Are you running a small business and feeling constantly overwhelmed by all the AI tools, wearing too many hats, and wondering how competitors seem to get so much more done? What if you could multiply your productivity without expanding your team or working longer hours? The struggle of being a solopreneur or small business owner has always been about limitations – limited time, limited resources, limited capacity. But what if those limitations could be dramatically reduced?
Today's small business landscape is more competitive than ever. Big businesses have the advantage of specialized teams, substantial budgets, and advanced tools. Meanwhile, small business owners are drowning in tasks, from marketing and sales to operations and customer service. You're expected to be everything to everyone, and it's simply not sustainable.
That's why I'm thrilled to introduce our guest today, Phil Pallen – a brand strategist, keynote speaker, and author of "AI for Small Business." Phil has personally tested over 100 AI tools and has cracked the code on how to operate as what he calls a "1+ business" – delivering the output of a much larger team while maintaining the agility and personal touch that makes small businesses special. He's going to share practical insight into how AI is leveling the playing field and allowing small businesses to punch far above their weight class.
The AI Hat Podcast host Mike Allton asked Phil Pallen about:
✨ Start Small, Think Big - Begin with one AI tool that addresses your biggest pain point, then gradually expand your AI tools as you build confidence.
✨ Human-AI Partnership - The most successful implementations of AI in small business maintain the human elements that customers value while automating repetitive tasks.
✨ Competitive Advantage - Small businesses that strategically implement AI tools can effectively compete with larger organizations by achieving similar outputs with fewer resources.
Learn more about Phil Pallen
- Connect with Phil Pallen on LinkedIn
- Subscribe to Phil Pallen on YouTube
- Connect with Phil Pallen on Instagram
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
- Phil Pallen Collective
- AI for Small Business: From Marketing and Sales to HR and Operations, How to Employ the Power of Artificial Intelligence for Small Business Success by Phil Pallen
- Adobe
- Synthesia
- Goodbye Traditional Branding, Hello AI: Transform Your Brand Story with Park Howell
- Everhour
- Text Blaze
- Descript
- Fireflies
- Notta
- NotebookLM
- Magai
- RICCE Prompt Framework
- Nicky Saunders
- philpallen.co/tools
- AI Primer: A Comprehensive Guide
- AI Training for Businesses
- Explore past episodes of the The AI Hat Podcast podcast
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
AI Tools: How Small Businesses Can Punch Above Their Weight Class with Phil Pallen
[00:00:00] Phil Pallen: You don't need to be using and trying everything that's coming from someone who is paid to use and try everything. That's my job. These brands hire me to create content that might be interesting to someone like you that needs a tool for, but my recommendation is that's my job, not your job. So you need to be laser focused on those business challenges, not the AI tool.
Focus first on the challenge, and then start to explore what the solution can be, which might involve or incorporate AI. Lean on creators that you like. This is an amazing podcast about AI. There are other amazing video creators, audio creators, Instagram content creators, et cetera, that you can subscribe to and know that you can trust.
[00:00:56] Mike Allton: Mike's got The Hat. The AI kind unlocking power in business. You'll find cut through the hype. Explore the tech. Every week new ideas to check
Allton leads us on a digital quest. AI secrets. He'll always invest. Tune in tight. Don't miss a beat. Knowledge groove. Keep you on your feet. Listen up. To the AI flow business growth. Here we go. Cut the edge inside. That's the plan with The AI Hat you'll understand.
Greetings program. Welcome back to The AI Hat Podcast, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at harnessing the power of AI across all areas of business. From streamlining operations and boosting productivity to gaining a competitive edge and driving explosive growth. Oh, and you get to learn too.
Subscribe to be shown. I prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come on ahead. Now you're running a small business and feeling constantly overwhelmed, wearing too many hats, and wondering how competitors seem to get so much more done. What if you could multiply your productivity without expanding your team or working longer hours?
The struggle of being a solopreneur, small business owners, always been about. Limitations, limited time, limited resources, limited capacity. But what if those limitations could be dramatically reduced? Today's small business landscape is more competitive than ever, and big businesses have the advantage of specialized teams, substantial budgets, and advanced tools.
Meanwhile, small business owners are drowning in tasks from marketing and sales to operations and customer service, and you're expected. To be everything to everyone, and it's simply not sustainable. So that's why I'm thrilled to introduce our guest today, Phil Pallen, a brand strategist, keynote speaker, and author of AI for Small Business.
Got it right here. Phil has personally tested over a hundred AI tools and correct the code on how to operate. That's what he calls a one plus. Business delivering the output of a much larger team while maintaining the agility and personal touch that makes small businesses special. He's gonna share practical insight into how AI is leveling the playing field and allowing small businesses to punch far above their weight class.
Hey Phil, welcome to the show.
[00:03:47] Phil Pallen: Come on. That intro was so good. Can I bring you everywhere and you can just introduce me. Even when I walk into the grocery store, everywhere. I want that introduction everywhere I go.
[00:03:58] Mike Allton: It's awesome, isn't it? And I often, I always say transparently, Claude wrote that you did all the work to make that possible, but I have a workflow for my podcast.
Claude does a fantastic job of writing the introduction because I told him, look, hey, I wanna hype this guest up.
[00:04:14] Phil Pallen: Well, okay. And it, but it's, it's also your work. It's your landing on a prompt that you have finessed and tweaked and improved gradually. What, I just wanna highlight something before we like get into it.
This is the perfect example of how AI helps us do our jobs even better. And using these generative AI tools isn't a sign of laziness or the quick way out, and I think a lot of times as we're starting to learn these or we're beginners, the output that we get might be obvious to others that, ah, you wrote that on ChatGPT with all those emojis and m dashes, like I, I, I get excited, I guess is what I'm saying when I see someone that is using AI to do their job better.
That's the whole point of this.
[00:05:00] Mike Allton: You're absolutely right. And one of the things that I know as a host, whether it's in person or virtual, I'm the one who's setting the audience up to start to receive the guest or the speaker. If I'm like MCing an event and it's incumbent upon me to build them up and Im part as much energy as I can into them and the audience, and basically it's just get 'em hyped up, right?
Yeah. And so the delivery. Is a large part of that, I could, I could have said he's going to share practical insight into how AI is leveling the playing field and only small businesses to punch far above their weight class. Hey Phil, thanks for coming. I'll turn it over to you, which I have seen people, I've seen people introduce speakers that way and it's just totally deflating to the speaker, to the audience.
And so you're right, Claude wrote it. I had to deliver it. And hopefully I did a good job.
[00:05:57] Phil Pallen: You did an excellent job, and I'm thrilled to be here, truthfully.
[00:06:00] Mike Allton: So thank you. I hope everyone listening, you're, you're already on the edge of your seat. 'cause you can tell when a guest, even just the intro, introduction, they respond with insight and, and wit.
So thank you Phil. I'd love if you could just start by sharing your journey. And how you started leveraging AI for your business, what you were doing before, and what your aha moment was when you realized how AI could transform how you were operating.
[00:06:27] Phil Pallen: Oh, yes. Okay. I'm gonna give you the short version of the story because there's a lot of other things that we have to talk about.
Yeah. But the me story is this. I've owned a branding agency for almost 15 years. Branding has always been my business tool. So I listen to my clients' goals and go, what is it you're trying to achieve? How do we use branding as a means of getting there? Not just branding who we are today, but who we want to become.
Technology has always been something I've been interested in, always. So when I started my business 2011, social media was the thing. Graduated, moved out to la, started working with TV hosts. My most well-known client is a shark on Shark Tank, and so. Feel these days how I felt back in those days about social media now about ai.
And so adult job is owning a branding agency, working with people in companies to position build and promote their brands. But my fun job, my, you know this, my fun job is right before the pandemic, so early 2020, I decided to take my own advice that I would give a client, which is. Create content in a way that is fulfilling for you.
For me, sitting down and writing, even though I wrote a book sitting down and writing is like not actually a thing that brings me a ton of joy, although I would say writing pre ai. Okay. That's the little aspects there. But I like, I like recording videos. I like doing podcast interviews. I like standing on stage.
I like teaching people how to do cool things. And so I started posting videos about branding and then about social media, and then I got a, an email. In my inbox in the early days from this brand called Adobe, they said, Phil, we want you to try this new platform called Adobe Spark and make a little video about it.
We'll pay you a couple hundred dollars. And I said, yes. Anything from Adobe? The answer is yes. That was four years ago. Adobe is my biggest brand partnership. I. I also got an email from a brand called Synthesia. I was one of the first YouTube creators that they partnered with to create sponsored content highlighting their custom avatar technology.
So I said, yes, I will get on board with this, so as long as you can show me that you have, I. Ethics, and you're not gonna use my avatar for government propaganda in Venezuela. And my avatar video that I created, it basically starts out with this, is this is me, this is Phil, and then this is Avatar Phil.
And they look very similar and created a video that went viral. And truthfully, Mike, that started my career as an ai. Tools or an AI focused content creator. Every video I publish these days on YouTube is sponsored. I love dedicated videos. I love the opportunity to try new tools and technology, even if I'm not the target market for it.
I know that someone out there. Is looking for a new, note taker for meetings, a new AI powered search engine to find distributors a new AI powered tool to create graphics that are safe for commercial use or create content. I have had a front row seat into so many of these interesting tools over the last few years.
Which landed me a YouTube video was seen by Adams Media, an imprint of Simon Schuster. They said, Phil, we watched a video of yours on YouTube and we wanna offer you a book deal. Here's the advance, here are the details. The book is called AI for Small Business. Wanna Write It? And I said, yes. And so that book published in January, so it's new.
And I'm sure we'll talk about that, but that's essentially my, my journey in a nutshell.
[00:09:59] Mike Allton: Wow. Okay. So there's so much to unpack from that. Some truths there. When Adobe comes to you and asks you to be a sponsor, you say yes a hundred percent. Your little caveat about Venezuelan government propaganda, that was strangely specific.
It almost sounds like there's a story there, but I love how, you and I have known each other for a while now, and yeah. We are almost exact opposites in that I would much rather be writing than creating video and podcasts and speaking. I obviously do all those things, my heart is, yeah, you're good at it.
The
[00:10:28] Phil Pallen: writing, you're good at it. You have like a very nice, calm, welcoming disposition and I think that's why you do so well at podcasting. 'cause you create a very safe space for people and it, it translates very well for the listener also.
[00:10:44] Mike Allton: Thank you. But yeah, that, that's, that's a good synopsis of what I do.
Generally speaking with my training, I was talking to Park Howell and he, he ran me through his story Genie, which is this AI tool that he's created that to analyze a brand's website and their branding message and their personalities, their target audiences, and so on. This was a whole podcast episode we did.
I'll lean into it down below for you folks if you haven't listened to it yet. 'cause it was really insightful. But he identified that my. Personality type is that of a sage? Yes. Where, teaching and guiding and, and obviously you, you've already picked up on that. Yes. But I love that you're looking into these tools.
'cause that's something, honestly, I just don't have the time and patience to do. I need to have a, that's a very specific, why am I doing this? What is it for? What's the ROI before I even crack open a trial or a free demo? So that's a lot. So kudos to you for, for. Taking one for the team, so to speak, and, and being the one I've, I've tried Synthesia and I think it's fantastic.
One of the things that I noticed that you did was in the book, you, you coined this term, I'd never heard this before, call it a one plus business. So I mentioned that in the intro, 'cause I wanna make sure we talked about it, explain to us what that means and how, and AI enables this new way of operating for small business owners.
[00:12:06] Phil Pallen: I can't tell you how happy I am that you picked up on that because I think I said it without even realizing that I said it. But it really accurately describes and depicts the business that I am existing in in this particular moment. So last summer, well, actually it was prior to that, my, my my colleague Lauren, who I worked with for nine years to build my branding agency.
I feel like she had a better grasp of my own voice than me. And, and from a branding standpoint, she gave me seven months notice and said, Phil, I can't believe this, but I, I have to go. Her side hustle, which was born from social media hosting book retreats for women all over the world, took off. Like lightning in a bottle.
But she told me seven months ahead of time, out of respect for me and our friendship, she said Phil, let's, let's use AI to find workflows, to write some prompts, to basically automate aspects of our business without losing the human part of it. I said to you earlier that I've always been interested in technology and so having like a timeline I.
And almost an urgency around that was really useful. Truth is, Mike. I I didn't replace Lauren. I am a one plus business, so it means that I have a handful of contractors that I work with, but instead of being two people leading the charge where she handled the client side of my business, freeing me time to do the, the brand, the tools, the sponsorships, I now do all of it with a handful of creatives and contractors.
So. There's a lot that I accomplish. There's a lot on my to-do list day to day, and so I have used AI as a, a way of being more productive than I have ever been in my entire career and life. So that's what I mean by one plus AI has really given me the freedom to create the business that I want, a business that fulfills me.
2023 to 2024, I reduced my client work by 50%, five zero, and truthfully, that has made me a lot happier. Mm-hmm. I love client work. Limited client work. It's a, it's a, it's exhausting. It's mentally taxing and it's, it's tough. I have mad respect for everyone that does client work. I'm really happy working with brands, trying tools, consulting and strategizing with companies that, that, that have a huge impact on the technology that becomes generally available.
And so I'm just at a really exciting and happy point in my business where I have built a business around. What I love to do, where I make high impact, doing the things that I love and the things that I don't like, Mike, I delegate and or automate those.
[00:15:08] Mike Allton: I think you've really hit on a fundamental truth for consultants and, and agencies out there in that the, the way to scaling isn't to add more clients because we all like working for clients.
Initially, and I think what gets people so burned out isn't so much that they're doing client work is they're doing too many clients Yeah. At a time. And they're juggling too much. And of course then they can't come up for air often enough. Now, as I looked through the book, I noticed in the, in the contents, lemme flip to it real quick.
You talked through, you listed out all these different areas of business Yes. Where AI is helping. Where'd it go? You had.
[00:15:47] Phil Pallen: It's also on the cover. The cover has a little, a cute little branded icon. It's like
[00:15:51] Mike Allton: I just couldn't get to the page. Oh, you had AI plus sales, AI plus marketing, social media, customer service, finance account.
So would I be quick in understanding like this is how you're experiencing ai you're using in these different areas for your own solopreneur business, and then sharing your insights in the book.
[00:16:08] Phil Pallen: So I'm not using it in all of these ways. The book Okay. Was equally. An exercise for me in sharing my thought leadership and recommendations and experiences in using tools or helping clients write prompts.
In a variety of business applications. Mm. However, I'm not personally using AI in all of these applications. I could and I might, but in the spirit, in the season, I'm actually gonna say in the season I'm in right now, I'm all about simplifying my business. I hear the word scale and I want to throw up in my mouth.
I'm really in a season of like. Simplicity. Yeah. And making sure that my business is rooted in my passion, making sure that I'm feeling challenged by my work. To be honest, it is a place of privilege. I have a handful of income streams. I've been at this working hard for a lot of years. But I, so when we look in some of the later chapters, data analysis, security, I'm not doing a ton with ai Sure.
For my own business, but certainly I'm helping clients navigate some of those challenges in branding projects. I think I mentioned this, but branding has given me such an interesting vantage point. Mm-hmm. Right? Clients come to me and they need a new website, they want an updated logo, but that's not what they really need.
That's part of the equation. We gotta talk about the business. I have to hold the mirror up and say, Hey, friend. Here's what I see. Here's what I hear. I know it's overwhelming because you're in the trenches, but let's dump this out on the table and sort it in terms of priority 1, 2, 3, and then four, and then five, and then six.
That's been my job for 15 years, and so it's an interesting time where now AI nicely plugs into this. It nicely compliments those workflows. But as I said, the book was equal parts. Here's what I've learned with research, Mike. So I even find myself rereading some of the la the later chapters that I wrote a while ago and I'm like, what the heck is this about?
Again, the, the traditional book publishing experience is wild. You write a book over the course of a year, a year and a half, and I had, if you can believe, I had to submit the finished manuscript for this thing. Almost a year before the publishing date.
[00:18:29] Mike Allton: Yep.
[00:18:30] Phil Pallen: A topic like ai, people are like, how on earth did you do that?
I did it in the best way I could. Sometimes I have moments where I go, you know what? I'm just today. I'm just gonna do the best I can. That's all I can do. So I focused on tool recommendations, which I've been trying for three, four years. I focused on prompt ideas where someone in the industry or outside of the industry could read an example and get ideas for their own businesses.
By the way, I'm Canadian, so I do say please in my prompts and I'm proud of it. Same yeah, see And examples. Examples and tool recommendations and, explorations of every aspect of business in the most evergreen way possible. But I, I, I don't pretend like I'm an expert on this subject. Truly, I have a lot of anxiety stepping on stage, not so much podcasts, but stepping on a big stage where people are like ready to argue and have an ethical debate about ai.
I am, like I say, right off the top, I am not here to talk about ethics. I have my own concerns, deep fakes. I gave the Venezuela propaganda example. My partner's from Venezuela, but also the government of Venezuela used avatars AI avatars to spread propaganda. So that's where that actually happened. See, I knew that was, that's for that example, specific example.
I have concerns about the environment. Mm-hmm. I have concerns about deep fakes. These kinds of things are really troubling. But I'm an optimist at heart. My, my strengths finder or my, out of the 34 strengths, my number one strength is positivity. And so I, I get really excited and optimistic about the ways that this can change people's lives and help them achieve their business goals.
[00:20:13] Mike Allton: That makes complete sense. I'm, I'm the same way in a lot of respects. Like I can talk to people about how to use AI for customer supports. But it's not like I'm personally managing hundreds or thousands of customers and using the kinds of things that AI can really bring to the table. When you're talking about that volume of customer outreach, I don't have to do that, but I can understand it well enough to tell people Yeah, you can use it to generate responses and prioritize and yeah, get reports and all kinds of wonderful things.
But one of the things you mentioned a moment ago was the sheer overwhelm that some folks might feel. When, when you're talking to them, 'cause I know a lot of small business owners, they feel intimidated by ai. They worry about some steep learning curve. What would you say to someone like that who's maybe hesitant about using AI in some of these areas of their business that we're talking about?
I.
[00:21:06] Phil Pallen: My first piece of feedback is don't use AI right away. Actually. If you're curious and you want to explore what you can generate in a tool like Chad, GPT, Claude, Gemini, or image-based tools, I use Adobe Firefly, DALL-E, Midjourney, or some others, certainly experiment. I don't think anyone should tell you how to write a prompt.
I think you should learn how to write your own prompt based on your own experience of what works and what doesn't. What these generative AI tools are good at and what they're not good at. The most important thing you can do is not get distracted by the novelty of ai and instead focus on the real business challenges and opportunities that exist within your small to medium sized business.
So one thing that I do religiously is track my time. Have ha been doing this pre AI because it's how I'm accountable to my clients, not just me, but my team. Whether it's taking a piece of paper and a pen and committing. Someone might track their calories on a diet, write down where you're working.
Minutes go more efficient than writing this down With pen and paper, I use it ever. I use a Google Chrome plugin called Ever Hour. It's a tool that I pay for, but my entire team uses it. It syncs with our Monday Asana, Trello notion, and it allows us to attach time. To our work tasks. It's how I pay my team at the end of the month based on what, based on their, their work hours.
And for me, I own the business, so I'm not really paying myself in that way, but I can look back at my week. Every Friday I look at the report, where did my working minutes go this week? And I go through it with three different highlighters. Okay. Imagine this highlighter one. What did I spend my time doing this week that brought me a lot of joy?
Keep doing that. I look through it again. What are the things that I spent this week on that were high impact in my business? They drove sales. They drove a deliverable that was, high value, that was something really important or in nature to what I deliver as a brand. And then with that third highlighter I go through and I think to myself, what on this list?
Is probably something I shouldn't be doing. It robbed a lot of working minutes this week. It's something that maybe I can find an AI tool to help with and or an AI tool with some team member support. Whenever I'm, whenever I'm figuring out what goes to an AI tool, what goes to a team member?
Usually it's a combination of the two. But I always want my humans, my team. Operating on that higher impact human required work. So for example, replying to brand. Sponsorship inquiries is not the best use of my time. And there was a a a week where I noticed I had spent more time replying to inquiries than I spent creating content.
And that's a problem, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so I quickly discovered. Through a series. Some, sometimes it's not even an AI tool. Sometimes it's a, it's a well-written email template that you can pop in, in an instant with a, a, a template in, in Google Mail or a, or a text snippet that you save. Using a tool like Text Blaze is one that I love.
That's it. Build the practice for identifying where those opportunities exist. Independent of ai, sometimes, sometimes a solution. Is not ai. Sometimes a solution is something else, but we're building into the practice to identify business opportunities and it might be AI that helps solve that.
[00:24:53] Mike Allton: So I, I know you've, you've tested over a hundred I.
AI tools. I, I think we've already talked about 98 of them in the first 20 minutes, i a, about tools. What do you, the two to three, like just essential AI tools that you think every small business owner should actually start with regardless of their industry?
[00:25:11] Phil Pallen: Every time I answer this question, I always remember a few others and I'm like, dammit, I didn't mention that.
So. Let me tell you the tools that I simply couldn't live without or I couldn't operate at this level in my business without. Mike, I forgot to mention that when I talked about reducing my client work from 2023 to 2024, I made up the difference in then some with brand deals. So even though I only had my.
My colleague for the first half of the year, we still gross 95% of what we made the year before. So that one plus business, it's one plus a team of contractors and a slew of AI tools. So the tool that I. Absolutely use the most is Adobe Express. That's what I use for my presentations, for my content creation.
I can import PDFs, I can import anything that I need as a starting point. I also keep all my brand assets handy in a brand kit. Logos, files, colors as a, as a, as a brand strategist. It's like this beautiful link between the pro tools that my graphic designers, creatives, video editors are using.
Photoshop Illustrator. In Design Premier, right it, now I'm able to deliver those creative assets to my clients in a way that they can actually use them. It used to be that I give them a zip folder and say, there you go. Good luck. Don't mess it up. And now you know, my clients are actually able to use this.
It's very, very cool. I use descrip. Like a madman. Yeah. I couldn't exist without an AI note taker. I use what do I use? I use fireflies. I, I've tried a whole bunch of them, but I like, mm-hmm. I like fireflies. I like NoDa. N-O-T-T-A is another great one that actually has a. Tra real time translation built into it.
Mm-hmm. Yep. What else do I use? I mentioned text Blaze is how I save all my text snippets. Let me give you just a few more. I'll give you a few also in the Adobe ecosystem because I talk a lot about security and safety with ai. It's wonderful to use all these AI tools, but you also need to consider.
Where's my data going? I deal with a lot of sensitive information when I'm doing brand consulting and business building, and so I can't just pop that information into chat GPT, I can open it safely and securely in Adobe Acrobat, who knew that AI was incorporated in this PDF tool? We've all been opening.
Let me tell you. When you click that little rainbow button in the top right corner, that gives you access to a little chat feature, and you can have a conversation with your document at the time of recording this up to 600 pages. But Mike an example would be my book only. I and my publisher have a PDF copy of my book.
I don't send that to anyone. It's, you're asking for trouble if you've got a PDF version floating around. I can't upload my book to chat. GPTI don't own my book. I wrote it. But I don't own it. The publisher owns it, and so I don't have, I don't have permission to upload to, that, to chat GPT and then the model trains on it.
I can open it in a tool like Adobe Acrobat AI assistant, which does not train the model on any information that you provide it. And so I'm then able to have a secure conversation with my document. Open the book. Help me write a 500 word blog post about AI and sales. It will give me a result based on the information I've provided, and better yet, it will cite.
Each sentence that it provides and link back to the original document and show me where it pulled that information from. So you asked me about tools. That's a very dangerous thing to do, but those are a handful of the ones I'm using. I would say I use obviously Firefly for Image Generation. In Adobe Express, you can click generate Image, and that's gonna give you the ability from a text prompt to create an image.
That image is safe for commercial use that has been created only from images sourced from Adobe stock or the public domain. And so not only can I create this cool image, but I can go put that on my blog and not be sued for it, for infringing copyright or trademark. So very, very focused on AI tools, but from the lens of safety and security and compliance, which is something my clients small and medium sized businesses must care about.
[00:29:40] Mike Allton: Fantastic advice. Love these tips. I, I honestly did not know that about Adobe Acrobat. That's fantastic. Folks who've been listening to the show for a while, that might have sounded eerily like Notebook lm and it is, yeah, it's that same kind of concept where you can have that secure private repository of information, one source, 50 sources, whatever you want.
Ping it, talk to it, whatever you wanna do. Folks, we're talking with Phil about AI for SMBs and in particular, which tools they should think about investing time in. I've got several more questions you aren't gonna wanna miss, but first quick word from our sponsor.
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And I love Magai. I love, was it? Oh yeah. Magai is fantastic.
[00:31:15] Phil Pallen: I love Magai by the way, Magai is included and mentioned in the book. And it, that's the tool that I go to when I want to test different yeah, models. And also different tools against each other to see which one is best for different tasks.
For example, chat, GBT, ain't it for copywriting? Terrible, right? Unless you take the time to give a ton of input, everything's gonna be unleash, unlocked, treasure trove game changing. So I think Claude is much, much better at copywriting. Gemini is amazing when you need citations. ChatGPT is lazy as hell when it's, when it's when you ask for citations, anyways, sorry. I know there was a, a commercial spot, but I'm like, that's a good one. That's a really good one.
[00:31:59] Mike Allton: No, it, it, it was very appropriate. And I was even gonna say, we're talking about AI powered tools, less about the LLMs themselves. Magai is fantastic for exactly those reasons. You can, you can, if you're not sure which LLM to use, well use Magai and pick and choose, and you can change within the same chat, you can start a conversation with Gemini and then move to Claude, which I do all the time, because you're right, I, I love using Gemini for strategic thinking, brainstorming, that sort of thing.
I have it set up as an AI work body where I'm ping it. It knows all about me and my business and my goals and everything, but when it comes to right. Some copy I still wanna turn to Claude. And the same thing with the image generations. You have, gosh, at last count, maybe 16 or 20 image generating tools accessible within Magai.
So if you don't know whether stable diffusion or Leonardo or ideogram is better for what you want. Try all three, give the same, same prompt. See what it comes up with. So I love that for, I love that use case. Now I'm wondering, 'cause I've also love stories. Could you share a specific example of how an AI tool that you use helped you achieve something that would've otherwise required you to hire staff or outsource to a consultant?
[00:33:17] Phil Pallen: Okay, so let me give you two quick examples. The one that I've told before was the day I realized that AI made a significant impact on my work. A client of mine had just gotten her personal branding photos back.
We were ready to incorporate them on her website, social profiles, et cetera. She didn't like the way the red brick photographed. It was the day that generative fill launched in Photoshop. And I thought, I have all my content creator friends talking about, oh, you can just change the background. Look how cool this is.
And I thought, I'm gonna try it. So I took out the red brick and then turned it into white brick with a text prompt. That image is now on the homepage of her website. I tell that example in the book, a new example that happened recently that I've not told anyone other than you. My friend Mike, a client of mine, came to me and said, Phil, this is my new bio.
Do you have any input before we add it to my website? Phil always has input. I read the bio and thought, oh, Chad, GBT was involved with this. So I said to my client. Read this bio back to me in an audio note, but I want you to take liberties when you're reading it out loud, explain things, elaborate on things, give me stories.
Don't overthink it. Read back your bio and explain what this says and add some color to it. And she said, oh, oh, I can do that. She sent me the most amazing audio note back with tangents and stories and examples. I took that and, and, and fed that into a tool. I can't remember which tool I used. I think it was ChatGPT, and I said, I explained what I had done.
I didn't think about the most, elaborate prompt. I basically said my client tried to update her bio using ChatGPT. When I read it, I felt like it was generic. So I had her go through this exercise, reading that bio, but giving her permission to go on tangents, give examples, add color to it. This was the result.
I'd now like to work with you on further refining this. Let's get this down to eight to 10 sentences. Let's try to make it sound as true to her brand voice as possible. Before we begin the exercise, describe client's brand voice based on this sample to see if we're aligned. Next we'll begin editing it. I always like to give it instructions and if it's gonna be in multi-step, I like to lay those out and say, first we're gonna do this before you try to do this all at once.
'cause you're trying to get this done as quickly as possible. Nope, we're gonna do this, then we're gonna do this. And it worked beautifully. Her bio is, sounds exactly like her and it, it's not missing the human, which is what it, which was that, that that's what was missing.
[00:35:58] Mike Allton: Makes complete sense. And I love the fact that throughout this entire interview you've subtly interjected some truths about prompting.
Don't just copy and paste Yes blindly prompts. Think through tell the the ai we're gonna do this step by step. Tell the a to take its time. One of the things that I teach people is the RICCE framework. It's just really, it's just a framework for prompting. And I tell them this is basically training wheels.
This is to help you start to think about what makes for a great prompt, what, how to talk like a human to another human and not talk to the ai. Like, it's an ai, yes, it's an ai, it's a computer, but if you treat it like an intern, then you realize, oh, I probably should give it some context. Oh, I probably should give it some guardrails.
So it doesn't just, go off. So I appreciate that. I'll link to that in the show notes. We're almost out of time. So for my last question, Phil, I'm wondering if you could just recommend to small business owners, how should they approach the evaluation of AI tools? 'cause like I said, we've now probably talked about a thousand different AI tools and there's more out there every single day, and that in itself is overwhelming.
How do they go about it?
[00:37:05] Phil Pallen: So first practical tip would be add all of your subscriptions, even if they're free trials. Onto one credit card, consolidate them onto one credit card that is purely for business subscriptions. And then I want you to add a calendar event reoccurring once a month, end of the month, or a few days after the statement date to review that credit card statement and double check that you're not being charged for tools that you are not actively using. I've seen other like templates and spreadsheets and stuff for this. I think that makes it too complicated. That's another thing on your to-do list, so you need to update. Just make a practice of doing a monthly audit for what you're being charged for, and if it's not a tool that's bringing you value, then get rid of it or downgrade it.
You don't need to be using and trying everything that's coming from someone who is paid to use and try everything I'm getting. That's my job. These brands hire me to create content that might be interesting to someone like you that needs a tool for X, but my recommendation is that's my job, not your job.
And so you need to be laser focused. On those business challenges, not the AI tool. Focus, focus first on the challenge and then start to explore what the solution can be, which might involve or incorporate ai. Lean on creators that you like. This is an amazing podcast about ai. There are other amazing video creators, audio creators, Instagram, content creators, et cetera, that you can subscribe to and know that you can trust.
Let other people do the work for you. You need to be purely focused on the business challenge. Honestly, this is what we, we wrote the book for going through every aspect of business and recommending over 200 tools in the process. I don't actively use and pay for every tool, but I have tested and researched at least all of the ones that we recommend for businesses of all different sizes.
I, I get it. I get the challenge. I empathize with it. But my recommendation is stay laser focused eyes on the prize. Which are the business challenges that you face, not the next AI tool that you need to use and incorporate. I.
[00:39:35] Mike Allton: I could not agree more with that advice. Fantastic. And a very tactical tip of using a single credit card.
I love that. Phil, you've been absolutely amazing. You are absolutely one of those people that the business is listening should be following. So that, thank you. You are doing the work for them. We've also talked to folks like Nicky Saunders and other incredible creators. I'll link to some of those in the show notes as resources.
But for folks who wanna reach out to you, they wanna learn more from you or they want to even hire you, where should they go? Phil?
[00:40:03] Phil Pallen: Sure. I have my website, philpallen.co. There I consolidate actually, philpallen.co/tools have all of my AI tool recommendations. There's links to my book there. The book is on Amazon philp.al/ai-sm.
I'm sure you'll note these in the audio notes. I shorten that link so I could remember it by heart moments like this. YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn are the platforms where I hang out the most and where I create and share content that's designed to be useful for people. My most downloaded AI freebie is my avoid words, the words that I tell chat GPT, not to say groundbreaking, treasure trove, unlock, all of those.
And so I have those. I'm constantly updating that. That Google Doc resource, so you can get that on my website and on my Instagram, I link to it.
[00:40:55] Mike Allton: Fantastic. We will of course have all those links in the show notes below. So whether you wanted to pick up Phil's book or you wanna follow him on Instagram or grab that guide, I'll have it linked below for you.
That's all the time we've got for today, friends. But don't forget, if this is your first foray into the world of AI and business and you're struggling with some of the terms and the jargon we've been talking about, I've got that perfect resource for you in the show notes below the AI primer.
Then they quickly gets you up to speed on all of those things. It's powering this air revolution. Check it out and I'll see you in our next episode. Welcome to the grid.
That's a wrap on another episode of The AI Hat podcast. I hope you've gained some valuable insights and actionable strategies to boost your business with ai. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your network. And don't forget to visit the ai hat.com for more resources and to connect with me.
Until next time, keep innovating and remember, the future of business is human and it's powered by ai.
