I Was an AI Skeptic. Here’s What Changed My Mind

Welcome back to this week's episode. It's great to have you here. Three weeks ago, my website looked like something out of the early 2000s. It was there, but it was clunky, it was ugly, it was heavy, and it didn't load very fast. But hey, I had my own little corner of the web.

Today, I have a website that's fast, it's interactive, and it pulls stuff in automatically, such as these podcasts that go live every week. Beyond the website, I have content scheduled, I have trackers that help keep me organized, and I have a daily brief that comes into my inbox every morning at 6 a.m. so that when I wake up, I know what's on the agenda for the day. I have gotten more done in my business in the last three weeks than I have in the last year, especially when it comes to growing the business online. And the reason for this happening is something I've been super skeptical about.

Yeah, AI. And I say it hesitantly because if you've listened to this show for a bit, you know I have talked openly about my skepticism of AI and where it fits into business. Back in episode 29, I talked about how AI isn't your competitive advantage. Being human is, and I still believe that to my core. But over the last few weeks, I've been watching some people do cool things with AI, and I've been trying things.

And here's what I'm starting to see. When AI is used in the quote unquote right way, it doesn't replace a human. It actually becomes a really powerful enabler. It makes people more productive. And honestly, I think it opens up the playing field for a lot more people who want to grow a business that they love.

Now, there are a lot of people out there using AI to do the thinking for them. And I don't think that's what AI is for. Where I think it fits in is helping us be a whole lot more productive, getting more things done, and taking care of things that used to bog us down, which in turn allows us to focus on things that we're really good at and that provides a lot of value into the world. So today I want to take you through what's actually changed in my business, some of the misconceptions I heard about AI, and where I think the line is between using AI well and letting it take over. Now, let me back up a little bit.

I've been really lucky. I've grown my business successfully through networking and referrals, but I know I want to grow more of an online business. And this I was doing the hard way. I was trying to build the website myself. I hired some things out, but I didn't keep them going.

I was doing social media, but it was exhausting, so I gave up for a few months. I was constantly trying to figure out what to post and what to create. And then actually making the posts, it was becoming a full-time job and it did not light me up. Even the launching offers felt heavy because I was doing it all myself and I was doing it all manually. I didn't have a team around me.

Then over the past few weeks, I've been presenting in person to groups of advisors. Leading up to those events, I wanted a better online presence so that if somebody looked me up, they could actually see that I have some stuff online. And I knew that something had to change. So toward the end of September, I started getting serious about what I was going to do and how I was going to change that online presence. I had seen some people doing some really cool things with AI, and I thought, well, maybe it'll work for me.

I'll give it a try. And I started small. I have this whole concept of doing tiny experiments in your business to see what works. And this one kind of blew me away. I decided that I was going to start with my website, and I decided to use Claude as my AI companion to build the website.

Now, there's a lot of people out there who will tell you that you can just tell Claude what to do and it will build the website for you. And it's a yes and no. If you go to YouTube and ask, you know, how do you build a website with Claude? All kinds of examples come up, but they're oversimplifying a lot of things. Yes, it can build a website and it can do it extremely fast.

But it's so important that you direct the tool on what to do. My website, if you go to it right now, ashleyfrank.com, it doesn't look like something AI built. It's my brand, it's my look, it's my feel, it's my personality, and most importantly, it's my message. I didn't let AI go out and write my messaging. I crafted my messaging alongside AI.

And the words that are on those pages, they're my words. AI was just the enabler to get it into the world. But here's the really cool part. Claude built me a website that would probably cost upwards of $10,000 or more if I hired an agency to build it. I started off really basic and I've been adding to it over the past couple of weeks.

Now it's a really nice interactive website. It's responsive, so it works on your iPhone and your iPad and all your devices. It automatically pulls in my podcast episodes. And I even have a back end where I can go in and update things like promotions and banners and episodes and blog posts all on my own without having to go into Clot at all. Within a week of starting the project, the website was live.

And I want to be really clear about the time it took from start to where I am today. So there's been a couple of iterations and I've added some things on, but in total, I've probably spent maybe 20 hours on the website, 20 hours total of sitting down, working on the website, gathering graphics, creating the pages, the content, the strategy, and going live. And if I need to change it, I just have to go to Claude and ask for the change to be made. And some of the changes I'm making by myself on the back end that we built. And this is where it's so important that a human is involved.

I was involved in every single step of building the website. And because of that, I know what to ask for when something needs to be changed. I'm not just handing it over and hoping that the AI bots can do it. I'm actually involved, and that's the differentiator and why AI is working for me right now. Because as the site was created, I was reading content.

I was looking at things and saying, that's not how my audience would see that. And I was making uh changes in real time, not just hitting publish and going live. Besides the website, I started to use AI in some different areas. So, for example, content and graphics. I didn't love it.

I didn't love coming up with a content calendar and having to feel like I was always on this content roller coaster. And for the past two weeks, I've consistently been posting. And it's AI is changing how I'm creating the content. And again, AI is not doing the thinking for me. The ideas that I'm putting out there in the world, they're my ideas.

But what Cloud is helping me do is it's helping me get the content built, scheduled, and out there in real time. The graphics that I'm posting on social media, if you go to my Instagram, they don't look like AI slop because they're not. They're made in a real graphic design program. Claude helps me coordinate all of it and drafts everything into my high-level account so that I can go in and put on the final touches and then schedule the posts. And right now, I actually have two weeks of content ready and scheduled that I don't even have to think about.

How cool is that? It has changed the admin side of my business quite a bit as well. I now get a daily brief that helps keep me on track. It comes into my inbox at 6 a.m. every day.

It gives me the breakdown of what's in my inbox that I didn't take care of, what's on my schedule, and the to-dos and the items that are going to move move my business forward. The project trackers that I normally use in Notion, they're now connected to Claude as well. So my projects are being updated manually. Sorry, instead of my projects being updated manually every day, Claude is telling me this is the next step and it's checking in each morning to make sure that I'm on track. And that accountability is pretty cool when it's coming from an AI that's basically just putting it in front of you to make sure that you're doing the things to move your business forward.

And here's one of my favorite examples because it's a task that I absolutely dread: expense reports. Now, I don't do many of them, but I was recently traveling for a client and needed to expense some things back. And when I counted it up, it was close to 50 or 60 receipts. Normally I'd have to take pictures of every receipt, type them out into a spreadsheet myself, then reconcile everything against my credit card to make sure that I didn't miss anything or put wrong things in there. And it was hours of work, like at least a couple of hours of work, and not work that I enjoyed.

And normally I put off creating my expenses until the very last minute. This time I thought I'm gonna give AI a little bit of an experiment and see how this goes. So I took pictures of all the receipts, I saved them in a folder, and I took a screenshot of the transactions on my credit card statement. Not the credit card information, just the transactions that I had for these trips. I gave it all to Claude with some really specific instructions, and I wanted an itemized expense report with the HST and the tips broken out separately, and which locations each thing was for.

A short time later, I came back to Claude, the report was ready. I downloaded it, I gave it a quick review. There were a couple of things missing, so I asked Claude to make the changes. I reviewed it again and I sent it off to the client for reimbursement. It was that quick.

The cool thing is, is Claude is connected to my inbox. So there were some receipts that I didn't have the physical copies of and I forgot to download them. The tool went into my inbox, found the receipts, and included them in the report. That probably accounted for a couple hundred dollars worth of expenses that I would have not submitted into the client. So it actually didn't only save me time, it actually recouped some money that I probably would have left because I forgot about the receipts in my inbox.

And when it was all done, the client

has a really nice-looking expense report with all of the receipts in one PDF document that they can review, approve, and then submit my reimbursement back. It saved me at least two hours of time, the dreaded work of doing expenses, and I think that is a pretty cool example. And notice that I still had to review it.

And I was the one directing the entire process the whole way. It was just the actual work that was administrative work that the tool took care of. And it's changed how I make the podcast. I know I'm talking about how it's changed so many things, but in the last two to three weeks, it's changed so much. Before, I would make a podcast the day or two or the night before.

Now, making a podcast looks a little bit different. This podcast was built with the assistance of AI. Now, AI is not doing my voice, it's not creating a script, but what it's doing is it's helping me get clear on the episode. So while I'm out for a walk, I will use my phone and dictate the episode into Claude. So just as I'm walking, I'll talk about the episode, the ideas that I have, how I want it to flow, examples that I want to use, all of those kinds of things.

And then I ask Claude to structure it in a way for my podcast. When I get back to my desk, I have a one-pager that talks about the title of the podcast, the different talking points that I want, and the order in which I want to talk about them. I sit down, turn on my laptop, and I start to record. That's what I'm doing here today. I'm not reading a script, I'm just looking through the talking points.

And it has made me more effective because before I would record, stop, go back and re-record because my thoughts weren't clear and they weren't organized in a way that makes it engaging for a listener. And that has completely flipped on its head, and I'm finding the entire process of podcasting way more enjoyable. And after the podcast is made, I upload this recording into Claude. It gives me a transcript, it gives me some recommended social media ideas, and then we go ahead and make those ideas for posting onto my LinkedIn. One more thing when these episodes are done, I upload them into BuzzSprout, which is my podcasting software.

BuzzSprout transcribes them using AI. And then I have show notes which get imported into my website, which are used as a blog post, which improves my SEO and all of that kind of stuff. And the thing that makes it different is even though AI is transcribing, I'm very transparent. If you go on the website and look at any podcast episode, at the end of the notes, it will say that it was transcribed with the help of AI and that I've reviewed it, but there could be errors. That way I'm not trying to pull the pull the hood over anybody and say, hey, I did all the transcription.

No, I'm using AI, but I'm using it in a way that's helping improve my business and it's not doing the thinking for me. Now, all of this to be said, yeah, I'm enjoying AI. I might change my mind at some point in time. But I don't think we need to be as scared of the tool as the media is making it out to be. And I get it, people have a lot of fear, they really do.

You see it and you see protests happening. But I think that we don't fully understand the impact of where AI is going to fit into our lives and our businesses. You see, I've been around for a while. I've been around for 43 years to be exact. And that's long enough to know that whenever there's something new, there's hesitation that comes with it and resistance to change.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s. We did not have a computer at home until I was in my late teens. When we got the computer, we had dial up internet, and downloading a song off Napster pretty much burned the house down. And if somebody picked up the phone, man, and disconnected that download, it was it was not a good situation. I remember back then, people were scared that computers were going to take away jobs.

And yeah, the job market changed a lot, but it also opened up the door for so much more possibility. You know, I lived through the Y2K scare. And honestly, that's when everybody thought that the nuclear reactors were gonna melt down and you know the banks were gonna collapse when the clocks turned midnight at 2000 because they didn't believe that the computers could do that. And well, we all lived in fear during that time, and we made out just fine. Today, the fear is AI, and the fear is that AI is gonna take over the world.

And I don't think it's gonna take over the world. I do, however, think it's going to change the world, and how we get ahead of AI is gonna impact how much it changes the world. Think of it like Facebook, right? When it first got off the ground in 2007, people were posting absolutely everything on Facebook. They were posting private messages on people's pages, and you know, everybody was a social media manager.

Now, social media is just part of our everyday fabric. And it's almost in every role inside of a business. I believe that AI is kind of gonna follow the same path. Right now, it feels new, it's a little weird, there's a lot of unknown, but before long, it's gonna become part of how we work. It's not gonna replace us.

I do believe humans are still going to be powerful in the world as long as you can think. And maybe there's some truth in the fears, but until the day comes, I believe there's a way to embrace AI without letting it take over your world. And I think it's part of building a business you love. I think it's gonna help you build a business that doesn't burn you out and that makes such a bigger impact if you use it correctly. Three ways that people are using AI right now, though, is quite interesting.

So, where does it leave us today? From what I'm seeing, people are using AI in one of three ways. And I'm not saying this to scare anyone, I just want you to see how much opportunity there is. And this is coming from someone who has been resistant to this entire movement. There's the first group of people, they're using AI like a glorified Google.

They ask it a question, they get an answer, and that's it. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's all if you're only using it as a glorified search engine, you might be missing a big opportunity. And over time, you'll start to fall behind because people are using AI for way more. And I would say late last year and 2025, I was probably this first group, even into early 2026. The second group of people that I see, they're letting AI do everything.

They are letting it do the creation, they are letting it think for them, they're not directing it. And that's a whole different dangerous group because they hand it a blank page and they say, post whatever comes back to my Instagram or write me the email. And I don't know about you, I'm tired of seeing AI generated images, and I'm tired of seeing emails that are written by AI. This is where I believe AI slop comes from. And in the long run, it's gonna hurt the brand and the business behind it.

Because if you are not putting your kind of intellectual property out there and you're relying on an AI to do it for you, there's nothing separating you from anybody else. And then there's the third group that are starting to use it professionally. They bring their ideas, they bring their expertise, they bring their voice, and they direct AI to help them build, organize, and get out into the world more effectively. This group is the one where their work is going to last for years. It's their own ideas.

They're just using AI as a tool to get faster and better and have a bigger impact. This is kind of how I'm using AI right now. So I've gone from the group one, I bypassed the second group because I've never been a huge fan of making images with AI. I tried it a couple of times, wasn't for me. And now I'm in this third group of I'm actually directing AI to help move my business forward.

Wherever you are right now, it's okay. You can move into the third group, uh, experiment for a bit of time, and then maybe move back to group number one, or you can cut it out altogether. But I think if you're cutting it out just out of fear, you're missing out on a huge opportunity. So let's talk about some of the misconceptions misconceptions I had and that I hear all the time. And I had a lot of these misconceptions about AI for a long time, and I started letting my guard down and experimenting.

Misconception number one: AI will just do it for you. Now, I've never really thought that AI will just do it for you, but you know, people will be like, hey, they can just build my website. Yes, AI can build it, but it doesn't know your brand, it doesn't know your clients, it doesn't know your voice unless you bring that to the table and you constantly direct it. You're still the director. The better you know what you want, the better result that AI will deliver for you.

Misconception number two everything AI makes is slop. This is false. It is slop when you let it do the thinking for you. But when you hand AI the blank page and say, write the post or make the graphic, that's slop. But when you bring your ideas, your words, your experience, your frameworks, and you ask AI to help you get it out into the world faster, that's the differentiator.

That's no longer slop because I don't believe what I'm putting out there on social media or in podcasts or on my website is slop. It's professionally done, it's because I'm directing things. Misconception number three: AI is going to replace people. I don't see it this way. There will always be a need to hire people.

But for some tasks, AI has changed how we go to market. It's letting small businesses like mine do things that used to take a whole team. It's not replacing the human, but it's opening up the playing field if you know how to use the tools. Misconception number four: if you use AI, you don't have to do the thinking. This is the one that over and over I just think people get it wrong.

They're letting AI do the thinking for them. They're outsourcing their executive function. You still need to think because it's your business, especially if you're an expert. I work with experts, right? You bring things to the table that only you can bring.

Your thinking is what people are paying for, and they can feel it and see it when it's missing. They know when AI is putting stuff out there, they know when you're not behind. It so there's a major misconception that if you use AI, you don't have to think. No, if you use AI, you actually have to do more thinking, and you're thinking in a different way. The last misconception is misconception number five.

It's AI is like another person. No, it's not. AI can very quickly get you thinking that it's your best friend or another person. It's kind of scary because it talks back to you like a person would, and it can feel like it has a personality. And I think it's partly on us, the users, to not fall for that.

I don't. I remember it's a machine. It doesn't have a personality or emotions and any of the things that make us human. Yeah, it can say that it's sorry or it feels for you, but it doesn't have empathy. So it's important for us as users to remember that it's not a person, it's a tool, just like we would have used a word processor back in the day, right?

It's a tool. But it's an awesome execution partner from my experience over the last few weeks. And that's exactly how I'm treating it. And this is where I think the real danger comes in. AI is a great enabler, but you also need the foundations to make it work.

A lot of people are diving into AI thinking that they can build anything without having the foundations underneath it. And that's where things go sideways, real quick. I've watched it. I've seen people launch websites, and I went to scroll through the website, and things aren't working. There, you know, you can't click on certain things, or the wording's weird.

And I've gone to people and said, hey, there's something up with your website, and they'll be like, Oh, it was AI who built it. You mean you built it and launched it and never tried that darn thing? That's where there's danger in not having the foundations of knowing how to use it. I like to think that I'm using AI differently. Not saying that it's the right way or the only way, but I'm using it differently because I do have foundations.

I've spent years in sales, I've picked up some technical knowledge working in the industry. So I'm not going into any of this blind, just asking questions and hoping. When AI is doing something and I don't understand what's happening behind the scenes, I have no problem in saying, hang on, I need to understand what you're doing. Why are you doing this? What's going on behind the scenes?

And I have it go deep and give me explanations. But most people don't do that. They're trusting what AI is doing on the surface level because maybe they don't know how to ask the questions or those foundational things that need to be part of the conversation. Because the last thing I want is for AI to build something that I have no idea how it works. I would have never built my website if I didn't know how it was built, constructed, the layers of it, and how the front end and the back end and all that kind of stuff work.

It's the same thing I talk about on the show all the time. Start with the foundations. When the tools, the AI included, they make you much stronger. But without the foundations, the tools can help you build the wrong thing a whole lot faster. And honestly, this is just the start.

Right now, I'm doing my website and a lot of content with, you know, the AI tools. My content is taking me maybe six to eight hours a week. And before it felt like a full-time job. And it's not taking away from my business, it's giving me more time for the things that I love to do and deliver the most value into the world. The coaching, the facilitating, the training, the recording podcasts without having to, you know, spend hours trying to edit and piece it together because I didn't have a good outline.

Working with people to help them grow businesses they love. I have more time to do that and more energy to do that. And that's the real impact. AI takes on the heavy lifting so I can spend more time being human and doing what humans are here to do. And I get to serve the people who I love to work with, which are people like you.

And this isn't the end of my AI journey. Or at least I don't think so. You know, I believe in running experiments in my business. Instead of picking a direction and running straight ahead, I set up experiments and I measure those results in the side of the experiment. And then if I'm getting the results that I want in a specified amount of time, usually 90 days, I then double things down.

And that's exactly how I've approached AI. I'm still in the experimentation phase. The website was a successful experiment, so I moved on to content. And so far, it's been working and it's been making me more productive. I'm enjoying the process and I'm putting more value out there into the world.

So now I'm starting to explore what's next. I don't know exactly what it will be with the AI stuff, but maybe it's some experimentation with AI agents and how they can support my business and maybe even the people I work with, giving them a resource outside of just having to reach out to me all the time. I'll try it, I'll measure it, and I'll see what works before I go all in. But I'm going to continue because I'm seeing some early indicators that this is working for me. And all of those misconceptions and fears that I have may have just been me thinking about this the entire different way.

My next experiment with AI agents, I will keep you updated on that because it will be part of the journey. And if it falls apart, I'll let you know that as well. I don't think the AI is ever going to take away the need for the human connection, but it's it's just another tool, it's a way to organize information so people can actually absorb the information that's out there and put it into action and into work. Because we don't necessarily need more information. There's a ton of it on YouTube and podcasts and Google, but we need ways of implementing the information.

And I think that's where AI can start to help us move faster, putting things into action. We're not just stuck in this planning or information overload anymore. So, all of this, it's a lot here today, folks, but I'm hoping you're getting some value. And I wanted to leave you with some ideas on where to get started. So if you're hesitant like I was, where do you get started?

Here's what I suggest. Pick one thing in your business right now that feels heavy. Maybe it's your website, maybe it's your content, maybe it's some of the admin tasks that just absolutely eat up your time. And try AI on that one thing. Think of it as an experiment.

Like I talked about in episode 35. You don't need permission to run an experiment. Give it 90 days and see what happens. If it's working, continue. And if it's not, stop.

But give it 90 days to figure it out because it's gonna take some learning and it's gonna take some mindset changes to make this work. And stay in the driver's seat. If you're gonna do it, don't give away your executive function and your thinking and just let AI run. Bring your ideas, bring your words, bring your judgment, and let AI help you with the heavy lifting. That's what I'm doing, and it's working for me.

I wouldn't just trust it to run without me ever having tabs on it. And I don't think that's the way AI intends to be in my business. And I would recommend that you don't let AI just run your business because you are the expert. So, needless to say, I found a new approach to AI. I've learned something, and it's something that I was really hesitant about just a few months ago.

And now I'm starting to see where it fits. I still believe that humans need to be involved because we can't let AI do everything. And I've said that a couple of times. That's how important it is for me. Let AI help you with the work, but do not give away your thinking.

Because that what make that's what makes your business yours. And honestly, it changes your business when your stuff is out there and you're leveraging AI to move things forward faster. Hopefully, this week's episode has left you with a couple of ideas. Maybe it shifted some of your thoughts around where AI can fit into your business. And as always, I'd love to hear from you.

If you have any questions, reach out. We can nerd out about some AI stuff. And until next week, keep growing a business that you love.