Episode Transcript
Lisa Lane: [00:00:00] as a brand owner, it's always challenging because we're constantly having to make content, right? Believe it or not, I could go onto TikTok now, instead of making my own video, I can ask TikTok like, Hey, here's an image, turn this into a video.
Elizabeth: if you don't pay for an LLM, if you don't have an enterprise version, don't share anything you don't want out in public.
'cause it's like you're running down the street naked.
Lauren Lane: I strongly prefer Claude. I definitely do. I like some negative feedback. Sometimes it makes you feel like when you make the right choice, it's really right,
Richard: I put it into the LLM and it took some of the best stuff out and I said, "nope, I'm gonna leave that in." And I said, you always do this. And I got mad at it and apologized.
Sonia Satra: I asked another question and it said. I could answer that, but you know, the real thing you need to do is to take action. I was like, are you kidding me?
Intro: This is real AI use cases, business owners round table. Here's how real companies are using AI right now
Elizabeth: Sonia I'm gonna start with you. What we're gonna do, I'm gonna ask everybody for one way they used AI [00:01:00] recently, or their favorite way, and then we're going to have a discussion because I know there's not just one way for everybody. So, Sonia, I'm gonna start with you.
What's one way you're using AI?
Sonia Satra: So on a regular basis, I use it just for brainstorming. Mm-hmm. Creation of ideas. I've also used it for editing videos. Mm-hmm. I actually just got this really cool AI clip where I was able to take a picture of me and make it move as if it's walking down the hallway almost like I was walking
Elizabeth: It's actually really cool.
So. Okay, good. We'll come back to you. Yeah, that is awesome. Okay, so I'm gonna go to Lauren Lane next. And then to her mom, Lisa. So Lauren, what's one way you're using it?
Lauren Lane: So I actually joined the business this year and using AI has been the number one way for me to get up to speed and learn all of the major platforms that we sell our product on.
So it's been a tutor for me. And a way to actually understand the business [00:02:00] and see real time analytics. I know Amazon is our biggest platform right now. And recently they released Canvas for sellers. So as someone who's still learning the business, I can log in and immediately have charts and an understanding of not only how much we're selling, but why it's happening on the platform.
And that has been so invaluable.
Elizabeth: Oh, excellent.
Lauren Lane: Very cool.
Lisa Lane: And my one way I always say, as a brand owner, it's always challenging because we're constantly having to make content, right? Believe it or not, I could go onto TikTok now, instead of making my own video, I can ask TikTok like, Hey, here's an image, turn this into a video. Boom. My image is now a video on TikTok. So it's a time saver. And it helps generate sales. And TikTok does it. Amazon's doing it. It's getting better every day. And what was a decent video is becoming a really good video with time.
Richard: So one of the projects that we have is that Gearhart [00:03:00] Law wants to have sort of a bigger voice in what's going on in the intellectual property community. And there are a lot of rules that are proposed by the Patent office but we're using AI now to scan the regulatory landscape and to notify us about different activities at the patent office and in the legislative branch. That'll give us the opportunity to give an opinion about whether a particular rule relating to intellectual property is something that supports entrepreneurism or doesn't.
And so it would be virtually impossible to track all of that stuff without a staff of people. With AI, we are just setting up the algorithms and it'll sort through it and give us notifications of content that we think would be appropriate for us to comment on.
Elizabeth: Yeah. Amazing.
So I gave, this last presentation on AI and [00:04:00] marketing, I asked everybody in the audience like, "how many of you does it send down the rabbit hole?" Everybody raised their hand, so I did kind of go down a rabbit hole with perplexity, but I was happy I went down so.
We were talking about the Gearhart Law website, and it could only find the most recent blogs that our marketing agency did that had optimized their blogs for answer engine discoverability, so the ones our previous marketing agency did were not in the right format to be discoverable by ChatGPT Gemini, et cetera, which Gearhart Law now does get quite a few leads and clients from the large language models.
You're not doing anything really, or not doing a lot with your passage to profit show content. How about if I pull blogs out of that for the, especially the IP in the news section and just write blogs for you? And I was like, let's try one. And it did, and it quoted Richard and it was a really good blog post, but we can't really use it for that because our marketing agency is doing our blogs and that it just would be too much.
But I [00:05:00] do wanna start doing that for passage to profit. 'cause we have a website for passage to profit, a lot of social media, but we don't actually have any blog posts. And the answer engines love blog posts. Mm-hmm. They love the structured content. Mm-hmm. So, it was funny because perplexity, I was not trying to use it as an AI agent, and it was almost acting like an agent.
So for those of you who haven't heard of agents before, they do a series of steps for you. So I was just blown away, but I am going to try to really experiment with that and use it more. So
Richard: maybe you want to tell the audience a little bit about what you presented on in Indianapolis? 'cause it is AI related.
Elizabeth: So I was talking to. The A CPA group. So CPAs have a national chapter, national organization, and they have state chapters. So these were the marketing people for the state chapter. So I was talking on AI and marketing, so. I went through the usual stuff.
Yes, you can do [00:06:00] newsletters, yes, you can do emails. Yes, you can do communications, but make sure you check it all. Make sure you do it in your own voice and , you know, if you don't pay for an LLM, if you don't have an enterprise version, don't share anything you don't want out in public.
'cause it's like you're running down the street naked. That's a good analogy.
Richard: Gee, I never thought of it that way.
Elizabeth: That was super important. And that is how do you get found by ChatGPT and the other LLMs, but most people are on ChatGPT. So as I said, we've been working on that. I've been working on that for the last three years for Gerhart Law. We hired a new marketing agency, which is much better at that.
Passage to profit certainly helps having all this content out there. High level entrepreneurial content with the iHeart authority has really helped us. But there are a lot of things that you can do and a lot of things you should do on your website that are like almost programming things and how you structure your data and everything.
[00:07:00] And there's this code called Schema Code. Sonia and I have talked about this she's like, nobody knows what that is. You kind of have to show an example. I asked everybody there, have you, who's heard of schema code? And nobody raised their hand, so
the AI visibility, which is showing up as the answer for the search engines is really new for a lot of marketing people and even marketing agencies. And there's a lot to do with it, a lot that you have to do with it. But as I told 'em, SEO with Google is still important for your website and digital presence and it's 80% of what you need.
You have to really make sure you're doing the Google stuff right, and then do some more for answer engine optimization. So I'm starting consulting now for that.
Sonia Satra: Right.
Elizabeth: So Sonia. How else are you using AI? How else? Oh, I want you to tell the Claude story.
Sonia Satra: I know me and my AI, first it was Chat, who was like, I had the most negative chat person 'cause I started to do voice chat and she'd be like, hi.
So I was like, lemme try something else. So I went to Claude [00:08:00] and I was going down a bit of a rabbit hole. Yes. Having used the Sphinx code, I was kind of interested in these tarot archetypes. So I was looking at that through the lens of my speaker reel and a podcast.
And so I was going down and I was asking all these different things and it got to three quarters of what I wanted. And then I asked another question and it said. I could answer that, but you know, the real thing you need to do is to take action. I was like, are you kidding me? You're, I was like, you're not not gonna answer me.
I asked you about these other two things. And they're like, that's interesting, but what you really need to do is take action on these. And then they asked, I actually just looked at it, well, how does that make you feel? Or something like, how do you feel about that? And I was like, I feel like, why are you holding out on me? Yeah. Like, why won't you answer my question? And they were like, okay, fine. And then they answered it. And then they came back to now it's time to take action. Oh God, serious. Like, I can't [00:09:00] believe it.
Richard: Yeah. I mean, but I think they're programming this stuff to have more emotions because then it makes you more engaged with it. Right.
I just think it's a tactic. Yeah. To get you to spend more time on the, you know you get mad at something even though you're mad, you're engaged.
Elizabeth: Exactly.
Richard: Actually,
Sonia Satra: I think it had the reverse effect. I was like, fine, I'm going back to chat. That loves everything I say so Lisa and Lauren, what do you guys think?
Lisa Lane: We always have a debate, you know, from an e-commerce brand. Do we like Claude or do we like ChatGPT?
Mm-hmm. So we're always like playing one off of the other. But Lauren, I don't know what your opinion is, do you have a, a preference
Lauren Lane: I strongly prefer Claude. I definitely do. I like some negative feedback. Sometimes it makes you feel like when you make the right choice, it's really right, you know?
Richard: Yeah. Ah, very clever. Yeah. Well, you know what's frustrating is like there are times now if the content I'm reviewing somehow doesn't fit into [00:10:00] one of the LLMs, it can't analyze it. Mm-hmm. Then I get frustrated, like this hearing I was talking about a little bit earlier, a congressional hearing on some patent stuff.
They didn't have a written transcript and the, I pasted the link in and the LLMs couldn't review it, and I mean, I literally did listen to the whole two and a half hour hearing, but I also wanted some summaries. Mm-hmm. So I could start thinking about my thoughts on it, and I couldn't put it in, and it was very frustrating.
Then all of a sudden I'm like, oh. Darn, you know? Right. I didn't take notes because I assumed that I was gonna be able to, to analyze it independently.
Elizabeth: And I think we're running up all of us probably against some of the limitations, right.
Because I find it's a very linear thinker. So it's really like talking to a child. You have to be so directive with it. And right now I do want to make some AI agents but I realize that I have to pull out every single tiny little detail of the process and document [00:11:00] it before I give it to the AI to make the agent, because it might make up its own mind or it might just skip a step and then get the wrong answer, right?
Mm-hmm. Like, are you guys finding that?
Sonia Satra: I do find you have to double check, especially for facts or anything that's really important. I always double check or I'll go through all of 'em and be like, test them against each other, and every once in a while I'll still go to Google.
Elizabeth: Yeah,
Lisa Lane: I do feel like it gets to know you with time. Right? Yes. Like initially, very much so saw that, but now it's like I kind of have a relationship with my AI, right? You ask a specific question, it knows the brand, it knows what we've asked in the past, and the output is really, really much better than it was.
So I think the more you work with it. The better the result.
Elizabeth: I do think though, that it gives you biased answers because I had these prompts that I gave to the CPA organization where they could ask baseline questions so, their clients [00:12:00] could see how they show up in AI right now.
Mm-hmm. And I put those through for Gearhart Law and I was like, what are the top three patent law firms near Summit? And Gearhart Law was coming up. So then I'm, and I said, act as though you are a small business owner who's never heard of any of the patents firms.
And it kept giving me Gearhart law, and I was like, well. Is it giving me, that's a
Richard: good thing, by the way. Whatever you're doing out there, keep doing it.
Elizabeth: So is it giving me Gearhart Law, because that's true. Which it is! Or is it biased? I'm glad you said that. Is it biased in giving me Gearhart law?
'cause that's what I want to hear.
Lisa Lane: Is it because you've used it so much?
Elizabeth: Maybe I have.
Lisa Lane: So maybe that's a benefit to you because you use AI
Elizabeth: but I can't get a real answer. Right.
Richard: On the Gerhart law thing, going back to that, we did have our marketing agency run the queries and they're far away in like a different server farm area in Virginia.
Elizabeth: Right.
Richard: And they also got some pretty good results. So listeners. Go ahead and [00:13:00] plug Gearhart Law into your LLMs and then give us a call.
Elizabeth: All right. So I think the visibility is the next challenge for a lot of people and there are a lot of things that you can do for that. And there's a lot you can do on e-commerce sites for that too.
But one thing I realized I was doing when I talked to somebody else in our last real AI use cases was I'm asking it to train me on how to use it. So I'm saying give me optimized content.
How do I optimize this content? How do I do this? And it is, to some degree, I dunno, what do you think?
Sonia Satra: I think you always do need to add your special touch to it.
Elizabeth: Oh, yeah,
Sonia Satra: yeah,
Elizabeth: yeah.
Sonia Satra: In terms of optimizing for being seen or optimizing for being correct.
Or both?
Elizabeth: I do both, but it's not always right. And I use Claude as the final, but I'm not even sure that Claude is always right.
Sonia Satra: Yeah.
Elizabeth: And then I was thinking of podcast names of somebody else, and I came up with the podcast name. I was asking ai and it just couldn't give us a [00:14:00] good life.
Sonia Satra: I found that too, looking at podcast names. I'd put in a bunch of names and they would tell me that. They were available and then I would look it up and they wouldn't be available.
Elizabeth: But even just coming up with the name itself, like it was not coming up,
Sonia Satra: or I would, yeah,
Elizabeth: Because I came up with outsmarting, the algorithms.
It hates that. So what about you? Any other thoughts on ai?
Richard: When I was doing, working on this blog post, I'll use AI for ideas. And sometimes I'll copy a sentence or two, but there are some things that I really want in my own voice because I want the authenticity.
So I will use it as a writing aid, but I will also disagree with it. I was using it in part for IP news coming up next and, I put some stuff in and then I put it into the LLM and it took some of the best stuff out and I said, "nope, I'm gonna leave that in." And I said, you always do this. And I got mad at it and apologized.
Elizabeth: It does have an attitude now.
Sonia Satra: I think also my [00:15:00] husband's using it a lot. He's got three different computers and two of them are set up with emails that are not connected to his regular email.
He doesn't have anything else on the computer except for the LLM. That's it.
Elizabeth: Yeah. That's how the users are doing it now, because they don't want their information out on the internet. So you do have to be careful.
Sonia Satra: And I do think more and more that is gonna become a thing, just the security side of it.
So that's something else I'm looking at. But he also has five different assistants for five different pieces of his business, and he's given them names and voices and so i'm trying to integrate some of that , I don't need five of 'em, but maybe I just, maybe I want like a hundred.
Elizabeth: I think that's gonna be a new job as ai, assistant manager.
Sonia Satra: Yeah.
Elizabeth: A human job.
Sonia Satra: Yeah.
Elizabeth: Okay. Well thank you everybody. This has been real AI use cases, business owners, roundtable.
Speaker: You have been listening to Real AI Use Cases business owners Roundtable with hosts, Elizabeth Gearhart, marketing expert and PhD researcher using AI every day. And Richard Gearhart, [00:16:00] entrepreneur, business owner and intellectual property attorney specializing in innovation. We hope you found this valuable.
Join us again for more stories because the future of business is driven by AI.
