Listener Questions — Where to Start With AI, Whether to Pay for It, and How to Keep Your Voice

Transcript

Kai: This was a text I got over the weekend from a friend. Right. It said, "It makes me laugh sometimes how AI can be both the smartest and dumbest thing at the same time. It's like the insanely high IQ person that can solve a quantum physics equation but can't tie his shoes."

Tim: That's well said.

Kai: There. Yeah. There you go. That is a former guest, uh, Mr. Blake Martin.

Narrator: This is AI With Kai, practical AI for real business leaders. We break down what matters, talk with people using AI in real businesses, and share one idea you can use right away

Kai: Welcome back to AI with Kai. I am Kai Gray, your host. I'm coming to you from Fairhope, Alabama, along with producer extraordinaire Tim Scott. Hey, Kai. Hey, man. How are you?

Tim: I'm doing good.

Kai: Good. Well, it is another great day to talk about AI, and today we got a great one for you this week, 'cause we're gonna do something a little bit differently. We are going to open up the mail bag and answer some questions that have come in. Uh, so I'm excited about this.

Tim: Yeah. Hey, Kai, I just wanted to let you know that, um, I tried one of the playbooks- Oh, cool ... that you talked about in, in one of the earlier episodes. I was working on a pitch deck last week for a possible new client that, that, uh, I hope I'll be doing a podcast with. I remembered you talked about using Claude to build a pitch deck. So I had, um, all of my information, my numbers and everything that they wanted. You know, what I found really useful was I actually built all that in ChatGPT, and how I wanted to word everything. I just fou- find that ChatGPT does that part of it better, and then I just paste that information into Claude.

Kai: Mm-hmm.

Tim: I just literally said, "Build me a pitch deck," and two minutes later it was like, boom, the most amazing looking-

Kai's glasses: Battery 100% ...

Tim: professional... What was that? Did you hear that?

Kai: My glasses.

Tim: Oh. I was like, wait a minute. Where'd that come from?

Kai: My glasses are joining the podcast.

Tim: Are you, are you videoing me?

Kai: I'm gonna, in a second.

Tim: All right. Yeah, get my good side. So just a couple minutes later, had an amazing pitch deck. Made a few tweaks. Yeah. I mean, it just looks so much better than anything I could've designed in, in a PDF and, and everything. You

Kai: know, y- and you gotta think for the person that's looking at it too. They have to be much happier with that-

Tim: Mm-hmm

Kai: than if they're looking at the kind of garbage that we make- Yeah ... by hand.

Tim: Yeah.

Kai: So at least it looks pretty. It like it, you know, it flows nicely, those types of things. Um, now the, the next step, and I think we talked about this, is turn that into a webpage.

Tim: Okay.

Kai: Right? Because, um, if you, if you m- have it turn that deck into a webpage, n- it, it will look slick, and one thing about the web that, that slides can't get is sort of a lot of animation or nice transitions and things like that. Um, whereas you can do all that stuff in a webpage, and it comes out really, really well. That's what like all, all of the Lower Alabama AI presentations are all websites. Which is very nice, because I can just forward a link to someone, and it's the entire presentation. They don't have to download anything. N- no- nothing like that. Mm-hmm. So that works very well. Yeah. Well, cool. I'm, I'm psyched you, uh, put in action one of the playbook things. One thing, kind of staying on the playbook, um, that I want to talk to folks about that I did this week for myself, and I wanted to pass this along because it came out, uh... It, it was very eye-opening for me, which was- I wanted to see how My website was incorporated into AI answers, and if it was being incorporated i- into AI answers. And so what I did is I went to ChatGPT, um, because I, I use ChatGPT less than I use Claude, so it knows a little bit less about me, and I wanted this to come from a sort of a, a, a non-biased opinion. But I went to ChatGPT, and I asked it for a review of all of the companies that provide a similar service to myself in, in this area, in this region. And then I asked it, and this is the most important part, I asked it to tell me what sources it, it based its information on. And so ChatGPT gave me this very, uh, a, a very good and, and fairly exhaustive list of all of the... what amounted to, to be my competitors. Um, my company was included in those, but what was fascinating is it, it listed me for things that I don't do. Um, and even more interesting was where it got its information from. So for instance, for, for me, it used a directory called Built In Houston, which I would never in a million years think to actually, like go look at. But sure enough, there's a profile there, and I needed to go and update that profile. Um, and so if you're a business owner, I highly recommend going into ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or Gemini or what- whatever you use, and ask it not about your company, but ask it to list all of the, the companies in a s- or in a similar space to yours, and then tell... ask it to tell you where it found that information. Because that sent me down a rabbit hole of m- m- going through and, and making sure all of the sources of information were correct. It also led me to add some very distinct web pages to my current site m- because it was able to tell me, "Hey, this other site ranked higher than you because it said these things on its website." It's very concrete. So if you're a business owner, I highly recommend doing that. It, it, it's, it's free. You'll get a sense of, of kind of how your services or your website, your company is being integrated into AI, and that's where everyone's going for information now. So you wanna make sure you, you rank in there.

Tim: That's a very useful tip there.

Kai: Now, like I said at the top, we're doing something new today, and I'm really excited about this. We've been wanting to do this for a while, and that is to answer email-

Tim: Let me reach into the mailbag.

Kai: Listen, Tim has a makeshift mailbag that he's reaching into right now

Tim: Listen, i-if you want to send us an email and ask a question, you can reach us at hello@aiwithkai.com. And maybe he will answer your question on an upcoming episode. I

Kai: feel like this makes me sound like Santa. Like Santa. Um-

Tim: Yeah. Or you could just ask him at the local coffee shop when you run into him. Yes. Let's get started with some of these questions, Kai. Cool. Um, first one from Dothan, Alabama. She says, "Everybody keeps telling me I need to use AI, but honestly, where do I even start? There are a thousand tools, and I don't have time to learn them all."

Kai: The question is really: where do I start? Um, and I think everyone at this point has used AI, even if they don't understand it. If, if you're doing a Google search, you're, you're, you're getting back an AI answer. Um, so m- my guess is that this person's already used AI, but they're not using it for their business. And where does someone start? Someone just starts with p-picking one platform. Uh, use ChatGPT or Claude. Uh, it doesn't really matter. Those are the two sort of frontier models, quote, unquote. Um, they have the most, uh, well-developed applications. Pick one of those and just start incorporating into your workflow. And, and by that, what I mean is that anytime you think about Googling something Think about putting it into AI first, right? So, so incorporating AI into your workflow means going to AI first, um, having it try to help you from the starting point, not after the fact. So a lot of people will try to think through everything and then turn to AI. My suggestion is put that at the top, and so if you're interested in something, you, you turn to AI first, and you use it as a conversational partner, right? And say, "Hey, I'm, I'm thinking about doing this. What, what do you think of that?" Um, really the next step, and we talk a lot about this on the show, is this idea of making projects. Um, but I, I think if you're just getting started, if you're brand new to it, find the app that you like, that you're comfortable with, and just start using it.

Tim: All right, this one's from a listener in Hattiesburg, Mississippi: "Are the free versions of ChatGPT good enough, or am I gonna have to start paying for all this?"

Kai: You're going to have to start paying for this. The free versions are fine for experimenting, especially if you're trying to get a sense of which one to use, but there's some very big distinctions between the free and the paid versions, especially when it comes to business. If you're using this for business, the pro and enterprise versions come with a data protection agreement built in, so there's a, um, explicit privacy and data sensitivity component to the, to the, the paid versions that you do not get with the free version. So if you're at all worried about data security, you must use the, the paid versions. And quite honestly, I understand $20 is, you know, real money, but when you think about the value that you get, that $20 a month probably couldn't be better spent in any other thing you're doing in your business.

Tim: If you stop spending your $20 a month, uh, do they release all your information? W-

Kai: w- welcome to the AI hostage situation. Um, no, luckily they don't.

Tim: All right, Kai, next question in the email bag. "Every time I use AI to write something, it comes out sounding generic and nothing like me. What am I doing wrong?" I, I might be able to answer this one.

Kai: Oh, yeah. You, go for this. I wanna hear

Tim: this. So tell AI not to sound generic and to sound like me.

Kai: Yes. I think that's correct.

Tim: You can expand on this.

Kai: Yes. So the way AI is trained is, is on sort of the, the full body of all text that's ever been published, right? So, so it's going to sound generic almost by, by design, right? Because it's taking the average of everything that's been written. Um, and so that's why you see things like em- emojis, and you see em dashes, the double hyphens, and you see a lot of sort of stylistic things that people can now pick out as being m- sort of AI written, which i- is, you know, now referred to as AI slop, and you definitely wanna stay out of that. Um, and it's probably not how you write individually, right? Everyone has their own style, and what I would suggest is developing a voice guide. Uh, and, and that means going through all of, all of the things that you've actually written. So whether it's your emails or d- previous documents or slide desk, decks. Take all of that information, put that into AI, and say, "I would like to create a voice guide so that- Um, the output going forward will sound more like me. And so if you let, uh, AI analyze everything that you've written, uh, it, it can develop that. And what's very important is that you continually update that voice guide, right? Because you'll find when, when AI does something that you don't like, what you need to do is, is correct it. Think of it as, you know, m- training a dog, um, that if there's behavior that you don't like, you, you correct that behavior and you reinforce it. Uh, you reinforce good behavior, and in this case you say, "Hey, you know, I never say these types of words." Um, you know, I, I never say... R- right now a lot of AI says things like, you know, uh, "Let's sit with that for a moment," right? Or, you know, um, "Let me look at the shape of that." These are things that I don't think I've ever uttered in my life, um, but they, they show up a lot in AI. So that's the kind of thing that I will instruct AI to, to remove because I never speak like that. So create a voice guide on- based on all of your past writings, have it analyze that, create a document, and then f- called your voice guide document, and upload it back into AI and say, "This is how I want all future output to look like."

Tim: And if you're too lazy to do all that, you could do what I do, which is, um, I'll just have AI create my email for me, and then obviously it will sound like AI.

Kai: Mm-hmm.

Tim: So what I do is just hit, tap the microphone button, and then I kind of paraphrase the email like I would, I would be speaking it to somebody, and kind of tweak it along the way, 'cause that's how I would say it.

Kai: So you have AI create, create a draft email for you.

Tim: Mm-hmm.

Kai: And then do you rewrite the email?

Tim: Yeah. I'll just, I'll just spit them out really quickly and be like, "Write me an email to this person, and here's what I wanna say." Yep. Just getting it out there.

Kai: Yep.

Tim: And then it'll put out a perfect email with everything, right? And I'm like, "Oh yeah, I didn't think about saying it that way."

Kai: Yeah, yeah.

Tim: That's a good point. "But here's how I would say it."

Kai: Right.

Tim: What you suggested.

Kai: Right.

Tim: The second time it spits it out, it's way closer. Right, right. And I might tweak a few things and boom. Yeah. Like that. I, I find I have good results like that.

Kai: Yeah. I think that that's great. It's funny because I have not found AI to do a good job writing emails for me, and I think a lot of it is because my emails are so They're so casual actually. Like a lot of my-- Y- y- you know, even with, with, with clients, there's very f- there's very little, you know, "Dear so and so," and, you know, paragraph one and paragraph two. It's sort of like, you know, "On it, got this," you know, "Whatever, whatever it is, um, I'll get back to you in a little bit," that sort of thing. And when AI tries to write my emails, it, it creates these very, like, formal documents almost. Yeah. Even if I say like, "Hey, you know, this is to a friend," or, "This is casual," it'll still be like, "Dear Tim-"

Tim: Yeah.

Kai: hope this finds you well," sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim: All right, Kai, next question. This listener writes, "I'm worried my customers will be able to tell I'm using AI, and it'll make my business feel fake. Is that a real concern?"

Kai: That is a great question, and it is absolutely a real concern. In fact, um, just this week I saw a bit of a dust-up on social media about a company that had clearly used AI to, to write their social media post and was getting called out on it publicly as AI slop, which I think is probably slightly hypocritical on a lot of people's parts who, who definitely use AI. Um, but m- my take on this, and this is something that, that we also think about here at the podcast as, as well as other ventures, is, um, you know, my personal take is, is y- you can have corporate speak, you can have authentic speak, you cannot have AI speak. Um, and so you can be, you know, very sort of marketing heavy, lot of buzzwords, that's fine. You can, you can be sort of very personable. That's fine. The minute it crosses over into AI is when you run into trouble. So you can either lean into it like we do at the podcast. In fact, you'll see on, um, our LinkedIn channel that our posts are written by an AI agent named Morgan, and Morgan identifies itself, and we lean into that, right? We're, we're trying to experiment with AI agents, um, and we want people to know that it was AI generated. Um, or-

Tim: Of course it is easier when you have an AI podcast.

Kai: 100%. Yeah. 'Cause it's on brand.

Tim: Yeah.

Kai: Right? So I, I would say if you're, you know, i- i- if you're a real estate agent or you're a bakery or whatnot, um, you know, you may not want to lean into it, although it could be interesting. Um, but w- w- w- the other angle is just to really sort of develop that voice guide for your business that's, that is very authentic to you, um, and uses your words. So if you do use AI to help draft those, and I say help draft those because in this case you probably don't want AI to, to automate that for you, um, y- you, you want it really to sound like something you would say, and I think y- that you become the litmus test for that as the business owner saying, "Hey, would I actually say this ever?" Like, d- would these words come out of my mouth? And if the answer is no, then m- then you may want to rethink that. So I think it's a big problem for a lot of businesses. The reality is that AI offers all of us this opportunity to scale our businesses, to be more productive, to do all of these things. And a lot of companies are embracing that and seeing real results. I think that just like with every new technology, there's a certain amount of backlash that comes along with it. And so we just have to be, I would say, hyper aware of that and make sure that when we do run into that, that we are transparent about this. I think the one thing that people hate is the feeling of being tricked. And we talk a lot about this with folks about AI voice, particularly like AI receptionists, where people want to create lifelike AI receptionists for their business. And my advice to those people is always be very careful with that because People, people get really angry when they feel they've been tricked. So if someone's been talking to an AI agent for a minute and then, and then all of a sudden realizes that it's AI, they're gonna get really, really angry. Um, as opposed to just being upfront with people and saying, "Hey, I'm, I'm... You know, this business is AI agent. How can I help you? Um, and you know, as an AI agent, I can do this much faster." You know, there's a, there's a value to you, the customer, because, because of AI, not as a cost-cutting measure or something like that. So, um, you know, I, I think you, you want to really strive to be as authentic as possible, um, and, and build your AI tools to... You know, it sounds weird to say, make your artificial intelligence be authentic, but there is a balance there that you can achieve.

Tim: Yeah. I mean, I don't think anybody's gonna be mad at you for being honest-

Kai: Right ...

Tim: or upset,

Kai: right? That's right. That's right. Even if I read y- like a cookie shop just opened in downtown Pharaoh, which, uh, a shameless plug for the cookie shop, not a sponsor, but a delicious cookie. You know, i- if they c- if they came out and said, "Hey, folks, um, you know, we're using AI to do this and this and this, right, with our social media, um, platform," I'd be very interested in that. And yeah, I'm wildly biased in th- that respect, but I wouldn't hold it against them.

Tim: No. And I, I, I would take it a step further and say, "We're doing, uh-- We're, we're gonna start using AI for some of our marketing and social media so that we can spend more time- That's right ... perfecting the cookie."

Kai: There you go.

Tim: You know? That's

Kai: it.

Tim: And we can keep our costs down- Right ... on the cookie.

Kai: That's right.

Tim: You know, because we're not having to pay more people for marketing.

Kai: The reality is that companies hire marketing agencies to write all of their social media campaigns anyway, right? So y- you can't tell me that that's, uh, that's more authentic than having AI do it. That's a good point. It's just, it's just you're having another person do it.

Tim: Yeah.

Kai: That's

Tim: it. That's a good point. And to kind of go back to your point about being, uh, tricked Or hoodwinked.

Kai: Yeah,

Tim: that's-

Kai: Like- That's

Tim: exactly it ... hey, you know, what really irritates me, uh, is, like, when I call a, call a business and they clearly have an AI agent talking to me, and they put that little keyboard sound in the background.

Kai: Oh, yeah.

Tim: You know, that.

Kai: Yeah.

Tim: The only purpose that serves is to try to fool me like you're typing.

Kai: I, yes.

Tim: But I know you, nobody types that fast. Yes.

Kai: Yeah. I, I think it'd be more realistic if they put, like, uh, screaming kids in the background or something like that. That's a good point, yeah. And every, every once in a while the AI would be like, "Hey, I'm, I'm sorry, can you hold on one sec? Shut up back there."

Tim: Yeah.

Kai: That would be perfect.

Tim: Yeah, it's like that would be more believable. Yeah. They're working from home.

Kai: Yeah, ex- Yeah. I mean, that, that exact thing has happened m- maybe n- not as abrupt as that- Yeah ... but that, you know. I can hear kids in the background. I hear someone be, "I am so sorry," like, "I'm working from home"- Yeah type thing. That's a wrap for this week's episode. Thanks for listening and thanks for your support. If you know another business owner who's trying to figure out AI, send them this episode. Be sure to check out our YouTube channel. Not only do we have shorts on there, but we are offering up a free guide of tips and tricks you can use. Uh, it's free to download. Have a, have a look. Thanks for listening, and remember, with AI, today is the worst it's ever gonna be.

Tim: And no, AI did not write that outro.

Narrator: For more episodes, practical tools, and business insights, visit aiwithkai.com. Follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and share it with someone building a business on the Gulf Coast.