S2. Ep18 - 3 Steps to Start Using AI in Your Business (Without the Overwhelm)

Where do you actually start when AI feels overwhelming?

In this episode, Katie and Noel break down the three things every solopreneur should focus on when getting started with AI. They cover why the first step has nothing to do with AI tools at all, why committing to one platform beats dabbling in five, and how even a basic no-code automation can change how your business runs plus the shiny object trap, Katie's switch from ChatGPT to Claude, and why OpenAI's GPT-5 has a goblin problem.

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• Episode Transcript

  Katie (00:26)

  Hello, welcome back to another episode. Hi, hello, I'm Katie. And as always, I've got Noel here with me today. How are you doing, Noel?

  Noel (00:36)

  I'm doing absolutely fabulous again this week. Having a great week in the sun.

  Katie (00:40)

  Another ab fab.

  Noel (00:43)

  Absolutely, yeah. Can't go wrong with the sun shining, can we?

  Katie (00:47)

  No, exactly. Yeah, for the last week we've had a little bit of sunshine here in the UK and it makes everything feel so much better.

  Katie (00:58)

  But you've had a good week.

  Noel (01:00)

  Yes, yeah, been a busy week with Clyde. He's doing a great job right now. Yeah, I think we're looking at a June launch for Clyde Cloud. Just ironing out the last few bugs and features and things like that. So that's our AI agent, which can basically go off, create teams and do anything for you. You don't have to ask it to do it. It will just go off and do it. It will learn. And yeah, it's a really awesome little tool.

  Katie (01:33)

  Yeah. So are you feeling excited? Do you feel like you'll be ready for June?

  Noel (01:40)

  Yes, so I was thinking of doing it this month and then I started looking about and I thought, well, actually this month isn't really a great month to do it.

  Katie (01:48)

  No, you've got a lot going on this month.

  Noel (01:50)

  I do. I thought, just push it back like two weeks, maybe a week. That's not going to make that much difference.

  Katie (01:56)

  Yeah, Noel turns 40 this month and Noel's not really a birthday kind of person but he's married to a Leo who loves nothing more than to celebrate birthdays. So yeah, we have lots of things planned throughout May.

  Noel (02:03)

  We do, yeah. Definitely.

  Katie (02:23)

  You sound like you're not looking forward to any of them, but it's all things that you like.

  Noel (02:27)

  It is, yeah, I am looking forward to it. Yeah, it's going to be a fun month. June's going to be very boring in comparison.

  Katie (02:29)

  But it won't be because of Clyde. You've got the Clyde launch. There you go.

  So are there any updates this week in the AI or automations world? Because that's how we always start our podcast. Any updates?

  Noel (02:53)

  Yeah, so there's nothing groundbreaking or new that's come out, but there is actually one fun story. OpenAI released this about seven or eight days ago now. They've got a problem with goblins, which is a weird sentence to say.

  Katie (03:13)

  With goblins? Like goblins as in from the Labyrinth with the Goblin King, David Bowie and his tight trousers? That one was for the mums.

  Noel (03:17)

  Yes, exactly that. Yeah, they've got a problem with goblins, gremlins, orcs, and I can't believe I've said this as well, pigeons!

  Katie (03:42)

  I'm sorry, no. What have pigeons done? Pigeons don't do anything wrong.

  Noel (03:49)

  But they released an article the other week which goes into why so many people are seeing goblins or references to goblins in their chat and things like that. I mean, it's not a huge amount, but when you're looking at 800 million users per month, like 1% of that is quite a lot of people. So they'd be like, someone would be saying whether they reached a personal fitness goal and it was like, "you're training like a goblin." What does that even mean? I don't understand.

  Katie (04:17)

  Yeah. I'm confused.

  Noel (04:42)

  And most people won't know what ASCII art is, but back in the 90s when you used to create pictures with your punctuation, forward slashes, backslashes, all that sort of stuff to make a picture. Before MMS was a thing.

  Katie (04:59)

  Yes. Yeah, and you could create like a cat and all sorts of things and it would take you absolutely ages.

  Noel (05:10)

  Yeah, bigger smiley faces. It would, yeah. So AI could obviously create those sort of things and they show up in terminals and stuff. Anyway, this guy asked for a unicorn and he got back a goblin. But where this all stems from is the GPT-5 model. So at the very start, like 5.1, there started to be little bits about goblins, orcs, and mythical creatures creeping into the model. And it kind of got a bit worse with GPT-5.2, but it got exponentially worse when they went to 5.3.

  So at this point, they added in, if you remember, they've got a little option where you could select almost like the personality of the agent. So it would be like fun or professional. What they added in was nerdy, and that nerdy thing went absolutely bonkers for gremlins and all this sort of stuff. So from that point on, all of their training kind of went a bit crazy and goblins started appearing everywhere. But yeah, they're trying to bring it back in and retrain it, but now they're finding every time they release a new model, it's kind of getting worse and it gets worse over time as well. So yeah, it's an interesting problem they've got, but I did find that one quite funny.

  Katie (06:55)

  Yeah, because I guess goblins and orcs together are like, it's not Lord of the Rings, is it? I'm trying to work out where has it come from. Is it like D&D?

  Noel (07:07)

  Yeah, probably something along those lines. But adding in that nerdy personality just blew it all up. So the coding platform called Codex is fully open source. So you can see all of the code, all the system prompts and that sort of stuff. Somebody noticed in the system prompt for Codex, it explicitly says in there, "do not make any references to goblins, gremlins, orcs, pigeons." I don't know why pigeons keep coming up, but obviously they keep coming up in people's chats. So they were even put into the backend prompts so people aren't getting random references to mythical creatures in their responses. But there is a get out of jail clause in their system prompt that says, if it's actually relevant, then yeah, obviously do mention it.

  Katie (07:50)

  Yeah, interesting. Really interesting. Wow, okay. Maybe they'll start bringing in the unicorns. Who knows? Who knows? Okay, so what are we talking about this week?

  Noel (08:29)

  So I thought we'd talk about the three things to learn as a solopreneur or small business owner with AI and kind of what you should focus on first. Because whenever I meet people at events and stuff, I start talking about how long I've been working with AI and automations and what I've been building. Some of them are kind of new to it and they're just like, how did you get from day one to year four almost? So yeah, I do get asked this sort of question a lot. So I thought this is what we would cover in this episode.

  Katie (09:13)

  Sounds good. Okay. So as a solo business owner, where is like, someone wants to start with AI, maybe they've only used ChatGPT, which I find is the most common thing that people have started with. When these people are talking to us at events, I find they're using a bit of ChatGPT, but that's kind of it. What would be the very first thing that you would then go, okay, start here?

  Noel (09:55)

  Yeah. So I think when you start using ChatGPT, it's very self-affirming. It's very, this is amazing, this is great, your ideas are brilliant. And that's kind of a flaw with ChatGPT, but I guess it gives you that false sense of security that you can just go off and do anything with AI in your business. And it's not particularly true. Like we discussed last week, there's things that you probably shouldn't do.

  But I think the first thing that you need to do is to sit back and then look at what your business does, how it operates, and try and figure out where AI could best help you. So don't think about AI as being this magical thing that's just going to semi-retire you. You're still going to need to be there to do stuff. It's not going to do everything for you. So that's kind of where I see some people going wrong. They just think, just because I can, I will. But yeah, you probably shouldn't.

  So it's kind of a moment to step back and assess your business and then go, right, well, what bits could I use AI for? Where do I need help? What do I struggle with? What stuff do I do that's repetitive and annoying? All those sort of things. And then start to work out if AI could help you with those sort of things.

  Katie (11:27)

  Yeah, I totally agree. And as well, people think they've got to use AI or an automation for the whole task. And actually they can just use it for part of the task. So if there's a task that you do week in, week out, but there's only a very small part of it that you enjoy doing, well, continue doing the bit that you enjoy, but then use AI or an automation or both to do the bits either side, or the start of it, or the end of it.

  Noel (12:00)

  Yeah, exactly. You can always give it too much and then you just fall out of love with it, I suppose. And that's not really why you started the business in the first place. So yeah, that is very important to think of. But that's where I always see people fall over. They just get baffled by what it can do and then just think, do everything, and then end up in a bit of a jumbled mess. They might have things that work, things that don't work, or there's just too much going on and they don't really know what's happening.

  Katie (12:32)

  Yeah. And I think as well, you can get swept up a lot by what you see online. It's kind of like, automate this in your business or do this in your business. But actually, is that going to work for you in your business? And actually, are you taking away something that makes you feel really creative or something that makes you feel connected to your business? And that's what you need to be aware of. Like you were saying, Noel, just because you can doesn't mean that you should. And yeah, our whole episode last week was all on that.

  Noel (13:17)

  Yeah, it's a tricky balance, isn't it? To figure out.

  Katie (13:19)

  It is, because you do kind of get swept up by the hype online, I think. I see things and I think, that's really cool, like how that person's using it for that particular part of their business. But either that's not relevant for me or I wouldn't want to do that. But I really appreciate it.

  Noel (13:24)

  Yeah, you always see different ways someone's tackled the same problem. You're like, that's cool, I haven't seen that before. But I'll keep that to one side and then maybe one day that might be relevant to me. But yeah, you almost need to think about measuring how well your AI and or automations are doing as well when you're going through this process.

  We always advocate for starting off with little bits and then building from there and seeing where it goes. But you just need to keep a control on it, I would say, and measure it over time. Otherwise you'll think you're saving hours and hours of time, but actually when you look at it, you might not be. If you're not careful, you're spending that time saved going off trying to figure out what it's done and monitoring what's happening.

  Katie (14:42)

  Yeah. But sometimes it isn't always about time. It is actually about things you do struggle with or things that you just cannot stand in your business. Because it's always that shock, isn't it? When we think, I'm going to start a business because I'm really passionate about this, or actually I'm really good at this and I think it would help other people. You don't then think of all the other things that are included in running a business. And some things you don't know about until you're actually in it. You're in the trenches and you're like, oh my goodness, I didn't realise I would have to do this. I didn't even know this was a thing. How on earth do I do this?

  Noel (15:26)

  Yeah, exactly. I guess also like you mentioned, the shiny object syndrome as well. There's AI tools coming out every day at the minute. So you don't have to try them all. Not ever.

  Katie (15:38)

  I did see the other day something about Notion and it was like how to automate all of this Notion stuff and it was all made to look really pretty and cute and I was like, oh my God, that looks amazing. And then I remembered how much I do not like using Notion and I was like, wow. Me and Notion don't work together. My brain just does not work with Notion. I think Notion is absolutely amazing as a platform. I'm not saying it isn't. It just does not work for my brain.

  Noel (16:17)

  No, you're not a spreadsheet kind of person. There's lots of databases, isn't there?

  Katie (16:26)

  No. Yeah. I don't like that sort of layout and I know you can change the layouts and stuff like that. But for me, I don't know, maybe I haven't found the right layout within Notion for me. And that's something that I need to explore. But yeah, for me right now, Notion's a no.

  I really wish it wasn't because I'd love to be that organised person who's like, oh, I'll just put that in my Notion. But even the thought of having to enter things into Notion is a nightmare. And I know now you can automate it. But for me, it would just be a graveyard of things that AI has entered into Notion for me. It would never get looked at.

  And I think that's a really good example of seeing something really cool that looks aesthetic and thinking, God, I would be so organised. And then it's like, wait, do I actually work like that? No. Just because something's aesthetically pleasing, looks pretty, looks cute and can be automated, would I actually use it? And I think these are the conversations that you've got to have with yourself and not get swept up with the hype.

  Noel (17:55)

  Exactly. Yeah. Because you get that with kind of every business tool, don't you? Whether it's a CRM or whatever. I mean, this morning I was looking at Ahrefs for keyword research and stuff like that. And that's $99 a month to start off with. I was like, ooh, no. So I had a chat with Claude and I built my own version of all the bits that I was actually interested in. Because there's so many features on there that I'm not interested in. So I was like, right, let me just build what I need.

  Katie (18:01)

  Yeah, you didn't want to pay for all of the features that were available to you.

  Noel (18:26)

  Exactly. Yeah. So I got the data from somewhere else and it was like, you just chuck in $50 and you're going to use like 0.1 of a cent every time you use this. I'm like, great, well that $50 is going to last me a long time because I'm only going to use this a bit.

  Katie (18:40)

  And that's what I love about AI now. You can take bits of software that you were like, well, I only want that bit and that bit, and I don't need the other features right now. And then you can go away and build your own app.

  Noel (18:51)

  Yeah, it's a bit bonkers, isn't it? How easy it is.

  Katie (19:02)

  Yeah. Let's go back to the three steps of using AI. Let's not go off on a tangent and tell people you can build apps and stuff, especially when they're like, actually, I just want to get started. So what would step two be?

  Noel (19:13)

  Very true. So for me, what I found with step two is kind of using an AI chat model, whether it be ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, whatever could be your flavour. It's kind of getting into one of those platforms and learning it in a deep way. So I used to find that I was always flitting about between Claude and ChatGPT all the time. And in the end, I was like, I just don't know why I'm using ChatGPT. For me, it just didn't work. It didn't work with the way I worked. And I was like, right, I'm just going to cut my ties and learn Claude.

  So for you, that could be, I don't like Claude, I'm going to do ChatGPT. Either way is fine. It's up to you how you work. Yeah, it's kind of really having a deep understanding of that platform and getting the best out of it. There's plenty of things around showing you stuff. I'm sure there's millions of TikToks about each platform, what you could do and how they all work and all that sort of stuff. So yeah, I would pick one, stick with it. That could be for like six months or whatever. Really learn it in a deep way.

  And you'll find you'll get so much more out of using AI in your business when you start doing that. Because I was just wasting time using all the other tools. And I was like, no, no, no. Just put all my eggs in that basket and then hope it doesn't collapse. Which it won't.

  Katie (21:07)

  I know for me, I've spoken about this several times on the podcast. I got really fed up with ChatGPT. I just felt like it was giving me really basic answers and staying really surface level. And some of the things I wanted, I wanted it to be able to go much deeper. And the questions I wanted it to ask me back, they were just really basic and surface level. And I was like, no, this isn't cutting it for me anymore.

  But I can remember when I was like, I don't want to have to learn Claude and then Claude doesn't know me. And I know you can transfer all of your information over, but actually because I knew that ChatGPT wasn't really giving me the answers that I wanted, I wasn't having the conversations with it, and the outputs weren't what I wanted, I just kind of went for a clean break and I started from scratch with Claude.

  And obviously I gave it a lot of information about me and things like that. And actually it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be. And I'm so glad that I made that change because how I use Claude and what I use it for is completely different to how I was using ChatGPT and also what I was using it for. So I feel like I'm in a much better place with Claude than I was with ChatGPT. It's just getting over that initial fear of, oh God, I've got to start all over again.

  And I don't think the platforms are really that different.

  Noel (23:03)

  No, I think the concepts are very similar. They've just got different features, haven't they?

  Katie (23:06)

  Yeah, but if you can find your way around ChatGPT then you can find your way around Claude, I think.

  Noel (23:17)

  Definitely, yeah. I'd say going the other way round would probably feel less feature rich. So if you went from Claude to ChatGPT, you'd probably find there's quite a bit missing in ChatGPT compared to Claude. I think for me and why I picked Claude was not only just how it talks and the stuff I get out of it, but kind of looking at that future roadmap.

  So I quite like the coding bit. That's made really simple within the Claude platform. They then added Cowork, which allows you to automate things on your laptop and stuff like that. I was like, that's really awesome and how that works. And then recently they released live artifacts. So you could create almost like a live dashboard. Basically you would ask for a live artifact and then it would go and gather your data, whether that be from a spreadsheet, could be from Notion. It could draw that information in from your accounts and then display it on a dashboard. So it could be like your sales funnel and stuff like that. It could bring all that live data in and then you could chat with Claude and see that information on one screen. It's like, wow, okay, I didn't know I needed it until I saw it.

  But yeah, learning and really getting into one platform, you'll find your learning curve would be so much shallower. It's so much easier to do than try and learn everything. Definitely.

  Katie (25:01)

  Yeah, I agree. I think maybe we need to do an in-depth training on Claude for everyone. If you're listening and that's something you are interested in, either email us hello@makeautomations.ai or come and let us know on Instagram @makeautomations.ai, or you can come and let us know in our free LinkedIn group, which is AI Automations for Business, and it's completely free to join. So let us know if that's something you'd be interested in. If we get enough interest, then we will put that on and we'll make sure that it's accessible for everyone as well.

  Noel (25:57)

  Yeah, absolutely. There's so many different things. Already my brain's going crazy with it.

  Katie (26:03)

  Okay, well let's see if this is something that our podcast listeners want, but yeah, do let us know if this is something that you would be interested in. We'll get Noel onto it.

  Noel (26:10)

  Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Okay. So to move on to the third thing, the third piece of the puzzle, which I would look at if I started afresh today, would be an automation platform to connect things together. So you might not be super technical, not everyone's technical. I fully appreciate that. But I think with some of the no-code automation platforms, they make it as simple as possible.

  So you're not having to think, oh my God, how do these API documents work? I don't understand these. Whereas a no-code automation platform like Make.com would just be like, well, you want data coming from the spreadsheet out of this column and then you want it going into this app into this bit here. And that's all you need to know. You can probably work that out quite easily.

  But yeah, if you try to reverse engineer API documentation, you could be there for hours or never figure it out. So yeah, I think it's definitely worth investing some time in learning those tools. I think they are still relevant. Like I said, you could go down that coding route and create your own stuff. But for anyone that's starting out, then yeah, using anything like n8n, Make, Zapier, that would help you out from day one.

  And that would help you out with all that repetitive stuff, because one thing that we talked about at the end of last year, start of this year, was that people are wasting time chatting to AI when really they should be letting AI do stuff in an automation which just runs automatically. So a client enters your sales funnel and then something just happens. You don't even need to know what's going on. You just then see the output from whatever the automation does for you.

  So yeah, it's definitely still worth learning. And what you can build as well, it could be really basic or it could be super complicated and do all these incredible, amazing things for your business. But I think you'll find even three or four step automations in any of those platforms would easily revolutionise a simple process in a business. Yeah, definitely well worth investing some time in those tools.

  Katie (28:43)

  Yeah. And as well, it's really thinking about when you go to automate things. What are those repetitive tasks? What am I doing daily, weekly, monthly that actually I could set up an automation for? And sometimes you don't even need AI, do you, for those things.

  Noel (29:00)

  No, you could be moving data from one application to another or just simply saving an email into a CRM when it gets received. That doesn't need AI in there to do it for you. You're just linking the two together. Yeah, done really, really easily in those platforms.

  Katie (29:22)

  Yeah, for sure. And this three-step guide is actually something that we teach inside our membership, the AI Business Club. And it is going through these first three steps with you in detail. It's a bit of hand-holding. So you know exactly how to get started, how to move on, and then actually build either your first automation or use AI to help you with something. So it goes way beyond just using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini.

  We also help you look at what is the right software for you. We have trainings on the different software that you can use for AI automations, as well as tutorials on actually how to set up your initial first automations. We give you some suggestions as well.

  And as always, if you get stuck, you've got Noel on hand answering your questions. Noel's in there giving detailed, personal answers to your questions. It's not kind of, I'll answer this on a live and then actually you don't really get your question answered, which I've seen a lot of during my time. He will go in there and individually reply to your question for your business, which I don't think you get in many other places.

  So that is the AI Business Club. You can find us over on the Skool platform. We would absolutely love to have you join us. You can join for a month and check it out. And if you don't like it, you can just cancel. But hopefully you will like it and you'll want to stay. And we're always updating it as well with new things, any updates and things like that.

  So thank you so very much for listening to this week's podcast episode. We hope you've enjoyed it, we hope you find it helpful, and we'll catch you for another episode very soon.