Two Skills That Actually Matter With AI

AI's is like this brilliant new hire that can do anything, but it doesn't know what you want it to do, how effective it is, and the quality of what you get back from it is directly proportional to what you give it.

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.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to the show. I have been on a tear, actually feeling inspired about the podcast episodes that I'm putting out, because I obviously listen to a lot of different shows from other people, I have lots of conversations, but at the same time, you somehow end up in your own little echo chamber of the world, thinking everybody knows this, everybody already gets this, and it's so not true. So, I thought today I want to expose to you two skills that you actually need, like as a human, I'm not talking about Claude skills, you guys, two human skills that you need in order to be really effective at AI. When I think about how the heck did I even become this person who is a co-founder of an AI tech company, now pause for dramatic reflection and effect. I think about the skill sets that I have that actually work well with this generative AI technology, and what's exciting is that they are not technical skills at all.

So I'm going to tell you what they are. I'm going to share some examples of how I have been observing this in the past few weeks in the work that I've been doing for Wave to get our next phase of Wave Live for you, and I'll be talking a little bit about what that looks like, and how you can get involved, and if you're interested in building bot squads for your business and starting to sell AI tools. I feel like this is one of the hurdles, is how do I actually make good AI tools? Well, these are the skills that you need to hone, and you probably already have some of them. So, when it comes to using AI, well, it's not the most tech-savvy people who are winning, like, don't let us fool you. It is people who can communicate clearly, number one, and number two, think in systems and be able to organize thoughts. So we need to talk about this.

So, there's a common assumption that you need to be technical to get good results from AI, but the real issue is that AI responds to how well you can communicate what you want. So, remember when we first got started using ChatGPT, and everything was about how well you can prompt, and the phrase and the terminology, prompt engineering was big deal. Well, it makes sense because that is just communication. So, if you think about it, AI is like this brilliant new hire that can do anything, but it doesn't know what you want it to do, how effective it is, and the quality of what you get back from it is directly proportional to what you give it, so when I think about that, like it comes down to if you're building a bot, if you want to get AI to help you do something, you can't just say, like, go write me an email about this topic, you need to think about what does this tool, what does AI need to know about me, about the job I'm asking it to do, about the kind of output that I want to have back from it in order to prevent me from having to go back and forth 150 times on getting a result, and then going well. I could have just written the email right faster.

So let's use that as an example, and break it down. So, if you were to build a Claude skill, or a custom GPT, or a bot on Wave to produce emails for you, it would need to know what one and. Everything that you could possibly share about your brand, so I've talked about this before. The number one piece of context that is required for any AI tool to work well is what I call brand calibrator. So this is a breakdown of your bigger vision and mission, like why you're doing what you do, because that speaks to your values, and that is an underlying tone of your communication, no matter what it is that you're producing. As far as an output, it also needs to understand what kind of topics you talk about, so the messaging side of things, the conversations that you want to have, your opinions on all of those things, and how you want to position yourself as a thought leader, having these conversations within your industry. You need to know about your industry, context of what you do, who you do it for. Communication is very much what do I need to say? Who am I talking to, and how can I then shape that message so that I get that audience to do what I'm requesting, whether that's from a marketing perspective to buy your thing. Back in my PR days, it was usually to help shift their perspectives, right, to open their minds to different ways of thinking about things, and that's also a very important skill that we can be using, and it's a nuanced layer on top of just like I have a workshop, I need to tell people about the workshop, it's not just tell them about the workshop, it's tell them why they need to be part of this workshop, make them want to be part of the workshop, make them actually buy the workshop, that's the goal of the communication, and being able to explain all of that.

So, back to your brand calibrator, knowing your audience, having real clarity about who your business is for, who you're trying to serve, who you're trying to reach, and understanding like what they think, feel, what they're struggling with, what their beliefs currently are, so that you can come together in the middle of that and help to shape the communication the way that you want to shape it, and then it also needs to know AI needs to know, as part of your brand calibrator, what your offers are, How do you actually show up and sell what you do. What kind of is it coaching? Is it digital courses? Do you do consulting work? What are the things that you offer, so that it can think about how to strategically like frame those things for you. And then the last piece is your actual like tone and voice style, your writing style, your speaking style, your personality quirks about you, like as much of this as you can. And I have a brand calibrator tool that walks you through this entire process, and will extract that for you. So, if you want to check that out, Brand Calibrator has been my core product, that AI product that I've created that will take you through all of this and and pull together the documentation that essentially becomes the context for any any conversation that you have with any AI. It needs to be present, so when you're thinking about like the communication skills, communication is all about context. Generative AI is all about context. What does it need to know to do the job you want it to do? So that's the information you provide to it. Then how do you want it to do that job? So that's your ability to explain what does it look like to write a good email. What length of an email are you writing? Do you have a specific format that you like to follow in your emails?

For me, I usually start with a story. I transition that into the conversation about whatever the topic is. I usually have links in my emails. I have a call to action. I do things like put buttons in there for people to click on. I have a section at the bottom of all my emails called the menu at the moment, which is a sort of inserted advertisement about what's happening currently, so no matter when people receive my emails, they get that. So being able to know the whole big picture and explain the whole big picture to AI is very, very important, and this is why the communication skill is one of the most important skills you can think about, and if you don't feel like you're very good at this, then you can try asking what it needs to know before it does the job, ask it to tell you what it needs to communicate, what you need to communicate in order to get the output that you're looking for, and you can then respond to it, and this will help shape the way that you approach AI, whether it's to do a task, to build a bot, to create a workflow, or whatever it is that you're doing. It, and one more little side note about context, because I think this might be the most used word in my vocabulary right now.

Context, context, context, context window, all the things I need you to know that more is not better. If you're like, well, let me just plug my quad into my entire Google Drive, and say, here's everything that you need to know. Like, let's be honest, you did not organize your Google Drive that well. This is what is becoming like this is the transition into what the next skill is that's so important, is your organization skills thinking about what needs to be shared and what does not need to be shared, that also like backs into what are we creating, as almost like when I think about documents that I'm creating now, these are becoming like single source of truth, as much relevant information in one place as possible, not a million things all over the place. Crappy drafts of stuff like, think about what's actually in your Google Drive, a bunch of screenshots from five years ago that you never actually did anything. You have folders that are like stuff to remember, or ideas like AI has no business getting into all of that. All you're going to do with that is confuse the heck out of it. It's going to start reviewing things, pulling that into its context. It makes decisions about what is and is not important. You are the one who needs to make those decisions about what is and is not important, and I'll tell you that even in like part of what we're doing with Wave is I do a lot of work in Claude or in Chat GPT and then I take things over to Wave to create bot squads around different workflows and processes and things like that that I'm doing because it works really well over there, but in that process I know it doesn't have the history of everything that I've ever done. I think this is another misconception, is that we think that well, I'm going to just just use one platform because that platform knows everything there is to know about me.

Well, spoiler alert, it doesn't actually remember everything, it is making decisions about what it should remember based on your patterns and habits, and that is what is informing the memory and the context there. So, I mean, I'm an Enneagram eight of, I like control of things, and particularly I like control of context, so if, for example, I'm building out, so I'm building out a marketing strategy for the next phase of Wave, which is we are going to be offering a workshop in June, and then following that up with an invitation to join us for the next phase of our beta, where we will be working directly with people to build out sellable bot squads and getting that ready over the course of a couple of weeks in July, so that you can have your bot squads ready to add in as bonuses or features in your September launches, so anybody who's kind of reworking their program for September launch. I know a lot of people like to launch in September. Then that is what we are doing, and so when I think about how to build a marketing strategy, obviously I have some experience in coming up with this process.

I have a way that I approach this task, I explain what that is. That marketing strategy becomes my single source of truth. I can take that strategy, which explains why we're doing this, who we're reaching out to, all of our messaging angles, all of the marketing, all of the details around like dates, pricing, the curriculum of the offer, like all of that stuff that needs to be known. I can take that over to Wave, where I'm building my marketing department squad, and in that squad that becomes the reference material for my email writer to start building out the sales emails for my social media caption creator and my social media carousel builder, and my LinkedIn writer, and whatever else, my podcast, you know, script or idea creator, all of those are now doing their jobs based on this piece of information, this context, right? So just to zoom out one more layer on top of that, when you're thinking about how you will teach people through AI, how you will get AI to help deliver and teach what it is that you do, which is what Wave is for, so that you can mod. A tie, as part of your processes, you need to think about building agnostic tools, so if you help somebody, one of our beta clients, she is a journalist and a PR coach, and so she helps people to find podcasts and write good pitches to get landed on those podcasts, as one example. So, if you were to go to AI and just say, "Help me find podcasts, it would try, and it would do that based on what it knows about you, but you have to think about what information is needed in order to make that work really well. It puts together a media messaging document that's customized to the user that then can be used through her tool, and then she doesn't have to rebuild this tool for a bunch of different people, so that's the thing to think about with respect to how you are going to build a bot squad that works for many people, but what is the piece of context that needs to be brought into that? So, there's an input in a

bot squad, there's an input, there's a process, and there's an output, and that's the framework. And I will do another episode explaining that in more detail as well.

So, communication skills, organization skills, organizations, and systems. So I learned the second half of this is so critical, because as we've been, you know, establishing wave, creating our workflows, I've actually had to think like outside of my own brain about that. Yeah, I'm doing stuff, but how do I.. if I'm going to build a business that's AI forward, that's using AI to help me to do these things, I need to be able to understand, like notice, understand, and explain what systems I'm creating. So, I'll give you one last tip before I get off this, like, soapbox. I had like an outline in front of me, and I have gone on a complete impromptu riff here, which is good. I always love them when my episodes go that way, but I have started a Claude project called Systems and Workflows, and I gave it instructions, something to the effect of I want to be able to come in here verbally, explain what it is that I'm doing, and have you identify what the steps are, and ask me some follow-up questions that will help me to understand whether this is like a one-off thing, something I do regularly, and so that I can then think about how to use the tools that I have at my disposal to support me, so those tools being AI, whether that, what does that need to look like? Does that need to be something that's automated? Does it need to be something that has AI as part of the process? Where's the human part of the process? All those kinds of things,

so I'll give you an example of one of the workflows that I do regularly, or that I need help with doing regularly, so slash maybe I ignore it way too often, and that is with respect to my podcast, right? I get pitched podcast guests all the time, and I want to actually review them and reply to them, and potentially book them on my show, but I'm not really doing that, because I don't have this system set up, so I go into my cloud project, I explain the issue, I'm like, the pitches come to my emails, like, where what can I do to, like, capture those, centralize those, and then actually create an action plan for myself, and what am I going to do with that? Right, so this entire episode came from the fact that I just started learning Airtable last week. You guys, I don't know, it's 2026 and if you're an Airtable fan, and you're like, "Oh my god, you just finally started using Airtable, I'm kind of going, "How did I run a business for nine years without this, especially in the AI era, where we need to have a central repository for all of our things, we need to have a place that is organized and structured that a bot can review and that you are controlling what gets put in there and the way that it looks, so I think this is kind of why this whole episode came together, because I've been going through experiencing how that is supportive for me and all of the systems, workflows, tools, context storing, document creation, and communication all comes from that, like central hub.

So I hope that this was a helpful episode for you to see really what to focus on as far as thinking about the skills that you. Need to be really good at generative AI communication and systems thinking. So, I also mentioned that we are having a workshop in June. There will be information below in the show notes about that, but the purpose of this workshop is a blueprint to bot workshop, so I have been sharing our AI tool launch playbook, which is a functioning bot squad where you can actually jump in, use Waiv, and get Waiv to show you how you could monetize AI. What kind of a bot squad should you build for your business? So we had a little bit of that chat today, but that workshop will be happening on June the 17th, so there's a discount code and a link below in the show notes for you to get in on that workshop, and we will actually build your first bot live in that workshop, so you're going to come out of there seeing exactly what this looks like, having a functioning bot, knowing what the next steps are, being able to see the path for you as far as becoming a creator of AI tools, and as I like to say, make him bank with your bot squad. All right, I'll see 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.