How AI saves me 150+ hrs a month ⏰

Hi Non-Techies,

This newsletter is part 1 of a two-parter based on a talk I did for the good folks at Agency Hackers. In today’s email, I’m going to introduce you to my AI team and talk about some of the ways that they help me out.

In part 2, I’m going to share a tool that’ll help you to build your own AI team. Sequels can sometimes be rubbish (did you ever see Jaws 2? Exactly), so I’ll be doing my best to make sure it lives up to the hype.

Before we get started, I want to let you know that access to my AI Academy is currently free for 30 days, exclusively for readers of this newsletter. This is not a drill.

Get a whole month of academy access by clicking the button below and entering the code ‘NEWS4367’ in the “HAVE A COUPON?” section.

I’ve packed my AI Academy with as much value as I possibly can, all for just £25/pm (or $32/pm).

But if you’re the sort that likes to try before you buy, I’m opening the doors and giving you completely free access for 30 days. It’s a bit like when Charlie gets to visit the chocolate factory, but without the prospect of imminent death. Remember, use NEWS4367 to redeem this offer.

See you at my next live session? I hope so.

Meet my A(i)-Team

I want you to meet my team of AI helpers who, luckily for me, all happen to have incredibly catchy names (a total coincidence, of course).

Column Callum has to be my favourite, name-wise. Between them, they’re saving me over 150 hours a month. That’s a full-time employee!

But how exactly do they save me so much time? To show you their impact, I’ve drawn up a list of three tasks I might need to do in a typical week, and how my AI team helps me to do them faster.

Task 1: Creating a Lead Magnet E-Book

Before I ‘hired’ Lead Magnet Larry (Larry is an absolute animal at the Christmas party, btw) I had to write these myself. All in, with ideation, writing the thing, design and reviews, it’d take me around 10 hours.

But with Larry, it takes me just over 6 hours. He brainstorms ideas, he writes the initial copy and he makes the edits. Human time still goes into the design and reviewing to ensure Larry hasn’t said anything weird (you never know with him).

Lead magnet time saved by Larry = ~4 hours. Cheers Laz.

Task 2: Creating a 6-month Training Programme

Enter Programme Polly. She turns a 23-hour marathon into a 16-hour stroll. What a woman bot. Polly gives me two big unlocks during this process:

1) She takes 2 minutes, not 3 hours, to write up the meeting notes from the kick-off call into an outline for the programme.

2) She takes 2 minutes, not 6 hours, to turn that outline into slide content and design notes. This is one of the biggest time sappers of my job.

It’s worth noting that, at every step, I make sure a real, proper human checks things over. This process isn’t about removing human input, it’s about making sure human time is spent as productively as possible.

Training programme time saved by Polly = ~7 hours. That’s nearly a whole working day!

Task 3: Creating Proposals

Oh, where would I be without Proposal Pete? To avoid any confusion, we’re talking strictly business proposals here, not marriage proposals (but there’s probably a chatbot for that too).

Pete takes my sales call transcripts and converts them into data-driven proposals in my specific style. I also use Perplexity for the company research, but Pete’s not getting the credit for that.

Where before a proposal would take me around 3 hours and 40 minutes on a good day, now they take me 2 hours. And Pete picks up on tiny things that I’d miss in a call.

Proposal time saved by Pete = ~1 hour 40 minutes. Not all heroes (can) wear capes.

So…how can you use AI to save time too?

All of the lovely AI assistants you’ve met today are custom chatbots. Here are the steps I followed:

Step 1) I started with just 1 custom chatbot

Step 2) I wrote out my goals (business, personal)

Step 3) I mapped out my blockers - what’s stopping me get there

Step 4) I built a chatbot that could unclog that blocker

Next week, I’ll share a tool that’ll help you build your own chatbots, talk about AI notetakers and introduce you to a few more AI team members that I use every single day. They don’t all necessarily save me time, but they arguably save my sanity. And like most founders, I’m running low on that.

Okay, this week I’m doing a ton of work in the public sector, helping councils wrap their heads around this AI thing. It’s kind of bonkers how I bounce from public sector to hospitality, to pharmaceutical, to legal, to agency…but in the end, absolutely everyone is in the same “what is it and how do I use it?!” boat…

See you next week,

Heather

PS: the results from last week’s Shadow AI poll are in:

• 46.15% of recipients don’t have any AI restrictions at work.

• Of the 53.85% that do, 78.57% ignore the restrictions, and just 21.43% follow them.