Putting AI to Work in Your Business: Practical Advice from Ashley Gross [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 52]

This transcript has been generated with AI and not checked for accuracy.

Ashley Gross
0:00:00
I built a business using AI in 10 days, and now I'm gonna show you how to do the same.

-
0:00:04
♪♪

Alex Winter
0:00:13
Welcome back to Endless Customers. My name is Alex Winter, and today we are joined by Ashley Gross. She's an AI strategist, a business owner, and founder of the Prompt community. Ashley, welcome to the show.

Ashley Gross
0:00:25
Thanks for having me. I'm stoked to be here.

Alex Winter
0:00:27
I'm stoked to have you. This is really our first time meeting and interacting, but I feel like I've seen you on LinkedIn, and we dabble in a lot of the same communities like Macon, and we're both fans of AI, which is what we're talking about today, and it's a hot topic. So before we dive in, I think it would be great for our audience and for our listeners out there, can you give them a little background just about who you are, your expertise, what you do,

Alex Winter
0:00:50
just so that they know what's up.

Ashley Gross
0:00:52
Sure, so I'm many things, I wear many hats, but I like to say first and foremost I'm a mom, and then I'm a wife, and then I'm a business owner. And as far as generative AI goes, I started using generative AI in 2020 when I found out I was going to have a son soon,

Ashley Gross
0:01:06
and I knew immediately that I needed to ruthlessly prioritize my schedule. So that was really what started me dabbling in AI. It had nothing to do with the tech itself. I just knew I was going to be strapped for time and I wanted to condense a 40-hour work week

Ashley Gross
0:01:20
into a 15-hour work week. So I started using, back then it was called Jarvis, now it's Jasper AI. And I learned so many use cases on my own and really just like hacked my productivity. So by the time 2022 rolled around,

Ashley Gross
0:01:33
I was known internally at my enterprise as the AI girl. So like people were like either really excited to see me cause they knew that I was about to like make their life easier with a workflow or an automation or they were like running for me. They were just like, please stop talking about AI.

Ashley Gross
0:01:48
But it paid off talking about it because it garnered the attention of our CMO. And she asked me if I wanted to roll out multiple LLMs to our marketing org pre-Chats GPT. So I was able to get that experience and long story short, there was over 25 amazing AI use cases

Ashley Gross
0:02:05
that I was able to create. But I think I always like to tie my impact to revenue. So what that translated like into revenue was we overachieved our pipeline of 90 million and hit 115 million three months after implementation.

Alex Winter
0:02:19
Wow.

Alex Winter
0:02:20
Was it 115 or 150?

Ashley Gross
0:02:22
115.

Alex Winter
0:02:23
115, wow. So 90 to 115, that's huge. Yes, congrats, wow. That's amazing.

Ashley Gross
0:02:30
It's bananas. So as soon as I saw that, that was kind of like my mic drop moment where I was like, this is so cool. This is about to change lives. But for me, I always have a soft spot

Ashley Gross
0:02:40
for entrepreneurs and business owners. And I just think that, I have really spicy takes on that, but I won't get into it. But I just think in general that they're not really set up for success and given tools that they need.

Ashley Gross
0:02:49
And they are arguably some of the most time crunched folks around. So I wanted to create an accessible and affordable community so that they could come in, they could learn how to use AI, and then they could learn how to create a business with it

Ashley Gross
0:03:03
if they wanted to, and that's what I did.

Alex Winter
0:03:05
Very cool, very cool. I love the background. Thanks for sharing your story. Yeah, no, that's really interesting. I've heard this too, and I'm going off script already, because I just love your energy,

Alex Winter
0:03:13
and it's funny with the AI piece, people either are fascinated with it and they're like, I want to know everything, teach me everything, or they're like scared out of their mind and don't want, they're like, just put it in the closet,

Alex Winter
0:03:24
I don't want to think about it. Is that, do you find that to be true more often than not?

Ashley Gross
0:03:28
I think in 2023, yes, that was definitely the case. It was like either, you know, everyone was talking about it or they were like talking about how much they hated it. And now I think this year, the tone is a little bit changed. I think now people are less excited about it because they tried it,

Ashley Gross
0:03:44
but they didn't have the right tools to succeed and get outputs that they liked. And so now we're in like a little bit of a fatigue bubble. So we have a little bit of the same people that are against it. And then a lot more people that are just fatigued.

Ashley Gross
0:03:55
They tried it once, they didn't have a structure or safe guards around them. They didn't see an ROI and they bounced out.

Alex Winter
0:04:01
Yeah, that makes sense. It's one of those things too, where it is pumped up a lot in the media and there's a lot of preconceived notions and ideas where you think it's gonna solve all of your problems and be this magical, mystical thing.

Alex Winter
0:04:12
And it is pretty amazing, but it's not gonna do all that. You have to also, it's a tool like anything else that you need to learn how to leverage and use to your advantage.

Ashley Gross
0:04:20
So. Right, right. And I think it's frustrating a lot for people too to pay attention to the media. Because I'm a tenured marketer, I think I have a certain perspective,

Ashley Gross
0:04:27
which is probably why it's easy for me to break these things down. But from a user experience of a non-marketer, if you're looking at the news, it's like, update, update, this person's doing this, this person got traded to this company.

Ashley Gross
0:04:38
It's more intense than a football roster. You're trying to keep up with it, and it just becomes this time-sucking activity trying to keep up with it. But from a marketing lens, I don't even pay attention to the news

Ashley Gross
0:04:49
because I'm like, okay, well, if OpenAI just rolled out an update and then Claude's update came out, and OpenAI doesn't have another update, then I can guarantee Sam Altman's gonna be in the news for some things trying to keep the attention on his company.

Ashley Gross
0:05:00
You know, like, I have those multi-layers where it doesn't overwhelm me because I understand what's happening from that perspective. So that's why I try to cut through the noise and just tell people, like, this is what you need to set yourself up for success.

Ashley Gross
0:05:12
If you wanna listen to noise, go for it, but you really don't need to.

Alex Winter
0:05:16
That's great advice. I've never really thought about it that way, but you don't have to, there is a lot of noise, and you don't necessarily have to let that come into your world. You can still use some of these tools and experiment

Alex Winter
0:05:26
in certain ways that aren't gonna maybe overwhelm you at times, right? So with that, can we talk a little bit about maybe some of your favorite AI tools or some tools that are like your go-to things that really helped you as a marketer and with all your tenured experience like

Alex Winter
0:05:40
has really helped like be a game changer for you?

Ashley Gross
0:05:41
Sure. So I always tell people when I'm talking about these tools, like I get excited about them only because I've seen the ROI. So take everything I say with a grain of salt and always lead with the problem. So identify what problem you have and then go vet the tools that are built to literally solve that problem. So for me, some of my favorite problems to solve for marketers that have existed for a while are around the validity of our data, right? So a lot of companies, and the bigger a company gets,

Ashley Gross
0:06:08
the more third-party tools they rely on for their data. And it's really, really terrible if you go to those third-party tools and it says, for instance, like, this prospect is ready to talk and negotiate a contract, and then you go get sales on the phone with them

Ashley Gross
0:06:22
and they're already under negotiation with another vendor. It's really horrible. So I like to use tools for data cleaning. And so it depends on what I'm trying to use, but a few of the ones that come to top of mind, you can always use ChatGPT,

Ashley Gross
0:06:36
but you can also find apps like Vizio. So Vizio works with Salesforce and HubSpot, and I think Marketo and a couple other ones. And you can actually like text the app and it's like texting your CRM. So if I'm on a call with a prospect

Ashley Gross
0:06:49
and I don't want to go get on my computer and update that immediately after the call and then I get busy with the rest of my day, I can just send a text to my CRM and it updates it immediately in all of the different technology,

Ashley Gross
0:06:59
you know, CRM parts that I have. That's a good one. I would also say-

Alex Winter
0:07:04
That's a great one. No, I have to interject because I feel like sales folks are busy and they have a lot of calls and they have numbers they have to hit and it can be stressful at times.

Alex Winter
0:07:11
And then, you know, it's clunky to have to go into the CRM or go into the spreadsheet and try to log all this data and to be able to just text it on your phone. There's like almost no excuse not to at this point. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, very cool.

Ashley Gross
0:07:24
Exactly. Thank you. And then I would say the other problem that I like to focus on, especially from a marketing perspective is, you know, we all talk about omni-channel strategies,

Ashley Gross
0:07:33
but at the end of the day, if you don't own that data, you really don't know how to calculate an ROI on how much you're spending on content and how much you're spending on LinkedIn and Instagram, all these other tools. So I like Zekin and Zekin works really, really well

Ashley Gross
0:07:48
because it solves that problem. So I always like to preach that unless you can convert the traffic from any channel back to your webpage and actually learn and see if those people that you're even, you know, gazing the interest of are high intent buyers,

Ashley Gross
0:08:02
then what are you doing? So Zekin is you can create any video that you want and embed a link into their video. And so whether I put this video on a blog, on a social media channel, on someone else's website, as soon as someone clicks on that,

Ashley Gross
0:08:15
it leads them back to my website and it actually lets me collect their data. So then I can actually get a full scope of reference on if I'm attracting the high intent folks that I want. Because I think a lot of times marketers focus, or are told to focus on certain metrics,

Ashley Gross
0:08:30
and it just doesn't matter. Who cares about top of funnel metrics, or how many people are converting? Are they actually in our ICP score? Do we even want them? Are they ready to purchase our product?

Ashley Gross
0:08:40
Because those are the people I want to focus on. And so I like to focus on problems that align marketing and sales, instead of having, here's the marketing strategies, and here's the marketing metrics, and here's the sales.

Ashley Gross
0:08:50
And it's like, if we're spending marketing dollars, we should be targeting the sales accounts. Otherwise, what are we doing? We're just making the sales cycles longer, we're creating friction points with sales, it's a mess. So those are the two problems that I like to focus on

Ashley Gross
0:09:03
with the tools.

Alex Winter
0:09:04
Those are big problems, and those are problems that I think are misconceived in a lot of businesses where the answer's like, oh, volume. If we just get more leads, we'll be fine. All our revenue will go up, it's gonna work out great, and it's like, yeah, but are they quality leads?

Alex Winter
0:09:18
How long's the sales cycle? All the things that you were just saying, where you really need to think about those pieces, and if you can automate some of that with AI, it sounds like it's a game changer. So for business owners out there, for people listening,

Alex Winter
0:09:30
what's a typical budget, and I know this is such a loaded question, because businesses range in scale and size and all those things, right, but what's a monthly spend for some of these tools? Or like, what should people be expecting

Alex Winter
0:09:40
to start leveraging these tools?

Ashley Gross
0:09:42
Yeah, so my tech stack, so I have five tools for marketing that I use. And my monthly cost for those tools all together is $75. That's it.

Alex Winter
0:09:55
75 bucks, no we're gonna pause, so we're gonna hit $75, okay? So that's amazing. For your tech stack, that's what it costs on a monthly.

Alex Winter
0:10:04
Wow.

Ashley Gross
0:10:05
And what else? For the marketing portion.

Alex Winter
0:10:06
For the marketing portion, right. And for that marketing portion, what do you get out of that? Like, what's that look like?

Alex Winter
0:10:11
Yeah.

Ashley Gross
0:10:12
So, as far as how that translates into productivity, I was spending 12 hours every single Sunday creating content. So, I create YouTube videos with tutorials, and then I create five LinkedIn posts across three business accounts, five Instagram posts,

Ashley Gross
0:10:26
and then same thing with Twitter, so double it, 10, right? That's a lot of content to be creating. And it's really hard to find an automation that's not half broken, that actually gets you through that. So I like to start my video tutorials off, and I always record it in Riverside,

Ashley Gross
0:10:45
and then I'll edit it in CapCut, because that will splice it into the different portions that I need. And then I can post it on my different social media platforms. And then I've got Zikin, which is embedding

Ashley Gross
0:10:57
the links into it. And then from there I'm just using Jasper because after I have an idea from Zikin, how many people are actually looking at the content, which ones they're clicking on the most, then I can do something that's actually productive

Ashley Gross
0:11:11
and use Jasper to take the content that I know is converting and repurpose it, because a lot of people underestimate the power of reconverting copy, but if you think about it, if your content team is putting out, let's just say five vlogs per week, and your old content's actually the stuff that's converting,

Ashley Gross
0:11:30
then why wouldn't you go back to that old content, add some new keywords, figure out a way to repurpose it, maybe like every 30, 60 days, and then keep getting leads off of something that's already working instead of creating net new. It's just more work for you.

Alex Winter
0:11:42
It's more work and it's less effective. So you're doing all this work and it's not really turning the dial, whereas I love what you're saying. That's great. This lines up so much with, so here at Impact, we have a very similar mentality and share a lot

Alex Winter
0:11:53
of commonalities there. So it's really cool to hear this. So we're talking about cost a little bit. So there's options too and this happens to me a lot where I'm like, do I do the monthly, or do I do the annual?

Alex Winter
0:12:05
The annual's a little bit cheaper overall, if you commit to it, but then it's like, I might not like this tool in two months, or there may be an update, or Altman, or one of the CEOs or executives might change something, so what do you recommend when it comes to

Alex Winter
0:12:17
making those decisions from a time standpoint?

Ashley Gross
0:12:22
Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up. So I am ruthless with my time, and I think everyone else should be as well. So my process is I download a free Google Chrome extension. It's just called Toggle, it's T-O-G-G-L, and it's literally just like a little clock

Ashley Gross
0:12:35
that you click on and it starts a timer, and then you stop it whenever you're done. So I have a really thorough process when I'm trying out new AI tools. I always, again, like I find a problem, and if I don't have technology in my tech stack

Ashley Gross
0:12:48
that can solve that problem, then I go do my research to figure out which AI tools could solve that problem. Because I don't necessarily need an AI tool to solve the problem unless it's related to something that, like the AI feature of it makes it faster.

Ashley Gross
0:13:01
I don't want to just get an AI tool to get an AI tool. I want to know what is going to solve my problem. And then from there, I just do the free trials. I never buy any tool until I try the free trial. And again, since I have the problem and I have the hypothetical tool to solve that problem,

Ashley Gross
0:13:15
I start and stop that clock. And if it goes over the amount of time that it would manually take me to create that task, then I cut it immediately. There's no negotiating. But if it saves me time, then I keep it.

Ashley Gross
0:13:27
And so from there, I like to try three to four use cases after I'm excited about the tool and I know that it's not a time suck. If after those three to four use cases, it's good to go, that is when I will purchase it. Now, I only purchase the tools monthly,

Ashley Gross
0:13:40
only because these tools keep coming out every single day, week, right? Like, I'm big on product hunt, and it literally has like tool of the day every single day with hundreds of new tools.

Alex Winter
0:13:51
So. Yeah, it's exciting and overwhelming all at the same time. It's like, yeah, sensory overload there.

Ashley Gross
0:13:56
Yeah, yeah, so I, you know, I used to have a couple AI tools like Descript was one of them where they had, they even say, you know, like, a couple of our features are wonky, but stick with us. And I think for that specific tool, it was worth sticking with. But for the rest of them that are still figuring out their product, like that is on them to

Ashley Gross
0:14:14
do and I appreciate what they're doing, but I don't have time to wait. So for Descript specifically, I keep that because it's got the coolest feature where if I'm looking at myself in the camera, but I need to be looking at you in the camera, you can click a feature and it will actually move your eyes up to that. So that is why I kept it personally just because I do a lot of tutorials and I don't want to be like staring down here and not staring at you. Right, staring at the script. Yeah, which

Alex Winter
0:14:37
I have my script here in front of me and I do that try to practice not looking at it too much but yes that's definitely a great tool. So in terms of time you said that this this has exponentially saved you a ton of time. Can we talk about defining what that was? Like what were you doing before and how much time it took?

Alex Winter
0:14:54
Because you create a lot of content. And what's it look like now and how much less stress do you feel because of it, you know what I mean?

Ashley Gross
0:15:03
So much less stress, so much less stress. So it was taking me between 12 and 13 hours every Sunday to create all my content. And now I have it down to three hours. And I think a lot of, I'm glad you brought this up too, because I think a lot of the preconceived notions

Ashley Gross
0:15:19
is if you're using an automation tool or an AI tool, you're not like working or you're not doing it. And I have the same workflow as if I was manually doing it when I'm using an AI tool, because I still need to be in the loop. And there's no way for me to know where I'm at in the loop

Ashley Gross
0:15:33
unless it's the same workflow that I'm used to. So then if there's an issue, I can track it back to the exact task I gave it that it hallucinated with and fix that right from the get go instead of getting through the whole entire exercise and having to go back and repeat it.

Alex Winter
0:15:45
Yeah, that's a great point. And that's some of the fears, like people are worried it's gonna replace your job. And I think it's a misconception where it's gonna make you do your job faster. It's gonna help you do your job better.

Alex Winter
0:15:55
So if you change that perspective in your head, like you've done, you can get way more done and it'll make your job way more efficient. So that's really cool to hear. We also have a question where we see this a lot and people ask us this a lot where AI tools

Alex Winter
0:16:08
tend to have a lot of overlapping features, almost like a Venn diagram, right? Some capabilities are shared, some are unique to each tool, they're changing all the time, but when you're building a tech stack around AI, how do you decide which ones to pay for

Alex Winter
0:16:21
and which ones are essential? And can you walk us through that process? And I think it might be good to go back to what we were talking about earlier, where you went from 90 million to 115 million using these tools, and how you built out that tech stack.

Ashley Gross
0:16:33
Yeah, so specifically how I achieved that was, again, this was a pre-chat GPT, so I was like, okay, I don't think that people have the awareness to know how much time they're spending on tasks, and so again, I'm thinking, well, if I have them measure how much time they're spending per task,

Ashley Gross
0:16:49
that's a time stack, right? Like, what are we gonna do with that? And then as far as value goes, other than time, it's like cost, and that didn't really seem great to me either, because then I'm time crunching, or cost evaluating everyone's tasks,

Ashley Gross
0:17:03
how much they are getting paid, what tasks they're doing. So I looked at it as the lens of, what do you not like doing about your job? Because then people were already bought in, because I wasn't trying to replace anything that they already liked doing.

Ashley Gross
0:17:14
I was just trying to get them to get through the tasks that they hated doing a lot faster. Everyone was happy about that. So it intrinsically motivated them to actually become aware of what tasks they were doing that they didn't like. And so then once they located those tasks

Ashley Gross
0:17:29
that they didn't like, I was like, great, now take a video and send it to me on Loom every time that one of those tasks comes up and then send it to me. So now I have their workflow. So I have the problem and the workflow.

Ashley Gross
0:17:39
Then from there, it was just going out and vetting these AI companies and asking them about their data security, their policy, their ethics, where are data stored, what that means. All those wonderful, sexy security questions

Ashley Gross
0:17:49
that nobody really likes to talk about.

Alex Winter
0:17:51
No, they don't, but they're also critical, especially if you're in certain industries where data has to be secure and you don't want any leaks or any issues with that. So you gotta do your due diligence with vetting, for sure.

Ashley Gross
0:18:02
Yeah, and then after I got through all the security, I had to, like I made every team get on a call with me and I talked to their product teams. So every single AI vendor, if they pass the security portion, then their product teams got on a call with me

Ashley Gross
0:18:16
and I made them walk me through their product roadmap because I wanted to make sure that if I was going to roll out a tool to over a hundred marketers, that if they didn't just have features right now that work, that the features would evolve

Ashley Gross
0:18:25
and the product would evolve to meet our needs in the future. So that was really the two barriers. And then how I really do this on my own is I look at what do I need to do to run my business, right? So if you look at what I do, it's a lot of content,

Ashley Gross
0:18:41
it's a ton of teaching, and it's a ton of speaking engagements. So I was like, okay, I know I need a calendar automation because I don't want to be going back and forth with email. I know I need a personalized GPT for my PR agent so that whenever I get bookings, speaking engagements,

Ashley Gross
0:18:56
whatever, I can send them my GPT, it's already got my headshot, my bio, a little bit about me, and my talk tracks that I can speak to based on historical data. And then, as far as other tools go, it's like, okay, well you need your CRM,

Ashley Gross
0:19:08
you need something to check SEO, you need the basics, but everything else is out of it. So I have the bare bones minimum tech stack and I actually think that it's served me really, really well just because I'm super aware of where everything is going. Maybe you felt like this in the past,

Ashley Gross
0:19:24
but I feel like as marketers, we get tasked with understanding and onboarding ourselves to a ton of tools. And because we're trying to do that and our jobs, we're not actually like remembering what these tools are supposed to do.

Ashley Gross
0:19:34
It's more like we're in zombie mode trying to, you know, fulfill a little check mark.

Alex Winter
0:19:38
Yes, it's like drinking from a fire hose, it's crazy. And it can be overwhelming at times, and that's the thing too, is I love how you're not using all the tools, you're using the ones that are right for you and that you're very selective about less is more, let's use these three or four tools that really work for me

Alex Winter
0:19:54
to solve the problems that I have. And I love that perspective, because I think we see some shiny object, like this tool's so cool, I wanna use it. And you could experiment with it for sure, but if it's not gonna help you in your day to day,

Alex Winter
0:20:05
it might not be the right tool for you, per se.

Ashley Gross
0:20:07
Exactly, exactly. Well, and you have to get rid of tools, too. Like, as you start to get scrappier and hone in on your strategy, you should be evolving your tools. So when I started the business, I had Apollo,

Ashley Gross
0:20:17
because I needed to have a tool that had an extension where I could go through LinkedIn, because that's my channel of choice that I'm most present on, and figure out, like, who my ICP score is, who is engaging, and I built my CRM there.

Ashley Gross
0:20:28
But then as I started to get better at knowing my ICP score and I had all that data, I didn't necessarily need that tech and so since I was paying monthly, I canceled that. I have Beehive that I'm already using for my newsletter. They just added their email functionality. I'm very familiar with it

Ashley Gross
0:20:43
since I have to write a weekly newsletter in it, so I canceled Apollo and I stuck with Beehive. So you have to consolidate. You don't just add more to add more. The idea is to take away.

Alex Winter
0:20:51
Right, right, that makes sense. Lean and mean, I like that. So what tools, are there any tools coming out or is there anything in the AI space that you're excited about that's future state that you're maybe eager to see what's gonna happen

Alex Winter
0:21:04
as we move forward into 24 and beyond?

Alex Winter
0:21:06
That's a great question.

Ashley Gross
0:21:07
So there's a lot of tools that I'm excited about that haven't made mainstream media yet and I'm waiting really patiently. I think butterfly AI is one of them, because I think it's really nice. It gamifies lessons.

Ashley Gross
0:21:20
So let's just say you have a product marketer, you know, a CMO and a field marketer, and manually, if you wanted them to upscale in learning development, you probably had to have an ERG or give them a budget, they go, you don't really have any way of measuring the ROI for that budget

Ashley Gross
0:21:35
and those opportunities. And with butterfly AI, you have the ability, because it goes off of all of this data and all of these algorithms to say, hey, I have a field marketer, she needs help upscaling on XYZ.

Ashley Gross
0:21:47
And it creates games for that specific employee so that they can just take a five minute game and interact with it once a day and upscale, and it's zero dollars, so it's completely free. And also there's like this nice little portion in there where there's a survey, so you can actually say like, you know,

Ashley Gross
0:22:03
this week was really hard, here are the blockers I ran into, here were the achievements I had. And it collects that data and it keeps it anonymous, like truly anonymous, because a lot of companies use Google Forms and it's like, that's not anonymous. Like no one's actually gonna tell you

Ashley Gross
0:22:15
how they feel through Google Forms.

Alex Winter
0:22:16
No, no they're not, you're so right, yep.

Ashley Gross
0:22:19
I don't. But with Butterfly, right. But with Butterfly, they anonymize it and they give the employees a report and they give the managers the same exact report and it's like,

Ashley Gross
0:22:28
here is the skills that you can work on as a manager and here's the skills you can work on as an employee. So it completely takes like, well here's the problem that so and so said because that's another way of being able to decide who said what and it just talks about,

Ashley Gross
0:22:42
it puts the solution oriented approach at first where it's like, here's what we're gonna work on. You don't need to know what the comments were but here's the skills you need to work on.

Alex Winter
0:22:49
Very cool, very cool. I love it, thank you for sharing some information. Yeah, of course. It's really fun talking with you too, because here at Impact, we very much are in the business of building trust.

Alex Winter
0:22:59
We believe that good business is all about trust, and that, again, AI is a tool that you can use to help do that and leverage to be more efficient and faster, but can you talk a little bit too about how important it is to build trust? And you say ROI a lot, and we believe that,

Alex Winter
0:23:11
like, return on investment is huge, and I think we're aligned on this where like How do you how do you get people to see the value in these tools that it's only going to help enhance? You know that feeling of building trust and gaining quality leads and gaining better conversations and better potentials for your business to scale and to grow

Ashley Gross
0:23:26
Great question. So how I like to do this is you know from an enterprise standpoint The first thing I actually ever did was I got one person from every single department together. So not even just marketing, I had the head of sales, I had a product, I had a marketing, like everybody from the department. And I got them all together and I said,

Ashley Gross
0:23:46
okay, what is the business's main problem this quarter? And we all went around and everyone guessed what it was. And we all aligned on like that specific quarter, it was revenue, right? Like we had a revenue problem. And so then all the development leaders were like,

Ashley Gross
0:24:01
okay, how can we as a department solve that problem? And then we went around and it was like, you know, marketing was like, you know, we could create better videos because our short videos convert better. And then product has something to say and then, you know, we go all around. And so then we're like, okay, great. So those are the use cases we have. We now have a top-down strategic approach to rolling out AI based on a universal problem. And we all have how we're going to develop these first use cases. And then it can trickle down a lot easier because if you don't have it coming from the top

Ashley Gross
0:24:32
and you don't have that buy-in, then it's so many more silos at the bottom because employees are inundated with so many other things that they have to do. And they're going to their managers saying, well, I have this and this and this, like, what should I prioritize? And if the managers aren't saying AI, then that's going to take a backseat. So I like to tell people that, but from an individual perspective, I'm very strategic.

Ashley Gross
0:24:52
And what I mean by that is I always tell people to start off with a fun use case. And I like to say, why don't you prompt Chatsyptee and ask it, what recipes you can make with the ingredients that are already in your fridge? Because it takes you 30 seconds to figure that out, right?

Ashley Gross
0:25:06
And then you're like, whoa, I don't need to go grocery shopping. I thought I had to go grocery shopping, and now I don't. And you're excited. That's the only goal for the first step. And then my second use case is, what is another language that you want

Ashley Gross
0:25:17
to learn? Okay, type a sentence in and talk to ChatGPT and ask it to repeat that back to you in French or Spanish or whatever. And it does it. So we went from a 30-second use case to a 60-second use case. So then the next one is, hey, I want this promotion. What skills should I go learn in order to get this promotion? 90 seconds and it's getting the answer. So I like to work my way up because we live in such an instant gratification world and it's not necessarily our fault, but it's whatever we see all the time and we're used to seeing things really,

Ashley Gross
0:25:45
really quickly. So that is intrinsically how people are motivated and how they learn now. So you have to change and modify your learning and teaching to fit that narrative so that they actually are getting this in bite-sized portions because that's what they would get if they open Tik Tok or Instagram. And then by like use case five, we can actually work on professional.

Ashley Gross
0:26:04
But that's how you get them intrinsically motivated and bought in.

Alex Winter
0:26:07
That's excellent advice. That's fascinating to me. It's baby steps. It's like, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, right? You got to crawl before you can walk, as the saying goes.

Alex Winter
0:26:17
That's really cool. So, what else can we talk about with AI that maybe we haven't covered? Something that maybe you've really wanted to talk about that you haven't been able to do so yet?

Ashley Gross
0:26:29
Probably prompt engineering. Okay. Because I think that it just sounds awful, right? Like it sounds super technical and really boring.

Alex Winter
0:26:35
Yeah, what is prompt engineering?

Ashley Gross
0:26:38
So it's actually just talking about communication. It's working on your communication and how you communicate with that LLM. And a lot of people, you know, like you lose them as soon as you say the name because it sounds like technical jargon.

Ashley Gross
0:26:49
So what I like to do is, once we make it through those first four use cases, because they don't need to know how to speak to the LLM to get those use cases, that's the other portion, right? So I'm trying to get them to see that they already have the skills

Ashley Gross
0:27:00
that they need to make this work. So they get through the first four use cases, and then we're actually ready to get into the nitty gritty and switch lenses into a full use case. So then I'll say something like, okay, I have a wonky little activity for you to do.

Ashley Gross
0:27:14
Next time that you're running through your to-do list with your significant other, go ahead and open up your voice memo app and record yourself telling them about your to-do list. And everyone always looks at me like I'm an alien, but hear me out.

Ashley Gross
0:27:26
So when they do that, I make them re-listen to it because people hate re-listening. Like, they hate listening to a recorded version of themselves, right? So when they're listening, they're like, most, 90% of the time people are like,

Ashley Gross
0:27:37
wow, I was barking my to-do list out at my significant other. I wasn't even having a conversation. I was saying I need to do this and this and this and this and this and that's the point. So I'm like, okay, great.

Ashley Gross
0:27:48
You were barking orders. We have diagnosed that. Now do it again. Record yourself again and evaluate it. And then next time they're like, hey, honey, I have to go get gas.

Ashley Gross
0:27:59
And then their significant other's like, okay, cool. And they're like, and then I gotta go to the bank. Okay, great. And then we're ready to start prompt engineering because what I'm having them do is chain prompt.

Ashley Gross
0:28:08
I'm having them say one thing, make sure that the other person understands it, say the next thing and keep going back and forth. And that is how you start prompt engineering. That is what prompt engineering is, is breaking things down into concise communication points.

Ashley Gross
0:28:21
People are not great communicators though. So you have to humble them without realizing that you're humbling them and they can't come to that conclusion. I love this. No, I love this.

Alex Winter
0:28:29
I'm thinking about my wife will give me the laundry list and I only get the first two or three and there's like 10 more that I forget. And it's because we don't have the prompt engineering. So this is, I'm actually going to take this back and practice this. That's really fun. It should.

Ashley Gross
0:28:40
Yeah, so cool.

Alex Winter
0:28:41
So for people out there listening and watching, what's going on in your world? Like if they want to, I know you public speak, I know you have a lot going on in your world, do you wanna tell people a little bit what's happening, because there's a lot of exciting stuff and maybe how they can see you and get to learn more about everything that we're talking about here today.

Ashley Gross
0:29:00
Sure, so you can always follow me on LinkedIn, I'm very consistent with putting out content, but I have my business, which is called The Prompt Community, and it's a subscription-based community, and so for $20 a month, you jump into the community and it's hosted on Circle,

Ashley Gross
0:29:13
and there's three events every single week, they're community choice. So I say, here are the offerings for the week, you guys pick. So they pick the three courses. Additionally, I bring in a new AI founder each week,

Ashley Gross
0:29:24
and we talk to them about data security, ethics, bias, mitigation, and they give us all the free access to their tool. So instead of keeping up with all the news that's happening and not understanding what to do with that, we actually bring in the people

Ashley Gross
0:29:36
that are creating this technology, give you the information to feel safe and secure and then if you want to test the tools after hearing them and meeting them, then you can. So, that's one really cool thing that I have going on.

Alex Winter
0:29:45
That sounds really cool. I love that.

Alex Winter
0:29:47
Very cool.

Ashley Gross
0:29:48
Thank you. And then I also have on Maven my How to Build a Business Using AI in 10 Days course is live, which is actually created from my blueprint with my workflows, my automations, and my tech stack. So, I took all three reasons why startups fail to start. And I went through hundreds and hundreds

Ashley Gross
0:30:05
of hours worth of research. And the three main problems for startups failing to start was poor product market fit, lack of funds or skills, and then a bad business plan. And so I rewrote this course based on here are the tools that you need to succeed.

Ashley Gross
0:30:22
Here's all the information that you need to succeed. Forget about everything else. We can figure this out later, let's launch. And so that course is live and I'm really excited about that as well.

Alex Winter
0:30:31
Congrats, that's amazing.

Alex Winter
0:30:32
Thanks, thanks.

Alex Winter
0:30:34
Very, very cool. So as we wrap up here, if people wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way if they wanna pick your brain, they wanna ask you more questions? Obviously LinkedIn, I checked out your profile before, there's a lot of great resources and info there,

Alex Winter
0:30:46
but how else can people get in touch with you if they wanna pick your brain?

Ashley Gross
0:30:48
Yeah, they can visit gettheprompt.com. My email is located on there. I'll also be speaking at Macon. I'm doing a lot of speaking, so you can always catch me speaking.

Alex Winter
0:30:59
I love that. I love it. Very exciting stuff. You have a lot of things happening. She has a lot of great content, too, so make sure you go check out her channels. We'll drop some links in the description as well. Any closing thoughts as we wrap up here for business leaders

Alex Winter
0:31:11
and for people out there that want to get more into AI?

Ashley Gross
0:31:16
Yeah, so for business leaders, my advice would be, you know, your employees, whether they say it or not, they do want to learn AI and they are curious about it. So the best thing you can do as a business leader is to enable your employees to go learn. So advocate for them, empower them, support them,

Ashley Gross
0:31:32
whether that means you're signing off on a budget or you are going out there and finding certifications on Coursera or Udemy that are affordable and then giving that information to them, you can be doing things and you should be doing things.

Ashley Gross
0:31:43
And then for everyone else, my advice is just to be really concise with what you wanna do. It's not, like you said, it's eating the elephant one part at a time. So start small, iterate mindfully, and then just continually get curious,

Ashley Gross
0:31:56
because honestly, curiosity is the backbone of innovation. That's it, that's really all it is. So just stay curious, start somewhere, and be experimental and mindful.

Alex Winter
0:32:05
Ashley, it was great having you on the show. Thank you for taking the time and for sharing just all your knowledge and expertise. We really appreciate it.

Ashley Gross
0:32:11
You're welcome.

Alex Winter
0:32:12
Thanks for having me. Anytime. We're gonna have to have you back on the show. We're gonna do another check-in at some point later this year. We did.

Alex Winter
0:32:17
All right, sounds good. And for everybody out there watching and listening, this is Endless Customers. I'm Alex. See you on the next episode. See you on the next episode.

Ashley Gross
0:32:21
Bye!




Transcribed with Cockatoo