Are You Outsourcing the Wrong Things to AI?

[00:00:02] Before we jump into the show, this episode is brought to you by Waze. That's W-A-I-V. It's the platform where coaches, course creators, and experts can build and sell protected AI products with their expertise baked right in so their clients can get their thinking, not just a generic LLM.

[00:00:22] Right now, you can grab a free 14-day trial of our creator account at graviastudio.com slash W-A-I-V. The link is in the show notes. Okay, let's get into the show. If you don't even know how to do it yourself, like giving it to AI is probably not going to come out the way you're hoping it's going to come out.

[00:00:48] I think people, they want to outsource stuff that it's because they think, well, AI will do it better than me versus outsourcing the thing that you're already doing well, but it's like not a good use of your time, essentially. 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.

[00:01:15] 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.

[00:01:41] 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. Welcome back to Entrepreneur School in the AI Era. Laura, I have a wonderful guest for you today. Laura Schoenfeld is here, and she is a business coach and strategist.

[00:02:04] And I love bringing you guests who are using AI in different ways in their business and want to show you sort of how they're making decisions, how they're implementing it, and where those lines in the sand really land. And so, Laura, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. The first thing that I want to ask you is, like, first of all, everybody listening, we're recording this episode on July 16th, 2026.

[00:02:30] So it's fresh off the press, but we do respect that, you know, lots of things change in AI really quickly. So I like to try and get these out the door as fast as possible. And, Laura, right now, as it stands in your business, what is the hill that you would die on with respect to how you use AI or don't use AI?

[00:02:51] So my feeling about AI, I've kind of had this ebbs and flows of attention to AI. And I think too many people are way too focused on things that their business doesn't really need to use AI for. And it's just like, oh, I got to get AI incorporated. And we got to, like, you know, build an AI team and have, like, a team of employees that are all AI.

[00:03:21] And for some businesses, yes, I'm not saying for no businesses, but I think there's a lot of people out there. And I'll even say myself included where going off on that rabbit trail actually can pull you away from the things your business really needs you to be doing. And it can actually hurt your revenue.

[00:03:36] So I know we're going to talk about that today, but I think using AI in a practical way where you're using it when you need it and not trying to, like, you know, plan for six months down the road when maybe I'm going to use this system or maybe I'm going to need this, you know, this process. It's finding the use of it when it's actually appropriate.

[00:03:58] And I think, unfortunately, because of all the hype around it, people get sucked in and they over focus on it and then it's actually wasting time for them. So that's the hell I'm willing to die on on July 16th. She's like, ask me again in two weeks. Yeah. But seriously, I think you are. Yes, you're so right.

[00:04:19] It's that shiny object syndrome and I feel to what I'm seeing in the circles that I'm roaming in are people are just trying to overhaul the entire operations of their business almost like, oh, everything should be AI. We should be able to do this and that and automate this and run entire launches with AI assistants doing things agentically and all this stuff.

[00:04:48] And that's like, OK, do we really need to start there? What is the best like what has been your journey in and the way that you've adopted it? That's kind of got you into that mindset. Well, I think for me, I have just seen so much chatter about what's possible with it. And that's the double edged sword, right? It's like there is so much stuff that it can do, whether you actually need that in your business right now.

[00:05:16] And especially if you're a solopreneur or you have a lean team, it might take a lot of time for somebody to be focusing on implementing a system for AI. And if it's you, the you know, the main salesperson, the main marketer, the main face of the business, it's something that you can get sucked into where it's like it feels very productive to be like building AI systems and like skills and, you know, all of that stuff. And then you're not showing up and selling. You're not communicating with your audience.

[00:05:46] You're not or you're communicating with them. But you just spend half an hour trying to make an email sound like you from Claude when you could have just spent that half an hour writing it yourself and practicing your communication skills. Right. So I think for a lot of people, they get like too excited by what's possible and they don't put their like blinders on to say, what do I actually need right now?

[00:06:10] And using AI where it's needed in your business is a much more sustainable, profitable way to use AI than going into this like, you know, rabbit hole of like you said, there's so many things it can do. Does your business need that right now? Is that going to help you make more money in this month, in this quarter, even in this year? If it doesn't, it's probably a waste of your attention right now. And it's tough because AI changes so fast. It's like it's just improving all the time. And I think there's this energy of you're going to get left behind if you don't jump in.

[00:06:40] And it's like, OK, you're not going to get left behind. I wouldn't necessarily say ignore it. I don't know if that's a great idea. But you don't have to be keeping up with all of the AI stuff to have for most people, the people I work with who are coaches and experts, service providers, people who are like, you know, selling their expertise. They don't need to be, you know, building a 20 person AI team to run their business. They didn't need a 20 person human team. Why would they need a 20 person AI team? Right.

[00:07:07] So really just being intentional about the use and not getting swept up in this momentum of like, I need to have all the AI systems built. And then you like completely lose track of the things that are actually what your business needs from you in the moment in the season that you're in. Yeah, it's like AI FOMO. Yeah, exactly. Let's dig into that a little bit more because like tell everybody, you know, about your experience, who you work with and how you can help make that assessment.

[00:07:36] What is necessary or not necessary? How would somebody make that decision in their business now? Mm hmm. So I work with mostly people who are already making money in their business. Usually they've already hit around six figures per year in their business. They are typically somebody who is an expert coach, practitioner of some sort, clinician. So they're really using their knowledge and skills to facilitate a transformation for a client.

[00:08:05] It's like kind of the, you know, the kind of business that I serve, virtual businesses. And I have seen. And it's unfortunate because it's such a hot mess. I have seen very, very intelligent people who actually have really strong inner positioning, inner beliefs, inner values that they that guides the way that they work with their clients.

[00:08:29] Outsource their public content, marketing, messaging, everything to AI, whether it's themselves doing it or they hire somebody who uses AI to do it. And when I tell you the absolute hot garbage that is getting put out, like from people who are very smart, very, very smart, very talented. And it's because they're like, well, I just thought it would be easier. And it's like I have a client. She's actually starting her whole Instagram account over because of this.

[00:08:58] She hired somebody to help with that kind of stuff. And he's using AI to create images for her business. And he was using AI video avatars of people who like he was writing these scripts for. So it was like these like fake people that were like trying to sell her business. And then one of the pictures was like a woman, you know, those weight loss pictures where the woman's like showing how her jeans are like about to go on.

[00:09:25] And the picture was a woman with closing a pair of jeans over another pair of jeans on this person's public Instagram account. And she is a nurse practitioner. So she's a licensed clinician. She's a professional. Like I just looked at it. I'm like, oh, my gosh. And I know she wasn't really aware that that was happening because she had a lot of other stuff going on. And she had just kind of like trusted this person to do a good job. But that's the kind of stuff where it's like that's an extreme example.

[00:09:53] But people are saying, oh, this is a faster way to do things. It gets things out quicker. You know, it's easier to like do this AI avatar of somebody, you know, talking about the business instead of me recording a video. But it is so off-putting as a person looking at it. And again, that's the extreme end. But even the communication, even if you are training your AI, even if you are, you know, doing a little bit more attention to the AI,

[00:10:18] there is a level of disconnect between who you are and what you stand for and how you communicate and what ends up going out. And for a lot of people, they don't have enough knowledge or skills around marketing to know what looks good or what will work in that to be able to then outsource it to AI. So when I think about what's a good thing to outsource to AI, I think about one, would you actually hire somebody to do it for you? And if you did hire somebody to do it for you, could you train them?

[00:10:48] To do it. So if you're going to hire help for social media, if you couldn't train somebody to do social media because you don't even know how to do it yourself, do not try to make AI do that for you. Like you have to learn the skill if you're going to be using social media to build your business. Do not use AI to make decisions for what kind of offer to create. Like you wouldn't hire somebody to build the core function of your business, which is what you're delivering as a service, right?

[00:11:17] So if you wouldn't pay an intern on your team, if you wouldn't pay like an entry level employee to do it, I would be very, very mindful of not giving it to AI. And if you would pay somebody to do it and you know how to do it and it's more about I just need this done and I can train it and I can like, you know, create an SOP for it.

[00:11:37] But that's the kind of thing that I think is really good for AI use is stuff that it's like, I'm already doing this repetitively and I know how to do this and I could teach somebody how to do this. Let me teach the machine to do it or let me like create the, you know, the skill or create the process. But it's like if you don't even know how to do it yourself, like giving it to AI is probably not going to come out the way you're hoping it's going to come out. But yeah, I just, yeah, the AI avatar thing. I'm just like, I don't know.

[00:12:05] And when I say AI avatar, it wasn't even her face. It was some random. I was like, is this a client of yours? Like, who are these people? And she's like, oh, no, I don't even know who those people are. And I'm just like, how are we going to sell like, you know, an expert based? They're working with you. You are the face of your business. You are like the person that they're going to be working with in this close proximity. And it's like some random like virtual dude robot that's like selling for you. Like this doesn't make any sense. So like I said, kind of an extreme example.

[00:12:35] But I'm just like, I think people, they want to outsource stuff that it's because they think, well, AI will do it better than me versus outsourcing the thing that you're already doing well. But it's like not a good use of your time, essentially. That's the kind of stuff I think is the much, much more effective place to start. And most people have stuff going on in their business that falls into that category. I love that as a litmus test.

[00:13:02] So outsource to AI things that you understand how to do. And understand how to train somebody else to do, too. Yes. It's that whole concept of validating outputs, right? So I think this is something that not a lot of people understand, which is AI will always give you an answer. AI is not going to say, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know how to do that.

[00:13:29] AI is going to just do its best job to mine all the information that it has from across the entire Internet, which is like so much data that it gets watered down, really. And it will give you something and it will do it quickly. And so therefore, you get that kind of done is better than perfect, I guess. Done is better than good, I guess, at that point. But done is better than good. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there's that piece.

[00:13:56] And then the other thing that you're talking about, like with the whole, I think that the other thing business owners need to think about and anybody adopting AI in any way, whether it's in your role in your organization or whatnot, is what is the governance kind of? Like where do I align and what does that look like for my brand?

[00:14:45] What's important? But there has to be parameters around the way that that works, because if you don't show up authentically and you don't create that connection or you don't sound like yourself, then is that actually helping you? And I think that's what you were trying to dig at. Yeah. Well, and I think before AI was so easily available, there was a bit of this competing on volume mindset. The more output you could create, the more touch points you would get, the more visibility you would get. And that was true.

[00:15:14] So now I don't think we're competing on volume because anyone can output thousands of pieces of content a month. Like anyone can do it. A robot can train itself to do it now. So I think now we're really competing on quality at this point. And so if somebody is like, well, it's better to have it up than to not. It's like, well, is it? Is it better? I would say if you're going to do it yourself and you post once a week, then, yeah, that's better than nothing.

[00:15:43] But if you're like, let me just see what this random cloud output is going to. And it wasn't even cloud output. I don't even know what tool he was using. But it's like this random, completely harmful type of content because a potential buyer goes and looks at that. And they're like, what is this? Is this a scam? So there is a level of output that I think can actually hurt your business if you are just kind of letting things just, you know, whatever. Just ship it, right? Like just get it out there.

[00:16:10] And unfortunately, I do think the more people that use AI sloppily, the more that everything just kind of looks like that. So even if you're training your own tool to be better, it's still like kind of sounds like the crappy stuff. And so for most people, I really do think it doesn't mean you can't use AI for communication at all. I just for me, I usually I'm like, I am the first point of input for it. And then I'm the last pass on it.

[00:16:37] If it's going to be representing me and my thought leadership publicly, it's not AI is just going to write it and it's going right. So and I can talk more about systems I use and tools that I do use AI for that help me amplify my visibility as a very busy mom and breadwinner of my family. But it's not it's not anything that I haven't had other people do for my business before. I just trained an AI skill to do it rather than have a human do it for me. Yeah.

[00:17:07] Well, I love that as a rule, like you are the initial input. Therefore, the initial idea is unique to you. Like it's coming from you. It's not like, hey, AI, what should I talk about today? Write me a blog post about this topic, right? Uh-huh. Here's a thought. Help me articulate this. And OK, I review that and then put it out. I do the same process, too, when it comes to content.

[00:17:33] But I definitely I definitely find even with emails and such, like you said at the beginning, sometimes you're spending 30 minutes editing when you could have just written it. And I just you know, I have days where it's like I just can't get myself to write an email today. Here's the idea. Here's the concept or here's the transcript from the podcast. Yeah. Wad, you write it. Right. Right. And I mean, when they're pulling from a transcript, it is tends to be quite a lot. It's good. Yeah. It already sounds like me. Right.

[00:18:04] There will be an AI generated email related to this podcast going. Yeah. But I also still review approved before it goes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Because I'm going to add a few things or tweaks and nuance. That's where AI is not good. It's probably not a sales email either. It's just an announcement that there's a podcast live. Right. So I think even the type of content that's going out, communicating something in a way that's just relaying information. And yeah, it's like probably a little bit of marketing.

[00:18:33] Like you might want to kind of amp it up like, oh, this is a really exciting episode. But it's not. You're not. It is a really exciting episode. It is. But you're not trying. It's not generating an immediate sale for your business. Right. So it's a little bit more removed from the actual like money in your business. Because I so I trained a skill. So I used to either have somebody do it as an agency years ago. And then when I started using AI for it, I was doing piecemeal AI, asking it to do things.

[00:19:01] And then when skills came out, I built a skill where it takes my podcast transcript and it creates the show notes. It creates a SEO friendly title, which a lot of times I end up actually zhuzhing up the title to make it more interesting. But it creates the title. It creates the show notes. It creates the blog post, the SEO optimized blog post to go with it. It pulls out the top five to seven most interesting quotes from the episode.

[00:19:28] And it writes the email to my list to let them know that the episode is live. All that happens in one shot from me. I just drop the transcript in and then I take that and I give it to my team. And the team goes and puts it in the places. Right. So they schedule it on Libsyn. They schedule the email, like all the different actual, like get it distributed happens from an actual human. But all of that to say, like all of that is coming from every single word that came out of my mouth or my guest's mouth from that conversation.

[00:19:56] And I have baked into that skill to pull as much direct quotes from that conversation as possible so that it's really not making anything up. It's just reorganizing content. Right. So I look at something like that as the thoughts, the words, the way of presenting things, the way of communicating was from me. My energy is in it. My signature is in it. Like just, you know, when somebody goes and consumes it, they're getting me. But things like the show notes, nobody's worried about the show notes.

[00:20:25] Oh, it has to sound exactly like Laura. Right. Like I want it to be accurate, but it's not that's not the content that somebody is consuming. It's really just kind of like a summary. So that's the kind of thing or like notes from a client call or notes from a group call, like stuff where you're making it easier for people to get the information that they need, I think is great. But when you start to try to use it to either inform your what you're actually saying or to

[00:20:52] really, I think the sales thing is the hard, the thing it really struggles at is anything that's really meant to be like sales messaging. It just kind of misses it. And it is flatter than it needs to be. It's feeling like what you're saying is like, what are the stakes? Yeah. What are the stakes of the output that you are willing to outsource to AI at whatever percentage? Right. Right. Right. Yeah.

[00:21:18] And like something that informs your business strategy or is something you depend on to make a conversion and actually earn income. That is a higher stakes piece of content or output from AI than a podcast show notes. Yeah, definitely. For sure. And I still look at them. And even with the podcast show notes, a lot of times I'm looking at, so I mentioned the title, right?

[00:21:47] That's the thing that will make somebody decide if they're going to listen to the episode or not. The show notes less, right? Like somebody might look at the show notes to decide, but the title is really going to be that first point of contact for them. And if the title sucks, they might skip it. If the show notes suck, but the title sounds interesting, they might still listen, right? It's almost like the email subject lines, like, you know, whether or not somebody reads the email is the first step is, did they see that subject line? Right.

[00:22:13] So I think like those are the touch points where I don't want to just trust what AI said. But again, if it's just like some bulleted notes of what I talked about in the timestamp, I mean, I trust that it's looking at the timestamp correctly, right? So that is a really great way of saying it. It's like, how much does this piece of my business impact the bottom line financially? And if it's literally what drives the sales, which if you're a coach or consultant or an expert thought leader, your communication is what drives sales in the business.

[00:22:43] And your ability to communicate authentically in a way that sets you apart from other people is what creates money in your business. And AI, for better or worse, is something that kind of shaves off the edges on things and makes everything a little bit more average, right? And so like, if you're trying to stand out and your stuff is kind of a little bit more like everybody else's because you use too much AI for it, that's where it can really be very, very negatively impactful on the business.

[00:23:13] So that's to your exact point, like anywhere in the business where I'm like, this is not going to make or break the success of my business. I am very happy to use AI as much as I can reasonably use it and install it and run it. But the thing that is actually literally the difference between somebody buying from me and not, I really do not want to outsource that. And I don't think most people should.

[00:23:38] I don't think most people have the skills to know what's good enough output from AI to trust AI's read on that. 100%. I totally agree with that. That's that differentiation between an output and being able to validate the output, right? And I feel like also to kind of add some more context, assumptively, so correct me if I'm wrong, to what you're saying even about the podcast process that you have.

[00:24:06] That's all built on templates and many like data that you already have. You know how you do your show notes. You know how you do your titles. You know how you do your blog posts. You can feed that structure to give the guardrails to AI to work with in the first place. It's not just like, make me podcast show notes. Yeah. Does that mean? Right. Yeah.

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[00:25:56] Yeah, there is the structure that came into it. And then honestly, part of it's also the source material, right? Like if the source material is not that good, it's not going to create magically good show notes, right? And so the time and energy and thought and creativity needs to be spent in the part that is the output, like my output, the things that are coming out of my mouth and making sure that it is valuable and interesting and helpful.

[00:26:25] And then that is what the AI uses. So if I just like do this really boring topic and just give it garbage input, it's not going to like magically make this a good episode. It's not going to magically turn it into something that's going to help me make sales, right? So it's really like it takes my stuff and gets it out in more forms. And usually the more forms are a little worse than what I would do if I was doing it manually. But as we said before, I don't think my show notes are the reason why people pay me. So it's not that big of a deal.

[00:26:55] And it's just a way, honestly, I feel like it's with show notes. A lot of times it's just a way for people to almost have like table of contents with a book, right? You don't read a book because the table of contents looked interesting. You read it because of the title. That's the thing that you're paying attention to. But the table of contents helps you find, oh, I'm in that spot of the book. Let me go there and go read that part. So that's where, yeah, what's actually in the content of the podcast itself is the thing that makes or breaks how much that impacts my sales.

[00:27:25] And that's where I'm like, do not outsource that to AI. I think this is interesting. What this is making me think, too, is just overall prioritization and looking at things differently. Like when we start, because guilty over here, I'm like building an AI company. So I use AI a lot. Oh, yeah. Like you should. You totally should. Your company actually makes sense to be using AI a ton. I think that's the big difference is we have all these people that are like, I need to be

[00:27:54] keeping up with all this AI stuff. It's like, no, you don't. But Kelly does because Kelly's building an AI company. But also, I would say that my biggest problem is too much, too many. And AI told me this because I was obsessed with. Because I am. Very meta. It was so meta. I was like using Claude Fable, right? Because it was like, oh, this new shiny, which it is. It is better. It is better. I'm sad it's going to be leaving. Because I'm like, oh, it's such better out. Well, you're just like, do I really want to pay for it?

[00:28:24] So I'm like, I'm waking up at midnight and I'm running project ideas. Like that's just how my brain is working right now. But what it told me, it was like, your build muscle is strong. Your ship it muscle is where everything falls apart. It's like, I just have so many ideas and I'm not actually executing. I feel like you just get to a place. This is kind of where I'm at, where you think everything needs to be happening so fast. And like the expectation for productivity and what you build and what you create and how

[00:28:52] you share and all the content and all the things and all the shiny FOMO AI stuff that we've been talking about on this episode just starts to like become overwhelming. And you don't have the ability to step back and go, in fact, it is very important that I focus on the content of this podcast right now. And make that really great so that when it is the source material for all the other things

[00:29:18] that I'm going to do over the next week because of that and everything else that's connected to this, like remember to reprioritize these things. It's not just like everything on your list is the same priority. It's not. It's like some things are core. And I think maybe this is a way what our conversation is, is like reshaping the way I'm thinking about things a little bit. And that's helpful to be able to go.

[00:29:45] These are the things I really need to pour myself into, be in the right headspace, like create space for. And then the rest are like the leverage levers, right? Just going to like make it go far, like use all the things. Yeah. Yeah. Don't forget to, you know, do that stuff. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that? Well, and I don't know if this is, I don't know if this is a total tangent or if it's

[00:30:12] very related, but I was thinking about how with AI, it's supposed to make your world or your work day easier and less work. And I think for a lot of people, because you get sucked into this, like I could do this, I could do that, I could do this. Like you actually end up doing more work than you even would have if AI wasn't part of the equation because it was like when you didn't have AI, you just like you had the natural limits on what was possible.

[00:30:37] And so you really did have to be very strategic about how you were spending your time. And I think people get into the situation where it's like, it's there's no off switch, right? It's like there's no stopping point. And then they end up doing so much more than they even need to be doing. I'm like, I feel so sick. Also called out. Well, and it's like, I get it. I get it. Because it's fun. If you're somebody who likes thinking about this stuff and you enjoy your work and like

[00:31:04] you're creative, my top strength finder is ideation. So clearly I'm speaking from my own personal experience that I can just ideate, ideate, ideate. It's just like, it's like a phrase I will not repeat, but it's like mental self-enjoyment essentially. And so it's this idea that like you're just thinking about things all the time and it feels very like, oh, it's productive. And I'm like thinking about it and being creative.

[00:31:31] And then it's the business is just kind of like not actually getting what it needs. Right. And so and then if you're like me, I have little kids. I have a 18 month old and a four year old. I don't have endless time to be just, you know, messing around, coming up with ideas that never get done. Right. And so I think I had this, I did kind of have like a bit of a come to Jesus moment in the last, I don't know, six months where I was like, I'm really using this too much.

[00:31:56] And it's very addictive to just be like thinking about things all the time. And it's actually distracting and it's tiring me out and it's removing me from the things that need my creative energy, which is like the front facing thought leadership, public visibility in my business. And so I do think for a lot of us who we get excited by ideas and possibilities, you have to really have some level of personal guardrails around.

[00:32:26] Yes, I could do that, but I don't. I'm not doing that right now. Right. And really creating almost artificial boundaries around what's possible, because if not, you'll just be like just this endless spin of like all the different things you could be doing. And I think it can feel very attractive when you're somebody who likes to feel productive. Ooh.

[00:32:49] What an amazing permission slip to remember that you are still a human being who doesn't need to like fill all this capacity with more things. I have had this conversation with myself every day for the last month, at least, where it was like 830 in the morning and I've built three web pages and like done 17 things. And I'm like, wow, look at me go. Yeah.

[00:33:19] An old version of me, that would have taken, you know, weeks to put together everything that's required to, you know, launch a new program or whatever. And I'm glad like I can deploy this all. And that's a good thing. But like, but I know that I have two people who are human people who said, can you send me details on what it would mean to pay you to learn this thing that you just told me about?

[00:33:45] And it's been weeks and I have not sent them emails. Right. Money making activities. How do you do you have a top tip, Laura, on surfacing what those money making activities are so they can really like stay as your North Star and then you like tackle that and move

[00:34:10] into the other things that may be like self-satisfying or productive or they've been on your list. So therefore you need to do them. Like, how do we how do you help people make those decisions? Well, yeah. Well, I think for most people, they're going to have at least one core activity in every function of their business. And the money making activities are typically visibility, which is your marketing. Basically, I mean, from the people I work with, it's typically content marketing.

[00:34:41] So getting your perspective and thoughts and expertise out on the Internet in some way, shape or form there is so that gets you in front of potential clients. Now, obviously, you can do paid ads. You can do interviews like there's lots of different things you can do there. But just you and your company and your business, the thing that you're selling being in front of the people who would buy it. And then there's the sales and conversion activities, which for some people, there's degrees of involvement. Right. Maybe you do sales calls.

[00:35:09] Maybe you have a webinar that you just need to promote. Maybe you do DM selling. Right. Like there's a point of purchase that happens for people that that's where the money gets exchanged. And if people are not getting into those conversations or seeing that sales page or going through that webinar, you're not having sales conversations. And so the sales and conversions piece for most people is like that's the metric that if that starts to dwindle, that's the most immediate impact on their income.

[00:35:35] There's the delivery piece, which obviously delivering your service, your product or whatever you're selling at a high level of excellence is important because delivering what you sold is obviously like the bare minimum. And then wowing people can help with referrals, can help with, you know, testimonials, actually getting that brand building from your clients that are getting good results. And then there's the selling to people who have already bought from you.

[00:36:03] So I think a lot of times we get so focused on getting new people all the time that we forget we've got people we could sell more things to that have had a good experience with us and want more. Right. So that's a huge source of money that people sometimes drop the ball around because they're just like so focused on get more volume on the front end. But really, those are going to be your main money making activities in a typical online business that is not selling like, you know, widgets on Amazon or something.

[00:36:29] Right. So are you being visible on a regular basis in a way that is standing out and actually presenting your unique selling proposition effectively to the people who might want to work with you? Are you getting into sales conversations and are you actually delivering on what you said you were going to deliver in a way that creates, you know, a good name for you in the industry?

[00:36:53] Right. So most of those things I don't really think are super AI friendly. Like there's little bits of it, but the driving force of it, I don't think most people use can use AI in a way that is like the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. Yes, you can save time on a lot of that using AI, but the quality drops, the warmth drops, the human connection drops and your conversion rate, man.

[00:37:23] End up dropping. So, yeah, you're spending less time, but you're making less sales. So it's like, is that really a good trade off? So those activities, I think for most of us, unless you have like a marketing department or an actual CMO in your business or like one of your team members is responsible for all of that. Most of us are the ones that are responsible for the bulk of that. And I think for most of us, the goal of using AI should be to have more time and energy for those activities than trying to replace those activities with AI.

[00:37:53] Mm-hmm. I totally agree with all that. And I think the other way to look at how to use AI isn't just can it do something for you, but can it help you remember to do something for yourself? Mm-hmm. Which is something that I'm trying to implement right now is more of a like a better project management system for myself where I can use AI to surface those things. So those people that I know that I need to email, it's shown up every day in my face. Yeah. Telling me that I need to do that.

[00:38:23] I'm just not doing it, but at least it's there. Where it's not like lost because I didn't store it properly or like have a way of capturing that to-do item. Yeah. Actually executing on it. So that's another element of an opportunity, I guess, of the way that we can look at integrating AI for like producing things. Mm-hmm. Like an executing task. Yeah.

[00:38:46] But so for like more of an administrative layer that just like collects everything for you. Yeah. I don't know what kind of systems you have in place for that, but I've just been, I don't know how I lived without Airtable, to be honest. I just discovered this in the last few months.

[00:39:04] And, but now I have like things that there's tasks related to different things in different places and I need to pull that all together into a single viewpoint, which I can't do directly inside of Airtable. So I'm getting clawed to do that for me on a daily basis, like a daily triage that's pulling my tasks related to my podcast and collaborations and then other things related to, you know, development of WAVE and all of those kinds of things.

[00:39:32] So anyway, it just kind of made me think about another opportunity. Yeah. And to your point, like that is something historically you would have probably like an assistant of some sort to do. So if you could train an assistant to be like, hey, Kelly, you got these three emails that you need to respond to and here's the thing that's happening this week that you need to prepare for. You would very easily be able to outsource that to a human. Right. So. And it's not the money making directly money making activities.

[00:40:02] It's the things that help you stay on top of the money making activities. And so that's like you said, that's like the degree of separation. I would not use clawed to follow up with my leads to make a sale. But I might use clawed to look through my email to remind me what conversations I've had with that client or that potential client. Right. That lead. It's like, hey, can you look through my Gmail, see every, you know, pull up every conversation that I've had with this person. And I have a few longer sales cycle type buyers in my audience.

[00:40:31] So it's like, oh, that person emailed you two years ago about this. And it's like so kind of gathers like what's my data on this person. But I'm not going to ask it to like have the sales conversation. Right. And so, right. Or, you know, I have my otter on sales calls. And so, OK, I talked to them on the sales call. I have this DM from them. I have this email from them two years ago. Pull all that together. Let's paint a whole picture of like how I can support this individual.

[00:40:54] So it's data collection that then I can use to have a more productive conversation with somebody versus being like, I don't remember if I talked to this person. Like, what did we talk about? And then I'm not relying on my memory to have a very personal conversation. So and it's like that's I know we talked about this before you hit record. It's it's finding what's the line for you.

[00:41:15] And unfortunately, I think a lot of people, at least the ones I work with, they've over they've over outsourced AI to the things that really are needing to come from them to actually drive the income part of their business. And they aren't using it as effectively for the things that are really like more of the task rabbit type of work. Right.

[00:41:39] And so or even like client delivery, there's so many I love using AI to consolidate everything we talked about on a client call and write up the notes, give like the specific action steps, who's going to do what. And now we know, OK, like we talked about it. It was 45 minutes ago. I might have forgotten it normally. But because I was listening, hey, we had the whole list of everything that needs to get done. And it's very easy to go back to and remember that. Right.

[00:42:04] So that makes my delivery better, but I'm not using AI to come up with the plan that I give my clients. Right. It's like it's consolidating what we've already discussed into something that's more user friendly. So I just think there's so many places AI can make your business better that have nothing to do with like the point of sale and the thought leadership piece. And most people are not ever going to be ready to outsource that. And they probably shouldn't.

[00:42:30] And that's not the part of your business that is needing AI's involvement. Yeah, I feel like that's full circle to what we started with at the beginning, where now that you're like overstimulated by all the opportunities and such, you, in fact, probably have less memory. I said in a text to somebody the other day, I was like, I have undiagnosed ADHD thanks to AI. Yeah, probably. It's AI's fault. Yes. AI's fault. I'm like, ooh, this, ooh, this. Just push you over the edge. I'm waiting for Claude to do something.

[00:43:00] Let me get Claude to do something else. Oh, my gosh. But yeah, I think that you're so right. And it's interesting to think about how AI can actually help you be more human in that way, which feels ironic. But if you choose the right thing to outsource to AI, it allows you to be more human in the moment.

[00:43:22] So like you just said about your calls with your clients and whatnot, you're more present because you're not sitting there writing notes yourself. You're actually just in the moment experiencing that call. Mm-hmm. And then you have all the notes and you trust that it's there and it will go back. And we know that AI is good at pattern recognition and identifying, like if you said, this is my to-do item, it will tell you that. It will. Mm-hmm.

[00:43:52] It's good at that kind of thing. Yeah. So I love that, how we've unpacked this conversation. Is there anything else that you want to leave anybody with as we wrap up, Laura? I just, I feel like AI is one of those things that it is changing so fast. And sometimes I think there can be, like you said, that FOMO. And I know for me personally, being in the season of business that I'm in where the first, I don't know, seven years I was running a business, I didn't have children.

[00:44:20] And it's like, it's just such a different ballgame and there's already that level of feeling like you're not doing enough compared to other people. I think if we can all just take like a big collective breath and be like, it's not, it's, you're not missing out. You're not going to get left in the dust. I think, you know, somebody who's absolutely anti-AI in all ways, I think maybe that's a little bit of a concern. But even them, I still think they can find a way to make it work.

[00:44:46] Like, I really think AI is one of those things that's like, it's, you will not lose your entire business if you don't use AI. You might have to adapt to certain things, but I don't think the person who's choosing not to use AI is going to somehow just get like, you know, completely shut out of the business world.

[00:45:04] I think the people who honestly are at the biggest risk of hurting their business are the ones that are, they're basically trying to make, they're trying to make entrepreneurship not hard at all with AI. And it's like, they've just completely outsourced, like they want to be like an employee in their business and they want AI to be the CEO, essentially. I don't think there's that many people that are consciously doing that, but I think there's a lot of people who are subconsciously doing that because they're like, I don't, I just want to serve my clients.

[00:45:34] I don't want to like think about marketing. And that is like a death trap, I would say, for an online business, at least in 2026. So I do think we have to be mindful. You're not getting left behind. You can learn at your own pace. You can add chunks in. You can shut the computer. I actually have, there's an app called Opal that I have it set to block all my access to all my AI apps from 10 p.m. at night through 8.30 in the morning.

[00:46:04] So I could use that literally thinking last night, I need something like this because it was midnight. Yeah. And it's in my bed. Yeah. It's, it's hard. And it's like, you're, you are a human. Your brain needs rest. You need downtime. You need like empty space. And like, it's just, I think it's like, it's so tempting, even like I'll be on walks and it's like, let me talk to Claude while I'm walking. Actually, Laura, maybe you should just like look at the trees and like clear your mind.

[00:46:31] Right. And I think we have to remember that, especially as the leaders of our business, we do actually need that downtime. We need the space. We need the lack of doing things. And I think that having those boundaries around AI and being okay with feeling like other people are using it more than me, it's okay.

[00:46:50] And in some ways it may even, you may even be actually the one that, you know, tortoise in the hair is it where you're like, I'm using it effectively and not blowing my brain out on, you know, 3am Claude conversations that other people are like losing what's actually making their money in their business because they're, they're just off on this like, you know, FOMO train. So all of that to say, I do love AI. I am very glad I had my kids in that season of the world because it's made my life a lot easier.

[00:47:20] And I also just think it's like, it's just like you can have too much water. Water is good for you. You can still have too much of it. I think you can have too much AI. And I think finding the sweet spot is really like what I'm trying to leave people with is what is your sweet spot and use it to run your business in the most effective way possible, not just be spiraling out on all the things you could be doing in your business that now are available to you with all of these AI changes that happen every single week that we're trying to keep up with.

[00:47:48] This whole episode has been one big mic drop. Absolutely. So good. If you're listening, if you listen this far, listen again. I'm going to be like and taking some tips for myself out of this conversation. Thank you so much for sharing, Laura. Let everyone know where they can find you. I know you have a podcast as well. Yeah. My podcast is called The Nourished CEO.

[00:48:10] So the whole theme of my show is helping founders, CEOs, experts who run their businesses to make more money, but not at the expense of their life and sanity. And so we talk about all sorts of different things on that show. So it's kind of like my passion project, but it is also a revenue driver for me. And then I'm on Instagram at Laura.Schoenfeld. And my website is LauraSchoenfeld.com.

[00:48:34] And I have a free quiz if anyone's interested in taking an assessment on what kind of CEO type you are. So that can help you understand your skill sets and what you naturally optimize for with your business so that you can build your business around your strengths rather than trying to be someone you're not. And I think also the AI piece is using AI to kind of bolster the things maybe you're not so good at and not necessarily use AI to replace what makes you unique.

[00:49:03] So really understanding just how you show up in business and how to grow from who you naturally are so that it's not this like constant white knuckling through every stage of growth. Thank you so much for being here, Laura. Yeah, thanks for having me. 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.

[00:49:32] 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.