Loading summary
Transcript93 lines
- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, before we start today's show, if you want to accelerate your AI learning, I have a solution for you. Become a member of our AI Business Society. You'll join me as we go deep with live AI training each and every month. Imagine crafting more persuasive content, creating stunning images and automating those time consuming tasks. It's all possible when you join the AI Business Society. Go to socialmediaexaminer.com AI and join today.
- [00:41]
Jeff J. Hunter
Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [00:53]
Michael Stelzner
Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Software Social Media examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. Today I'll be joined by Jeff J. Hunter and we're going to explore how to get AI implemented into your teams, into your staff, into your workforce. Now, this is going to be a podcast episode for you. Whether you have a team or not, you're going to discover a lot of very fascinating things. Number one, how to overcome resistance that you might face with your staff who do not want to embrace AI. Number two, how to actually employ very creative techniques to get everyone on board and actually utilizing AI so you can really transform the results that your business is capable of. I think you're going to love today's episode. We get into some really exciting stuff in the middle and latter half of the episodes that I think are going to blow your mind. By the way, if you are new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show on whatever podcast app you're listening to because we've got some great people coming your way. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Jeff J.
- [02:10]
Jeff J. Hunter
Hunter, helping you simplify your AI journey. Here is this week's expert guide.
- [02:19]
Michael Stelzner
Today, I am very excited to be joined by Jeff J. Hunter. If you don't know who Jeff is, he's an AI consultant who helps online business owners leverage AI to grow with less effort. He founded VA Staffer and is author of the AI Consulting Blueprint. Jeff, welcome back to the show. How you doing today?
- [02:36]
Jeff J. Hunter
Great to be here.
- [02:37]
Michael Stelzner
Super excited to have you here. Jeff and I are going to explore how to get your staff on board with utilizing AI on their work. And Jeff, I know that you've got a bunch of different businesses and you've got a pretty big staff and I think you're a great guest today. To kind of dig in on this. My first real question is like, why should businesses utilize AI to optimize their teams? Because when we think about what it means to optimize, you know, our teams with AI could mean lots of things. So let's explore this a little bit.
- [03:08]
Jeff J. Hunter
Well, let's take a step back to the big bad wolf, which is, you know, most businesses have still not figured out a way to actually get AI to be useful in their business. So they're messing around with it. They might have somebody who's like, check out this, you know, email I wrote in ChatGPT. But they haven't really seen a huge amount of like actionable success using AI. So the first low hanging fruit is should we implement AI and what things should we actually implement with AI? One of the biggest things that you can do right now is just like you said, optimize, which is how can we just get better results out of our existing team? You know, because everyone's worried that AI is going to replace them. And this is probably a theme we'll talk about throughout this session, but if you can just position AI as the helper, then you're going to get a lot more productivity. For me, the clients I consult, we're seeing about 20 to 40% increase in productivity within the first 30 days of just getting AI to help your existing team members do more stuff.
- [04:13]
Michael Stelzner
You know, when we think about this, there's so many angles to why you might want to consider something like this, especially for the business owners that are out there. Number one, you could start with the small team and accomplish what used to take a big team to accomplish. Right. Number two, you could potentially, instead of going out and hiring more people, you could probably demand more from your existing staff. Have you found any of these things to be true?
- [04:36]
Jeff J. Hunter
Yeah. And here's the thing, this is a very interesting shift right before and even during COVID we found this shift that moved into that remote work environment where people were basically in some states like here in California, right. We were like mandated to stay home and not work, you know, or, or we had to figure out how to work from home. So businesses were kind of forced to move to a cloud based, you know, infrastructure. So you saw the rise in Amazon and cloud, even Amazon delivery services, you know, every. Everything went crazy during COVID and it gave interesting power to the worker. That hasn't really been seen because basically the government was mandating these businesses not to allow you to go into work. Right. But it actually now with AI is a double edged sword because Most jobs that you can do remotely, AI can do. Right, Right. So now we have this interesting dynamic where the power is now shifting back and the pendulum is swinging back to the employer because the employer's saying, hey, employee, I can get AI to do your job. And it's. It's removing a lot of that bargaining power that employees have. And as a business owner, we have to be a little cognizant. We have to be sympathetic, a little. Show a little empathy and figure out, like, how can we utilize our team, not replace them, get them to do more. Although there are definitely some. Some hard conversations where there's literally people's jobs that. Like, for example, I used OpenAI's new operator to go and find all my podcast appearances and radio appear that I've done already this year. And I asked it to go out and find them and put them into a spreadsheet, and it did. That's something that I would have had one of my virtual assistants do.
- [06:26]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. And it only cost you $200 a month and you could continue to use it. Right, Right.
- [06:30]
Jeff J. Hunter
And the matter of fact, it's so funny, I'm at the point now to where, like, as I'm doing stuff right, like, I'm just doing my job. I have a dual monitor display. My second monitor is literally has operator up doing stuff while I'm working on something else. And once in a while, operator will ask me, hey, do you want me to do this? Or can I have your permission to do that? Or can you log so I can do this? And I'm like, sure. And I take over, I log into my LinkedIn account or whatever, I go ahead and let it have access and it just goes and does its thing. And, like, that's pretty much where the future is going. And you have to really get your team to buy in on that and realize that there are lots of things that the AI can do better than them.
- [07:11]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. Or if not better than them, at least it can do most of the work. Right. So you don't need to spend as much money. Now, marketers and folks that are listening that are not entrepreneurs or business owners might be a little freaked out about this, but let us explore this entire discussion. So let's agree that when we talk about optimizing our teams with AI, we might mean A, getting more productivity from our existing team, B, getting our team to do maybe the kinds of work they haven't been able to do before. Right. Deeper work. Right. Because the AI is supplementing their kind of work, or even C, allowing us to do things that we've always wanted to do, that we've never been able to do because we haven't had the staff to do it. These are all kind of what I'm going to call labels under which AI optimization could come in, and I'm sure there's a million more. So let's just kind of play with this discussion, assuming that's what we mean by AI optimization of our teams. Now, my first question is, let's say that everyone who's listening is very interested in doing this, and some of you that are solo operators, this is going to be very valuable for you too, so pay attention. Right? But where do we start if we want to optimize with AI?
- [08:22]
Jeff J. Hunter
Taking a step back, what you said is very valuable and important, and I want to just recognize it because it doesn't matter if you're on the spectrum of, hey, you own a business, you have multiple employees, maybe you're a solopreneur, an entrepreneur, or a social media manager, right? And you're, you're looking at it like, okay, this, you know, probably isn't that important to me because I don't really have to worry about my team members or what they're doing because it's just me. Well, the cool part is it actually empowers you. You have a really massive advantage because the things that I used to have to hire people to do, now AI is doing and doing really well. So this really empowers you. Again, you're the employer of these AI Personas is what I call them.
- [09:04]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, there you go.
- [09:04]
Jeff J. Hunter
Right? So now there's that different spin on it. So there's optimizing your existing team if you have people. And then if you are a solopreneur entrepreneur, that's just building. Or maybe you're, you have a job and you're trying to do a side hustle, now's the easiest time ever to start a side hustle, because AI can do all the work.
- [09:21]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Love it. So where do we start?
- [09:23]
Jeff J. Hunter
Now let me get onto what I know you really wanted to ask, which is, okay, where the heck do we start? So if you have a business, and I'm going to do it from two perspectives, all right, the first perspective, if you are a solopreneur and entrepreneur, the first thing you look at is, okay, what are some things I can have AI do in my business that will move the needle? All right? I always look at increase in marketing and sales. Why? Because you're driven and it's easier to do stuff when you can see that payday, right? You're like, okay, this is working. I want to do more of this because it's increasing my sales, it's increasing my leads, it's increasing people signing up to my newsletter or even creating a newsletter. You never had to get signups, right? There's so many things with A.I. now, if you own a business and you have team members, the first thing you have to do is figure out who's on point. Who is that person who you can ID on your team? And that is the implementer. And here's the funny part. It doesn't have to be your tech guy, doesn't have to be a guru. It has to be someone who just shows interest and understands a little bit of operations.
- [10:34]
Michael Stelzner
I love it. And that could be somebody who has a few extra hours in the day that wants to go down a rabbit hole, Right. And kind of learn AI. Is that correct? Is that kind of what I'm hearing you say?
- [10:41]
Jeff J. Hunter
Right, Exactly. Like, who on your team can actually say, I got this? Like, and you want, what you want to do is you want to identify, especially if you have multiple teams, you want to say what are different ways that people on those teams could use it. So for example, if you, if you have a large company, you're like, we have a sales team. Okay, what can the sales team do to use AI? Maybe it's inbound chat bots.
- [11:03]
Michael Stelzner
Okay. Yeah.
- [11:04]
Jeff J. Hunter
Maybe it's appointment setting. Maybe it's using SMS AI to send text messages and get people going. If it's a marketing team, maybe it's to create landing pages and sales pages and funnels and stuff like that. Email marketing. Right. Like, there's just so many different things that AI can do. You just have to pick one thing. And like I said, I start with like, what is the money making stuff? Like, the copywriting is very simple and very easy to do. And by the way, you and I did a very advanced training on how to get AI copywriting. So we'll make sure to link that previous conversation before. But there's so many different ways to get AI to do stuff. But the easiest way to get people to buy in is just have it make you money.
- [11:46]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. And for the folks that want to know how to find the session that I did with Jeff, I'm actually looking it up right now and it was episode 22. And episode 22 can be found@socialmediaexaminer.com a. Okay, so just double checking that and it is. Yeah, a 22. Okay, a 22. All right, Josh. So resistance. There's going to be resistance. We need to talk about this, right? Because there are people inside the company. When you start talking about, like, we're going to somehow use AI to make our team, our entire company, more efficient, you're going to face resistance. So share with me a little bit about any experiences that you've had overcoming resistance and how people can move forward with this.
- [12:33]
Jeff J. Hunter
So, ironically, I like to start with the resistors, okay. In the company. And your resistors are going to be like an anchor holding you back from your initiatives. So I like to find out who are my biggest resistors first, and then I win them over. And here's how you win them over. If you're a leader and you have those, you know, negative Nancy's on your team, the way you overcome it is by addressing what they think the problem is, right? Just say, hey, what is your biggest concern about leveraging AI in your job? And by the way, for me, it's always my writers, it's always my copywriters, because I think that they're obviously the most scared as well. So they're like, well, it can't write as good as me. Or sometimes they're honest and they're like, hey, look, I'm afraid this thing's going to take over my job. So what I do is I. I position it. And this is. If there's one thing you guys get out of the training here, it's that you want to position the AI as that assistant that helps them achieve their job better. Everyone, I don't care what their job is, has stuff that they don't like to do that AI can do. Okay? For example, sales teams, they absolutely hate doing lead generation. There's not a single person who's on a sales team that I know who wakes up in the morning is like, ooh, I can't wait to go on LinkedIn and scrape leads, right? Like, you can have AI do that. There's so many different things you can do. So you position it as, hey, we're going to create. And I even kind of joke with my team because I have some of those, too. I have some resistors, some last holdouts, you know, like the Alamo here. And I just said, hey, look, what if we created an assistant that, you know, what do you hate about your job? Ask that question, what is the stuff you just don't like about your job? And then see if you can come up with an AI to do that. And that is going to show them and make it non Threatening. Don't call it like, you know, job replacement bot. You know, call it like the sales enablement assistant or something like that. Right? And it's like its job is to help, maybe it's to help you make proposals if you're on a sales team. No, a lot of people don't like making proposals. So think about different things like that, that you can implement. These little bots, we call them AI Personas. Basically, they're like little AI employees that they are now the manager of. That's the key.
- [14:53]
Michael Stelzner
So how did you go about persuading your copywriters? Why don't you share a little bit about that story?
- [14:58]
Jeff J. Hunter
Well, I'm going to preface this by saying that I wasn't 100% successful.
- [15:03]
Michael Stelzner
Okay.
- [15:04]
Jeff J. Hunter
All right. Copywriters. There's a lot of ego in copywriting. And even for myself, you know, like I've gotten. My AI copywriter is so good because see, I've written over 20,000 pieces of content over the past 10 years as a marketer and copywriter. I have them all saved in a spreadsheet. And I've written some really good ones. We call them bangers. That's what the kids call, that's what my 12 year old calls it, a banger. And I've written some pretty bad ones that didn't perform well. But see, I fed my AI with only the top 200 top performing content I've ever written over all time. So it only knows how to write good. So let me relay that to how that, what that means and how that circle it back to my copywriting team. When I trained my AI on how to write like me, okay? And I am the lead copywriter on my team. So, you know, suffice to say, I do believe genuinely with my own ego that I'm the best writer on my team. Okay? I'm open to be challenged. By the way, I can't wait for my team to be better than me. But what happened was last year, out of hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of social media content and emails that I've written myself personally, my AI copywriter outperformed me. When I brought this information to the team, I kind of said, okay, guys, we have to reposition ourselves. Look, they have just paying you $150 per blog or $500 per sales page or whatever. It's like that's changed because now I can use AI to write that in 10 minutes. It used to take three, four hours to write a really good sales page. Now it takes 10, 20 minutes, right? And that includes the editing. Like that's, that's crazy, right? So now I have to pay them a little bit differently. I'm like, look, I know that how much easier it is to do your job. So there's only a couple different ways you can do this, Michael. One, you either have to change how much output you expect from the person. Right? Which to me is the fairest. Right? If they used to be able to do two things a day and now that AI tool can do five of them in an hour, then I expect you to do, you know, be reasonable, 20 pieces a day, I don't know, right? Like you should be able to just knock stuff out now. But the other option is you have them work less. It doesn't take you as much time. You have some time freedom, right? But obviously you're not getting paid the same. I mean there's definite things here. Or you can switch to a completely results based pay where you just come up with what it's worth to you and say, hey, here's how much it's worth. You're paying X amount and we go with it. So by the way, that's why I was unsuccessful is because I came to the team, I presented this, I even gave them multiple options on how we can pay them moving forward. And three of them scoffed and said, oh, I'm better than the AI. The AI can never do better than me. And then I had two of my copywriters that embraced the AI and they started writing all my copy and all of their copy too.
- [18:05]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, they took over all the work.
- [18:07]
Jeff J. Hunter
Right, exactly. My two people are now doing the work of five. And by the way, they're still light. You know, I gotta find more projects for em to do. Like I just had em do more projects yesterday. Whenever they have free time, I'm like, okay, make some lead magnets, you know, get ahead on our email newsletters, you know, like that's how we do well.
- [18:24]
Michael Stelzner
And I like this and we should talk about this because this requires a little bit of exploration. So this is what's going to happen with anyone who's listening who has full time staff or hourly staff or contractors, right? Where you pay them per project or by the hour, you're going to have to reset expectations because the truth of the matter is that we can go out there and find people that are leveraging AI that will do it for less money and have a higher quality. So this is going to require a reset of expectations. Right?
- [18:57]
Jeff J. Hunter
Jeff, here's something I'm going to leave you with. Too, Michael. I almost feel bad saying this, you know, because first off, it's not a good look as a CEO to say, hey guys, I'm able to do all this stuff now and I was able to fire all my staff, right? It's not a good look. This is not the time to be the anti human CEO.
- [19:16]
Michael Stelzner
Okay?
- [19:17]
Jeff J. Hunter
I want to repeat that. The anti human CEO is not cool, right? So what you gotta do is you have to give an opportunity to your people to figure out how to augment their job to create more value, right? It is what it is. Because I'm gonna give you an example here that's mind blowing. My own assistant from the Philippines. She's worked with me for three years now. She's never written a newsletter in her life. She's never been in marketing training. She's never been a copywriter. She literally just answers my emails, text messages people back, sets my appointments. You've met her, Jackie. She's the one who coordinated this call. Well, I created a newsletter, AI Persona. And it literally writes like me. It writes really good. It understands my company, it understands my target audience. We went through all of this on that previous training he was telling you about. And she was able to write 77 newsletters without ever writing in her life, like marketing copy. She was able to replace 77 of the job that I used to personally write those emails. If you have an email writer or copywriter on your team, like I was doing that personally, but I created my own clone. All I said was, hey, here, let's come up with some topics for the newsletter. And then she just says, write a newsletter on this topic. And then she would send it to me and say, boss, does this look good? I might make a few changes. And I said, good. She goes online, she posted on my WordPress and whatever else not, it's done. I would have never had that before.
- [20:39]
Michael Stelzner
AI and she's doing more work than she used to do. Right? Because that's work that you used to do. And now she has margin to do it. A couple thoughts on this. Number one, I have in my company expected everyone in the company to use AI to improve their work. And I know that if they're legitimately doing it, that they should have margin left for bigger tasks. So what I'm doing inside of my business is I'm giving more expectations to the leaders of the various divisions of my company. I'm expecting a lot more from them. And I think it's reasonable to expect more from people when they are using AI because as you Said Jeff. The kind of work that is a slog that we don't like doing can now be done really, really quickly, which I believe opens up more deep work. Right. And that's when we can use AI in a different kind of role. Not necessarily an output role, but more of a brain sparring partner role. Right, where you can start thinking about strategy and stuff like that.
- [21:40]
Jeff J. Hunter
That's right. And here's the thing too, when it comes to augmenting your team, you know, really getting them to dive deep and using AI. Like for example, that example that I just gave about my own assistant, you know, like now she's more valuable to me and she's doing ROI activities because that newsletter makes me money. So now I can justify giving. I just gave her a nice raise, like almost a 20% raise not even two days ago. So, like that's the type of thing that you can start doing is I. And I think this is why this excites me. A. I'm able to do a lot more with a lot less and I'm able to just make my own team more valuable. And it's given me an opportunity to just see people that want to shine, you know, like, I'm giving them an opportunity. And this is a very new opportunity, like AI mainstream being useful with, you know, these large language models and especially these multimodals that can do videos and graphics and stuff. Like now I'm, I'm implementing a new strategy with my own creative team that does my videos and graphics and stuff. I'm giving them incentives to use AI. I'm doing contests and stuff. Like you can do contests on your team. Like, I just got done having a contest with, with one of my groups and I said, hey, whoever can come up with the best use case for OpenAI's operator gets $100 bonus. Done, right? So I'm trying to figure out how can we get ways of implementation on the stuff that make people feel more valuable and not that they're just being replaced by it. I know that even sounds chatgpt esque what I just said.
- [23:15]
Michael Stelzner
Are your competitors already using AI to create better content and faster? Are you struggling to keep up with the pace of the ever changing AI landscape? If so, Social Media Marketing World 2025 is your solution. Our dedicated AI track brings together the brightest minds in AI marketing to help you master the latest and greatest AI tools. You'll learn from experts like Matt Wolf who will share 25 AI tools to transform your content creation forever. Chris Penn will show you how to use AI as your second brain for analyzing data and building winning strategies. Molly Mahoney will reveal how to quickly create months of high converting content with AI. As one attendee, Melanie Miller said, quote, the AI teaching was mind blowing. I realized had I not gone there would be a good chance my business would have been obsolete. I'm so far ahead of so many people because Michael Stelzner brings only the best to teach. Thank you, Melanie. The most affordable way to attend Social media Marketing World 2025 is with our dedicated AI ticket, which gets you the AI track and access to all of the keynotes in San Diego this March. Visit social mediaexaminer.com aikon today and future proof your marketing career with our AI Ticket. Don't delay. The event starts March 30th. I hope to see you there. I'm going to move on to the next question. Just a second here. But I think what I'm hearing you say is this, and this is how I would position to anybody who's listening to this, hey, once you get one person in the company, as you mentioned earlier, who is your point person, who's the most skeptical person, and you begin to open their eyes to the possibilities of AI and then they become a champion for your AI efforts, then you probably need to call a company wide meeting or a team wide meeting. If you lead a team and you need to say, hey everybody, here's the deal. AI is here and we're expecting everyone to use it for the following reasons. Number one, it's going to make you a lot more efficient. Number two, it's going to allow you to get things done much faster without having to wait for someone else inside the company and you can give examples. And number three, everyone is expected to use it. And if you don't use it, you're going to fall behind, right? And if you fall behind, that's going to be a problem. But if you embrace it, that's going to be a great opportunity because with the margin that you will have of time, there's going to be new opportunities and I'm going to be able to delegate out these new opportunities to those of you who make the time to make it happen. You will become more valuable. You will secure your job here. You will make it so I don't have to go out and hire more people. Right? And if you position it that way, and I think you're really careful and kind about it, then all of a sudden you can do magical things. Now the other side of the equation, which you've already mentioned, is Having AI assistants. We're going to talk about this in just a second, but here's how to position this. Hey, everybody, we're going to teach each of you how to have your own assistant. You all want assistance? I can't afford to hire assistants for you all, but guess what? You're all going to have an AI assistant. I feel like this is the ultimate use case. Jeff, you could start here. Imagine all of you had a personal assistant. How much happy would you be? Raise your hand. Well, guess what? I'm going to hire an assistant for all of you. You position it that way and they're going to be excited, right? So let's talk a little bit about how that might work, because that's what I'm really excited about.
- [26:31]
Jeff J. Hunter
Yeah, and what's really interesting here is like, when I'm working with CEOs that have large teams or even medium sized teams, even small teams, you know, they always say the same thing, you know, like, how do I get my team to buy in? You know, how do I, you know, sometimes it's those harder conversations, like, how do I tell this person that basically, you know, AI can do their job and what, you know, how do I retool them to be more useful for the company? Right? And when I approach it as, hey, look, let's see how we can create an assistant for your team. Now, you don't have to have an in person company. You can do this 100% virtual. But I do exactly what you just said. I put together these AI workshops where the very first thing, by the way, when people hire me, a lot of times I come in and I'm viewed as the bad guy. I'm the outlaw. I'm this evil villain who's going to come in and, you know, like, just destroy the company, you know, some evil AI, whatever. And when I come in and I'm like, I try to be very fun and playful. I'm like, hey, who here's used AI? Okay, cool. What do you use it for first? You know, let's warm it up, let's see what they do it for, right? And I'm like, now my job here today is to hire an assistant for you. Would anybody like an assistant? Right? And they're like, yes. I'm like, great. Now what if we could create the perfect job description of who you want to hire? Let's do this together. Okay? So I don't even tell them that it's AI yet, right? I said, let's make the perfect job description. And then I'm like, hey, guys, I want you to think about you creating your own human, right? That's what that AI Persona thing comes into play. And I said, what kind of personality would it have? How would it do the job? You know, like, what are some things that needs to know? What are some specializations that it's in? You know, we go into it and basically we look at the end goal in mind. We always try to say, okay, if you were going to hire a person to do something for you, what would it be? What would that person do for you? Okay? Then we work backwards. And that's where, you know, me being a project manager in a past life helps because it's always about working with the end goal and then going backwards, figuring out how we can get that done, right? So basically, what they don't know is that they're creating their very first AI Persona. They're literally creating a job description for the AI assistant that we're going to make. And I just break it to them. I say, okay, guys, now wouldn't it be cool if we could magically go poof? And that person that you want to hire is actually here. They're like, yes. I'm like, okay, everybody open up your laptops and go to ChatGPT.
- [28:55]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. And by the way, wouldn't it be awesome if they were available 24 hours a day, seven days a week? They never slept. They were always friendly and always happy. Wouldn't that be amazing? Right? You could also say that too, couldn't you?
- [29:05]
Jeff J. Hunter
They never complain. They never roll your eyes when you ask them for a revision.
- [29:08]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, yeah. Oh, and they only cost, like, they're free because guess what? The company is happy to pay for them, you know, so, okay, so how do we craft? Let's talk about this AI Persona method. So far, here's what we've talked about. You said, okay, what's the end goal that you want to achieve? Right? And again, if you position this to your team, every one of them can have one of these things, right? What is it that they want? It's going to be different for everyone, right? But so once they've identified what it is that they. They want that task that they want this AI to do, what's next?
- [29:38]
Jeff J. Hunter
Let's use that newsletter example.
- [29:39]
Michael Stelzner
Okay?
- [29:40]
Jeff J. Hunter
All right. Just to make it simple, let's just say that you have a copywriter or a marketing team, and one of their responsibilities is a newsletter, and they hate doing the newsletter, all right? They would rather run ads or do something else, and they hate doing that newsletter. It's a burden. Well, you know, the thing I don't like about my job, Jeff, is that you make me do this newsletter every day. And honestly, I hate every day. I have to wake up and I have to. To figure out, like, what I'm going to write the newsletter on. And we put together, I said, okay, great. So we want to build a newsletter. What does a newsletter need to have? Right. You see that? One step behind. Let's look at the newsletters you've got now. Well, I already have a bunch of newsletters I've written. Great. You know what we call that? Training data. Right. So you already have all these newsletters you've written in the past. Great. If you don't have training data. You know what I do right now? I subscribe to all my favorite people's newsletters and boom. Training data.
- [30:30]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, yeah. So we're clear. Training data could be anything, right? So whatever the task is, if you've already got them in Google Docs or word docs or PDFs or. Or even in your inbox of great examples, that is what you refer to as training data. What do we do with that training data?
- [30:45]
Jeff J. Hunter
Marketing emails, newsletters, sales pages, sales proposals, pictures of you.
- [30:51]
Michael Stelzner
Right.
- [30:51]
Jeff J. Hunter
If you want to use it for Flex. Laura, like, there's so many different things that. And this is what's really cool, like right now. And this is a really important step. That one point person on your team, whether that's you as a solopreneur entrepreneur or it's that person on your team who's going to be that kind of AI champion. Definitely in the very beginning, at least, I would say 50% of the job is just collecting data from people. It's collecting data, getting all the useful things, all the emails you've sent to people, proposals, like everything that you can collect that you've done. And that can be your starting point to train the AI on how to do its job. Okay, so there's really, let's just say, six main components to building what I call an AI Persona. Number one is you have to think about what you actually want it to do. That's that specialization. Right? So you have to have a role. That's number one. Number two is specialization. Okay? So this is really important. You have to make sure that you know what it's going to do and who it is. All right? And then you have to come up with, do you actually have some special roles? Specialization. And then you start going into, what's this personality type? Right. Just like I said before, like Is it a friendly bot? You know, is it a. Is it sarcastic like me? You know, like what. What does it have to do? And this is where people get it wrong, by the way. A lot of people think it's about what they want, but it should be about what your target audience wants. Your personality type that the audience can relate to.
- [32:22]
Michael Stelzner
Why is that personality type important? Just help people understand that. Because personality type, when you're interacting with a bot, it depends on what the role is, right? But I would imagine you want a personality that jives with you if it's just there to be like a sparring partner or strategist, right? But if it's there to create output, do you mean the personality of the output that it creates for you, or do you mean the personality of the actual bot itself? That's what I'm curious about.
- [32:47]
Jeff J. Hunter
A little bit of both. So, for example, let's just say that we're. Let's go back to that newsletter. If you're writing an AI Persona that does newsletters, you'd want that AI Persona to be educational, value driven, but a little persuasive, because everyone knows the purpose of the newsletters, to get them to sign up for whatever it is, Right? Right, right, right. So little things like that and what I do is when I work with someone, I give them a whole list, hey, here's all your different personality types. Because most people are like, I don't know. So I just say, here's the cheat guide, right? So start coming up with what that looks like, you know, and then here's the thing, right? So we've got your role, we have your specialization, we have the personality type. Now we want to start feeding it information about your target audience, right? What are the desires of your target audience? What do they want? What are the pain points of your audience? And then you feed it the very last thing, which is what you actually do as a company, right? So for example, if I have a newsletter, an AI newsletter, and let's just say I'm selling AI consulting, so the newsletter is going to give everybody tips and tricks and things like that, but it also needs to know that they can pop on a call with me if they want me to help implement. So it understands that. So that AI Persona, after it's done giving all sorts of value and all sorts of cool stuff, at the very end, it's like, hey, you want some help implementing this in your company? Contact me, right? So that is really a full spectrum of what you need in drafting out that job description, right? Of what we call the AI Persona. And if you can get that for multiple roles, by the way, here's a little hack. Here's a little hack. If you're using what I call the AI Persona method, every single one of your chats, whether it's in ChatGPT or Claude or Meta or whatever you're using Deepseek, that's the new thing, right? I don't know if you've seen Grok 3 is pretty awesome. So whatever it is you're using, each one of these chat conversations, I treat them like a person. I rename them as a person, an actual AI Persona. So I'll have like, here's the Jeff's AI newsletter AI Persona. Here's the contract writer AI Persona. Here is my social media marketer, AI Persona, right? So I treat each of them as a person because they have different goals, they have different needs, specializations, they understand the audience different. And that endpoint, the goal is different. One is made to create emails, one that's made to make social media posts. And I never mix them. I would never go to my email, one that's been trained on all my emails and ask it to write a social media post for me. Okay? So that is the real key little secret here is you treat these AI Personas, these chats, as people.
- [35:27]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, I have a question for you. This is unusual, but I think it'll resonate with people. Let's say that I send out a weekly update to my staff of all the things that come company has been working on and I do this actually right now and it's kind of a pain in the butt. And currently my assistant is just putting things inside of an asana task and then I have to come and I have to organize it and write it in a cool way. So let's say I wanted to train an assistant, an AI assistant to help me generate these emails every week, help me go through each of these things. The role obviously would be your role is you are a world class company, status update person, something along those lines, right. Who specializes in sending weekly emails to staff that encourages them about the progress we're making. Is that an example of a role in specialization?
- [36:15]
Jeff J. Hunter
Because I'm a project manager. In a past life we used to call those project coordinators. So I would say project coordinator, absolutely. And then what you would do though, okay, you'd want to give us some dynamics about your company and your team. So you are a world class project coordinator. You specialize in making team members motivated, excited and make progress.
- [36:37]
Michael Stelzner
Okay.
- [36:38]
Jeff J. Hunter
Something like that. That's a good specialization.
- [36:40]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, keep going. Let's see, the personality is. You got to model Michael Stelzer's personality. Right. So. And I'm gonna have to write up what that is. Right.
- [36:46]
Jeff J. Hunter
You have strong leadership development skills. Right. You're very encouraging, you're empowering. And I would even use maybe in this one, some negative stuff. I would say you are not critical, but you are encouraging. I would say something like that. Because sometimes leaders, they are critical. And I can tell you, as a former project manager, the best way to get people to do something is to show them how they win by doing something for you.
- [37:13]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, keep going. The target audience is my employees, Right. And they want to be motivated, right?
- [37:19]
Jeff J. Hunter
Exactly. In this case, your target audience is your actual team. And then I would probably give it a little information about you, because, believe it or not, you are the client in this scenario. It works for you. I'd say you work for Michael Stelzer, and he is the CEO of Social Media examiner and whatever else not. And his team members are, boom, here's the role. Boom, here's the role. Boom, here's the role. And then after that, you would say, your goal is to help people achieve the things. And then you. You take that to do list or whatever that they're supposed to do, and you put it in there.
- [37:54]
Michael Stelzner
Okay.
- [37:54]
Jeff J. Hunter
And then that's where the conversation would start. That would just be one prompt. Okay. And then what you could do is you could say, and here's where people go wrong. People start asking it to do stuff. That's very biased. It's very biased to tell it what to do. What you want to do is say, based on the information I provided you. How could you help me?
- [38:14]
Michael Stelzner
Okay. All right. I love where we're going with this because now I'm not just thinking about a task. I'm thinking about a role. I think this is the important distinction. Right. Because I was just thinking about sending a weekly update to my staff, but now this is a role that I would actually hypothetically hire for. Does this mean that I could feed it a spreadsheet or a bunch of text at this point now, and I could say, write up a really encouraging weekly update. Is that where we would go with something like this?
- [38:40]
Jeff J. Hunter
Let's go even sexier than that. You ready to go deep and sexy?
- [38:44]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, let's do it.
- [38:45]
Jeff J. Hunter
I'm going to blow your mind here. So imagine this. It has a role. You're doing your weekly call or your daily call on Zoom by the Way before we get there, let me give you some operational goodies because this is what I do as a project manager, I can tell you if there's one thing I know how to do. I'm not the smartest guy, but I am very good at getting results from people. I can get people to do things that they didn't think they could do. So for me personally on my team, and I recommend you guys do the same. Every Monday, we have a call at 9:00 in the morning. It's an all hands call for my leadership team. And on that call I say, what is one thing? So whatever it's. If it's AI. So for right now, it's AI for my team. What is one thing you're going to do this week? You're going to implement execute this week using AI in your role.
- [39:35]
Michael Stelzner
I like that.
- [39:36]
Jeff J. Hunter
That way you're guaranteed at least 52 things a year, right?
- [39:39]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, I love that.
- [39:40]
Jeff J. Hunter
It has to be something that's actually doable within a week time frame amongst the other things they have to do, because everybody's got a job, right? So guess what happens? I'm on that Zoom call. It's getting transcribed. You send the transcription over to your newly created AI Persona that's designed, the project coordinator, and you say, here is the transcript of this call. What are people going to be doing and what are some steps that you can help to make them achieve their goal for Friday?
- [40:09]
Michael Stelzner
Ah, and I can make that available to them potentially. Is that what you're saying?
- [40:12]
Jeff J. Hunter
Also you absolutely could. Or you can say, hey, look, I want you to draft an email coming from my desk to everybody with what they said they're going to do what they own and what's due by Friday.
- [40:22]
Michael Stelzner
Ah, I could put that in a sonic task too.
- [40:25]
Jeff J. Hunter
Exactly.
- [40:25]
Michael Stelzner
I love it.
- [40:26]
Jeff J. Hunter
And then on Friday, guess what you do follow up, you have a call.
- [40:29]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
- [40:29]
Jeff J. Hunter
And you do a check in and you can tell your project coordinator, hey, today is Friday. I'm having a call with my team. Or even better, hey, today's Wednesday. I want to make sure the status of my people are getting their project done. Can you write me an email to make sure that they're on track? Boom. Send that out on Wednesday. It'll say, hey guys, just checking in on this. If you guys have any questions, like it'll put it together. And then on Friday you can actually ask it. Okay, cool. Now how should I address this on the call today? Because today's the due date. How should I do that? How do you even Lead that call as a leader, how do you even get that? Like okay, how did everybody do on their things on Friday? Right. And then that call's recorded. You send the transcript on Friday and say, what do we do here? What do we do now?
- [41:13]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, let's talk about also how you're using AI assistance to help you with the hiring side of things. Because I think that's another great example that we were prepping for.
- [41:21]
Jeff J. Hunter
Yeah. So at this point, AI aptitude is highly, highly ranked on my list of things. Like we have three core principles, our core values at my companies. Number one is adaptability. How good are you at figuring stuff out? Right, yeah. Number two is work ethic. It's non compromisable. Do you show up, do you put in the work? Number three is do you actually care? We call it give a damn. Right. Do you actually care? Because if nobody cares, the others don't matter. Under the adaptability is where I would rank AI. Because their AI aptitude, their ability to figure things out with AI is really important. Remember when the old phrase was Google it? Yeah, right, sure. That's completely replaced. Can you get AI to do something for you? Now it's more than just finding information now it's like, can we actually get AI to do stuff? So before we even get to an interview, we have a screening process now to where all of our people have to take an AI aptitude test. We actually give them two assignments to do. One is creating some social media content, the other one is doing some research and we give them. And of course that is all free to do in chat GPT. Right. So there's no excuse. We give them very limited instructions, we ask them what we want them to do, we give them very limited instructions and then we give them the link to ChatGPT to figure it out. And then we ask them to email us. Well, technically they paste in their application, they paste the results and they paste the link to the ChatGPT so we can see their reasoning, we can see what they type in to find out if they are actually able to figure things out. And I'll tell you, that tells you a lot about somebody.
- [43:00]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, that's the most important part, asking for the link. Because if they just did it in one prompt and they got it done in 60 seconds, you know, they're not really, actually they don't really understand what they're doing, but if they kept working with it and the thread has got a lot of iterations and that's going to show you that they understand it A little bit. Right. So what are you looking for when you're looking at those links? Just out of curiosity.
- [43:22]
Jeff J. Hunter
So we are not so worried about how good the result is. What we are looking for is do they have the capacity and aptitude to look at it and try to figure it out. Right. Because we know the people that apply for us are not social media copywriters, they're not blog writers and stuff. Right. Our whole model now at VA Staffer, that's the company, by the way, is it's a virtual assistant company. But we're moving away from virtual assistants right now. We're moving into AI virtual assistants.
- [43:58]
Michael Stelzner
So AI staffer.
- [44:00]
Jeff J. Hunter
Yeah, it's ironically, it's still VA staffer. Right. It's just instead of a human va, it's AI. But here's the thing. We're training the workforce of the future. We're training people that can actually operate these AI tools for our clients. That's what we're doing. Right. So it's important for us to see if they have the know how or at least the ability to figure out how to try to get a result. So, for example, we give them some social media posts to mimic and we see if they figure out how to get AI to imitate it. We're just trying to see what their thinking process is. It does take a little bit more time to review the applications. It's a manual process because we want to look and see what the results are from ChatGPT. Right. But I will tell you, it screens a lot of people out that just wouldn't even have a clue. Right. So I think right now, if you don't have some sort of an AI aptitude test on your screening, you're doing yourself a disservice. Because I think that that's going to be one of the most, if not the most important skill of any team member moving forward is can they figure out how to use AI to do their job better?
- [45:05]
Michael Stelzner
We started today with identifying a point person inside the company who is able to utilize AI and perhaps start with the skeptic to win them over. And then what we started to do was we talked about our ideas, some of the challenges that you're going to face, Right. Getting your staff on board with AI. And we, we spent a lot of time on that. But where I got excited is really when we started talking about everyone having their own AI assistant. And we went through these couple of examples. In your case the copywriter, in my case the maybe project assistant. And then what we did was we got into some of these goals, right? Where like, hey, you should challenge your staff to use AI and then follow up with them at the end of the week. And by the way, you can have your AI help out with this. And then the last part of this is like, hey, when you're starting to staff real people, because you're still going to need humans. We need to have a sense that they actually understand how to use these tools. And I love the idea of, hey, here is a high performing social post and we want you to go to ChatGPT and we want you to create something that's comparable to this. Is that essentially what the instruction set that you're giving them?
- [46:12]
Jeff J. Hunter
Yeah, we, we specifically say, hey, we want you to write content about whatever topic it is and here's some sample content from somewhere else that's not on the same topic.
- [46:21]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, and you want to see whether they're smart enough to paste it in there and train the thing to model it. That's really what you're looking for right now.
- [46:27]
Jeff J. Hunter
You got it, Jeff.
- [46:30]
Michael Stelzner
Jay Hunter, we have just scratched the surface of what's in that brain of yours. If people want to connect with you, what's your preferred social and if they want to learn more about your business, where do you want to send them?
- [46:38]
Jeff J. Hunter
You bet. Just my website is jeff j.hunter.com we actually are launching a brand new newsletter called the Tip AI. I'm really excited about it. We have the world's largest AI community. It's just called AI artificial intelligence. We have 3.4 million people. So if you go on Facebook and you type in AI and you see the group that's got 3.4 million people, that's us.
- [47:00]
Michael Stelzner
Awesome. Jeff, thank you again for coming on the show today.
- [47:03]
Jeff J. Hunter
Thank you.
- [47:04]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@social mediaexaminer.com a45. Hey, if you've been a long time listener, would you give us a review on whatever platform you're listening on and would you let your friends know about this show? It's super awesome when I get tagged on the various social platforms that you love the show and I definitely will respond back. Do check out our other shows, the Social Media Marketing podcast and the Social Media Marketing talk show. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful.
- [47:43]
Jeff J. Hunter
The AI Explored podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.
- [47:51]
Michael Stelzner
Are you ready to transform Your Marketing with AI at Social Media Marketing World 2025? Our exclusive AI ticket gives you access to cutting edge tools, proven workflows and strategies that drive real business results. Join industry experts like Matt Wolf and Chris Penn this March in San Diego. Visit social mediaexaminer.com Aicon to secure your AI ticket. Today, the future of marketing is waiting for.