SHOW TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is automatically generated by Descript.  Any errors or omissions are unintentional.

[00:00:00] Jennifer Bennett: You know, the vast majority of the people, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, ChatGPT knows me so well.” No, it really doesn’t.

[00:00:05] Jeff Sieh: Yeah

[00:00:06] Jennifer Bennett: it is just reading the patterns of what you’re telling it And this is the, the part that a lot of people need to think about is you’ve got to put your core essence into these so that it actually helps you with whatever it is you’re helping it with.

[00:00:22] Jennifer Bennett: We gotta tell it that this is the source of truth. Do not go outside of that source of truth. So remember, we’re training an employee. “Okay, this is cool. We do plumbing.

[00:00:32] Jennifer Bennett: These are the vendors we use.” Okay? well these vendors don’t have it. Okay, they have to order it. Okay, we can’t go to Joe Schmoe over here because their parts are crappy.” So if that’s not in there- Yeah … this is where you have to get into that decision tree of like, this is the source of truth.

[00:00:47] Jennifer Bennett: You don’t search the web for this

[00:00:55] Jeff Sieh: Hello, folks. Welcome to Creator News Live. I’m Jeff Sieh, and you’re not

[00:00:58] Zac Brown: And I’m Zac Brown, and this [00:01:00] is the show that keeps you up to date on what’s happening in the world of the creator economy and so much more

[00:01:05] Jeff Sieh: How much of your week disappears into work that nobody ever sees? The inbox, the scheduling, the follow-ups, the endless repurposing. Have you ever felt like you got into this to create and be creative, and instead you have become your own unpaid admin? And what if AI could actually take that off your plate without making everything you publish sound like everyone else?

[00:01:27] Jeff Sieh: If that sounds familiar, you are in the right place

[00:01:30] Zac Brown: Our guest today is Jennifer Bennett, the founder of getDesky and a fractional chief AI officer who spent over 20 years inside high-volume operations, at one point running the systems behind 1.2 million leads a month. Today, she is showing us how to hand the backend busy work to AI and AI agents, how her human-driven AI integration method works, and how to keep your voice intact while you do it

[00:01:53] Jeff Sieh: So sit back, clear your schedule, clear your mind, and get ready for this week’s episode of Creator [00:02:00] News Live That’s right. We’re gonna talk about how to create what’s right with Jennifer Bennett today. But first, I wanna do a big shout-out to our sponsor, which is Ecamm. Yes, that’s right, Ecamm. You can find out more about them at ecamm.com/jeff. You can use code JEFF15 to save 15% on your first purchase.

[00:02:36] Jeff Sieh: So let’s jump right into this. But I wanted to ask the audience, you guys, before we get started, I want to know how you’re feeling about AI in your business right now.

[00:02:46] Jeff Sieh: Are you– I want you to put it in the, the chat: excited, overwhelmed, or skeptical? So AI in your business: excited, overwhelmed, which I think a lot of us are, or skeptical. Let us know down below from [00:03:00] wherever you’re watching from, and, uh, we would love to know what your thoughts are on this. So Jennifer, you call yourself the executive in the building, not the consultant on the sideline.

[00:03:10] Jeff Sieh: So what does that distinction actually mean for a solopreneur or a small team who cannot afford this whole ops department that they see so many of these big businesses have?

[00:03:20] Jennifer Bennett: Yeah. So the, the biggest distinction for that is, the vast majority of the people, they need somebody that’s in the messy middle, that comes in and is gonna sit with them and figure out exactly what they need versus handing them a guide, handing them a template, you know, creating them a roadmap, all of this different stuff for them to go and do it themselves.

[00:03:41] Jennifer Bennett: Because the vast majority of you guys, you guys are amazing at what you do, but you are not amazing at taking away all of the desk work that comes with building a business, and that’s what I really shine in really, really well

[00:03:57] Jeff Sieh: Awesome

[00:03:57] Zac Brown: Jennifer, your thesis is that AI will [00:04:00] never replace real presence, that the future belongs to founders who train AI on what only they can carry. That is something that I am fascinated by. Unpack that for someone who’s worried that AI is going to make something sound the same as everything else

[00:04:16] Jennifer Bennett: well, it comes down to a few different things. So you have to remember that AI and, and its state that it’s in right now is still a robot. And when you get down to the real heart of that, it’s still programmable logic. So it only determines and reads based off of the logic that it is programmed in. So it doesn’t have the in-depth decision trees, the emotions, all of the different cascades of things that happen inside like the human mind at all times.

[00:04:51] Jennifer Bennett: You know, we can have like multiple different emotions all at one time, and those can drive our decisions [00:05:00] or we can train ourselves to kind of like feel them and then let them go. And that is not something that any sort of AI or any kind of automations can really do. You know, automations can go and say, “Hey, you know, this happens.

[00:05:17] Jennifer Bennett: Okay, then, you know, let’s search all of the rest of this stuff and let’s make the best logical choice.” There’s no, emotion that is in that, and that’s the biggest part. I think I recently put up a post about that as well too, explaining, you know, when people are going through and they’re making hard decisions or they have life that is life-ing, they don’t need someone– they don’t need a robot to tell them what their, what the coping strategies are.

[00:05:46] Jennifer Bennett: A lot of the times what they need is they need somebody that’s just gonna sit with them and allow them to borrow their presence for whatever that is. And that’s, that’s something that AI can’t take away. You can’t take away that [00:06:00] physical presence that only you can give somebody when they’re going through whatever it is they’re going through

[00:06:07] Jeff Sieh: I think that’s a great point because, like, even at the conference we were in a couple weeks ago, like I wouldn’t have asked the AI Jennifer bot if I was, you know, trying to find out about you. I wouldn’t ask her to be on the show. But since we were able to sit down together, experience the conference together , you know, then I was like, “Okay, she would be fun.

[00:06:23] Jeff Sieh: This would be somebody I’d like to introduce to my audience.” That kind of stuff I don’t think AI is ever going to be able to replace because there’s that give and take, there’s that face time, which I, I really, once more, I mean, I love everything that AI can do for me and it’s helped my business, but I really think going out and, and making those connections and ha- going to conferences and all that stuff is still super important, especially for a small business owner or a solopreneur.

[00:06:45] Jeff Sieh: I mean, I just think that’s the way you can take your business to the next level. But speaking of that, of taking to the next level, Jennifer, I mean, you, you managed systems behind, like, 1.2 million leads a month before you built this GetDesky, thing that you, [00:07:00] that you have. So what did running at that scale, ’cause that’s a lot.

[00:07:03] Jeff Sieh: Like, you think about 1.2 million leads, that’s a lot. So what did that teach you about what breaks first when you grow, and how does that apply to a creator going from, like, 5,000 followers to 50,000 followers?

[00:07:16] Jennifer Bennett: Yeah. So in that capacity, I was running an ad agency that mainly targeted real estate agents. and those leads were coming in for brokerages all over the world. and really what breaks first is your undocumented processes. the vast majority of those were for, buyers or sellers, and what, came down to the wire was people didn’t have good follow-up systems.

[00:07:43] Jennifer Bennett: They didn’t set up their, their systems before they even did it. I was– I literally sat down probably three years ago, with a mentor that I had, and one of the questions that he asked me, he says, ” Well, how many of the people were really [00:08:00] successful with the leads that you generated for them?” And I said, “About 15%.”

[00:08:05] Jennifer Bennett: And of those 15% of people that had those leads come in and were successful, they asked the question first of, “Okay, I’m gonna have all of these leads come in for, for me or my brokerage or my whole team. What do I need to do to make that be successful?” So the ones that were doing that, they sat down and they looked at, “Okay, this is gonna come in.

[00:08:30] Jennifer Bennett: What do I need to have in place before this first lead comes in? Do I need to have you know, a round robin where multiple of my people are touching this person? Do I need to have sales scripts ready? Do I need to have templates? Do I need to ha- what, what all do I need to have to make sure that every lead that touches this system actually works?”

[00:08:53] Jennifer Bennett: And the vast majority of the people did not even, take a pre-call to know what kind of CRM should I [00:09:00] have? should I even have a CRM? That was the biggest thing to me. And then also, like, what should I be prepared for? Like, what should the lead flow look like? when should I know if there’s a problem?

[00:09:13] Jennifer Bennett: all of these different things, and it revolved around an undocumented sales process for them really, because they were in such a feast or famine- that they thought that they needed more leads. The vast majority of them really didn’t need more leads. They needed to double down on what they already had in their system in a much better way, and they didn’t want to do that.

[00:09:36] Jennifer Bennett: They just wanted more leads. And so their undocumented process like exasperated that to an, an exuberant level for, for some of them, because some of them would get hundreds of leads a day. some of the brokerages in, in larger places, they were getting upwards of like three to 5,000 leads a month. and they weren’t, they were closing at less than 1%, because their, [00:10:00] their, their sales process was not fine-tuned enough

[00:10:03] Jeff Sieh: So I guess the question would be, is it… So now with AI, is there any reason why there should not be an undocumented process anymore? Because now AI can take that heavy lift that so many… I mean, a lot of the stuff that I’m using AI for is like, I would love to do it, but I never had time, and now I can do it because I do have that time.

[00:10:22] Jeff Sieh: Is that what you’re seeing, and is that what you’re saying as well?

[00:10:24] Jennifer Bennett: 100%. You know, we have note takers that can follow us around. I– one of my favorite tools that I use to document, processes is called Scribe. and between that and all of the note takers, all of the different avenues that you have to be able to document your processes, there’s no reason as to why you can’t have documented processes that you can then feed to an AI, that you can then feed to a sales team, that you can then feed to an, an executive assistant, that you can then feed into, you know, your, your editor, you know, [00:11:00] all, all of these different things that are going to allow you to do that.

[00:11:02] Jennifer Bennett: There’s really not a whole lot of excuses out there for as to why you do not have undocumented processes. But it is one of the reasons why the vast majority of entrepreneurs and small business owners that I encounter, why their systems break, is because everything lives in their head, and they are so on fire, and they just want to grow their business so that they can make the impact that they wanna have, but they’re not willing to sit down with their, team or even an AI or even a tool like Scribe and take the five minutes to do that.

[00:11:39] Jennifer Bennett: I cannot tell you the vast majority of times when I was running upwards of a team of eight for, for GetDesky, somebody would ask me how to do something, and I’d go into Scribe, and I’d just put it in there, and I’d be like, “Okay, now next time don’t ask me. It’s there in the, in the library. Did you see that?

[00:11:56] Jennifer Bennett: Is there a question about that?”

[00:11:59] Jeff Sieh: Very cool

[00:11:59] Zac Brown: [00:12:00] You know, you’ve presented an actual issue and a solution. So I’m sitting on this side going, “Well, this is obvious.” But I think there’s a lot of people in our audience just out in the world that they’re either scared of AI or maybe they feel like there’s too much and they’re feeling behind and so like, “I’m just not gonna get started.”

[00:12:19] Zac Brown: When you sit down with a founder who has just basically bounced off AI already, what is it that you feel is the real reason that AI did not stick with them?

[00:12:28] Jennifer Bennett: lack of understanding of the way that you train AI. Okay? So you have to remember when technology first came into the vast majority of workplaces back in the early 2000s, okay? It was presented in such a way that it was set it and forget it. Okay? And so the mentality is, is, “Okay, I can go in and I can set this, and then I can forget it.” it.”

[00:12:55] Jennifer Bennett: AI, because it has generative and pattern recognitions, [00:13:00] you have to think of it less as a standardized automation, like this happens, you do this, and you have to think of it more as you’re training an intern that you’re then going to rise up into other roles. So you have to come in and assume like this, this kid knows nothing about anything, and you have to bring it up to, to the level that which you want it to do that.

[00:13:27] Jennifer Bennett: And that means when you bring in an intern, usually you’re, you’re with them quite a bit. You’re, you’re refining them. You’re saying, “Hey, this was amazing. You did really great here. Hey, this… L- let’s tweak this. Instead of this here, let’s put this here.” You know, really, really sitting down and working with them on that.

[00:13:46] Jennifer Bennett: And that’s the, the vast majority of the, the gap that I see with some of the founders is they want to set it and forget it, because a lot of the times their hair’s on fire.

[00:13:56] Jeff Sieh: Right

[00:13:56] Zac Brown: Yeah

[00:13:57] Zac Brown:

[00:13:57] Jennifer Bennett: you know, I mean, service providers [00:14:00] especially for sure, they’re really good at plumbing, electrical, you know, all these different things, and they have all these leads coming in.

[00:14:07] Jennifer Bennett: and they want something that they can set and forget, and you can’t do that with AI

[00:14:11] Jeff Sieh: Mm-hmm. Right. you know, we asked the question where people are at, like if they’re scared of it, if they’re using it or whatever, and we had some great comments. And, this one from Rich Graham says, “Loving having Claude help with email and day planning.” I do the same thing. I think that’s awesome.

[00:14:25] Jeff Sieh: and you mentioned earlier, Jennifer, talking about the recorders, and I use Fathom. That’s what I use ’cause it’s free and it’s easy. I use it for my mastermind. But I think a lot of us are doing something that I did for a long time is like, I would use Fathom, it would record the notes, and then I did nothing with it, right?

[00:14:41] Jeff Sieh: I mean, I had a skill now, so after, and I use it mainly for my masterminds that I run with Paul, Paul Gowder. And what happens is now it auto- automatically goes and transcribes the, I mean, it’s already transcribed in Fathom, but it pulls it down, puts it in a database that my AI can, I can ask it questions later or come up with products [00:15:00] or what should our next thing be about that we need to talk about based off those conversations.

[00:15:05] Jeff Sieh: But it’s that, it was that unlock that I had that, okay, finally I, instead of just recording it, now it needs to do something with that data. And so now there’s a process, a system in place that does that automatically. One of the lines that you said, and I love this line, you said, “Systems before software,” which I was not a systems guy.

[00:15:22] Jeff Sieh: I’m starting to be ’cause I, I see how valuable it is. But most creators are like me. They do the opposite. They buy the tool first. They get Fathom or whatever. So why do, why does that backfire, and what should they do instead? Instead of waiting for such a long time like I did, what are you telling creators to do?

[00:15:37] Jennifer Bennett: Well, creatives and entrepreneurs, we love shiny objects, okay? We love the next big thing that we think is going to just grow our business without us, okay? But if we don’t understand the system in which we want people to filter through, whether that’s an [00:16:00] email, whether that’s all these other things, it’s not gonna matter.

[00:16:04] Jennifer Bennett: The tool’s not gonna work. you know, the, Fathom’s not gonna work. You know, all of these different things are not gonna work if we don’t sit down and say, “Okay, these people are coming into my circle. What am I gonna do with them?” You know? We have to think of, you know, the system as, as a whole, as an ecosystem of like, hey, how, how do we move these people forward, and so we can’t, we can’t sit there and, you know, just buy all the tools. You know, I’ve met some founders that had upwards of, like, 200 tools, and I’m like, “Why?” I’m like, “Some of these tools do the exact same thing. Why do we have so many of them?” And so one of the things I also talk to my founders about is, do you really need all these tools?

[00:16:45] Jennifer Bennett: Is there one specific feature that this tool does that none of your other tools do in your, your stack? And if that’s… If they can’t answer that and they can’t tell me that for certain, I’m gonna tell them, like, “Let it go.” [00:17:00] ‘Cause we… You know, if you’ve got, three CRMs and all of them do about the same, which spoiler alert, the vast majority of them do, you don’t need multiple ones unless there are multiple ones for different businesses and you can explain that to me

[00:17:12] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. One of one of the things that I tell people all the time is like, every one of these tools, they want you to sign up for a annual plan, and they give you a big discount when you do that. Don’t do it, because things are changing so fast, like, you might wanna switch. Unless you’re doing, like, something like Magai.

[00:17:26] Jeff Sieh: That’s the only one I say, because that gives you access to all the tools, and you can play. Especially when somebody’s starting out. I, I love Dustin’s product. But don’t buy the, the yearly plan of anything else, cause, like, this week Claude’s great. Next week it’s gonna be ChatGPT, OpenAI stuff. Like, so don’t get locked into a system when it changes so fast.

[00:17:44] Jeff Sieh: So I, I, I am, I’m willing to pay more for the, the freedom to switch. But I wanna ask the audience, If you could wave a magic wand, what is one admin task you would hand off tomorrow if you could? Would it be your email inbox? Would it be [00:18:00] scheduling calls? Would it be following up those calls, repurposing, or something else?

[00:18:04] Jeff Sieh: Tell us in the comments. Wherever you’re watching, put it down below. I would love to know what you… If you could wave that AI magic wand and have it do something for you, what would you take off your plate right now? I would love to know, because I think some of you, you probably could, and you just don’t know it.

[00:18:18] Jeff Sieh: So that’s what we have Jennifer here to talk about.

[00:18:21] Zac Brown: Jennifer, I love what you said about, you know, just the leaders who their hair’s on fire. And I think so many of us feel like that. you know, just all the things, things that are just eating our lunch. We’re like, “I’ve got so much to do.” So for the creator, the solopreneur, if they were to come to you and be like, “Jennifer, I need your help,” you know, what is the first backend admin job that you would tell them to hand off to AI or an AI agent?

[00:18:45] Zac Brown: Like the boring stuff that is just quietly eating their week.

[00:18:49] Jennifer Bennett: so it’s not which one I would do. I actually sit down with them and see which one is creating the fire. ‘Cause sometimes, sometimes it’s their audience, sometimes it’s their [00:19:00] inbox, sometimes it’s their calendar, sometimes it’s, it’s their team. Or sometimes it’s, service calls. Sometimes it’s all these different things.

[00:19:08] Jennifer Bennett: So really what you have to do is you have to have a holistic view of what is actually eating the founder’s, not time, but actual mental bandwidth. Because sometimes it, it is less about the actual physical task, and it’s more about the mental bandwidth that is literally draining the founder and making it feel like, you know, their, their hair’s on fire, you know?

[00:19:35] Jennifer Bennett: And so sometimes it- Yeah … it, sometimes you can just figure out which one is the mental bandwidth, and then design a system around that one to reduce that. and the, mental feeling of like, “I’m, I’m always stressed out. I’m… You know, there’s chaos everywhere,” that feeling goes away. And then they’re able to objectively look and say, “Okay. I’m spending way too much [00:20:00] time on my inbox, okay? How can I systematically train an AI agent to manage some of that, to where it’s only pinging me, ‘Hey Jen, you gotta pay this invoice,’ or, ‘Hey…'” like mine, my, agent for my inbox and my calendar, it schedules all of my requests that come in, and then it also will follow up with them and be like, “Hey, we’re gonna have a meeting, the next day.

[00:20:29] Jennifer Bennett: is there anything we need to change about that? Is there anything we need to know about the meeting?” And if it does, it’ll update it automatically. I don’t even have to think about it. So it just shows up and it just does that. It’s like, “Hey, uh, Zac Zac, we’re meeting tomorrow at 10:00 AM. is there anything we need to change?

[00:20:43] Jennifer Bennett: Do we need to go through there?” And then sometimes I’ll be like, “Hey, I need to reschedule that. can you reschedule that meeting for me?”

[00:20:49] Zac Brown: That’s great

[00:20:50] Jennifer Bennett: So, you know, making it to where it, it takes away some of that stuff is, is really helpful

[00:20:57] Jeff Sieh: And I think a lot of, people watching, a lot of creators, a [00:21:00] lot of creatives, have the issue of, like, they feel like they’re drowning already, and they don’t know where to s- start. Like, they know everything is broken, and it’s like you get into this vapor lock.

[00:21:09] Jeff Sieh: Like, what do I… I don’t know what even to start on. And what has been helpful for me, Jennifer, and I think you’ve talked about this before too, is that having AI interview you so you can find the thing that you could do first that will give you the most leverage to do those other tasks. Like it… I used to roll a dice to, like, figure out my, what I should do on my to-do list because they were all important, right?

[00:21:30] Jeff Sieh: Like, okay, if they’re all important, which one do you start with? So I would gamify it by rolling a dice. Now, I have AI that kind of tells us, “Hey, if you do this, this may help with this down the road.” And, you know, it kind of can walk you through and prioritize, help you prioritize things. I love the ask me questions that Claude has.

[00:21:45] Jeff Sieh: I love it that he asked me that, and I can really nail it down. So, I want to have you walk us through your human-driven AI integration methods, which is diagnose, design, deploy, and drive. So if I’m a team of one, what does [00:22:00] each stage actually look like in my business?

[00:22:03] Jennifer Bennett: Yeah. So we touched on this a little bit already, is I sit down with, with founders and figure out where, the vast majority of the time suck is coming. And like I said, for the vast majority of people, it is more mental than it is actual physical, task at first because, you know,

[00:22:22] Jennifer Bennett: I really wanna get to the heart of the feeling first, because if I can’t unlock the feeling of being on fire, once you set up your engine, your business engine, if you don’t take care of the feeling first of being on fire, even if things are well-oiled, the founder’s still gonna be in the middle,

[00:22:43] Jennifer Bennett: so he’s just gonna create more chaos.

[00:22:46] Jennifer Bennett: So you have to remove that first before you can actually go in and start building things with automations, with AI, or even creating SOPs or systems, processes, any of that kind of stuff. So [00:23:00] you have to figure that out first, and then once we figure that out, then we can design, “Okay, this is what we do first.

[00:23:05] Jennifer Bennett: This is how we do it,” and then we deploy it and we retrain it

[00:23:09] Jeff Sieh: Mm, got it.

[00:23:10] Zac Brown: There is a real difference between using ChatGPT and building an actual AI agent and workflow that runs on its own. Hand up accountability, I have not done this yet. I know I need to. I’m hearing it over and over and over again. So Jennifer, like, yes, it’s for our audience, but I’m gonna be selfish. Talk to me.

[00:23:28] Zac Brown: In plain English, what is an AI agent and where does it change the game for a small team or let’s say a solopreneur?

[00:23:34] Jennifer Bennett: Yeah. So there’s, there’s a big difference between, an agent that can actually run without you, and automation. So the vast majority of people that come to me, they say, “Hey, I want, I want this to follow up with people.” There’s automations for that. There have been automations for that since the early 2000s.

[00:23:55] Jennifer Bennett: but what I’m talking about is you’re going in and you’re training [00:24:00] an AI to think like you and go through and detect all of the different patterns that are available, and then make a decision based on the data that you have given it. Okay? So it is pretty much in layman’s terms for all of the people that have ever created automations, this is removing the vast majority of the decision trees of the, if this happens, then do this.

[00:24:33] Jennifer Bennett: So now it is pretty much short coded, you know, having to have Make or what it was called a long time ago, Integromat or Zapier, for some of the things that people used to use it for. Like one of the things that I did in real estate for the longest time, and I don’t think people realized it, was Zapier actually had an email, reader, and it was called parser.zapier.

[00:24:58] Jennifer Bennett: And so you could go [00:25:00] through and you could have it read for keywords in an email and it would do something. So now you have something that within five minutes, instead of learning how to do parser, you can have it say, “Hey, read all of these emails, and if they sound like XYZ, they go over here. If they’re this, put them here.

[00:25:22] Jennifer Bennett: If they’re this, put them here.”

[00:25:24] Jennifer Bennett: and that’s just the tip of the iceberg

[00:25:26] Jeff Sieh: what’s so cool that I think is, like, the stuff that I… Like, I’m not a data nerd, but now I can be, really easily. Like, I sent, an agent to go and crawl all… I use Kit for all my emails. So I, it told me, like, the best, subject lines, I talked about in the past, my frequency, what are people clicking on, all that stuff.

[00:25:44] Jeff Sieh: Now, you could go and drill in doing that, all that stuff inside the dashboard. But having AI have a connector that can go in and just spit me out a report in five minutes, oh my gosh. I mean, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, too. But being able to take chunks of data that I would never even take the time to look at [00:26:00] and have it distill it down so I can understand it and actually be useful, that’s the thing I think is really, really cool.

[00:26:06] Jeff Sieh: Because you have a thing you call the human check, which is an idea I think is really key for anybody who starts playing with AI, that it makes sure the output still sounds like you before it goes live. So talk about that, because I know that’s something that a lot of people wanna know. Like, how do you train AI on your voice and your judgment?

[00:26:23] Jeff Sieh: That’s the other part. Not just a lot… You know, Jasper was able to clone your voice a little bit, but your judgment, like the stuff that you want, and cloning your logic, not just spitting out generic, you know, AI slop. How do you get it to do that?

[00:26:36] Jennifer Bennett: Right. So that goes back to the mindset of this is not an automation, it is an intern. So you have to think of this as an employee. So that means when this agent comes in, you have to train it on all of these different decision metrics. You have to train it on, this is what I say. Like, I have words that I don’t use in my written [00:27:00] words.

[00:27:00] Jennifer Bennett: I have stories that I, that I use. I have stories that I don’t use. I have sources that I will pull from, and why I pull for them and different things like that. You have to give time and effort to this. And the vast majority of the people that are producing AI slop, they’re just doing it…

[00:27:21] Jennifer Bennett: They’re like, “Oh my God, I need to get a graphic out. ChatGPT will do one in five minutes.” I saw Jeff’s over here, drop it in there, and it looks exactly like Jeff’s. I wonder why it looks like Jeff’s. Because you copied Jeff’s. You didn’t take the time to teach it, like, who you are, your core values, your mission, your vision, y- you know, like where you’re going, what you’re doing, you know, all these different things.

[00:27:46] Jennifer Bennett: Think about it. Like, when you go and anybody has, been hired at a job, do you just go in and be like, “Hey, I need you to create an ad campaign for this,” without telling them anything about the company, [00:28:00] anything about your mission, anything about your vision, anything about, the goals that you guys have, anything like that?

[00:28:05] Jennifer Bennett: Do you… Does anybody do that? No. They tell you about the culture. They tell you about all this different kind of stuff. They tell you about the company story. If you don’t have that, I’m sorry, your stuff is gonna look like everybody else’s on the internet. That’s why.

[00:28:19] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Real quick, Zac, before you have a question. I, I gotta, I gotta get nerdy for a minute, so Okay, so one of the things that I think that we need to talk about, because, Coming up with a design system, because you mentioned like don’t look like Jeff, just copy an image. Take the time to create a design system, like a .md file, which is a, a markdown file, but it has your logos, your, your colors, everything put together.

[00:28:49] Jeff Sieh: And the cool thing is once you create that, it doesn’t matter what, system you use. You can point… You can drop that document into ChatGPT, you can do it to Claude, whatever, but it has that built into [00:29:00] it. and if you don’t even know what that is, have the AI interview you and, and have that document put together.

[00:29:06] Jeff Sieh: anyway, off the soapbox, but I think it’s really cool because I think Google’s trying to standardizing the kind of the d- design .md file, so I think it’s a good place for people to start if they haven’t done that yet. Sorry, end of nerd rant.

[00:29:17] Jennifer Bennett: No, I love that because that goes back to remember we’re not having standardized automations. We are training an employee essentially in, in, in your business, and therefore it has to know all these things. You’re not gonna go and have all these things in there and not use them, ’cause now it remembers it.

[00:29:38] Jennifer Bennett: You know, a lot of them have much better, context windows than they used to have when they first launched in 2019. Perplexity just launched a memory, which you and I geeked out about in, in,

[00:29:49] Jeff Sieh: That’s… Yeah, we did

[00:29:51] Jennifer Bennett: In Witchita… I opened up my thing and I was like, “Oh my God, look, it looks like obsidian.” And he was like, “Oh my gosh, yes, it does.”

[00:29:59] Jennifer Bennett: But [00:30:00] when you think about it that way, you know, when people talk about like imparting their brain into AI, this is what they’re talking about. Because the goal is when you are in this space, is to create freedom, and the only way you could do that is, is you have to be able to train it on all of these different aspects of you

[00:30:19] Jeff Sieh: Mm-hmm. Very true. Yeah, very true. And it’s, and it’s worth doing because it gets better and better when you do it that way

[00:30:25] Jennifer Bennett: Oh yeah.

[00:30:25] Zac Brown: I think in the same way that, you know, Chick-fil-A and Disney creates, you know, their team members, their cast members to be brand ambassadors, we should be doing that with our AI agents. You know, making them follow the same guidelines and be like, “Hey, like this thing can run and it’s taking my culture and running with it,” like we would expect no less than, you know, a really solid employee.

[00:30:48] Zac Brown: So just a thought on that. Jennifer, if you’d give everyone watching a starting point. You know, if someone wants one AI system running in their business by next Friday, an actual time [00:31:00] saver, not just a hobby, what is the first one that you would have them build?

[00:31:04] Jennifer Bennett: well, first of all, I would have them review… So a little bit of a secret sauce about me. About two and a half years ago, I started doing something where on Fridays I review all of my emails, all of my text messages, all of my social media interactions, everything of that, of that sort, and I figure out, okay, what went good?

[00:31:25] Jennifer Bennett: What, what didn’t? Where can I improve? And now e- we, with AI coming in is, okay, what can I offload to AI? And so it’s really more about learning what your process is to augment,

[00:31:40] Jennifer Bennett: because everybody’s little thing is different. the vast majority of people, are gonna say it’s, it’s inbox and it’s calendar, but I would, I would make people pause to see if that’s actually where it’s at.

[00:31:55] Jennifer Bennett: Because sometimes people are actually really good at managing their inbox, [00:32:00] and they need something else first. Like maybe it is creating more blog posts, maybe it’s doing other stuff, and they’re just thinking about the obvious easy one when they’re forgetting about some of the other stuff they’re doing

[00:32:15] Jeff Sieh: Mm. So I wanted to know, where’s the line for you that you won’t use AI? So what does AI generally make better, and what will you never, ever hand off to it?

[00:32:26] Jennifer Bennett: Hmm. There’s, there’s a few different things that I will never hand off to AI. One of them is, is I’m not a big perpetuation of anything that has to do with a digital clone, um, and then, also digital pictures. So I will use it to enhance and maybe do some of the fun, you know, videos or things like that.

[00:32:48] Jennifer Bennett: But I won’t have it do full renderings of me. Like I’ll do the fun, you know, like character ones or that kind of stuff, but I will n- never have like photogenic realistic [00:33:00] ones. And like some of the ones on my website, they’re, they’re actual legitimate pictures of me, but I did enhance the backgrounds, with AI.

[00:33:11] Jennifer Bennett: So I… That, that’s the line I’m not willing to cross, just because there’s so many people that are doing avatars and they’re doing clones, and if that’s the line that they’re willing to cross, more power to them. but that’s not one I’m willing to cross

[00:33:24] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. That’s why I love live video, ’cause it’s really hard to fake. Now, I love playing with image generation like we showed, you know, this kind of things I think are fun. But, I’m like with you, I don’t, I don’t wanna do a video clone. I just think that’s a little… One, you don’t wanna clone this.

[00:33:38] Jeff Sieh: That would just, that freaks people out. So, I, I just, that’s kind of the line that I have as well. But one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, you know, people hear AI agent, right? And they’re like, Fable just rolled out back to us this week, and then it’s gonna go away again. But, when they hear this agent, they think, “Okay, this is something super technical and super expensive.”

[00:33:57] Jeff Sieh: but how simple can the first one [00:34:00] actually be? Talk about like somebody who’s like, “I know I need to,” like, “What can I do first in building an agent?” What do you tell them?

[00:34:07] Jennifer Bennett: start with something simple that you don’t mind if it messes up. So if it messing up your calendar is gonna really throw you for a loop, don’t do that. If it’s going to be, you know, the same thing with your email, don’t worry about that. You know, there’s a lot of, friends and mutuals that we know, they post a lot of fun prompts.

[00:34:29] Jennifer Bennett: The first thing that I would encourage people, if they’re even curious about doing AI, is play around with prompting first, because as with anything that works with computers, it has a totally different language than you do, and sometimes you have to teach it what your definition of those words are. like for instance, one of the key phrases that I put into all of my agents is world-class flawless [00:35:00] execution.

[00:35:00] Jennifer Bennett: I then have to explain to it what that actually means in Jennifer Bennett’s terms. So I can’t just say world-class execution, ’cause then it can go and look at all of these people that are way world-class and think, “Okay, well now Jen wants that,” when it’s really, “No, world-class means this.”

[00:35:19] Jeff Sieh: Got it. Yeah, defining, so, and yeah, so that’s one of the things, once again, going back when having it interview you, doing the, like what your core philosophy is. my thing, and it- my AI knows this, is that I would rather lose business than relationships. So relationship is huge to me, my AI knows that, and so everything goes through that filter.

[00:35:38] Jeff Sieh: So that’s what you also have to come up with yourself. the other question I wanted to, what, not a question, but more of a comment that I think is really good ’cause it’s very important, Adam says, “For attorneys, doctors, CEOs, et cetera, giving, you know, access to email or documents hold privacy risks beyond the practitioner.

[00:35:54] Jeff Sieh: AI requires trusting the company and any bad actors they hire.” Yes, that’s, I think we’re gonna see more and more of that [00:36:00] happening, as y- things are gonna come out, things are gonna leak, because they have given it to the AI, and you always have to think about that. I mean, one of the things, one of the things I love about, Magai, and Dustin talked about it in a, a post this week, was that Magai never is giving your data over to train any of these AI systems.

[00:36:17] Jeff Sieh: So if you’re needing some things that are very secure, you know, something like Magai, and th- that’s why they’re also not, doing the Fable model, and there’s a great post about that and why th- but they’re not gonna have that as of now because of some of this privacy stuff. So, it’s very important that you keep that in mind, especially if you’re in, like, healthcare or, like, financial stuff, or even your clients.

[00:36:36] Jeff Sieh: You don’t wanna throw your clients’ stuff up there. I’ve had, like, authors get really bent out of shape when they find their book out on AI or they’re getting quoted inside of there, so you have to be careful. I mean, if you put anything on the web, it’s gonna come out anywhere, anywhere. But, that’s a great point, Adam.

[00:36:49] Jeff Sieh: Thank you for sharing that.

[00:36:51] Jennifer Bennett: Yeah. And, and to, to dive a little bit deeper into that, there are platforms like Perplexity, that have [00:37:00] those HIPAA compliances, those SOC 2s, those higher level securities and those controls. so if that is something that your company needs those security levels, make sure that you’re actually consulting with someone that even knows what those are and how to constrain them, and that they’re, they’re keeping it encapsulated inside of your company as well too.

[00:37:26] Jennifer Bennett: I know, I know several of them have those securities available, but really sit down and read the fine print and understand it. And if you don’t understand the fine print of it, go and find, like a Swiss, security company. I know, I, I work with Proton, Protalon, and they ha- they put out regular documents on who has really good security, which ones have had data breaches, all of that kind of stuff.

[00:37:56] Jennifer Bennett: And so you are educating yourself enough [00:38:00] to even be able to talk to a consultant to know, is this the right one for you or not?

[00:38:07] Jeff Sieh: Dustin has a follow-up comment to, He goes, “Yeah, here’s the thing. So many companies don’t know your staff is using AI whether you know it or not.”

[00:38:15] Jeff Sieh: Mike Alton talks about shadow AI. give them the tools to make sure that they’re using it with privacy activated.

[00:38:20] Jennifer Bennett: and also train them on how to use it. So yes, we give them the tools. Yes, we allow them to have the access, and yes, we, we put the privacy on the backside, but then we also bring in people that can actually train them to actually use it the proper way. Because I don’t know about you guys, but have you guys not seen what, the Amazon employees did when they first launched AI?

[00:38:47] Jennifer Bennett: You know why? Because they launched it, and then they didn’t teach all the people how to use it,

[00:38:52] Jeff Sieh: Right.

[00:38:53] Jeff Sieh: Yeah Yeah

[00:38:54] Jennifer Bennett: And so bring people in that are gonna teach your team and empower your team to use [00:39:00] it effectively so that it, it grows what you want it to grow. Because leadership comes in and they’re like, “This is great.

[00:39:06] Jennifer Bennett: This is gonna make it easier for my staff. We’re gonna grow, you know, our revenue. It’s gonna be great.” But then they miss that middle ground of like, you have to teach the people how to do that, because you’re taking some of the task that those people were doing, and now you’re putting it in AI, and you’re not teaching the people how to train the AI and open up proper feedback loops so that it actually does what it needs to do progressively going forward.

[00:39:34] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. I think that’s a great point. By the way, another great point is our sponsor. We couldn’t do this without Ecamm, and we’re gonna be going to camp with them next week, but we have a quick word from them [00:40:00] Once again, thank you to our sponsor Ecamm. They are awesome. That’s what we use to produce this show. All right, Zac, give us the audience question of the day

[00:40:13] Zac Brown: So it’s kind of a silly question, maybe silly, maybe this seems outside of your realm at the moment, but a thought to, you know, consider. Do you want to get paid to speak someday? Comment yes, no, or maybe. There’s no wrong answers. Just curious to see where you are today

[00:40:31] Jeff Sieh: And you’re going like, “What in the world? Why are they, why are they pivoting to that?” Well, Jennifer has some really cool stuff that we were able to talk a little bit about at, the Wichita conference, Digital Day Wichita, and let’s, let’s dive into it, ’cause, you use AI to do deep research on events, hosts, audiences, before you ever do your speaking pitch, right?

[00:40:50] Jeff Sieh: Like, this is for you to get paid to speak. For a creator who wants to get booked to speak, what does that research actually surface [00:41:00] that they might miss on their own?

[00:41:01] Jennifer Bennett: it researches like the company. So i- you know, we talked a lot about our core values Like for me, one of the biggest ones is family. you know, I’m a third-generation woman entrepreneur, you know, so family integration and things of that nature are super important to me.

[00:41:17] Jennifer Bennett: So I want to be associated with brands that have that culture and that are going to align. So when we’re talking about, you know, doing that kind of research, we’re able to discover, alignment in those core values, in those core missions, you know, to where their mission may a- be adjacent to mine, and to where I’m not putting my brand in jeopardy with being around brands that, that are not in that.

[00:41:46] Jennifer Bennett: and then one of the other really, really cool things, in the process that I have is, is it tells you exactly how to pitch, when to pitch, and also how to build [00:42:00] relationships, ’cause that’s one of the things that, that I love too, I’m real big into relationships too, is how to build relationships on the other side of that.

[00:42:08] Jennifer Bennett: So it’s not just like, “Let’s go connect with this person, and then this is the perfect pitch to give them.” But it then it will also say, “Hey, these, these decision-makers may be, very active on LinkedIn. Go connect with them, and, make it to where they start seeing your content.”

[00:42:26] Jeff Sieh: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:27] Jennifer Bennett: then it’s not only just, hey, I’m getting in their inbox, but now I’m able to push it to where they’re seeing that, oh, this person is aligned with what we’re doing, it’s mission or vision adjacent, all of this different stuff. And so now you can, you can double down on that. So not only are you sending in a CFP or whatever they wanna call it, they call them different things, but now you’re also building that, that relationship side as well.

[00:42:57] Jennifer Bennett: ‘ Cause then you can do deep recon of like, [00:43:00] well, you might find out that one of them likes purple Skittles. You can buy Skittles by the color, okay? So you could do that with M&M’s as well too. But you might find that like this person likes purple. So you can, you can go and you can send that to them. So but you won’t know that if you don’t do this deep research

[00:43:19] Jeff Sieh: yeah, all I had to do was buy Lou Mongello s- sushi, and that was it. Like, I, I have to speak every year now at his conference. real quick before you g- your question, Zac, is and I n- I know you probably get this too, but because I produce Guy K- podcast and of, of this show, and Maker’s Table, and all these different shows, I get pitched a lot.

[00:43:36] Jeff Sieh: And a lot of times the pitches are cold, and you can tell they haven’t even watched the show. They’re like, “Hey,” first name, “How… We would love for you to have this.” Or I have their, or I have their VA contact me like, “Hey, you should try this guy, ’cause he’s great.” For my show, like for Jennifer, I just send her a message like, “Hey, you wanna come on?”

[00:43:55] Jeff Sieh: You know, I, I… My thing is my guests are very organic. They’re people I really, really like. Any time I have [00:44:00] not done that, I’ve been burnt. So, w- does your tool help you with that process? Because I do not like cold pitches, and when you said relationship and helping them, you know, get your content in front of the people that you want to, that was very intriguing to me, because I get so many bad cold pitches

[00:44:18] Jennifer Bennett: Yeah.and you’re pulling from one of the posts that I did on LinkedIn about cold pitching in general. AI has exasperated this to no end. I mean, it, it really has. and so I created an actual email process for one of…

[00:44:37] Jennifer Bennett: for my agent that does that. And so it will read the email, and if it is not somebody that I have regular contact with in my inbox, it will actually send to them that post on LinkedIn and be like, “Hey, this might be helpful for you.” secondly, as far as building relationships, there’s, there’s very minimal [00:45:00] ways to do this.

[00:45:01] Jennifer Bennett: And, yes, you can have tools to s- to start conversations, but even in, the vast majority of my emails, it’s, it’s still me.

[00:45:12] Jennifer Bennett: my, my inbox, my text messages, you know, even on LinkedIn, the vast majority of those are still me. So now, while I might have my comment browser go in and make the initial connections off of, you know, the criteria that I have, that initial message is, is, is sent out, and then the rest of that conversation is me.

[00:45:33] Jennifer Bennett: So, you know, I played around with chatbots even as early as 2010, and the decision trees have gotten a little better, but they still fade. So we’re still, you know, 16 years later, the, the conversation flow for these bots, even with the generative side on there, is still relatively in its infancy.

[00:45:58] Jennifer Bennett: and I’m talking about, like, when I had one for [00:46:00] real estate, I had it to where people could tell me what kind of house they were looking for, what their budget was, and everything like that, and it would pull a web hook and send it to them back in the chat in the Facebook Messenger. So it, it can, in a short essence, to where it’s just getting very little data and then pulling new data.

[00:46:24] Jennifer Bennett: But as far as full on, you know, human-to-human conversations, there’s just a depth that’s just not there yet. and the people that really care about relationships, they’re, they’re, they’re not gonna do that

[00:46:37] Jeff Sieh: Exactly. I think that’s a great point. Zac, final question

[00:46:41] Zac Brown: For someone who has never been paid to speak, how would you use AI to figure out what you’re even qualified to talk about? Like, who would pay to hear what you have to say? How would you get them to that place?

[00:46:54] Jennifer Bennett: so this is assuming that you already have a note taker, and you’ve been doing Zoom calls [00:47:00] and you’ve been meeting with people, for a while. So why not drop those into your AI and have it tell you like, “Hey, what are some of the things that I talk a lot about, that I could probably create a presentation around?”

[00:47:17] Zac Brown: Yeah

[00:47:18] Jennifer Bennett: then go in and again, make sure you, you know, like your mission, your vision, all these different goals and these different things that you have. Otherwise, your AI is not going to be able to help you. it’s going to go haywire because what it’s gonna do is, especially with the vast majority of the AIs, they are still very, very, very much programmed to placate you.

[00:47:42] Jennifer Bennett: So if they don’t have your data to be able to pull from, it’s gonna go and find it.

[00:47:50] Jeff Sieh: Right

[00:47:50] Jennifer Bennett: if it doesn’t have my data on what the core values of Get Desky is, it might find [00:48:00] Jeff’s and just put Jeff’s there

[00:48:02] Jeff Sieh: Which would not be as good. So

[00:48:04] Jennifer Bennett: It would, I mean, they wouldn’t be bad, but they wouldn’t be, they be Get Deskys. they wouldn’t be what, what Jennifer and Darlene’s are. They wouldn’t be. It, that, it just wouldn’t. and, and it shouldn’t. And this is the, the part that a lot of people need to think about is you’ve got to put your core essence into these so that it actually helps you with whatever it is you’re helping it with.

[00:48:29] Jennifer Bennett: You know, the vast majority of the people, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, ChatGPT knows me so well.” No, it really doesn’t.

[00:48:35] Jeff Sieh: Yeah

[00:48:35] Jennifer Bennett: it is just reading the patterns of what you’re telling it

[00:48:39] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And th- this is thread that goes through this entire conversation is that you need to put that into the memory where A- the AI can access it. So that is the big unlock that took for me. I pretty much did a word vomit using WhisperFlow, which I love, like, changes everything.

[00:48:57] Jeff Sieh: and that’s w- and had it ask me questions for, like, an hour, [00:49:00] and that’s what made AI, like… That was like, okay, it gets me and understands. Now I can have this th- filter to run everything through. so yeah, Dustin even says, “If it doesn’t have your source of truth, it will find it or make it up,” which that’s why you wanna have that truth that you can point to every time.

[00:49:16] Jennifer Bennett: so yes, it needs to have that, but then we gotta go further with that because then we have to tell it that this is the source of truth. Do not go outside of that source of truth. So remember, we’re training an employee. “Okay, this is cool. We do plumbing.

[00:49:29] Jennifer Bennett: These are the vendors we use.” Okay? well these vendors don’t have it. Okay, they have to order it. Okay, we can’t go, we can’t go to Joe Schmoe over here because their parts are crappy.” So if that’s not in there- Yeah … this is where you have to get into that decision tree of like, this is the source of truth.

[00:49:45] Jennifer Bennett: You don’t search the web for this

[00:49:47] Jeff Sieh: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Great stuff. Jennifer, once again, we could talk for hours about this, but this has been amazing. But I wanna give these last couple minutes to you to tell people where they can find you. Maybe they’re interested in, speaking more, [00:50:00] where they can contact you about this speaking process that you have using AI.

[00:50:04] Jeff Sieh: So the floor is now yours

[00:50:06] Jennifer Bennett: Ah, well, I actually made that app live, so anyone who wants to test it out is demo.getdesky.com so they can try it out. They can see exactly how it works on a very simplified version. and then also you guys can connect with me at getdesky.com. I have my socials on there. and I think everybody here is probably connected with me on LinkedIn.

[00:50:30] Jennifer Bennett: That’s where I’m most active. come find me, connect with me, ask me all the questions. I love helping entrepreneurs, and small business owners, get some relief from the admin stuff that these glorious tools can take away.

[00:50:43] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Very, very cool. And she knows her stuff, as you can tell from the show. I had a great time sitting with her and, and nerding out on AI at the Wichita conference, and I’m sure we’ll, we’ll hang out at some other conferences coming up shortly. But Zac Brown, where can people find the amazing Zac Brown and your brand new stinking book that now [00:51:00] is also on Kindle?

[00:51:01] Zac Brown: Well, you can follow me, @zackbrowncreative on Instagram. I’m also on Facebook. All the links are in the bios there. Would love for you to check out my new book, “An Accidental Education: What I’ve Learned So Far.” Definitely some great takeaways from the many wonderful and weird jobs that I have participated in over the years.

[00:51:19] Jeff Sieh: I highly recommend the book, so guys, go check that out. And everybody, I mean, Dustin, Sean from But Mostly Disney, Rich Graham, of course, he says, “You do manage to get some awesome guests.” but you know what? That’s because I have Thank you guys so much for watching. We’ll see you all next time. Have a great weekend. Happy safe 4th of July for all our American friends. We’ll see you next time. Bye everybody. [00:52:00]