Why Your Human Work is Now More Valuable than Ever

At the end of the day, AI is, yes, faster, but you, you, my friend, you are the superior brain. And it's really important that you know what it is that AI is giving you, whether it's worth running and sharing with your audience, or whether you need to kind of go back to it and say, hey, yeah, this isn't.

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.

Welcome back to entrepreneur school. I'm so excited that today I am bringing on a guest for the first time since we started putting this AI lens on the show, and I couldn't think of anyone better to start off our guest tour than Prerna Malik. She is an AI strategist, a sales expert and a conversion copywriter who helps creative entrepreneurs, course, creators and traditional businesses build people first profit rich sales systems, as the co founder of content Bistro, which is soon to be called profitably yours, she is the strategist behind multiple seven figure launches and evergreen funnels for clients like Pat Flynn Amy Porterfield, don't know if you've heard of them, but kind of a big deal, and Prerna blends AI buyer psychology and conversion science to make AI a strategic sales team member, not just a brainstorming tool. Welcome Prerna.

Thank you so much for having me. Kelly. I'm so excited to be the first guest on Yeah, on entrepreneur school, it's very exciting. And I just can't wait to nerd out all about AI with you, because we've been chatting. We met earlier as well, you know, virtually. So I'm really excited about this conversation.

Nerd out, I know. So we will. We nerd out. We shall. And I, when I think about like having guests on this show, the purpose for me is to just really highlight for my listeners the different ways that we can think about and approach how to use AI in our businesses and in whatever aspects we may be using them. Because I don't know about you, but it's like also helping me with my personal life, like, please organize my schedule, help me plan my meals. Turn this pile of food in front of me, into a recipe, those kinds of things. But I want to start also with like an acknowledgement that boundaries are super important, and that we all can kind of make our own choices around where we allow this technology in, and where we want to ensure that it just is like playing a supplementary role instead of a lead role. So what does that boundary look like for you?

Oh, I'm so glad that we're starting off talking about this, because you're absolutely right. AI, like anything else that we do or use in our business or even in our life comes with its own set of you know, concerns, and also it gives you, the person, the human, a chance to think about, okay, how do I want to use it? Because you could, you know, you'll see a lot of a lot of content, a lot of posts around, oh, I fired my entire team and replaced it with this AI text tool stack for like, $200 a month, something like that for my uncle me, my co founder, also my husband and me. It was very clear we were early adopters for AI. This is like, I'm talking 2022, so, but right from the start, the one thing at least that I knew I would never hire out to AI was writing which is both controversial and interesting, because that was, like the primary use, like everyone was, yeah, chat. GPT can write everything from poetry to sales pages, everything in between. But for me, it was very important because I, yeah, I'm a writer at heart. I started as a mom blogger back in 2008 that is when our daughter, who's now 18, was nine month old. So that's how I started writing online. But even before that, I'd been doing a lot of writing, right from school and college days. I was ghost writing for an astrologer, you know, as a side hustle when I was in college. So yeah, writing is, yeah, runs deep. So I was very clear. I do not want to use it for writing, but I still see the potential, and I still want to be a part of, you know, using AI, and because I knew right off the bat that this is going to change businesses and lives, and for me, that boundary came early on was that I don't want to use it for writing, but I still want to use it, and so that that boundary still exists, I still do all my writing, even though we have a, you know, an AI program. We've done multiple AI workshops, all of that, but yeah, I write for myself and our clients. I'm still and at my

keyboard, conversion copywriter, and yeah, I write all my copies. So that's like my hard learning in the sand. That's boundary number one. Boundary number two for us personally is we've decided not to use AI for our photos and videos I feel, and that, again, comes from the fact that I feel for us. Connection has always been the cornerstone of our business. So in the virtual world, the way you connect is through videos like these conversations, like these photos that you know, bring people into your life, help them see who you really are. And again, I know these have gotten really good. It's really hard to tell. There's no problem with hands and all that. But again, this is something that both mine can I feel very strongly about, is like we want our audience to be seeing us, not an AI clone, not, you know, an AI photo shoot again. Full disclosure there, you know, AI photo shoots can make things a lot easier for, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs. It's just one of the boundaries that we have for ourselves?

Yeah, totally. And I feel like what you're saying there is really all grounded in a philosophy about the importance of human connection, and that is even at a, you know, more broad narrative around AI use is like, like anything. You can either use it for increased quantity of any number of things, call that social media posts or emails or communications of what, whatever kind or you can still you can look at it as, how do I support the quality that I have as a standard for my business, and look at other ways to leverage it to allow me for more of that. Because what, what I always think about, too, is that AI is going to give you back something. It's going to give you back time, right? And what are you going to how are you going to redeploy that time? And if that time allows you to redeploy into more intentional writing that you're doing or taking photos and engaging with people like you can choose to do that, right? It's just like you've got a pie and you're figuring out how you're slicing it.

Yeah, absolutely 100% I am a firm believer that your AI use should either save you time, make you money, or improve customer experience. So for us, that was my initial AI use case has was, you know, using it for testing the copy that I was writing with AI audience focus groups. So I would build these little, you know, focus groups, and that this is, I'm talking like, 2022 and, you know, custom gpts had just come on the scene. Oh, no, in fact, I think it was 2023 they just come on the scene. And I started building these custom gpts That would be, you know, representative of our clients, audience, and then run the copy that I'd written through that AI audience to see how are they responding. That basically then led to one of my first AI, you know, opt ins lead magnets as well, which was the skeptic Barbot based on the audience focus groups that I was building. Because once I started doing that, you know, obviously I could see, oh, you know, our the budget conscious buyer is going to say this. So I need to include, you know, more, showing them how, what the value, or the what the ROI is for our clients program. And the interesting thing is, when I try, because I would be very upfront with our clients and say, Okay, I'm going to be testing this. A lot of our clients came back to us and said that, okay, would you be able to build this for us so that we can use it within the business, you know, not just for copy, but for when we are, like, wanting to launch a new offer, or for you know, assets that I'm not working on, say, ad copy or social media content and things like that, just to kind of see how or launch, you know, related assets. So. That I was not part of my, you know, contract with them. So that led to us building those AI, audience focus groups for clients. And then it was also interesting, because with Yeah, so I was also, besides using chat GPT, I was using flawed I was using, you know, pickaxe, mind power, building all of these things on

other platforms. And then then we had clients asking, Okay, would you be able to set this up for for us, so that we get it right? You know, train it on our brand, voice. Train it on our business, train it on our audience. So which led to basically setting these up. And like I said, I don't use it for writing, but I have seriously no judgment for anyone who wants to use it for writing. So I'm doing this, you know, I'm teaching people how to do this in my workshops. I'm teaching people how to use it for writing in my in my mastermind, and I'm building these, you know, AI team members for you know clients who want to hire us to build it for them. The point is that whether it's a workshop, whether it's a you know mastermind, whether it's my you know, my done for you build. I would always, always, always make it a point to first give you the strategy so that you when you get an output from Ai, whether it's an opt in page, a sales page and email sequence, you know what to evaluate it for. You're not just taking what it gives you and accepting it as the as the truth, or as the, you know, best possible asset to send out, because it's not and at the end of the day, they see this very often. At the end of the day, AI is, yes, faster AI can do a lot, you know, then say you could possibly, in a short speed of time. But you, you my friend, you are the superior brain. You have these years of lived experience. You have, you know, all of this expertise, as in the subject that you're trading as a as an entrepreneur, and it's really important that you know what it is that AI is giving you, whether it's you know, worth running and sharing with your audience, or whether you need to kind of go back to it and say, hey, yeah, this isn't so that led to doing evals or evaluations for clients who had bought, you know, pre built agents, or pre built at that time, custom gpts were really popular, so doing the evaluations with them and saying, hey, you know, your

output isn't up to the mark, so we need to kind of rework the instructions. So my AI use is essentially, personally as a business for clients, is focused on helping them either, like I said, reclaim time, increase sales by improving the outputs they get or improving their customer experience. Yeah, but personally, I don't use it for writing or for Yeah, the our, you know, the photos and videos that people see. Do we use it for some graphics? Sure. Do I use it for slides? Yes, you know. But if you're watching me on a reel, or if you're, you know, seeing a picture, a photo of Mike and me, that's that's us. And if you're reading an email that I sent out, that's me,

yeah, I like, actually, that you brought up the importance of being able to validate the output, because that's really, like, where your expertise comes in, and it's hard to, I think a lot of people, at least for the first little while. Perhaps now it's less so the case we're looking at AI like some kind of just hyper search engine where whatever it says is, like, it's the result, that's what it is. But, you know, if you're using AI to help, I had this use case recently, so we just started a new business with a business partner, and part of that was, like, you know, figuring out the business structure and how are we going to set this up, and IP and shareholders agreements and all this stuff. And I knew, like at a high level, what I needed to create, but I didn't know what that should look like. What should the recommendation be? And I didn't want to use AI to tell me how to structure my company. I wanted to use AI to tell me how to ask the right questions of the lawyer, to tell me how to structure the company. So that was different to like, think about, I'm not going to use it at face value necessarily what the output is, because I can't validate whether that's right or not. I still need an expert to support the validation, to understand what comes out of this? Right?

Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, I'm so glad that you brought it up and you didn't just use it to, oh, just go ahead and create my contract for me and then just use that contract, because you literally have no idea whether that's, you know, valid in a court of law would hold up or not. So, yeah, exactly. Love that.

But I think it's really interesting, though, and I talked about this on my episode last week, just the concept of expert backed AI. So where it's that Purna made it? And I know Purna is an expert at copywriting and sales psychology and all these things, because I trust you, because you have been building your reputation, and you have proven yourself as the expert in your field. So now there's this whole like new market for buying products that are AI built by experts, right? So like buying custom gpts, like you were just talking about how you were validating some of those, or fixing some of those for people, or buying, you know, packages of Claude skills now, or buying other products. And like, we're, we're building a platform to support this. And this is, like, I just, I like to hear other people's take on, how is this changing, even the way that you're offering your services. I mean, I know your entire business is very AI based now, but even if you can talk a little bit to that, like shift and how this is, obviously is continuing to change, because new technologies, new new applications, are coming out all the time. But I think then it's really interesting to look at how that is, like, you know, the digital course, evolution from the twin, from 2020 and now here we are, 2026 it's all about AI tools, and who built those. And I want that bonus skill as part of that workshop that you're giving next week.

You know, I love that you said this. And I really want to kind of come back to the, you know, the fact that you call it expert backed AI. I think that is brilliant, like that is, you know what, at least, how I see entrepreneurs, especially, and our audience, especially if it's like, course, creators, coaches, consultants, really, really leaning in and using AI. So I think, yeah, I love that. I love the phrase expert backed AI. And I see it all the time with our workshops, like our workshops consistently sell out Kelly, and when I ask people, why does this? Why did they sign up and all, it's because, yes, they love how I'm using AI in the business, which attracts a lot of, you know, fellow copywriters and, course, creators who don't want to use it for writing, but they want to use it for, say, like I said, building their AI audience focus groups or building, you know, workflows that accelerate work that they don't really want to kind of spend time doing like them, maybe creating a notion dashboard with plot co work. So the most important reason is that people are signing up because they trust. I mean, we have, like, 15 years of experience as entrepreneurs, and years and years of, you know, credibility and expertise as a copywriter and a marketer, and that is what helps me to create AI workshops that speak to entrepreneurs and leverage my strength. So some of the ways that I've seen our clients use it, and I've, you know, or I've built products for our clients to be able to help their students, or, in fact, just include it as a bonus as well. Have been like is that prepackaged skills? Because here's the other deal, you can go to, you know, there are lots of sites that have popped up now that help you. You know, you can just go download a skill and upload it to your plot. But you have to be so, so careful, because you don't know whether that skill file has anything malicious embedded in it. So you just don't, yeah, it's like the equivalent of buying a,

you know, back in the day, when you would go buy a website template from, you know, a site that wasn't trustworthy. Or, you know, where you would like get, like, say, 20, $30 website templates or page templates and things like that. But you wouldn't know whether the codes broken, or whether it's going to, you know, even look the way the preview is looking, and all of that. So it's the same thing. You need to be very, very careful where you're downloading the skills from. So that's just cloud skills. The same is true for custom gpts. The same is true for if you're building AI agents on, you know, any of the many, many, many platforms available to you. So you have to be very careful who you are learning from who you're buying from, one two. For our clients, we found that some of the you know, they're more popular digital products are those not using digital products. But I would say AI based products are those that help their students get faster results from Yeah, courses, you know, because majority of our clients are coaches and course creators, membership owners. So the reason I find like, I'm thinking back to in my intake format, I ask, so what? What is, well, you know, what is it that you're looking to do? Or, you know, why did you decide to work with me those kind of questions? The answer is A. I want our students to get more results one and B. I want to do it without putting more calls on their calendar. So, yeah, you know, so giving them tools or, you know, it could be an AI workflow, for instance. I'll give you an example in my mastermind, in AI conversion suite. There is a workflow that kicks in when with the trigger, where someone fills out a form, sharing a few details about their business. And in the back end, I have like, three different AI agents that get to work and put together a complete business intelligence library for them, which includes, you know, complete audience profile, including, you know, buying triggers, psychology, objections,

hesitation, complete brand dossier, which would include their, you know, their brand voice, their brand values, their positioning, all of that. And then you know, details about their core offers. So we go with the three core offers that they may be selling, and everything about those offers and how they tie into the audience.

So something like this would otherwise require watching a bunch of videos and sitting down, carving out time, you know, or and then not being sure whether, you know, have I covered everything, and it just leads to a lot of procrastination, and, you know, people not being able to complete the course and move on. So this, basically, all they do is, they open up a form, they fill out the form, and then they hit submit, and within minutes, you know, they get an email in their inbox complete with the whole report. It, yeah, it's been one of those examples to kind of show that AI can give you your time back, and can do you know, so much more, so much faster. So those are some of the things that I feel like are really, really popular.

Yeah, and right away, people are now having something to react to and respond to and they can adjust, and they're not, like, staring at a blank screen. I did a bunch of research for the episode that I was just talking about last week, and one of the things that it specifically noted was, you know, the first of all, course completion rates are down. They're like, 20% and like, raise your hand if you have a digital course graveyard right where it's collecting dust, and it's just like something you never implemented, but now you get high, like with AI as part of it, you get higher completion rates and then also the time to result. So we're used to like a digital course taking four to six weeks, and that seems like a fast it's a sprint kind of a course, but with the digital, like an AI tool built in, I mean, two to five days is even long. It's like a couple hours in some cases, right? That's almost instantaneous. That example that you just shared. And so when I'm talking to people about this too, they're saying, like, as coaches are like, we're getting, we're having much better discussions in those group calls that are supporting this. Yeah, so we're not handing the whole thing over to AI to do. We're just getting them through these steps, especially those initial like things that they have to figure out to understand, all the business strategy stuff, all the brand stuff, everything you know, and then they're able to come to those calls and have much more detailed nuance and really be able to leverage the strategic brain of the person who's hosting this, right? And so to me, again, that's that's such a good use for like human first AI adoption. It goes back to the human

exactly, always, always, yeah, anything that we build always has a human in the loop, so to speak. And something that I've like retreated in pretty much every, every time I've taught anything AI related has been that at the end of the day, you're the one who's in control. You're the one who's taking that final decision, and if you weren't just, you know, send something off without giving it even a first pass, you don't want to do that with AI at all. So at the end of the day, you're the one who needs to know how things work. You're the one who, yes, you're using AI as your team or a team member, but you're the founder, you're the business owner, you're the CEO, so the final call will always be yours. Again, you're the superior brain. So let's

it is hard though too. And I feel like you know, a lot of copywriters in particular, feelings around, even for me and and kind of like to circle back to where we started this conversation around, you know, losing your job to AI, or losing, like, all of this expertise and skill that you went to school for and you've spent years learning and honing, and every little piece of your lived experience has a. Has informed how you do it, and all of a sudden, like, AI can do 90% of it in 12 seconds. You're like, that feels very devaluing to me. However, if you reframe it, it becomes now I've been able to articulate that. I feel like that's part of how we have to learn as how to train AI on what we do, we have to be able to, like, think about how we think about things, and speak that way, instead of just all the things we used to do intuitively. Like, I built a brand calibrator tool based on my brand strategy, vipd. I used to charge $3,500 for it, and now it's like a digital tool that you can get for 100 bucks when it's on sale, so and so that was hard, like, it's hard to, like, feel okay with doing that, but it's certainly becoming the shift in how we're how we're operating

100% and I Yeah, so I love that you brought up in, You know, the reframe, and also the the almost, the existential angst that one feels when working with AI. And here's what we've seen. When I say, we again, Mike and me, here's what we've seen in our business. So like I said, we started using AI week back in 2022 right? So it's been, what, now, four years, and it's been very interesting. So we've had, and, you know, clients who would come to us for, say, a consult or an strategy session, or this would be like a launch strategy session, or even like a copy makeover, and then say, Okay, would you be able to build this? You know, because you also do AI building? Would you be able to build my plot project out for me? So it would write my, you know, copy for me, everything that we kind of discussed? Sure I can do that, no problem. But then we've also have clients we like right now I'm working probably, I'm working with six different projects right now, and all of those clients are five of those clients, sorry, are repeat clients. They've worked with us in the in the past, and for five of them, there is no AI involved in anything I'm working on. Their brand messaging I'm because they don't want AI to be touching their business. The sixth client is an AI built client. So not not counting that. But point is, I feel you will, you know, there is still, at least, right now, from what I can see, and I'm also talking about the last year, and I'm speaking only for copywriters, you know, who may be listening in. I am still seeing clients coming in asking for hey, I want you to write this for me, or I want you to create the messaging for this, or I want you to do the research for this and tell us, how should we plan out the strategy for our evergreen funnel and all of that. And at the same time, I'm also getting clients who are like, okay, yeah, I cannot afford to hire you for a full launch right now, but I want you to kind of strategize with me

and then build my AI team for me, it's just kind of opened up. I feel a whole other revenue stream that never existed. And I also knew about this as like, you know how back in the day, we would have templates, yes, you would always have clients who would buy the copy templates, and then there would be clients who would say, No, I don't want a template. I want someone to do it for me. So the same thing with AI. We have clients who are buying and again, across the board, this is not just for copywriting services. We even have clients who will buy our, you know, agents and the pre built plot skills and all of that. But then we also have clients who would come in and say, Yeah, I need you to do this for me. Totally custom. So from what I can see, at least it's just kind of yeah opened up. So a whole other revenue streaming that exist four years ago.

Yeah, that's such a good reminder, because we can get into, like, the echo chamber and be feeling like everything's AI, everybody wants AI only they only want AI, like, but I actually feel like what you just said, too was now the human stuff is even more valuable, because the reason they want it is because they don't want the AI, and there's so much of that available too. So it's kind of about staying with your finger on the pulse of how that is in your own industry, right?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely amazing.

Okay, well, Prerna, we could talk forever. Is there anything that you want to like mic drop us out on for our listeners today, and also make sure in that mic drop moment, you remind everyone where to find you, what things you have going on and how to get into your world, because I know that I came into your world sometime in the last couple of years after seeing you. Being on a panel or an event or something, I have the skeptic buyer bot that you reference. So shout out to the skeptic buyer bot, because that's a very good tool. And and yeah, so I would love our listeners to connect with you.

Well, thank you so much, Kelly. So yeah, one of my goals with teaching AI and with building AI tools is always to help you use it as a as a partner in your growth as a conversion strategist. So for me personally, AI has been a fabulous way to sharpen my creativity, to help me help our clients get better conversions and and free up time. So that is my goal. You know, with everything that I do related to AI, is to help people see how it can help them be more creative, help them get more conversions, help them get their time back, improve customer experience, all of that. And so when you're using AI, regardless of what LLM you're using, what tool you're building, I would love for you to kind of keep that in mind. And if you want to do that with with Claude, specifically, I have a recorded workshop on Cloud for conversions. It's I did it live, in fact, march 30, 31st, and you can now get the recording that gives you, in fact, what we were talking about, a pre built plot skill for a full opt in funnel, from coming up with an idea for a lead magnet to writing and giving you a you know ready to design page for it and a welcome sequence. And then, of course, also showing you how you can kind of replicate that. How can you set up your plot correctly, the same stuff that I do for clients, like setting up their business intelligence library project, setting up their, you know, showing helping them use CO work, yeah. So, yeah. If that is something of interest, you could head over to contentvistra.com forward slash Claude, and get access to the recording. Otherwise, yeah, go ahead. Download the skeptic Barbot. Access it. It's at again, content, visual.com, forward slash skeptic. So that's a free Barbot that shows you how your most skeptical audience tests read your copy. Like, how do they perceive your copy? What makes them roll their eyes? What makes it unbelievable? And yeah, it's gotten amazing, amazing reviews. I'm so glad that you

use it as well. And yeah, so yeah, that's the freebie.

Thank you so much, Prerna. And yeah, I have to say the skeptic buyer bought because chat GPT can be way too much of a hype girl, right? Just always, you're so smart, everything you wrote was amazing, and you're like, cool. And then you realize, wait a minute, there's got to be a different perspective. And that's one of the great ways to leverage AI, is to get it to challenge you and have different perspectives. And you have built this one in particular with the perspective of somebody who is skeptical about what they're reviewing, right? So that's really I love that use case. It's so amazing. Thank you so much for getting up super early in the morning to record this with me. We are on absolute opposite sides of the world, so I hope that you find some amazing new people in your space as a result of being on the show. And I thank you so much, Prerna.

Thank you so much for inviting me and thank you for staying up late. So yeah, I'm really, really glad to have this conversation and look forward to connecting with with your listeners.

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.