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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Boss Bay podcast. Now, if you remember, when I said I was restarting this podcast, I wanted to do things a little bit differently. I wanted to bring you into conversations that usually happen behind closed doors or behind a paywall. I wanted you to take away something incredibly tactical from every single episode. Now, what's really interesting is right now, between the next nine to 12 months, there's a really amazing window for entrepreneurs to learn how to drive revenue through ads using AI. There's a really, really big opportunity and so I wanted to bring someone on the podcast that could speak directly to that. And my guest today spent years inside the machine before she even built her own thing. So Brooke Shelton worked at Meta first writing and enforcing the global ad policies that governed billions in ad delivery, then training the AI systems that reviewed those ads, then advising high growth companies on how to actually scale their spend. So she has seen the platform from the inside in a way that almost no founder ever gets to. And in this episode she goes into a lot of detail on what opportunity is available for founders now. And for those of you who are really interested in advanced AI, in really taking your business to the next level and using AI, she breaks down exactly what the opportunity looks like, what is working on ads right now and for the next year, as well as all the different parts of AI and, and terminology that you might be hearing, but you're not necessarily used to executing. She also gives a very tactical masterclass at the end for those of you that want to dive in and actually start building an agent that can execute on your behalf. It really is such a masterclass. I think it's going to be the kind of episode that listen to more than once because there was so much gold in there. What's also really cool is Brooke and I are partnering together on a hackathon in New York where we are going to be bringing together a group of founders and actually building for you AI agents. So we're going to show you exactly what it looks like to build agents in your business that go and execute on your behalf. So you will leave that day in New York with your own AI marketing team, as well as some really cool resources for running your business online. It is unheard of in our space, this kind of hackathon and I wanted to do it because, as you know, I am launching a book, Please go and purchase the Freedom Based Business Method, if you haven't already. And I wanted to do it in a different way. I'm doing a few really fun events actually. So this one With Brooke, I wanted to take a lot of concepts that are inside of the book and actually help you implement them in a day using AI. That felt like a really fun way to launch the book. So we're doing it the day after the book comes out, June 10th in New York. If you're interested, I'm going to put the links in the show notes below. And if you can't make that and you still want to come hang out with me in person and celebrate the book launch, I'm also doing two other really cool things on July, on June 12, sorry, I'm going to be partnering with Jamie Kern Lima, the the founder of IT Cosmetics, who exited to l' Oreal for over a billion dollars. We are going to be getting together at the most iconic bookstore godmothers. I mean, the women that have sat in these chairs, Oprah, Gwyneth Paltrow, Emma Greed. I mean women that I'm so inspired by. This bookstore in Montecito is the most iconic bookstore. The energy is so alive. We're going to be sitting together and having a conversation around building business. And then I'm going to get a chance to meet you all and sign books. So seats are almost sold out for this event. I know that they will sell out. So if you're interested, I'll also put the link for that below. And then the day after in Orange County. So it's very worth the trip to come to both the day after in Orange County. I'm actually going to be hosting event with Lori Harder and a few other powerhouse entrepreneurial women. And we're going to deep dive into a live podcast recording where we're asking these powerhouses, if you were to build a business to a million dollars in the next 12 months, knowing what you have built, how would you do it? And I want you to walk away with really practical tactical steps as well as hopefully some new amazing friends. This is going to be such a fun way to launch the book. I knew that I wanted to do it with community involved. I knew I wanted to see as many of you in person as I possibly could. So all of the links for those events are below. I can't wait. I'm really excited. I would love to see you at any one of them. And with that, I let's dive into this episode that I know is going to absolutely blow your mind. Farooq, welcome to the podcast. Thank you.
- [04:54]
B
I am so excited to be here.
- [04:56]
A
We were just bonding about mom life. So your little girl Millie, how old is she now?
- [05:01]
B
She is almost A week away from being six months. I cannot believe it.
- [05:07]
A
It's crazy. And you were sharing too. You don't have support yet at home, so you're juggling it all. How are you feeling? How is it honestly all going? Because mom to mom, we're in the trenches over here.
- [05:19]
B
Yes, the trenches are shared, that's for sure. I would say, you know, we were just joking. It's, it's very frenetic. I could definitely use a nap. My caffeine consumption. I think I'm. I should be an affiliate for some coffee grounds these days because my goodness, do we crank through it. But, but again, looking back, I know that once we have a nap in a cinematic way, in a way, you know, this will be what we look back to when we're 90 years old about the beautiful chaos.
- [05:52]
A
I, I am in awe. Every time I see a mum doing that juggle, I just, I'm bowing down because you really do see what goes on behind the scenes. But I'm so grateful that you're sharing your wisdom with us today. There's so much that I want to dive into, but where I want to start, you, my husband, have in common, are both Meta alumni. And I would love to hear a little bit about your career in corporate before transitioning to entrepreneurship. What did that look like and what did you do?
- [06:23]
B
Sure. So before, before it all started about two years ago, I. There was a hybrid of roles. So number one, I was working to train to helped train Meta's internal ads AI enforcement models. So really looking at the crafting of the policies as well as the enforcement in the AI that actually governs what's prohibited and what's permitted on the platform. I absolutely loved it. And then ultimately transitioned over to the sales side where we were advising it's consultative sales. So we were advising renowned health and wellness advisors, or excuse me, advertisers on how best to deploy, you know, tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars annually on Meta, driving billions in revenue through Meta ads. And so I loved the ads and AI consult component but as you can imagine, was working with absolute behemoths, the biggest in their industry, with armies of folks. And so that marginal return was fascinating. But toward the end of my career there I ended up found, helping found their venture capital ads incubator for a lot smaller long tail advertisers. And that's when I realized really how much I loved that scrappy, resourceful, zero to one phase where income, each marginal decision has such inordinate impact on the outcome. I thought wow. Either I need to go do this and. Or I need to go work with folks in this more nascent stage in business. So that's when I left.
- [07:51]
A
It's incredible. And so before Meta, were you working anywhere else or did you jump into Meta straight from college?
- [07:58]
B
Hmm. So I was working at Boston Consulting Group and working. It's. It's a large scale management consulting firm, so we did a. A myriad of things. It was management consulting across private equity, so due diligence for acquisitions. Large scale. They called it digital transformations, but what does that really mean? But it was the true heyday of management consulting, which I'm finding AI is supplanting or at least very much changing these days.
- [08:28]
A
And it makes so much sense, the lens you bring to business now because of your experience there. So it all adds up and it makes total sense. So you decided a couple of years ago to, to leave corporate and start your own business before we even get into what you're doing. How did you come to that decision? Because I know from Steven's experience that is a really hard decision to make. They make it so comfortable. How did you come to that decision and how did you feel about it?
- [08:59]
B
They do, and I'm so grateful for that. I know since my departure it's been, you know, there's headlines right now about Meta continuing to advance in AI. And unfortunately, the downside of that for the human task force is there are a lot of layoffs that was less so or in its very early stages when I decided that. So my real decision making process came down to again, wanting to see that more resourceful, scrappy, startup side of the house. And I have to say, you and boss Babe inspired a lot of that. I was so I felt like if I didn't at least attempt to go out on my own, it would have been one of those very formative chapters. But to your point about push and pull factors, Meta was and is excellent. And they had just very candidly, a wonderful fertility program. They had a wonderful, really just care across a lot of different benefits. And that was very challenging to leave. And sometimes, you know, when we're going through some medical treatment and, you know, with postpartum, it's definitely tempting, I'll say. I have to have the discipline. It's tempting to look over my shoulder and think, wow, eight or so months of maternity leave versus eight days would have. Would have been useful. But on the whole, I would never regret my decision because I'm so grateful for the experiences that have shaped it. And it would never have been able to occur at a different point in my life.
- [10:45]
A
I love that so much and I really appreciate your honesty there because I also had a lot of friends in tech who've left to start their own businesses and actually went back as soon as they knew they were going to start a family because of that paid maternity leave and those benefits. So to spend, stick it out, to build your own thing, when you always know that's on the table, I just think is incredible because you know what you're building towards, you know that future, you know exactly what your vision is. Which, speaking of that, you have such an interesting knowledge, knowledge set with meta ads plus AI. I don't think anyone else has the experience you have in both of those things, and you bring such a unique lens to it. So I first want to start there by asking, why do you think, especially female founders really have to start leaning into both of these things together? And, you know, for the newbie on here, what does it even mean to lean into those two things together?
- [11:44]
B
Yeah, you know, you see, you see AI, you see ads. At least I have yet to see the AI ads component, but I'm such a proponent for it. So to me, they're very individually powerful, but together are kind of a compounding loop. So what I mean by that is ads I see as the demand driver. So you have, I always say organic builds brand, but ads build bank. Right? So you post once, and you are the queen of organic. My goodness, what a warm, highly engaged audience. But you post once and the machines can carry your message to precisely your buyer, and in the very moment that she's shown the data that she's most receptive to buy. So you're choosing your audience and you're not waiting for them to necessarily choose you, which I think is a very important leverage piece. And so your followers, at least for my case, aren't always my buyers. And then conversely, my buyers aren't always my followers, at least in the moment. So when I post organically, you know, you're posting to one placement, but when you run an ad, it's one piece of content, and then it's Dynamically delivered to 23 different placements across the platform. Feed stories, reels, Facebook reels, Instagram reels, all in the precise moment. So it's reaching your audience for a longer lifespan to precisely whom you want to target in the precise moment. So to me, there's no better demand generation or acquisition engine than ads. And then on the AI side, you have, I think of it as like a, like A leverage multiplier. So it's going to scale every part of your business without at least necessarily scaling your head count. And so it, to me, it's really, especially with a baby, I have zero team. I just have a bunch of AI agents right now. I have literally zero team except my, I call my two golden retriever support staff. They're not the best employees, but they, they pay their dues. But it allows me to remove myself as the bottleneck entirely. But then if you think about AI and ads together, or even better AI ads, there's a new model on Meta called Lattice and we'll get into it later, but it's essentially a new AI optimization engine that only rewards creative volume and creative diversity. And so because consumer behavior is changing faster than ever and because people get bored or fatigued of the same creative faster than ever, we not only would like to, but we have to have AI generating our copy, our images, our videos, to test different formats to deliver our creative production, our targeting. So everything I believe needs to be underpinned by AI on our end, not just driving Meta's AI as well. Well, and so this next year I'm observing is this arbitrage window. You know, historically we either learned it ourselves very scrappily, or we would outsource to a probably wonderful but very opaque and expensive agency. Not all founders can afford that. And I don't mean afford monetarily, I mean just mindshare effort time. And so there's this nine, maybe, maybe 12 month period of this arbitrage opportunity where Zuckerberg is investing in AI to where everything's going to be commoditized. Meta will generate everything for you. You just push a button and say, I want to spend a hundred dollars. So your competitive advantage is going away. Excuse me, going away. And so my sincere hope for anyone listening is that they can learn to implement the same AI ads tech stack during this year so that they can understand truly how they can use AI before Meta does it all for them.
- [15:41]
A
That's incredible. I had no idea about that 9 to 12 months arbitrage period that we're in right now. So can you say more about that then for the founder who is listening, who maybe hasn't even started running ads yet, they know that they need to. They really want to start bringing in more predictable revenue right now. It's very sporadic, but they feel like their hands are tied because, and I talked about this yesterday, there's this tech overwhelm where they've built it up so big in their head of like I'm not techie, I'm not good enough to do this. I need help, I need support, I need someone else to come do it. For that founder in particular, what would you say that they really need to start doing to tap into this window for the next nine to 12 months.
- [16:25]
B
Hmm. So to me that's a great question. I'd say in two parts. So one is frankly a mindset or paradigm shift to me. So it sounds silly, but you can't quite see it right now cause we're on the computer. But I actually have a little bison so sticker, little bison bumper sticker on my computer and what it symbolizes to me, I kind of touch it every time I'm nervous as a talisman because I say run toward the fear, the fear of the technical is your competitive advantage. So for those who aren't familiar, because I certainly wasn't, bison are the only animal, the only mammal that when they see a storm cloud, they actually run toward it instead of away from it because they know that if they go through it, the storm cloud is going to pass that much more quickly. And so to me, I don't know why I latched onto that so much, but it really helps me understand fear and discomfort as my compass. Now AI is not what I fear, but for someone who might think, oh my goodness, understandably so. This is a wildly steep learning curve. I would say run toward it and we can go into mechanics soon. But open clawed, build what's called a skill, build it messily, build it ugly, build it incompletely and just start toying around. You would be astonished. The 0 to 1 is the waiting and the intimidation factor. But then it's oh, you just say I don't know or help me or you know, explain to me step by step. And then it is infinitely patient, thank goodness. And then that iteration loop is more invaluable than any single AI tool. Learning how to engage with it supersedes the executioner, the tool itself.
- [18:16]
A
That is the best advice. And that for me was the thing that got me over that overwhelm was just getting in there and saying to Claude, you do that for me? Well, I don't want to. You do it. Explain that to me. What do you mean? And just pushing back to then see what it is capable of. You know, a lot of people will listen to that and I already know they'll say, well I don't even know how to get started with, with building a skill. All you need to do is ask. Ask Claude, stop looking for answers. With everybody else and just open up. Start with Claude, open it up and ask the question. And when you start to see how possible it is and how patient it is, you will then build so much confidence in yourself that you'll stop looking at everyone else for the answers and you'll realize, wait, the answers are right in front of me if I'm willing to ask. So I love that advice. So I want to go this, go through this piece by piece. So, media buying, what are founders getting wrong here and what should they actually be doing and teach me? Because I am someone that has built. You know, I talk about the numbers very openly. You know, we crossed $40 million in revenue and I spent less than $3 million on ads. I don't know what I'm doing with ads. I really don't. I use them every now and then to retarget, but I'm not really using them the way that I could be. And I think that' an opportunity for me this year. So what should we be doing with ads?
- [19:39]
B
Sure. So that's. I'm so, so excited for you. That's incredible in terms of the margin play there. And that's the thing. I'm not saying, you know, hammer nail. Right. I'm not saying that those half everyone has to use ads. It's highly predicated on where you are in business, your business model, your buyer archetype. Are they even on meta or is it better When I say ads, that's of course what I teach, but it doesn't necessarily have to be through meta. So I just want to caveat or preface with that. But there are key best practices that when you're actually running ads, it's. And this is probably going to be the most valuable for folks who have at least seen the ads manager and understand that. But I'd say number one is run only sales or lead campaigns. So what I mean by that is meta is actually optimizing for precise precisely what you ask the kind of the recipe that you're giving it. So try if you think about just a linear funnel, traffic and engagement or even awareness are far too high up the funnel. So you're not actually attracting buyers, you're attracting, dare I say, clickbaity users that aren't going to convert. So it's incorrect or misattributed data. One big one is if I could give you one media takeaway, it's one campaign, one ad set and literally as many ads as you can possibly create. This is a very big misconception. So a lot of People will be tempted to fragment and deliver to multiple audiences because that's, that used to be the best practice. And so it feels as though your hands on keyboard, you're controlling it. But if you have multiple ad sets in a campaign with different creatives and no meaningful reason or rationale as to why you've split, that you're actually, believe it or not, competing with yourself in the ad auction. And so it's really important to consolidate that sense of signal under one roof, on one umbrella, so to speak. So one campaign per offer, one ad set, and then every ad that you can possibly produce inside of it. And then of course, if you have different funnels or offers, then yes, different campaigns. So that's a big misconception for most, but and then I get a lot of questions about Advantage plus. So Advantage plus audiences, a lot of folks think that they need to delete or excuse me, to actually include interests, but I would say delete all of your interests. So instead of, oh, social media marketing, the way in which the ad auction works is it's kind of two towers. It's called a dual or a two tower neural network. So all that to say it's scraping all the data from your ad and it's scraping all the data about your ideal customer, precisely her buying patterns, what she's going to scroll by. And then there's this estimated action rate. We won't go too into it, but basically the algorithms are saying what is going to be the best matchmaking contributor here? And so if you allow Meta to actually ingest that trillions of data, it's going to be infinitely smarter than anything you or I could predict. And so that's why I say Advantage plus audiences and Advantage plus placements. What if you were to remove audience, network or reels as a placement? But that's precisely where your dream buyer and your most affordable buyer is going to be.
- [23:03]
A
Okay, so we'll get into the creative piece. I have so many questions on that. But I'm curious, can AI go in and set these campaigns and ad sets up for you?
- [23:13]
B
Yes, and they do. So I think there's a few component parts here. Kind of my overall MO or thesis is be an S and P investor, not a day trader. So it's so easy to think manually because often I included conflate movement or kind of activity in the account for progress or, or impact. But it's actually these days, set it and forget it. So I like to use AI to think of it as two pillars, content creation and then the actual analytics and management. So AI to create the copy and AI to conduct market research. To be very clear, I mean through my lens, my pov, my ip, like I'm taking all my coaching transcripts and then I'm marrying that with market research. It's not like I'm just saying, oh, what's viral and then putting it in there. So market research aggregation, market research of past. Objection. Handling it actually scrapes all the data of past sales calls. Back when I used to have that model, AI for copywriting, AI for the actual image and video generation, AI for the actual upload into Meta Ads Manager or to just Meta in general using Metricool and then actually Meta AI or Manus for the actual analytics component too. So it becomes this full circuitry feedback loop from creation to analytics and they feed one another and become increasingly sharp at understanding whom you're targeting, when, why and how.
- [24:41]
A
So will you reiterate that what you use Claude and Manus for, how do they differentiate?
- [24:48]
B
Sure. So I like to think of Claude and again I the, the highest ROI skill is to, in my opinion, to really understand the orchestration layer and use the skill. I'm not saying, you know, Claude is the, the, the darling of this month, but it could very well change because it's this continuous arms race of all these companies. But that said, I think of Claude as the brain and then the MCPS are these kind of connectors as arms. So Claude I use for the scripting, the research. Claude code, by the way, not cowork. I use Claude code for the scripting, I use Claude code for the research with plugins into different Internet sources. It takes over my screen and can scrape all the data. And then I have Claud code plus Higgs Field, which is a if for those who aren't familiar, it's an excellent, it's an aggregator. It's not really an AI itself, but it helps you produce best in class images, videos, anything you want. So I connect cloud code there and I have Claude code connect to what's called Metricool, which is a kind of like a HubSpot. It kind of uploads everything and then I can just upload directly to Ads Manager there, the Manus component. Now a little bit of context. Mark Zuckerberg tried to acquire Manus. It got blocked for geopolitical reasons, but it's effectively like an in house solution. And it's so good at understanding Meta's own analytics, Meta's own ads best practices. That's where I would say at least consider it versus Claude code. But everything Else can be Claude code.
- [26:29]
A
Got it. Okay. That makes total sense. I'm gonna imagine people listening are gonna listen three times to that because this is truly such a master class. I love it so much. So then, creative, what are you seeing that's actually working in 2026? Because I've heard you say quite a lot of times you really need to just get as much creative out as possible. And I think that can be very overwhelming for people that are very used to organic, because it's the opposite, really. So what is working and how are we getting that volume out?
- [27:00]
B
A.I. no, just kidding.
- [27:02]
A
But no, I love this.
- [27:04]
B
It's very true, because. So I'll talk more tactically and then again, kind of the philosophical lens. So tactically creative is your bid, nothing else. And so again, historically, there's this big shift around, I'd say 2023. I think the market rhetoric is catching up right now. Where people hear about the word Andromeda or lattice or gem, all these new models that AI is releasing, excuse me, that meta is rele. But what we're observing is historically audience was a lever, right? You, you put in social media marketing, digital marketing. Now it's broad audience, one campaign. Everything's very simple. Creative is your only competitive advantage. So to your question about how do we just produce that much creative, I like to think of it as she who creates not only the most volume but the most creative diversity wins. So specifically format diversity. So what I mean here is think of like a mosaic of sorts. Beautiful, polished, static ads, ugly ads as Hormozi might call them. Like the Hormozi style. He's so good at it. Like, hey, are you a plumber looking to grow your business, Nebraska or something like that? Right? It's so micro specific, but it's just white text on black background. You have carousels, B roll talking head as you as a point of view or an authority shape with, you know, maybe a microphone in a podcast Studio or casual FaceTime UGC testimonials. I'd say those are the key sub pillars, if you will. And if you can, more or less, don't get too beholden to I must have every single piece. But if you can do just a periodic sense check of, oh, okay, I have a good smorgasbord of all of these, then you know that you're at least checking the box, so to speak, of creative diversity. And simply because Andromeda only understands whom you're trying to target if you give it more diversity of shots on goal. I call it what if you were, I was trying to sell to you, Natalie, and you only converted on carousels on Instagram. But all I focused on was my mind share on ugc, testimonials on Facebook. I'll never be able to equip meta with a delivery to actually go catch your attention, much less re harness and convert it.
- [29:22]
A
That's incredible. And so you use AI to then create as much of that as possible in all the different segments. Is that something that you're going to be teaching at the hackathon?
- [29:33]
B
Yes, actually. So that's, that's a core philosophy. So I. I run hackathons and we're going to be running hackathons soon together. I'm very excited. In June. And that is a core tenant or really thesis of it is. So, yes, I use AI. Once we have that kind of matrix, so to speak of are we hitting all these. We have messaging diversity, which is catering to different buyer archetypes, different, you know, points of the products or feature sets, but also that creative diversity. Everything we do is how do we build an AI agent or an AI skill to actually produce imagery, to produce these carousels, to produce these B roll videos or these talking head videos and at scale. So again, if you think about it as like a X and Y axis, on one hand you have the format diversity, and on the other axis you have the messaging diversity. And so the intersection of each of those on a figurative scatter plot is equal to one ad. And so one ad never converts. It's the mosaic that converts together. And we actually build AI agents that not only sense check if you're actually capturing that level of diversity, but also we use AI agents to make sure at scale that you can produce literally hundreds of ads in an hour.
- [30:54]
A
That, to me, sounds like a pipe dream. So is this, Is this legit? Is this real? Can I really do this?
- [31:02]
B
It's believe it or not. What I probably, in some semblance, get asked the most because it's my, my dream is that how do we preserve the humanity of it? So I still like to film, or to be honest, no, I don't, but I. I still film. Yeah.
- [31:21]
A
You still do it, even. Yeah, I got that.
- [31:24]
B
Once I get going, it's good. But I'd say that's the only bottleneck. So can we do it? I genuinely believe yes, but I like to think about it very modularly, and that's not something that's natural to me. I'm a very creative thinker, so I don't actually. It takes a lot of Discipline and rigor to think in systems like that. But I think, okay, what does it take to produce ads at scale? High quality, high ROI ads at scale. And then I just write reverse engineer it. So I think, okay, the copywriting component, what would it need to, what would need to occur, what would need to be true if I were to entirely remove myself or all but entirely remove myself from this factor? Well, I need one AI agent scraping the Internet, scraping all of my coaching transcripts and talking to each other to ensure that they are high, converting 45 second scripts. Okay, now what? Well, now I need to go film it. So now I need another AI agent to take that, copywriting those scripts and literally take over my Chrome browser and plug it into a teleprompter for me that syncs with my phone and then so on and so forth up to the again image the video. So the only blocker intentionally so is my filming schedule. And again there are AI avatars. If you do recommend, if you do want to pursue that, for those listening, I Highly recommend Hey, Gen's Avatar 5. It just launched, launched last week. But I do think there's a humanity that is irreplaceable to filming if you're a personal brand. But yes, going back to it, I'd say think modularly, have an AI agent or multi agent teams just like you would deploy human employees and teams cross departmentally talking to each other and then you have this like cross functional team, right? That's all working in tandem to launch your ads. If you can do that. AI is working for you as you without you 24 7. And so the only bottleneck again besides filming is token usage, which just means how much you're willing to pay to use the AI. And that's very low
- [33:27]
A
and I like the way it's framed. So you know, you can think about the first 10% that's human lived experience and story that your AI is pulling from that 10, your coaching transcripts, what you're doing in the real world, your stories, what you've trained on that 10. Then it does 80% of the work. And then that last 10% is the filming element. To take out that middle 80% is taking out most of the friction. The reason people don't do this is because of that middle 80% because it takes so long to do. That's why I'm so excited about this hackathon, because I feel like it's so much easier to build something like that when you're actually getting coached step by step by step. Click here. Do this. So I love that. I want to go into a bit more AI stuff now. Can you break down how AI actually works? And I really want to know the difference between an assistant, an agent and a gentic AI because we hear these words thrown out all the time, but I, I struggle to really define them.
- [34:31]
B
It's, I would say I'm very guilty. I know many of us are on inter using them interchangeably and it's just one of those things there. Usually folks know what you mean if it's in context, but the more strict definition is an assistant is think of it as like a reactive helper, right? It's waiting for your instructions, like hey, write me an email about this, it's going to respond to you. It doesn't initiate. So what usually comes to mind is ChatGPT or Claude Chat or perplexity, something along those lines. Just the traditional conversational AI or assistance. Then you have an agent. So I liken this to an employee. It's very goal oriented, it is an executor, if that makes sense. It executes the tasks and so it can take multi step actions, although that's not necessarily what defines it. But think of it as like, hey, launch this ad campaign for me, go upload this post for me, go analyze the performance of the this, this and this website and come back to me with core analyses or recommendations. So it's acting, it's not just responding to you. Now the third piece is agent tick. So there's agents and then there's a gen tick I again, everybody has their own little idiosyncratic way of how they describe it, but to me it's a behavior more than it is a tool. So to me, agentic describes how an AI behaves. So it notices the problems and surfaces them proactively. It chains together different tasks, it makes decisions autonomously on your behalf or it can retry failures. So I like to say it just takes it and runs with it. And so every large language model or every model is just probabilistic math. So it's all just math on the back end. It's just simply predicting what word you're going to say next. And then it's built on the actual brain. So think like what anthropic employees actually trained Claude on, plus what you equip it with.
- [36:35]
A
So can you give me an example of what an assistant, an agent or agentic AI might look like in your business?
- [36:42]
B
Yes. So an assistant is a Claude chat window, I would say, or a chat GPT chat window where it's highly trained or even a custom GPT. An agent is a Claude code session that auto triggers every Monday and scrapes all of your emails and surfaces. The top three customer escalations, I would say. And then agentic is just simply how autonomous or the degree of autonomy that it's working, it's less of a thing and more of a behavior.
- [37:17]
A
Got it. So with agentic AI, you would still be using Claude code, but it would be an extra layer on top of that.
- [37:27]
B
Yes. So great question. So to me, for those familiar or have tinkered around in Claude, highly recommend. It's cowork to me is the thinker and then Claude code is kind of the doer. Now that's highly reductive and overly simplistic. But that's just when I think, okay, I need to X, Y, Z, I need to start a new workflow, I need to book a flight, whatever that may be. I personally just go to cloud code, but cloud code is the brain of the operation. And then I think of it as like hands. So there's things called mcps which just think of it as little hands that connect to anything. It's infinitely compatible. And so when you say, okay, hey, I need you to answer all of my customer service emails, here's how I write and when I say, here's how these are skills that I've trained it on in the past of like all my transcripts are signed, but I say, here's how I write, here's the objective at hand, here's the context. Here are what I call negative prompting, like any constraints or don't do these things. And then I give it all that context and then it goes out and actually takes over my screen or is running on the background and actually connects to Google's Gmail and is actually running it all for me or hey, go upload these ads for me, it goes and takes over my screen or does it in the background to Metricool to auto post everything. So it's, it's incredible. I would recommend anybody listening just open the Claude desktop app and go to. So download the desktop app, not web and then just simply go to Cowork and look at the opportunities to customize with different tools that you already use in your business. So Slack, Gmail, Stripe, really anything. And it's incredible what it can do.
- [39:13]
A
So what tools do you reach for in your business and what kind of agents do you have running your business right now? Because I know you talk a lot about the zero team movement and what you've been Able to build without a team is phenomenal. So what is that looking like from an AI perspective?
- [39:30]
B
So I would say I'll just do a quick hitter list if it's helpful. And then, you know, my job is to try all these tools all the time. So I, I play around and my goodness, am I bad at canceling subscriptions. So it racks up the bill sometimes, but I'd say, geez, for copywriting, it is Claude code plus my skills. For image generation, it is the Chat GPT 2.0 model. So you can either use ChatGPT or better yet, just use it within cloud code. And Higsfield for video generation, I use seed dance 2.0, best in class video model, at least for the time being. Again, you'll find that in Higsfield AI Higsfield Supercomputer. It's brand new, it aggregates everything for you so you don't have to have that mental fatigue of which one do I choose? At which time it will discern for you. So I highly recommend that for email management, Claude Code plus Gmail and for uploads, Claude Code plus Metricool. And I would say as kind of a governing philosophy, play with it, Tinker. But then find your tool and don't get too married to any one tool. But also don't get intimidated by this constant arms race of, well, this released or this released, it's very exhausting. And if it's working for your business, just like an employee would, you don't have to make the leap of experimentation just because it launched.
- [41:04]
A
Is there one thing you've built that you're most proud of or that saves you the most time that you just, it's just an absolute weapon in your business.
- [41:17]
B
Ooh, I would say yes. And I mean, I recognize my bias on this. So I'd say within business, the ability to fully automate customer service and customer experience, but maybe not for the reason that one might expect. So part of what we can call it what we want, but the zero team movement or really just not having anybody around me, that's a relatively foreign concept for me. I had an exceptional team last year and I would say in all candor, the biggest challenge for me has been more emotional volatility and emotional management of being so close to things. I don't have a buffer anymore now in terms of just sheer horsepower and, you know, being able to have output, great. But what I was lacking in Q1 of this year is the emotional buffer because I was still supervising the emails to ensure my new products would go so I'd say through that lens, I'm most proud of creating that buffer so that I can still when I'm ready and when I'm regulated, when I'm ready to go, I'll go look through and it will synthesize, it will surface proactively for me. But that was really challenging to see a brand new launch and of course it went incredibly well. I'm very proud. But there's always going to be a hey, my subscription, build me again or whatever, the little nuances. And building that buffer, I think is going to make me an infinitely more strategic, more visionary leader. Just like having a protective team around me would that moat, oh, you always
- [43:04]
A
get this is a scam. I just got charged again. No, you signed up for a subscription, you ticked every box box possible saying this was a subscription. You just probably forgot to cancel. And now you're blaming me because you can't regulate your own system. I get it. What made you take that leap from having a team to no team?
- [43:25]
B
It really, it came down to a few days before, just like broke to wait right before maternity leave. It was truly in the week before mat leave. So this was mid November. And you know, it's easy to look back and say, oh, this was a very rushed decision. It wasn't. It was silent but palpable. And I think one leadership decision or lesson I've understood through this is the compression of time between idea when you know you need to do it and the action sitting on that is lethal. And so I think that was something. Now I have the intuition and even if I don't have the data to back it up, I just do it. So I would say the shift to zero team had very little to do truly with the team members themselves and more to do with hard to admit, but my management style. So I started this, whether I consciously recognize it or not. All of this business, that entrepreneurial drive was to be the creative director, to be in the weeds, to be an IC or individual contributor, to be the coach, to be the product. And I am very okay with that. That, believe it or not, is what freedom based business is for me. I think it's such an intimate definition for each person. It's not monetary for me and I'm lucky for that. It's the freedom of the texture, of making quick decisions and not explaining it, of being chaotic, of lacking the standard operating procedures, of just doing before describing. And that was understandably frenetic. I would change prices, I would change business models and I continue to do that. But Now I actually see that as a very. A rarity and a deep strength because I can move so incredibly fast. And thank goodness AI is infinitely patient with me, infinitely so, and never takes a break. So I'd say what was again, candidly, probably a weakness. Actually, I know it was a deep, profound weakness. I was able to recraft simply because the universe gave me a force function in the form of a gorgeous little baby girl. But I said, I cannot do this. We have to start from first principles and build back up from the ground using AI and me. And thank goodness it's worked. 6x revenue, not to mention the profit margins.
- [46:00]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's true. Having a team slows you down and for some people that's the right move, for others it's not. It is more challenging creatively to have a team because you do have people you need to justify your decisions to, to inform, to write briefs for so that everyone's in the loop. Otherwise, people are working on things that are irrelevant, they get blocked, they're waiting on you. And then you find yourself leading and in meetings and informing versus actually being on the ground creating and executing. So I think that's a very honest response and I think there's probably a lot of people listening who can relate to that and wanting to be in that seat with AI. Particularly if someone listening is a little overwhelmed, but is very inspired and wants to go and get started with their first AI agent today. What would you recommend that they do?
- [46:54]
B
Can I riff for a sec? Yes, you can just pause it and be like, whoa, this is part that might not be good for 2x speed, but I, I truly just want to openly riff because I want to show everybody how I would just, if I had my phone with me, talk to an AI, just to get started. So this is assuming no context or anything. So I. Who knows where this is going to go? But I will preface by saying everything is modularized, you know, and I keep coming back to that pillar, but it's such a, I think, new skill simply because the marketplace hasn't demanded it, except for maybe software developers. So input function or magical thing you want to happen? Output, or better yet, output function, input, working backward to reverse engineer it. So start with your biggest bottleneck. And some lenses that you can think about are like, okay, what do you loathe doing? You're like, oh, I really don't want to do that. When is the work never quite right? When you outsource it? What outsourced line item costs more per month? Like maybe a social media agency or a funnel management agency than a year of like an AI subscription. So think through those lens of revenue opportunities where you want to replace yourself or where you just feel like it's if you could just encode your intellectual property instead of constantly teaching another person those are good starting points of finding and prioritizing your biggest bottleneck. Then step two would be just go to Claude desktop app. Again, not the web, but the desktop app. And I recommend here's kind of a a structured prompt. So first part is the role. I might say something like hey, you're my copywriter. For short form and long form, I want you to write newsletters, upsells sales pages and captions. So you have to put the role Then the second part of the the prompt is context. Again, you're just talking to your phone here I highly recommend whisper flow allows you to talk very quickly. But hey, I'm launching a $5,500 ticket co hosted with Natalie of Boss Babe for June 10th hackathon. My voice always include your voice is academic, elevated, poetic, irreverent. My credentials are meta AI, insider authority, top sales award, billions in revenue. So put your credentialing, put your unique mechanism. So something like, you know, this is what I teach that no one else does or this is why I teach the way I do that no one else can. Put your offer. Put your sound bites. So think like what do you say that if somebody heard it they'd trace it back to you. Put your sound like your grim, believe it or not, your grammatical pieces. So like I have a mix of short punctuated sentences that are very staccato and long winding purposely run on sentences. And then examples always beat descriptors. So instead of describing your writing style literally, go paste in your past, either social media captions, emails, funnels, or your talking transcripts. You have different styles, writing and conversational. And then the last piece is my client. So my client is a, you know, multi six, seven figure female founder, digital marketer. Part three of the the prompt would be your task. So this is where now that you've given it all that incredible richness of data, put in a task. Write me one Instagram caption. The last part is around constraints and examples. So here are all my examples. But your constraints are no banned words. You'll have a skill on that. No EM dashes and put a hook there and then save this. This is the key. Once you have all that context, press go, press the enter button and just see what it comes up with. And then you could say, ask me 10 clarifying questions or identify blockers of where you're stuck. And then you'll begin this interchange with the AI. And it's going to be incredibly powerful to show you what riffing with the AI can do. And I think having each of those aspects, once you lock that in, then say, save this as a slash command skill called like slash brook copywriting, and then you can trigger it. So every time you start a new session, all you have to do is just say, hey, write me an email. But everything thereafter is saved. I always recommend starting with copywriting because people know it and people need it.
- [51:12]
A
So, so good, I'm gonna force you to come back and do part 2, 3, 4, 5 with me because I promise you there's so many more questions I want to ask. But that was an absolute master class and I really hope people clip that and take it back and even play it to your AI and say, okay, we're going to do this together. Prompt me, help me, help me do this. Just for anyone who's listening who is interested in coming to the hackathon, can you give a quick overview of exactly what they're going to walk away with? And I would love if you could cover for the person listening who's thinking, okay, this is actually really out of my comfort zone. I feel like maybe I'm just not smart enough, I'm not techy enough, I'm not filling the blank enough. Can I really do this? Is this gonna be for me? Is it? And what are they gonna walk away with?
- [52:03]
B
Sure. Absolutely. So I'm really excited about this one, I have to say. It's the. The vision behind it was, well, Natalie is obviously launching the best book ever. I'm so excited. Freedom Based Business Method. And to. To us, at least, one of the important facets of it is AI. AI can truly. I was gonna say the word unlock and then I was like, oh, been around AI too much. So I can't say sell, but it can unlock your ability to have freedom in your business for every. All the reasons we just spoke about. So I'd say two things. One, it's June 10th in Manhattan in New York City, in kind of midtown area. We're going to be spending 10 hours immersed in it. And so you're going to be coming with probably experience using the conversational AI, like maybe ChatGPT or Claude. And I know I. I know how this sounds, it's a tall order, but I've run these before. You will be so immersed in it, skill after skill. Agent build after agent build that you will literally leave the day with an entirely automated sales acquisition engine. So there's different parts of that we're going to be building alongside you. So everything I, Natalie and I build, completely done for you as if it's like a, you know, $30,000 agency and then we give it over to you the second you walk in the door at 8am it's here's, you know, six figures of agent work, truly. I mean, that's the market. It's what the market is commanding right now. But the day is spent doing two things. One is actualizing and understanding the infrastructure of how these work, when to use them, when not to use them, how to use them, and for what use case. But then once you build one, you'll start to understand. Oh, okay. There's kind of a method to the madness. So we're going to have your copywriting agent, your market research agent that takes all the customer data and scrapes that together. We're going to have all of your image and video generation. So every post and every ad that you could ever want to run, carousels, videos, images, are all going to be done automatically in your precise brand voice and in your precise brand aesthetic. As you, we're going to learn video editing and it's going to actually edit all of your videos for you. So any part that you need to get new leads or new sales on social media is going to be automated for you and you're going to leave the day with that. And then a bonus is we're going to look at some of the operational side. We're actually going to be building your website and a custom app. So if you're a coach or a consultant or you need client experience, we're actually going to be building your app alongside you in the room. So you'll walk away with an entire marketing and sales acquisition engine, a website funnel, and a client experience app. My, my old client used to joke it was a year in a day and frankly, now I use that as a fun tagline. So that's the power of having an immersion. Now, can you do this? I would, I know how it sounds, but I would actually argue, can you afford not to? Simply because the cost of inaction and the compounding, there's this chasm happening right now, right? It's. The sooner you learn it, the sooner you can equip yourself with the skills. I am very close to this topic. I get to the advanced intricacies a lot. But on the day of the build, we're not going to be doing that. It's only the need to knows. It's only the you all are driving it. It's very much, hey, I have an agency doing this, this, this great. And Nadalie and I and our teams are going to come over hands on keyboard and troubleshoot for you and with you. So if it's a one time fix that you need us for, great, it's out of the way. But if it's something we believe needs to be imbued into your understanding or your team's understanding, we will do that too. So to me, this is a way to future proof and make it enduring, but also give you a year's worth of done for you.
- [56:16]
A
I can't wait. It's going to be incredible. I really, really can't. And to get us both together in a room, you know, you're really going to be able to access so much experience here. You know, if you need help with your messaging and your positioning, I'm going to be coming around making sure that's really tight, helping you tweak your offer while Brooke showing you how to install these agents. It's going to be incredible. I cannot wait. So I'm going to put the link in the show notes for anyone that's interested in joining us. Brooke, thank you so much for this episode. My mind is blown. I cannot wait to go and execute. Where can everyone find you and sign up for all the amazing things that you're doing right now.
- [56:55]
B
Thank you. Very, very honored to be here. Truly. It's a full circle moment. You can find me at Brooke Shelton official on Instagram and atelierai.org A T E L I E R A I.org is my AI and ADS coaching membership.
- [57:12]
A
It amazing. Everyone's going to jump into that and I'll also put the links below in the show notes. Okay. For those of you listening, come and let us know what you want to hear in a part two because it's definitely coming. Brooke, thank you so much. You're a powerhouse. This was an honor to have you here.
- [57:26]
B
Thank you so much, Natalie. And I'll see you on the 10th. I can't wait. Yes.