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Coffees & Content | Marketing, Social Media & Digital Strategy Podcast
Coffees & Content | What's Actually Working in Marketing Right Now
If you want straight-to-the-point marketing insights you can actually use, you're in the right place.
Hosted by Loren Tomlinson, founder of The Social Collective, international speaker, and social media strategist. Loren and her team run marketing every week for service businesses across NZ and Australia. The ads, the content, the email, all of it. This podcast is where they report back.
Coffees & Content covers what's working right now, what's changed, and what they'd do differently, straight from inside the accounts. Expect real talk on the digital space, the strategies delivering results this week, and honest conversations about what it actually takes to make marketing perform.
No fluff. No textbook advice. Just the stuff that matters, from people doing the job in real time.
Grab a coffee, hit play, and let's get into it.
🎙️ Presented by The Social Collective. Follow & connect: @loren.thesocialcollective
Coffees & Content | Marketing, Social Media & Digital Strategy Podcast
603: Live From Cocktails & Conversations: The AI Panel
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
It's finally here. The Cocktails & Conversations panel, live and recorded, is Part 1 of a two part drop, and it's everything you were in the room for or heard about after.
Karrina Mountfort (The AI Assembly) and Angela March (Brainchild) join me for the full panel conversation. We got into the AI mistake that can wipe your business in seconds, why your brand now needs to be visible and credible to AI systems, not just to people, and where each of us still refuses to let AI anywhere near the decision.
This one covers:
- The full live panel from Cocktails & Conversations, finally on the feed
- The AI mistake that can wipe your business in seconds, and how to protect yourself
- Why AI visibility and credibility now matter as much as SEO ever did
- Where each of us draws the line on human judgment
Part 2 drops next week: the audience Q&A from the same night.
Listen to Part 1 now.
This episode is proudly sponsored by Frankly Podcasting, helping female founders, entrepreneurs and creatives launch, grow and manage their podcasts. Head to franklypodcasting.co.nz to find out more.
Have a question? Click here to send it to me!
Links:
- Join the WhatsApp community
- Follow on Instagram: @coffeesandcontentpod
- Find Loren on LinkedIn: Loren Tomlinson
- Visit us at: www.thesocialcollective.co.nz
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Grab that morning cup of coffee, turn off those headphones, and let's talk marketing. This is the podcast where we get into the strategy, the numbers, and the conversations shaping the industry behind the scenes. Brought to you by the Social Collective, this is Coffees and Content. This podcast is proudly sponsored by Frankly Podcasting, a remote podcasting business helping female founders, entrepreneurs, and creatives to launch, grow, and manage their podcasts through strategy, production, and personalized support. Lara, the founder of Frankly Podcasting, believes podcasting is so much more than recording conversations. It's a powerful way to build trust, shows the person behind your brand, and creates content that keeps working for your business long after you hit publish. If you're thinking about starting a podcast or want to support one you already have, head to franklypodcasting.co.nz to find out more.
SPEAKER_03I will now introduce you to our panelists, and I'll start with Lauren. Obviously, you know a little bit about her. Um, but she is the founding director of the Social Collective, a boutique full service digital marketing agency, specializing in strategy, content, and paid advertising. Lauren also hosts Coffees and Content, one of New Zealand's top marketing podcasts, and she's a regular speaker on stages across New Zealand and Australia. She loves sharing her digital marketing knowledge with the next generation of marketers and is passionate about helping brands use digital marketing to scale and grow their businesses. She's also a great boss. So yes. And we now have Karina Mountfort, and she is the founder of the AI Assembly and chief innovation and technology officer at Webbase AI. She spent over two decades in technology and digital transformation and now focuses on making AI accessible and actionable for businesses every day for New Zealanders. Karina works on both sides of AI, building full solutions for businesses and educating people to use it responsibly and with confidence. And we have the amazing Angela March, is the founder director of Brainchild, an award-winning PR and content agency based in Hamilton. She helps brands across New Zealand build trust and visibility with both people and AI systems. Angela was selected as the sole New Zealand representative for the Global Women and PR Empower program and has spent her career telling stories that connect brands with the people who matter most of them. So we have fantastic panelists ready to share some great knowledge. So I guess we'll just get started. I'll sit down because I did do 15 kickstaps. You've earned it. I was like, um cool. So we'll start with Karina. And my first question to you is what's the first AI tool or moment that made you go, okay, this is actually going to change everything?
SPEAKER_02So we probably need to put it in context a little bit. We've been building with this technology for a long time. Uh so I think the most exciting thing for me about everybody kind of being able to use it is the fact that it, you know, gained memory. So the ability to actually rely on it outside of you know how we used to train things was really, really exciting because it's able to kind of carry the context over and be able to start to be a really useful tool.
SPEAKER_03And Angela, why do brands need to think about AI visibility and not just how to use AI in their business?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, um okay, who here has used AI to make a decision? That's why you need to be making sure that your brand is visible and trusted by AI. Um yeah, basically, now if you're not being cited by AI, because we're going there so often to help us choose whether it's a product or a service or does my bum look big in this? True story, just me. Um if you're not being cited, you're you're not being considered by your customer. Uh, and actually what's worse than that is actually if the information that AI is saying about your brand is wrong. Um, I've seen this before. I did a little test and I asked a bunch of different AI um platforms. I live in Hamilton and I want to fly to Australia. What are my options? All of them pointed me to Auckland, um, not realizing that actually Hamilton Airport now flies to Australia as well. Uh, and you know, the worst part of that is some of it was wrong. So, yeah, basically, if you're not considering AI, it's gonna affect your bottom line.
SPEAKER_03Lauren, what's something AI has completely changed about the way you run your business that you didn't expect? And I know we've obviously been working a lot on this in the last nine months, so it'll be really interesting to hear.
SPEAKER_04I think just the way that we've been able to take a lot of the time. So we as an agency, Morgan for Context, when she came on board, one of her jobs is to report to clients every month. And her entire first week of every month was spent manually creating these reports. Yes, using the already sort of reporting tools that we have in place, but then being able to like speed up the process over, like Morgan mentioned the last nine months. We as a team have gone so ham on making sure that we're able to take out a lot of that extra admin time that essentially, I mean, as a service provider, you have to bill clients. You have to add it into your costs that go to clients. So, what we've been able to do is take that time and instead speed up the process of the way that things are delivered and then add in more human time. So when Morgan gets a report, for example, all of the numbers are there, all of the presentation is taken away. I used to back in the day, I used to create all of my reports in Canva and I would like hand, yeah, I guess everyone's just like, yeah, canva. Can we? Yeah. Everything was going in there manually. I was pulling everything from our ugly reporting tools and I was putting them all into Canva. Now we can whip something up and called design that the clients don't care about the design, but we want to make sure that it's easy to read, it's easily accessible for them. And now we've replaced it with the time that we can actually spend reviewing the data and giving our human input. And I think for us that's so important. And to me as a founder and the person that obviously sends out the invoices to clients, that to me, from an integrity and an ethical perspective, is really important because clients are now not paying us for the time that we used to spend doing admin. Or on the flip side, I'm also not losing those essentially unpaid admin hours. And I'm able to provide the clients with an incredible service that is actually a lot more human-driven, despite the fact that we've incorporated so much more AI.
SPEAKER_03I'm also very grateful. We know don't report it in Canberra anymore. Um, so yeah, that was a win for me. Uh I think it was three days of reporting when I first started, and now it's down to half a day. So thank the Lord. Um, cool. Okay. That was a bit of a warm-up, so we should be warm now. And I will start with it. Angela, you talk about brands needing to be visible and trusted by AI systems, not just people. What does it actually look like in practice for a business trying to get found and believed right now?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so look, I think a lot of people think, oh, to be seen by AI and this need to be creating lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of content. Um, but it's actually the opposite. Um, there's basically three things that we're really focused on for all of our clients at the moment. And that is one, just getting really clear on what those topics are that you want to be known for and what those expertise areas are. Um, the second is actually building the profile of those people that can stand behind those topics. Um and the third thing is that external validation. You know, I mean, it's the age-old thing. I could come in here and say, hello everybody, I'm very good at PR, and you'd roll your eyes, right? But if it was media or an industry awards or my client saying, hey, Brainchell's very good at PR, that actually means so much more. And it's exactly the same for AI systems as well. Um, yeah, I mean, really, it's just not about being the loudest, it's about being the easiest to verify.
SPEAKER_03Awesome. Karina, where are you seeing New Zealand businesses get AI adoption most from? Using it versus actually getting value from it.
SPEAKER_02So I think it's been really exciting in the transition with the capability of these tools that it's now kind of across industry. So we're seeing people, you know, in all the the departments being able to utilize it now. So that's super, super exciting. Before it was kind of isolated pockets. I mean, marketing's always progressive. You know, when I go into the marketing team, they're always using something, but it's quite exciting to kind of see it across other businesses. And I guess, you know, reporting is a huge thing across every sort of part of the business. So uh that's been a huge kind of win for a lot of people. And I guess it's really uh not just saving time, but actually able to articulate back very clearly in plain language where they're getting wins or where they're kind of getting losses, which is giving them instant return to be able to carry on. So it's quite exciting.
SPEAKER_03Awesome. And Lauren, what's changed most in how your team actually worked day-to-day since you started building AI into the agency?
SPEAKER_04I think we've become a lot more conscious as a team of where you could actually be going the extra mile for your clients. We're speaking obviously in terms of like the delivery that we have for clients, we're always looking at, we talk about it a lot in the office, that friction point. Because at every point in AI, for us, for ethical reasons within our company, one of the things that we promise our clients is that we are never doing 100% of the things that we offer through AI. So a client is never going to come to us and have meetings done by AI, reports sent by AI, content created by AI, all of which is entirely possible. But we really love being able to bring our strategic expertise to it. And I think it's meant that we've been able to look through every one of our processes. We actually go through a process of setting up essentially like a flowchart and looking at, okay, what pieces can AI take out and make faster for us? And where can we insert those points of friction? So as humans, we are still involved. I think it was also really apparent a couple of weeks ago when we got to the office, we all turned our computers on and Canva wasn't, uh not Canva, Claude wasn't working. And so all of a sudden we're going, devastating. Uh-oh. What are we doing now? But thankfully, because we've put in all those points of friction, but we also still at the end of the day know how to do our jobs. And I think that's one thing that I always want to hold on to is knowing that if there was a situation where things completely went offline or we went back to the stone age, we as a company could still operate. And I think it also means that moving forward as platforms, I read a post this morning being like, well, Claude came after Chat GPT, what comes next? And inevitably something is going to come next. And what that next thing is, I don't know. But because we still know our frameworks, we still know our formulas, we can still operate with or without AI, it's just obviously a major benefit to have it. It means that we as a company feel really confident that moving forward we can adopt anything we need to to any different software. And I think it also means that making decisions as to which AI tools and which softwares we connect, whether it's with an MCP through Claude or it's bringing in a whole different external tool, we're a lot more capable of making those decisions because we still at its core kind of understand how we operate as a company.
SPEAKER_03Awesome. And Karina, what's something about AI and business that people are quietly scared to ask about? But you get asked constantly in private.
SPEAKER_02Um is it safe? And you know, is it secure? Do I have to say please and thank you? That's always a favorite one uh that people ask me, and I always say no, you don't. Um but I just want to lead on from that conversation that you raised there as well. And that's something that I talk about a lot. Uh, in if you anyone follows me, you'll see I talk about this a lot. Around how do you actually maintain control of that data and how do you create that central kind of hub? Um, I've actually been speaking about this for a long time, so I feel very validated now that people are starting to listen with AI around how do you create that central knowledge hub of your business and then allow the tools of AI to kind of access that so that as these things change, you're not constantly changing chasing tools. You've actually got that kind of central data repository and knowledge base, and then you're giving it access to those tools. So that's one thing I really like to talk about is don't build your entire knowledge base in one particular tool. Take control of that and share it with that. So yeah.
SPEAKER_03Are there some tools that you could recommend? I mean, I know as an agency we do that with Claude, and then we also send information to Notion as well. Is that something like in a marketing agency or I mean specific tools that would work well?
SPEAKER_02I I think the that there's a lot of different tools around. I don't know if people say like Obsidian and those sorts of things at the moment, but I think it really comes down to actually you don't always need those things. So if you think about uh your SharePoint or your Google Drive or any of those sorts of things, that's where your knowledge lives. That's where all the understanding lives. And then you create a kind of overarching layer inside AI that instructs it where to go and find those things and what it does with those things and how it applies to those different processes and things. So you don't even need to kind of go to that, there's a lot of hype online, you know, around all of these tools. You just need to kind of structure your data properly and give it instructions. That's essentially the brain.
SPEAKER_03Awesome. We um, like I said, we we send out information to NoShan and we call it the offshore account. So we thought we were quite clever with that one. Um, Lauren, what's a mistake you've seen a business with make with AI? Something that backfired or just didn't do what they thought it would?
SPEAKER_04I think just though talking to a lot of people about the way that they've used AI, I think one of the things, again, because it's of such importance to me with the way that I run the social collective, is allowing AI to make decisions for you, aside from the decisions of like, does my butt look bigger than this, or where should I apply to? When it comes to things like the core of what you do as your business, like asking it to make really important decisions for you, or in our case, for us, it's a lot of strategic decisions. We need to be able to back those decisions with clients. And I think another thing that I've also seen people do is allowing it just to run wild. And like Karina was saying, be really conscious of like the way that you input data and what you input, because it's very, very easy for things to go backwards to send a wrong email to someone, despite the fact that you can like I have it connected to my Gmail, I get it to draft an email, but I always check it over before it goes out because you need to remember at the end of the day what you've actually sent to that person. Because yes, there's a very good chance that there's an AI on the opposite end of, like, I mean on the receiving end of that email, but there's also a human being that will check it at some point. And so making sure that you can still really back and own those conversations that you're having. And also on the topic of connecting everything, being really, really conscious of how you've connected it. I heard of this company in the States that connected it through long story short, they connected um an AI platform to their internal CRM. And within a matter of seven seconds, the entire CRM was wiped. And they went back to, I believe it might have been clawed or some platform, it was probably not clawed, but it's some platform that they connected it to and was like, hey, can you please like put that back? And all it got out was, oops, sorry, my bad. Can't really go back and do anything, it's gone. And so being really conscious of what things you connect it to, I don't think that means in any way, shape, or form you have to be scared of using it, but it's also looking at do I need to connect this exact thing? So for us, one of the things we do is with reporting. I'm not a big fan of connecting anything directly to the likes of like Meta, for example. Like I will never connect it to my meta ads account. I know a lot of people do. I don't want to do that for protection purposes because I don't want AI to accidentally create some content in a client's ad account for us. But what we do is we use a third-party reporting software and then we connect it in. So having something is like a little buffer in the middle, just so that you've got that reassurance that at least if it hit that, it's hopefully more than likely not gonna hit the end thing and wipe your account.
SPEAKER_03Awesome. Uh that would be the worst thing. So uh, Angela, this actually, I'm quite interested to hear what you've got to say about this one. Is there a real reputational risk to learning on AI too visibly in a brand storytelling or comps, or is that fear of a blow-in?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, good question. Um, I think particularly with this week's announcements from Anthropic around the watermarking that they're putting across basically any output from Claude or AI tools, which means, you know, even if you copy and paste, it's something in there that we can't really see, but shows that it is from AI. Um look, yeah, there's definitely a risk. Definitely risk. Uh, but equally, I mean I mean, we've seen everyone's been on LinkedIn, right? And seen loads of AI slot and content that you just go, oh my god, another AI post. I'm just gonna scroll right past that. Um, equally, though, there's there's a risk to not using AI and kind of falling behind because it's so efficient. And, you know, I kind of liken it a little bit to spell check. Like if I looked over at a colleague and they were pulling out the dictionary to write a document or set an email rather than actually just using spell check, I'd be like, what on earth are you doing? Um, so why would you not use these tools? Um, yeah, I mean, ultimately it comes down to that human oversight side of things. Um, if you're letting it go crazy without having that oversight, they gave a look at it and go, yes, that's good, or no, that's not good, um, then that that's your problem. Um, and potentially it comes down to that skill level as well, because I'm not an accountant, I'm not a scientist. I could probably pull together a lot of stuff that looks quite accountant-y and science-y. Um, but if I gave it to a scientist or an accountant, they'd go, oh my God, that's terrible. Um and it's kind of the same with marketing, you know, as marketers, we can see where it's working and where it's not. And you need to have that experience and that expertise to be able to do that.
SPEAKER_03No, that's great. Awesome. Thank you. And Lauren, where do you still insist on 100% human judgment in your business? No AI involved, no matter how good the tools get.
SPEAKER_04I think for us it's when it comes to making those decisions on strategy. I think at the end of the day, for the the kind of business that we're in with having a marketing agency, people come to us for our creative ideas, they come to us for our events or like the way that we execute things. And so I think it's really important that we can stand by those decisions that we've made. We can stand by the calls that we've made, we can stand by the creatives that we put out or the way that we have created content. And I think another thing that we're really big on as a company is creating content ourselves. So when it's photography, it's videography, we have amazing. I mean, two of the photographers we work with are in this room. We have Lydia and we have Adam, and we work with them constantly. And then my amazing team take care of all the video content that we do. And I think that's really important. We're not the kind of agency that are gonna create content with AI, but there are amazing other agencies that do. And I think that's also the really important thing is when you're integrating it, especially if it's for the purpose of delivering services, is just knowing where your line is of like what you do and what you don't offer. Because I think that's also like you were saying, I can pull off a lot of things that are science-y and and mathematician y and all of the things, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's what we want to be known for. So really coming back to that any time that you're pulling together content.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely. And I think uh one thing that we do in the agency as well is like we we're all over the strategy and we don't let Claude touch that, but we also use Whisper and we're all just brain dumping and talking into our laptops all day, every day.
SPEAKER_04So has anyone here used Whisper or heard of Whisper? Anyone here not heard of Whisper at all? Honestly, I'd recommend that's your homework. Go home, download it on your computer. It's a great dictation tool.
SPEAKER_03Now I'm just type an email out. I'm like, oh come on. I know extra admin time, we're getting rid of it. It is amazing. So I we're just all whispering into our laptops all day, every day, and it's it's the best way to get ahead of like using that human touch as well. Um, yeah, so I definitely agree. Uh Karina, as you educate people on using AI responsibly, where's the line between this is a productive productivity win and this is a business handing over too much trust to a tool?
SPEAKER_02I think, yeah, I think if we carry on with that conversation around connectors uh is a very topical one. So we see people connect all sorts of type of things into their accounts, not consuming, uh not understanding that when you're connecting all those things and you don't have those right settings on, it's actually consuming resource too. So what we say is, you know, how do we map that out and how do we add AI to that process to then make sure that that is something that's actually viable for that, and then only engage those connectors when that's required. So amazing things, you know, clawed co-working can go through and it can kind of research everything, it can prepare the report, it can send the email, it can do all of those things. Uh so very amazing with that sort of technology, but that's a defined use case, not just kind of openly turning on SharePoint and then letting it pull and push and all of those sorts of things. So that's a really big thing that we talk to, you know, deploy it on the things that you know you need it for, and uh where you will actually get that proven return on there. Um, one other thing I just want to add that's really important that I talk to a lot as well is AI doesn't think. I I don't know how many of you kind of know the depth of it, but it actually predicts. So that's another really important thing to think about when you're using it in any kind of space is that the context that you give it and the access of the information that it has access to is how it comes to the answer that you get. So it's really Important to understand those sorts of things when you're putting this into you know productivity, anything that you've got going on, uh, because uh once we start to understand some of those core fundamentals around how the technology works, sort of starts to shift what we want to use it on and where we want to deploy it.
SPEAKER_03Cool. And Angela, what's a boundary you personally won't cross with AI and PR? Something you'd never let a client or a tool talk you into.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, aside from human oversight, oh, I've crossed everything. Um, it comes down to ethics, right? So, you know, no fake news, no nothing misleading. Um, but I mean, really for us that comes down to, I mean, we're governed by the Prince Code of Ethics and actually making sure, you know, as a PR person. Um, but also, like, we have an AI policy and we have way since day dot when we sort of first started experimenting with Chat GBT, because it was the new big craze. Um, and that's really important. Like, if you do not have an AI policy, um, you need one. It's like really important to be very clear on how you're using it, um, because that's what we share with our clients as well. This is how we use it. We're super up front. You can find ours on our website, so there's there's no secrets. Um, yeah.
SPEAKER_03How do you get around a client uh that doesn't want to use AI? And it so are you more up front? Like if you want to use us, we do use AI and you and tell them to find somewhere else, or would you try and work around them?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we would work around. Um, we haven't had that situation, and and I mean, ultimately, our clients are still playing for our brains, our strategy, and our oversight. So, you know, we never just pump out a whole bunch of AI content and send it over and try and pass it off with us. Um, we use it to help us, to speed things up, which is which is great. I mean, from from that value perspective, in terms of what we can offer a client, it means we can actually do a lot more and do it faster and and um yeah, but it it's all client-to-client. I mean, we're a service-based business, right? So we're always gonna work in without.
SPEAKER_02Was that add something to it? I think it's an almost an education opportunity inside that too. So when when I we do road mapping every day with businesses and they say, Oh, we're not actually using AI. So are you using Canva? Are you using Xero? Are you using Zoho? Are you using all of these different things? Well, inside that you've used Gemini, you've used Anthropic, you've used all of these different things. So even if you think you're not, if you use maps to get here, that you actually are, and that kind of breaks down some of that barrier as well to people when they start to kind of understand that. Um, we get a lot with kind of the sovereignty conversation, so that's kind of a different one. Um, so that's kind of moving into that space of how do you kind of govern those tools as well, which is a really important one. So, you know, yes, we use Canva and it kind of specifies that it has Gemini. So that's really important to include in that AI policy as well.
SPEAKER_04Can I jump on that one for something else too? Because I've had this exact situation happen within the agency in the last week, and it's it ties into both of these things is the transparency with the AI policy, and then also creating that conversation because I think that's something that it was someone who is a big corporate organization who's keen to work with the social collective. And one of the things they said is, Oh, can we just opt out of AI? And it kind of opened up a conversation for us to have a really, really great conversation that's actually moved things forward of we use AI and this is how we use AI. But I think one of the things that's been really interesting is what they are most concerned about. And I think that's something that for any of you service-based providers in the room, I wouldn't be surprised if that comes up at some point too, is like really working with people to figure out what is something that they are like, where are their hesitations around AI. So in this case, it was their client confidentiality and it was someone who was using MailChimp. And I said to them, Well, MailChimp's actually got AI integrated into it already, and they went, oh, it does. I was like, yeah, okay, so so where are the concerns here? If it's around the way that your client data is used, here are all the measures that we take to make sure that we do not touch your client data whatsoever. If your concerns, on the other hand, are around how AI and just AI in general is touching your data, then you've already done it by putting them into MailGhimp. And so it's creating that conversation and allowing, I guess holding that space to make sure that they can feel comfortable coming to you. And I think the same goes for businesses outside of service-based providers, but being able to have that conversation with okay, what are your hesitancies? And I've noticed that there's a lot of people that are more forthcoming and more happy to have conversations if you just open the conversation in a really gracious way and do say to them, what are your concerns? How can we fix this? Because not everyone wants to and should be afraid of AI.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. Um cool. So we are on our one of our last segments. Um, and this is more for advice advice for the room. So we'll start with Angela. And uh for a business wanting to build a brand that's trusted by people and by AI, what's the first thing they should fix?
SPEAKER_01Oh, so many things. Um, I'll I'll speak broadly. There's basically two areas that you need to focus on, and that's visibility, i.e., can AI actually even see you, hear you, read you? Uh, and then that's credibility. So the visibility side of it, part of it is technical. Is your website performing? Do you have all the right markup and schema? Is it actually written in a way that AI can reach you and read it and understand it and actually surface it in a way that's useful to people that are asking questions? Um, and then the second thing is credibility. Um and generally speaking, AI actually looks at quite similar signals that we do, right? Like we've all Googled a product or a service to kind of go, is this legit? Right? Like things pop up on um on Facebook and things all the time. Um and it's quite similar for AI. It's looking for are these people the experts in this? Have they published a lot of stuff on this topic? Who are the people behind this? Are they real people or are they just like those ghost websites or ghost brands, right? Um, and then again, it's that third-party credibility, that external external validation. Like AI likes to corroborate everything. So, you know, like I said before, it's not about being the loudest, it's about being the easiest to verify. So be visible, be credible, um, build that trust, and that's how you can start to win.
SPEAKER_03Awesome. And Lauren, what's one AI-powered workflow from your own business that any woman in this room could realistically copy this month? Ooh.
SPEAKER_04I think going through your inbox and getting it to help sort things out. Does anyone ever have that feeling when you open your inbox and you're like, I am so bleeping overwhelmed? Anyone? Yep. Does anyone look at their inbox and they're like, oh, I'm so calm all the time? One person. I aspire to be like you. So I open up my inbox in the morning, and usually by the time I've clocked off and clocked back on for the next day, there's like 60, 70 something emails in there. And it's usually most of them that I left the day before because I was too overwhelmed to deal with those. But what I've done is I have trained up Claude Cowork to have a skill that would run every morning at 8 a.m. And it's my little inbox triage, and you can teach it exactly what you want it to do. So for me, I want it to go through and I want it to figure out what bills do I need to forge to my accounts team? What emails can I pass over to each of the members of my team, obviously for different reasons. There's client stuff that goes to Morgan, Aria would take care of the social media, Molly takes care of any inquiries that come in. So, how can I delegate those to them? And there's obviously things that I need to reply to. And then in that case, if there's things that it can ask me questions that I can, like literally, I can use the little voice function and I'm on my drive to the office, which is an almost hour commute every day, I can have a chat with Claude and I can get it to draft up these emails for me so that by the time I get into the office, not only do I have a list of which ones to delegate to other people, I also have pre-drafted emails so I can send them off to people. And instead of spending the first couple of hours of my day scrolling through my inbox and trying to clear some stuff so I can feel, oh, I can start my day now, it's already taken care of for me. And I think you can apply that exact same framework and that same approach to anything that you're finding is overwhelming you. If there's a part in your business where you're like, I just wish this could be a little bit quicker, chances are there is something that AI can do to help you. Like we've said, obviously, taking a moment to think about the precautions that you want to put in place. And is this, does this feel to me appropriate to connect it to the software? But if it feels right and it feels like it's gonna help you move things forward and actually speed up your day or make your day a little bit better or make your morning a little less stressful, I highly recommend it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so by 8.10, then I get all the emails that she pushes over to my own. Yeah, that's the bow I missed out. That's all I heard. That's not a problem anymore. So then by 8.30, I then delegate to everyone else. We just it does the work on. Um, awesome. Uh yeah, no, that's actually a great tool though, because it can get so overwhelming. Uh, especially, you know, agency side, you know, there's just a lot of different client emails, and so you have to kind of prioritize which one, you know, which is this a priority right now, or you know, can I get back to it? So it is it's so great. Um, Karina, what's a free or low-cost AI tool or resource you'd point people to first if they're starting from zero tonight?
SPEAKER_02Well, plug for the AI assembly, obviously. Um, so yeah, we we kind of we specialize in responsible AI and what that even means in the real world. So I guess obviously plug for that. But then also, you know, the tools that you're using. Like Claude has amazing training. Gemini, you know, Microsoft Learn, whatever it is that you're using on there, you know, go and learn some of those key fundamentals and start with the basics. Like, don't be embarrassed, some of it is still quite complex. But I think, you know, starting with those tools, uh, to be able to kind of feel confident in what you're doing, what you're connecting, and all of these sorts of things is really uh is really valuable to be able to do that. Yeah, especially Claude's got amazing kind of different uh capabilities with the all sorts of levels of training, other than that, follow the AR assembly. Um yeah, but also just on that connectors one too. Like if you don't feel confident, you can actually set what permissions you allow the connectors to have too. So you might just want to read it. So for example, zero will only allow you to read it understandably. They don't want you rewriting your entire kind of financial uh overview. Um so yeah, so you can actually like change the settings and things in there and make sure that it always asks you to allow. So you're kind of, you know, until you understand how those things are working and you're kind of monitoring it, that's quite a good thing to do also. So that's awesome.
SPEAKER_03Uh okay, so we're now going to open it up to you guys. Um if there's any question, any burning question you want to ask these amazing women before uh we wrap up, then this is the time to do so.
SPEAKER_04Thanks so much for tuning in to today's episode all around our AI panel discussion for the new AI era. Come back next week for part two for your here at the QA. See you then.
