AI commoditized information. Sell this instead.

We need to be able to help our clients understand that there is a difference between just using a generic LLM like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, and asking it to do a task, or asking it for advice on the topic that you are best qualified to teach on.

Welcome to the next evolution of the podcast Entrepreneur School in the AI era. We are here to figure out how to integrate AI into the business you've worked so hard to build in a way that still feels like you. I'm your host Kelly Sinclair, award-winning marketer turned AI platform co-founder. AI has fundamentally changed how I thought about work, systems, and what's actually possible. This show is about navigating that new reality together. It's going to be a wild ride, my friend, but I truly believe there's a way to leverage AI in a way that's intentional, human-centered, and aligned. It's an ongoing evolution, so let's explore because AI may just be the unlock you need to achieve the life-first business you truly desire.

So I came across an Instagram ad that stopped me in my tracks yesterday, and it was an ad from Russell Brunson, the founder of ClickFunnels, kind of a big company. And what it said was, the people who are going to win in the next era of AI are the ones using AI; they're the ones selling AI with their expertise baked in. So I had two reactions at the same time. First one was, "Oh shit, are we too late, or what's going to happen now? And the second one was, "Thanks, Russell. Thanks for putting your ad budget behind educating the market on what I've been talking about for a year. So let's get into this episode of Entrepreneur School in the AI era. It's a little bit of a behind the scenes on the founder journey and just kind of like being in this AI space, which is crazy, how fast it's moving in them, like the competitors that just pop up all the time. But mostly, it's about understanding this shift in AI and where does it fit for you.

So, founder panic. Founder panic. A giant walks into the category that we are trying to carve out, but there is a reframe that I need to give to ourselves, which is: this is validation. This is validation that absolutely where this industry is trending towards is not exclusively about selling AI products, but there's definitely a huge shift that will be happening with respect to anybody who sells knowledge of any kind. I've talked about this on the podcast before, and that's AI has commoditized information, right? So your digital course, your program that you used to sell, is now available to everyone for free via essentially. And I don't say that to scare you because it's just something that's happened. And as creators, we have to adjust to the world around us and think about what does that actually mean. So, to me, what this means is what I've been talking about called expert-backed AI. Right.

One of the challenges I think that we face as our company Gravia Studio introduces Wave, our platform to the world is that it's for your clients, right? You can host your expert-backed AI products on Wave. You can sell them. You can protect your IP. You can gate subscription access, but your clients have to be willing to use AI, and that's a shift that's that's definitely progressing at different rates depending on the kind of audience that you actually serve. So for businesses, a lot of business owners are using AI quite a lot, so entrepreneurs, if your audience are businesses, they're thinking about okay. So I'm used to the the speed, the pace, the ease that AI allows me to do tasks. So if I'm going to invest in a program that's going to help me with a specific outcome. I almost expect that there is some element of AI built into it that will support me in being able to achieve that goal faster. And this is true. We've talked to lots of our users on Wave, and one of them specifically said she had a sales call with a potential client, and that question came up: How how are we using AI to do the task that you're helping me do?

So it's an expectation, but perhaps if your clients are more personal, so if you're a dietitian or nutrition coach, or you're working with somebody in personal, more personal ways, maybe those people don't have the same amount of experience, so their adoption of AI is coming at a little bit of a different pace. So those are some considerations for sure as to where we're at now and how does this trend fit into shifting the way that you deliver your knowledge-based services, training programs, coaching, courses-those kinds of things. The other piece that I think is important in terms of the pace of adoption here is also the reality that you, as a business owner, listening to this and thinking about, oh wow, all these opportunities to sell AI products, yes, I love this, but also I have all these opportunities to implement internal systems and structure with AI. So it's like choosing which one of those things is a priority, and I also think that you know we want to evolve our own individual AI savviness, and that means getting familiar using it for ourselves. AI is non-deterministic.

There are so many different pathways to achieve the same result. I I love going on different webinars and just seeing how people are teaching how to do AI, and me thinking I would do it entirely a different way, and both will get the same results. There's no right way and wrong way to do this, which is both overwhelming and empowering. So I think some of the struggle that we're having with you know reaching people who we want to talk to about selling AI products? Is that their priority first is to like clean house around their internal systems, and I totally get this because I have been like going deep and going hard into building internal business support systems with AI for my company for the last few months as well, like Fable Five getting extended for a week last week. Oh, the things I did! Oh, the projects I I ran! Oh, the the structure and skills and multi-step things that I built. I am so excited about them, and the truth is that you you have to figure out the most effective use for AI for yourself. And building an AI product may be secondary on your priorities to creating internal AI systems because both can honestly lead to monetization. Monetization looks like increasing your own capacity to be able to serve more clients by having AI systems that are structured to support you in doing the work that you're doing. Perhaps you're using AI to support actual clients, and that's great.

And then the third option is that you sell an AI product. So there's three different streams to get to monetization with AI, and it's about which one do you want to start with, right? And also, I keep wanting to underscore the fact that when we talk about AI products, they are not necessarily just here's an AI tool. Go use that. See you never to your clients. But we really are about human first AI adoption, and that is looking a lot like a hybrid approach. So when you're thinking about how do I imagine the next version of my program, my coaching offer, my course, whatever it is? How could it be a hybrid? How could there be tools that support my clients with AI and also a human to check in on how that's actually working, and to be able to add that additional layer of nuance.

I will point you back to the episode that we did with Dr. Michelle Mazur, who is actually our very first beta client to create on Wave, and she talks about how she now gets to you. Use her brain in even more of an exciting way, like how she wants to. She wants to be able to have these detailed, nuanced, strategic conversations with her clients, rather than the conversations she was previously having, which looked a little bit more like, "Okay, here's how you get started. Here's how you overcome the block that you're having from trying to do the thing that we're working on together, so that's really a really great opportunity to allow you to lean into your humanness and extend. Like we talk about this all the time, AI isn't about replacing you; it's about extending your abilities, your capabilities, and allowing you to use more of the human brain and the things that you even love doing that light you up as well.

So it's very interesting being a an accidental tech co-founder of an AI native platform in this world where AI moves at such a fast rate, and we're also trying to measure like where people are at in terms of adopting it in their own businesses and how this is you know a good fit for our ideal clients, so we're looking currently at people who are already more advanced. So if you have already been playing around with building custom GPTs and creating different quad skills and creating tools that your clients can use, then you are a really good fit to be a creator on Wave. If you haven't yet done that and you're still exploring how to do internal systems and structures, I can also help you with a consultation with a strategy call. We can map out what some of these systems look like that give you the space to start thinking about how you can monetize at that third level of actually selling AI tools to your clients and embedding that in as well. So this is where we're at. There's there's various paths. Where's it all going? Are we all going in the same direction? Don't know. It's a bit of a gamble. It's a bit of a an exciting thing. But when I see players like Russell Brunson coming out and talking about basically creating AI tools with your expertise baked into them, I'm like, great. I'm glad that we're having this conversation. I think it's important. I see the entire online course industry shifting into a model that includes more and more AI.

But, but this is where trust your brand, your reputation, your level of experience, all of those things come into play. We need to be able to help our clients understand that there is a difference between just using a generic LLM like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, and asking it to do a task or asking it for advice on the topic that you are best qualified to teach on. So when you're the expert and you have all of your frameworks that you've built over the years of experience, whether you have a doctorate in communications like Michelle does, or whether you're a business coach with years of experience from your corporate jobs and all the things-all of that is what makes you uniquely you, and that is where it's really interesting to have the conversation about expert-backed AI. And I feel like, as knowledge workers, I guess is what we get called. We have a duty, and I feel like this is part of my role at Wave is to explain what that looks like, identify the difference, and help you to know that if you like your audience is going to use AI, there's a difference that they're going to get when they use AI that is based on all of the garbage on the internet, just consolidated and you know best practices, quote unquote, found, which is how LLMs are trained, versus your expertise streamlining and putting guardrails up around what it is that you're talking about. This is an important shift that is happening, and we have a role to play as coaches, course creators, service providers, and thinking about what that looks like, what do our clients need and want, and how do we help them understand what the difference is between just just using AI and using expert-backed AI?

And if you're on this journey and you're ready to try building AI tools and AI products that you want to add to your programs to help support your clients. Then on july 15, Wave is opening our creator accounts as a self-serve option. Like you can just go buy the software. Turns out you didn't want to buy the software with all of the structure and support that we wanted to give it to you. As we have a two-week free trial for you to start playing with, and I would recommend getting to that by by grabbing our AI product playbook. So the link will be in the show notes. This is a free tool that we've built on Wave that'll actually walk you through what kind of AI product you should build. So we call them bot squads. They're a series of connected bots that will do certain jobs and walk your clients through a process. And I built one, which is the AI product playbook, and it produces your bot squad for you, like fully, fully audits whatever information you give it. I would give it a course outline, your sales page, if you have the transcripts from your training, if you have like a massive document that has basically all of your teaching in it, that is goldmine for information. So take that, put it into the AI product playbook. It will spit out your best fit like bots that you need, and it will build them for you.

And then you can launch into a creator trial where you can play with editing those. What does it look like for your clients to actually come in and use those things? What does the branding feel like? All of those things. So we have the platform that allows you to sell subscriptions to these bot squads without worrying about your clients sharing ChatGPT links. You don't have to give them a quad skill that's got everything available to them. Like you're basically giving them all your expertise behind the curtain-that is what Wave is all about. And our creator trial is available, and the creator counts are available, and we're excited to be welcoming new creators into our community and building AI products that just revolutionize the way that we teach and share our knowledge with our clients. So you can go to the show notes and you can grab the AI product playbook and start your creator trial. And also, don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or our thoughts about how you could add a bot squad to your current program. I would love to discuss that with you, so you can find me on Instagram, and I will talk to you next week. Bye for now.

Thank you for listening. If this episode got you thinking about how AI is impacting your business and what it might look like to integrate it in a way that actually fits, I'd love to help you think that through. You can book an AI strategy chat using the link in the show notes. It's a space to talk about where you are, what's shifting, and how to move forward with intention. And if this episode was helpful, please share it with another business owner who's navigating this evolution too. And make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's coming next.