or a presentation slide see that's where the magic happens because it it this is where I could see it being really valuable I know that workspace I know that Google integrates with as well but I have not experimented with it but the idea that there could be a living set of data in a spreadsheet or in a Google doc that the gem is essentially referencing right and if those things are dynamically being updated all of a sudden that's kind of magic sauce for any small business because I'm guessing 95% of small businesses are utilizing the Google workspace ecosystem so when you start adding in all that stuff to it I mean that's kind of magical yeah yeah the the trick is you need to tell the instructions what it is okay because you're not going to attach a Google doc you're going to put the link right in the instructions because it's just a link and you would want to tell it in the instructions this document is our brand Voice or this document is everything I need to know about my client or whatever or this sheet is all of my past podcast episodes you know whatever it is that you're trying to attach that way it knows when to reference that in the conversation that you end up having in that chat interesting so what what can it do why are you using it more than chat GPT I'm just curious like what is it what is it about the gems that has gotten you all in um outside of just using chat GPT is it just the fact that it's all in one system or is there something more beyond that that's a big part of it uh I'll be transparent I started using it because I was doing an AI Workshop in Philadelphia back in November with my partner Chris Carr and Chris is a huge heavy chat GPT user he's in there all day he's doing some really fantastic Advanced automations with chat GPT but we were teaching a room full of you know business folks from HR and all over the Departments and some of them were using co-pilots some of them were in the Google workspace environment and he said hey Mike can you learn one of those other systems so at least one of us can speak to Gemini and co-pilot so I said sure I'll use Gemini turned out I was already paying for a Google account that I just needed to change it to a Google one AI account and now I had full access to the most advanced Gemini model so that was the reason why I dove in to begin with and I immediately just fell in love with this system first of all Google knows what they're doing when it comes to UI so even though it's similar to chat GPT there's just some subtle differences that just make it a little bit nicer to use and then I started using notebook LM which I know you guys have talked about on on this show in a past episode folks definitely listen to that if you haven't already and I started using the original Deep research Gemini's deep research so for folks who don't know this stuff is freaking amazing you open up deep research which is just a toggle in the chat so you could use one of the regular models 2.0 1.5 or just choose deep research and you tell deep research hey I want to know everything about the businesses in this addressable market for instance or I want to know everything about something else and you give it that research topic you go in as much depth or as little depth as you want and it's going to read what you said and it's going to come back with a research plan that you can review it's going to repeat what you said and then it's going to add some other ideas that it had based on what you asked it to do so I did this in um over the holidays last year 2024 when I wanted to Rebrand and I live here in St Louis I've lived here since 2007 but I've always worked remotely for a gorals and then a different remote company before that so I'm not plugged in to the St Louis area I don't really know St Louis businesses and St Louis industry so I used deep research and I said hey we're going to start working more in St Louis please help me understand do some research and understand what are the top industries in St Louis what are the businesses some example businesses that that work in those Industries what are some of the challenges that they're having that AI could resolve what are some of the associations and organizations that represent those businesses and it repeated all that back and then also added things like where um these businesses are located um it said the top 10 Industries there were a couple of things that it thought oh I should probably research this too based on what Mike's asking things was like oh wow yeah that's a really good idea you should definitely research that and then it went off and scanned over hundred websites scraped them all pulled all that information back in it took about five to 10 minutes and then eventually came back with a complete report of what the business landscape is like in St Louis it identified Finance healthc care manufacturing as the top industries here in St Louis which is correct and some of the top businesses in those Industries like Barnes Jewish is the number one Hospital number one provider of Health Care and went on to talk about all the different things that they're going through the issues that they have as a business like we talked about before that aren't necessarily specific to AI but if I want to help them with AI I need to understand okay what are their challenges and pain points today that maybe AI can actually help them with gave that all to me in a report now for those who are familiar with uh chat gpt's canvas it's going to look very similar where on the one pane on the right pane you have the conversation that you're having back and forth and on the right pane you have the output so initially it's a report multiple pages of report including all the sources cited but then you can have a conversation with it you can ask questions you can tell it to go in different directions ask it for followup export it to a Google doc which you can then download as a PDF which is what I did so now every time I have a conversation with my AI Chief of Staff one of the reference documents one of the knowledge files is that PDF of research that we did way back when so all of you listening imagine you could do this not only for yourselves but your clients and have a really in-depth research report on the competitive analysis of your client something that you might have spent a week or two preparing before well now you can do it in 10 minutes a couple quick things uh first of all the other advantage to Google is it has a very big context window which is um like a million tokens something humongous so you can put a lot more files in there than you can for example with Claude which has a definite limit um the uh anybody who works for a business where they're hosted on the Google workspace like my company um some of these features have not yet moved over to these workspace accounts for example the Deep research I have to go and use my personal account to be able to do it however um Google recently uh announced that all these AI features are included they just ended up increasing the price by $2 a user so you don't need with a business account to pay anything to get access to Google Gemini uh but the Deep research stuff as of this recording is not yet available to the corporate accounts but I'm sure it's coming and this is one of the big challenges a lot of us are like why do we have to have a personal account and pay for that to get access to these things but the good ISS is like you know it's moving really really fast and I'm really excited to see what's happening there all right earlier uh Mike you talked about this rice framework so um talk to me a little bit about that because I think that will be helpful when people are trying to put together kind of the instruction set on how to optimize their assistant yeah remember so these are essentially training wheels right when you're first starting out folks like like like you and I who've been using AI constantly we're no longer thinking in Frameworks but if you're not familiar the idea here is we want to make sure that we're giving the AI all the information in the prompt that it needs to proceed and give us a great output so instead of going back and forth because you realized you forgot to tell it something or you weren't happy with the original output because it's just plain vanilla you can address that so the r in rice stands for role this is a really interesting concept that has evolved with artificial intelligence this idea that if we tell the AI that it's acting like a role like a job that it helps it and it really works well and this is because while the AI doesn't have the entire sum of human knowledge it essentially might as well have the entire sum of human knowledge for for all intents and purposes and within all that knowledge a small subset is what you need for the task at hand today so let's say you want to write an email campaign to your audience well you want the AI to help you as though it's this expert email strategist right somebody who's really familiar with how to create terrific email campaigns you don't need it to act like a lawyer so let's just tell it don't think about that stuff just think about what it's like to be a really smart expert email analyst and I'll tell you there's actually studies that have shown that there's a difference between act as the role and to tell to Simply Be You are the world's best email strategist that's the role you want to give that at and you can give us some additional information if you want but that's what it boils down to what is the job that you're asking it to do then the next is the instructions and the information you want to tell it what it is that you're trying to accomplish and what you expect to get out of our little session today I am doing an email campaign I want to reheat my audience you know a good portion of them haven't been opening emails for a while so I want to Target them and get them to re-engage with my email overall so that they're now opening my newsletters and that sort of thing and Mike I know you guys have been having issues with email so I'm sorry if I'm ing you but but I I do want to ask a question because this is where I think a lot of people have a lot of questions the role thing makes total sense like you are a world expert in email emails that convert or whatever right with the instruction set um there's a lot of people that do a lot of things with email do we want the instruction to be set at the high level or do we want it to be set at the prompt level do you understand what I'm asking because it's like uh if we tell it its only job is to send emails to our customers and then we ask it to send emails to prospects it's going to not know what to do so do you find giving it a broad set of instructions at the gem level makes sense and then to give it a detailed level of instruction at the command level makes more sense do you understand what I'm asking yes and and and and you're absolutely right if we were using this to create a saved set of custom instructions yes I might not be as specific right if I want an AI assistant in my company who's an expert email strategist and and writer right I'm not going to tell them probably in in the instructions who the emails are for because that might vary from dayto day but in the actual prompt like if I need to literally create this set of emails today I'm GNA tell it who the emails are for I'm going to get very as specific as I know now that might be a conversation we have back and forth but I'm going to be as specific as I know in the actual instructions um a little bit of advanced prompting here is that I might tell it in the instructions that we're going to go step by step through this process and I might I might tell it what those steps are I might not but I want to be clear what the first step is because the first step in sending an emails the marketers and the audience will know is well we need to identify who we're talking to and we need to identify you know what is the angle what's the point right so we need to think strategically about the email campaign before we get down into drafting the email and this is important to understand because AI is programmed to be as helpful as it possibly can and if you just tell it hey we're going to do an email reheat campaign you know what the first thing it's going to do write your email if we don't want that yet because we're not ready to write the email as marketers we need to think more strategically so that thought proc this case you would train it it sounds like you would train it Mike to say if I do not tell tell you who the audience is ask me that would be one of the sets of instruction right yeah that's one of the really really core mindsets that we have to keep going which is that we need to tell the AI to ask us questions okay because it won't unless you've told it to um so I tell it to push back on my assumptions and I tell it to ask me questions to clarify anything that I've said that it doesn't quite understand um and I'll rephrase that in different circumstances but when you can get the AI to ask you questions first of all it's pretty funny it'll give you a freaking questionnaire it'll send you 10 or 20 questions to answer because as you read through it you realize yeah okay if I was really like invested in this role whatever this role is these are things I would want to know who the audience is what their past open rate has been what their engagement has been like have I previously segmented my email list those are questions that'll ask you okay what comes after so we got the RS rule then instructions what's next yeah so next is context and so this is where you're going to want to tell the AI background information so if it if you're just starting in a prompt it's going to need to know okay who your business is who your target audience is those kinds of things that that's the kind of context it's gonna need to know if you're building a gem or a chat GPT do the same thing in there use the same framework there give it that context say hey look I've got an entire document prepared for my target audience you'll find it attached in the attached files tell it that don't just attach it and assume it knows it's there it'll read it but it might not know what to do with it so you tell that that in the context area of the instructions or the context of the prompt now if this is your first time going through this exercise just do this in a basic prompt but later on you can build this into custom instructions okay keep going with this rice framework yeah so the next is constraints and this is where you might want to add some specific bound that you want it to employ and there might not be any but maybe your emails are typically short so you might give it a constraint of hey just so you know when we get to the email creation phase it's got to be 500 words or less or maybe you're like me and you want to have a long form of stuff because that's pretty much all I put out say hey we're going to do it this is going to be a big deal this should be at least, 1500 to 2,000 words because I want to speak at length give it that constraint so that it understands what your preferences are and any other constraints that you might want to give it it's we're only English we're only talking to our North American audience or we're talking to a global audience anything that you can think of that again would help the AI come back at you with really great information and again you could do this in the prompt level or you can do this in your saved instructions whichever makes sense and the last the e in rice is evaluation and this is almost more for us it means that we need to know what success looks like we need to know what good looks like and you might tell the AI that you might give it an example sometimes people use e for example there but it also just means you know you and I as as we're creating the prompt or we're creating the custom instructions we need to already understand what we're trying to get out of it what will good look like so that we can evaluate the responses was this a great email or is this just a hoam email and so that requires a little bit of domain knowledge that might require some research if it's something you're not really experienced in but that's important to know otherwise you might be tempted to just go with whatever the AI gives you as outputs it's probably not very good yeah some of the things that I've noticed mostly working inside of Claude is constraints is really important like I could tell it look don't use don't overuse emojis like that that's an obvious one that you could put it as a constraint or avoid some of these kinds of words um another thing that I really love doing which maybe falls under context but might fall under this evaluation SL example is to give it examples of the best performing work that we've done especially when we're writing and then ask it to model or mirror that style I found that to be exceptionally valuable when you're actually creating content now when you're actually this is where it gets interesting when you're creating a chief of staff which I want to dig into a little bit here you know um what if you don't know what kind of constraints to give it or even how to you evaluate it because you've never had a chief of of staff can you talk to us a little bit about what you did there yeah so for my AI Chief of Staff this is an AI assistant that I can turn to whenever I have questions ideas I want a brainstorm for my own personal side hustle business thei hat and I've trained it to understand my target audience understand my voice and style it it knows I like Star Wars it knows I like history references it knows all that but it also knows because we had a conversation back and forth about this it knows what my goals and objectives are for the coming year it knows where I want to be by the end of 2025 and end of 2026 with this business it knows I want to help St Louis businesses like I mentioned before so I gave it a role similar to my own that you know you're a you're an entrepreneur and you're a content creator and you're an AI Enthusiast who wants to help other businesses Embrace Ai and not be left behind you're an historian who understands that we're going through the fourth Industrial Revolution and this is different from say You Know audio social like Clubhouse this is not something people can ignore and then I filled in all the other details about me and I had a conversation back and forth with Gemini before I got to actually building the instruction set and that's one of the beauties of AI right you can go into it and have a back and forth conversation at the end of the conversation then you can say to the AI now that we've had all this give me an output tell me what the custom instructions should be to create this AI assistant so one of the things Mike that I did this week that was after you and I talk so this is new to you but I've been thinking a lot about this how could I help other people go through this themselves so I actually wrote an article U and I and I called this your AI work body because maybe you're not a founder or a CEO and so this idea of a chief of staff kind of all of sounds kind of grandiose um our friend Paul did a whole webinar about a co-ceo well if I'm not a CEO why would I want a co-ceo maybe my job is copywriter maybe I'm a social media manager something like that and I thought well what if everybody just had a work Buddy based in AI what if everybody had an AI assistant that they could go to that is like them in their role they're trained they understand they have the same goals the same objectives they understand their place in the organization they understand what the organization is and they can then turn to that AI work Buddy anytime they wanted to and brainstorm ask questions help them prioritize that day's tasks help them create copy if that's what they want to do heck they could even turn to the AI for empathy which is super interesting you could turn to the AI and say you know what I am just having one heck of a day all this stuff has happened and you could train it if you wanted to to be empathetic and understanding and supportive so I I created an article it's just theih hat.com aior buudy all one word and it helps you understand what this is and it gives you a prompt just a single one paragraph prompt that you can put into gemini or chat GPT to get the ball started and then there's a PDF you can download so I created the instructions that you can give to the llm that will tell it what to ask you to create your own unique AI work body so it's going to basically do that questionnaire one question at a time it's going to ask you okay Mike what's what's your job title what's your business what's your role what are your objectives what are your key metrics what are your you know okrs uh what's your structure in terms of like your team who do you report to do you have people who report to you and then they'll start to ask you things like how do you want your AI work budy to communicate with you should it be you know buttoned up and professional all the time should it be humorous witty and it gives you a lot of these examples and like any AI if you're not sure you can have a conversation back and forth and once it gets done asking you all those questions it's been programmed to just give you in a complete summary one prompt output here are the custom instructions that you can just copy and paste into your new AI work bu for whatever role you guys are in that's freaking cool um where do we get that say the URL again just for people we'll make sure to put it in the show notes yeah so it's theih hat.com forward AI work budy all one word and I was talking to Chris dagel about this on on his podcast and and we were talking about this idea well what if every single person in your organization had their own AI work body what if everyone in the organization had an AI assistant personalized customized and trained on their role and your business that they could turn to this idea of a co-pilot which I laughed because this is really what micros co-pilot should have been because The Branding of co-pilot is genius that's absolutely what their AI system should be but the roll out has been terrible nobody knows how to use co-pilot and so they're they're rolling it back but this is what it should have been right that personalized assistant that's paying attention to what you're doing helping you step by step every day having all those conversations then back and forth it knows who you are and what you want to accomplish and it's that assistant you can turn to just imagine if everyone in your organization had that today and if everyone in the organization was increasing their efficiency and productivity by 10 15 20% minimum I mean bare minimum right the whole organization is going to benefit tremendously and to your point if you're using Google workspace it cost you what an extra two bucks a month well I mean it's included it it you don't have an option so it's just it's standard you know it's like hey that we're increasing your price but it's included it's free it's not really free but it's there it's free Mike this has been amazing if people want to connect with with you on the socials what's your preferred platform and if you if they want to reach out to you and do work with you where do you want to send them yeah so I'm active everywhere the best thing to go is to theih hat.com connect that's where you'll find my social channels you can pick whichever one you're active on I'm on all of them you can find the podcast the blog and if you want to actually have me come out to your business and do a workshop I do a three-hour Workshop where I'll walk through what's capable and possible with AI today and then we'll spend an hour and a half just on prompt engineering and custom instructions and memory and then we'll spend an hour workshopping individual Solutions you can find out more about it there sweet Mike thank you again for coming on the show this was amazing thanks so much for having me this has been a blast