32. How to Leverage AI as Your Tech Teammate with Abby Herman
Also available on YouTube!
Join me and Abby Herman, a Fractional Marketing Director, in this fantastic podcast episode that kicks off our AI series for leaders where we uncover the incredible world of AI and its game-changing role in small businesses.
Together, we explore the basics of artificial intelligence (AI), how it seamlessly integrates into our daily lives, and how it's making big waves in small businesses with applications like Chatbots and ChatGPT.
Abby takes us on a journey of practical examples, showing us firsthand how ChatGPT works its magic in marketing, content creation, and even in crafting Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) with ease.
Picture this – AI generating case studies from your work with clients, social media posts to help you stay visible, and templated emails to streamline your operations even more.
We'll take a look at simple strategies for how to effectively leverage your new tech teammate with ease and dive into some ethical considerations, emphasizing the importance of keeping our brand voice, adding a human touch, and steering clear of plagiarism in AI-generated content.
Listen in as Abby and I spill the beans on our personal experiences using ChatGPT for content creation, shedding light on its role in research and repurposing content. We'll unravel potential pitfalls, get a grasp of ethical guidelines, and find that sweet spot between efficiency and good ol' human creativity in content creation.
And if you have a team, stick around! Abby and I dish about how teams can effectively embrace AI, ensure you maintain brand consistency, and create an all-around delightful customer experience.
We wrap up the episode chatting about the positive impact of AI and setting our human creativity free to focus on more meaningful work.
Trust me, you won't want to miss this lively conversation on unlocking AI's potential for small business success!
(P.S. These show notes were written by AI and edited by me, Ashley! Tune into this episode today to learn exactly how I did it.)
In this episode, you’ll:
Get the lowdown on AI basics and how it's part of our daily lives, especially in small businesses, with tools like Chatbots and ChatGPT.
See how AI and ChatGPT makes life easier in marketing and content creation – from cooking up case studies and social posts to creating templated emails.
Learn the dos and don'ts of AI-generated content, like keeping your brand vibe, adding that human touch, and steering clear of plagiarism. It's all about finding that sweet spot between efficiency and realness.
Hear personal stories from the hosts about using ChatGPT for content creation – the wins, the pitfalls, and the tricky balance between tech efficiency and human creativity.
Find out how teams can rock AI together, keeping things consistent for your brand and giving customers a seamless experience. Plus, snag a handy guide for crafting ChatGPT prompts that get results from Abby Herman!
Mentioned in This Episode:
Abby’s Website: https://thecontentexperiment.com
Abby’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecontentexperiment/
Abby’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AbbyMHerman1/
Abby’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbymherman/
Abby’s ChatGPT Guide: https://thecontentexperiment.com/impact
Book a Free Call with Ashley: www.sprouthr.co/call
Transcription for Episode 32 - How to Leverage AI as Your Tech Teammate with Abby Herman
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Welcome to the Impact Ripple podcast, the go-to source for hiring and leadership made simple, doable, and fun for visionary female business owners. I'm your host, Ashley Cox, author, certified HR expert, and founder of Sprout HR. And I believe that you don't have to change who you are to be a great leader because you already are one.
Join me as we kiss uncertainty and overwhelm goodbye and say hello to the tools and support you need to grow a profitable, sustainable, impactful team with more confidence and ease. On today's episode, Abby Herman joins me for a fun and educational conversation on using artificial intelligence in your small business to kick off our brand new AI series. Abby Herman is a Fractional Marketing Director.
content strategist and podcast manager for business owners who want to gain visibility for their businesses with personalized content strategies and implementation. She also sells marketing tools and resources in her shop, the Content Experiment Lab, and she's host of the fabulous podcast, the Content Experiment. In this episode, Abby shares about what artificial intelligence actually is and all of the areas that it shows up in our lives.
the lowest barrier to entry for using AI in your business to serve your customers better, the difference between creative content and constructed content when using AI, ethical considerations we all need to be aware of, and dead giveaways that your content was generated using AI, including some common words and phrases to avoid. We also talk about how to maintain your own brand voice and...
keep the humanity in your content when using AI tools. But I have to tell you, my favorite part of the conversation is when we talked about how to use AI to leverage the brilliance and creativity of you and your team. So you are not gonna wanna miss that part of today's episode. Now, here's my conversation with Abby Herman.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Hey there, Abby, welcome to the Impact Ripple podcast. I am so excited to have you on today, my friend.
Abby Herman
Me too! I'm excited. Thanks for having me.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yeah, you're so welcome. So for our listeners, you and I met like seven or eight years ago in a Facebook group. And we have just really been fast friends and longtime friends since then right?
Abby Herman
Yes, absolutely. But we've only met in real life, I think, one time. Yes, yes.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yes, San Diego 2019. And you were surprised at how short I was and I was surprised at how tall you were.
Abby Herman
That's hilarious, yes, I remember that.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Like you're so much shorter than I thought you would be.
Abby Herman
Is that rude to say? Was that rude of me?
Ashley Cox (she/her)
No, no, it's a common thing. And I also think like we all look about the same height when you're on Zoom, right? So I'm 5'2", for those who've not met me in person, which is really quite short. And Abby, how tall are you? 5'8", okay, so that's a six inch difference. My husband's 5'8", and so I always tell him, he's always like, oh, I wish I was taller. And I'm like, well, you're tall to me when it's a whole extra six inches.
Abby Herman
Yeah, for sure.
Abby Herman
Uh-huh. I'm 5'8".
Abby Herman
Mm-hmm
Ashley Cox (she/her)
But it's so funny just to meet your online friends and acquaintances and business coworkers and stuff in person. And so what a gift it was to be able to meet you in person and to hug you. And I know you're not a hugger. So for anyone who ever meets me in person, I'm a hugger. I do ask for consent though.
Abby Herman
usually will hug back just because it's nice to see people in real life who you mostly know through the internet. So yeah.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yeah, right, right. And we've spent a lot of time together over the years. I mean, I've purchased your resources and been part of your programs. And fun fact for all of our listeners, Abby is actually the one who helped us get this podcast started, which was such, oh my gosh, that was such an incredible experience because we were just like, deer in the headlights over here. What in the world are we doing? How do we do this? How do we not mess this up royally?
Abby Herman
Yes.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
What do we not know that we need to know? And Abby was such an incredible resource for us and just gave us a lot of calm and confidence along that journey and just really step by step walked us through and I couldn't have asked for a better podcast support system and launch. And we're in season three now, which just feels so incredible to talk about. So thank you, Abby, for that level of support.
Abby Herman
Mm-hmm.
Abby Herman
Yeah. Well, I could only do it because I had support in my business who you helped me with. Did you like that segue? I mean, like, no, we did not. But yeah, it's like, yeah, Ashley has helped me with hiring and creating job descriptions and things like that. And ended up with an amazing assistant who has been with me over three years now. Yeah.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
I mean, that was really perfect. We did not plan that.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yes. Shout out to Maddie, who's amazing. Yeah. But just to let you know that, you know, Abby and I have really worked together hand in hand for many years now. And I trust her implicitly. I'm excited to have you on our show today. We actually co work with another one of our podcast guests, Lindsay Recknell. So go back and listen to Episode 15, Increasing Hope and Mental Wellness on your team. And that's where Lindsay and I come together. But Lindsay and Abby and I co work virtually.
Abby Herman
Yeah, yes.
Abby Herman
Mm-hmm.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
like a couple of times a month, and that just really helps us to get work done. So we know each other really well, and I'm excited because I think that lends a lot to conversations, especially around topics, like what we're gonna dive into today, which is all about artificial intelligence. And I'm excited to get your take on this. This is the first podcast episode in our artificial intelligence series. We've got some amazing episodes coming for you that I'm super, super excited to share. So to kick us off, Abby.
Abby Herman
Mm-hmm.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Tell us a little bit about your journey and how you came to be doing the work that you're doing today before we dive into artificial intelligence.
Abby Herman
Yeah, I will tell the shortened version of the story, which is basically, I mean, I started my business in 2007. I was a single mom and elementary school teacher in Arizona. I couldn't afford to pay my bills. Which I don't think is unusual, but I was the only income in my household and I had this little five-year-old, yeah, she was five at the time.
And I needed something, I needed to do something extra. And so I did some poking around and I found the company who developed the website that my school and school districts uses, the company that they used. And so I went to work for them. There's a whole story behind that I won't get into, but it took a little while, but I finally convinced them that they needed to hire me. So I did some very low paid freelance work.
$9 an hour, by the way, which was, I mean, it was ridiculous. But I was excited for the work and I learned a lot about the online space and the online world. Teaching was actually my second career. My first career was public relations. And so I was able to put some of what I knew from my degree in public relations into play there.
I volunteered for everything. I learned everything I possibly could. And then in 2013, I decided I had enough of working every single weekend, every single night, every single school holiday. And I left teaching. I was very in debt. I did not have enough clients to support me financially. I was still the only income in my household.
10 years later, 11 years later, I still am today. The only income in my house, but I was like, you know what? I was almost 40 and I knew that I needed to make a change in my life. And I was tired of being miserable. So I left teaching and started doing this full time. And it's kind of morphed from being a copywriter and just straight out content creation to now doing podcast management, content strategy and development.
Abby Herman
and implementation for clients. So, and I recently opened up a digital shop because one of the things that I was really frustrated with when I first left teaching was, I was a broke single mom trying to grow a business and I could not find resources and tools out there to help me grow, to help me figure out what in the world I was doing, cause I had no clue how to grow a business. Like,
Most of us didn't go to business school. And so I was, so I knew like one day I need to do something to help support people who were in that, who are in that same situation that I was in. So I opened up a digital shop. It only has a couple of products right now, but I'm planning to grow it with just the resources and tools that I think will help with marketing and online business and creating content and being a podcast host and all of those things. So.
So yeah, that's my story.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
I love it. I've heard this story a few times now and I just I just admire that journey so much because it takes a lot of courage and self-belief and tenacity to stick with that and it can be so terrifying to start a business just as an Individual but to be a single parent and to start a business and to know You know when you when you went full-time in that business that you were the sole
income provider. I just, I just, that's just so brave. And I just, I love that part of your story. So what the tears. That's true for any business.
Abby Herman
Mm-hmm.
Thanks.
Well, not without tears, because you know that there have been some tears along the way. Every couple of months, it's something. Yeah. But you know, I mean, I wouldn't go back and change it, and I couldn't imagine doing anything different than I'm doing right now. So, yeah.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yeah. I always say that being a business owner is the greatest personal development experience that I've ever had. There's no book, there's no video, there's no conference, there's no workshop, there's no PDF or checklist or download that can give you this level of personal growth.
Abby Herman
Yeah, absolutely.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Oh my goodness. So we know that as part of that business journey, there's a lot of figuring out new things. And watch this segue, folks. Artificial intelligence is a new thing in our business that we're figuring out. That was pretty smooth, right? So I want to kind of start off, especially since this is our first episode in our artificial intelligence series.
Abby Herman
Yes it is.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
just with a very basic question, what exactly is artificial intelligence and what are the basic things that we need to know about it for our business?
Abby Herman
So I'll give you the very non-technical answer to it. It's basically artificial intelligence is software that tries to, tries to, simulate human intelligence and human processes. And it's funny because, so I deal mostly with artificial intelligence in terms of content creation for business marketing, for business, content creation can also be tons of other things inside of a business too.
Abby Herman
But there are so many pieces of artificial intelligence that I think we don't realize are artificial intelligence. So if you just Google, like what is artificial intelligence or ask or Google examples of it, the actual search results you get, that's artificial intelligence by the way. But like things like spam filters in your email, the algorithms on social media.
New in Google Mail, there's like a quick reply. So based on specific words that are used in like the sender's email, when you hit reply, it will pop up like these predicted responses, like thanks or note, I can't think of one off the top of my head, but like, or a good one, but yeah, thanks for that, whatever.
Abby Herman
Project management tools are artificial intelligence. I use something that I use for my own podcast is Otter.ai, which you load the audio and it transcribes. So any kind of transcription. Zoom has a new one that I can't think of what it's called right now off the top of my head, but those are any kind of transcription tool or software is artificial intelligence. So.
It's just navigation on your car. That's artificial intelligence. So there's tons of different types out there. So yeah, I think the one that's talked about the most and the one that I actually use the most is chat GPT for content creation and things like that.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yeah, so this is really important because I think that everybody, not every single person, but a lot of people have been really hesitant to use AI because, and we're going to say AI for artificial intelligence because that's a whole mouth load, but everybody's been really hesitant around using AI when in fact, AI is not new. It's been around for a long, long time,
Ashley Cox (she/her)
And we use it in almost everyday situations, like you said, from navigating with GPS in your car to doing a Google search or, you know, the reply messages inside of Gmail where it says, hey, sounds great, thanks so much. And you know, you don't even have to write anything. So...
Abby Herman
Yes. Sitting in front of your TV, watching TV. So Netflix and Hulu, they all use artificial intelligence to predict or to recommend additional shows for you to watch. Like, because you watch this, you would like this.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yes. And that's why, right? And that's why like when I'm here at my house, my recommended shows look very different than when I go to my mom's house. And she always says, but why are your shows so much different? And I said, because we watch different things. We have different, you know, taste in movies and TV shows. And it's gonna show you more of what you like. And she goes, well, how do I find what you have? And I said, I can send you some recommendations and then you can kind of upload.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
them to your Netflix and it can start giving you different recommendations. So it's that learning technology too, right? It's learning about you and your likes and your dislikes and those preferences. And so there's so much that really has gone into AI and love it or hate it. I think it's one of those relationships. It's always going to be a both and. Right? Like we're not getting away from this new wave of...
Abby Herman
It will always be around from now until forever.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
of AI in the form of things like chat GPT. So let's talk about that part of AI. Let's talk specifically about the way that business owners specifically are using and can use AI in their business. So give us kind of that entryway to using AI in your small business.
Abby Herman
So if you have a small team that is not working around the clock, but yet you have products and services that your customers are able to access around the clock, you want to be able to support them if they're across the world or if they just are working with your products and services on off hours. So something like Chatbots is a great way
I think a really low barrier to entry way to get into using AI in your business. You basically front load the tool with responses to specific questions and kind of like a frequently asked questions page, but it relies on specific words that the customer is using in their inputs when they're typing into the chat. I think in 2024...
I think most people know that when they are interacting with a chat bot, that it is actually a bot, that they're not actually communicating with a human being. I know that some of those chat features are run by human beings or during certain hours they're run by human beings, but I think we all know that like when we're typing things into the computer and it's giving us...
article suggestions or help information that we're talking to a bot. Hopefully. So that's just one use. The other, another use would be, and something that I've used is helping with marketing, helping with content creation and getting my message out.
You can also use, and this is through, I use ChatGBT for this, you can also use it to create case studies for your business. You can use it to help outline an HR manual. You can use it to create templated emails for your employees or for your audience members, for your customers. There are so many different ways that you can use it.
Abby Herman
that, and actually one way that's really fun, I think, is one day I was trying to put together, we've been doing SOPs, we've been creating lots of SOPs for myself and for clients around marketing tasks. And I was trying to remember all of the steps that I took to do a specific task for a client. And I was getting really frustrated because it was taking forever and I was typing it all out and I was like, this is, this is dumb. So instead,
I decided to record myself in a Loom video, actually doing the task. And as I was doing the task, I was talking it out loud. I was saying out loud exactly what I was doing. I took the audio from that Loom video, loaded it into Otter.ai to create a transcript, and then took the transcript and literally copied and pasted the whole thing. It was pretty long. Copied and pasted the whole thing into ChatGPT.
and asked it to create an SOP, standard operating procedure for me, and to organize it in a specific way. And the information that came out was unreal. I was so excited. I was like, oh my God, I just saved myself so much time. All we have to do is walk through, which we're doing it anyway, walk through the tasks of a system that we use in our business, talk it out and then let ChatGPT do the rest. It was amazing.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Love it. That is so genius. That is so genius. And I'm very similar in my use of ChadGBT. I love to give it big chunks of content and information and say, distill this for me because I just cannot. You know, it takes a lot, you know, initially to create whether it's walking through verbally, you know, an SOP or in my one of my cases, you know, our podcast.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
I create all of this content for the podcast, and then you have to go back and create all of this content to be able to share it with the world. And what used to take us hours, literally hours and hours of time in season one, when we weren't using AI, now takes 45 minutes maybe, under an hour for sure, to be able to create so much valuable content to share this message. And it's not...
you know, asking chat GPT to come up with a podcast episode and give me all the talking points like that's all my thought leadership. That's our conversations. That's our brilliance. And then we're just asking chat GPT, Hey, write me a summary for this. Write me some, you know, bullet points. What are people going to learn from this conversation? Pull quotes out. That's one of my favorite ways to use it. Give me five direct quotes from Abby Herman in this conversation that we can use to share with our audience. Like what? That's
Abby Herman
Yes.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
So many fun, exciting ways to use it that reduces the time that we're having to have that hands-on content creation from something we've already created. This is the repurposing, I guess I should say. We've done the content creation and ChatGPT is assisting us in the repurposing of that content.
Abby Herman
Yes.
Abby Herman
So I recently was listening to a podcast, the Social Media Examiner podcast, and I heard Robert Rose, who is a content marketer, he has a content marketing agency, he's written some books on content marketing, he was talking about two different types of content. And this totally brings in the thought leadership piece that you were talking about. There is constructed content and created content.
created content is your thought leadership. That is the information that comes from your brain that your life experiences, the experiences you've had with clients, all of that comes and your knowledge, your own personal knowledge that you've gained and opinions that you have, that all is created content, your thought leadership. The constructed content is the content.
that when you ask chat GPT to write an article or to develop an outline or whatever it is, it's pulling information from all sorts of different resources that are found on the internet that are found online. And so that is constructed. Another, some of the examples too that he gives of constructed content are a dictionary. It's information, it's something that's created to communicate something
Abby Herman
a dictionary, how-to manuals, SOPs, things like that, contracts could all be considered constructed content. So I think it's really important to note that. And when you're creating content for your business and content does not have to just be marketing, it could be the things that you're doing in HR, the things you're doing in your leadership development. When you are creating things for your teams,
Abby Herman
for your audience, for your clients, for your stakeholders, they're human beings. Even if you are working with larger businesses, the human beings are actually the ones consuming the content, so it's really important to remember that and to be respectful of the fact that you're creating stuff for human beings. And if you want them to
Abby Herman
you know, consume the information that you're putting out there. If you want them to respect you and to trust you, then having created content and making that part of your AI journey is so incredibly important. Off, off my soapbox.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yeah. I love your snowbox because I think this is some of the challenge that people are experiencing or some of that push and pull effect. Like, oh, I wanna use AI because it feels like it could be such a great way to get support without hiring a bunch of team. It could be a way to not spend my time on tedious, boring, monotonous tasks and actually spend more of that time.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
serving my clients and supporting my team. You know, it really is such a great stopgap in our businesses and there's a lot of ethical considerations there as well. And I know that you've got some feelings about those. So maybe this is another soapbox moment, but I'm all here for, especially as an HR professional, right, like I talk a lot about ethical business practices and the things that we're doing to support our team and to take care of our businesses and our clients.
Abby Herman
Yes, absolutely.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
And I think that it's important for us to have conversations around the ethical considerations of chat GPT because they are very real, they're very prevalent, and there are also ethical responsible ways to use this great technology so that it can support us in our businesses. So tell us what are some of those ethical considerations that you've seen and experienced in using this type of software?
Abby Herman
I think the biggest one is what I just talked about, just like recognizing that you're creating content for human beings and it's so important to respect their time and their intelligence around the information that you're feeding them, that you're giving them. I think that that's really important. I know that a lot of people are really concerned about plagiarism and I talked about constructed content. So plagiarism is a...
something that people are worried about. However, when you are creating content from chat GPT, when you're giving it a prompt and you're asking it to construct something for you, it's really not plagiarizing. It's not because it's pulling from so many different places and it's actually creating something original.
So you're not plagiarizing, you're not copying and pasting from anywhere. Now, if you're using somebody else's content, if you're using somebody else's information, copying and pasting that into chat GPT as a prompt, yeah, I think that there's some definite ethical considerations around that. But actually asking it to create something, it's not. And I think it's fine to do that, but then that goes back to, let's respect the people who are, you know.
Abby Herman
If you're passing off something that ChatGPT created as your own, asking it to create a story, an article, a whatever from scratch without your thought leadership inputted into it, then I don't think that is very ethical to do.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
sign that. To me, that feels not even like a blurry line. That's a hard line. If you're taking and just leveraging that chat GPT can literally create anything and you're just slapping it on your website or your social content or in your newsletter as your own original thoughts, that's not okay. But the way to really effectively use it are the ways that we've been talking about feeding it our thought leadership and letting it help us
Ashley Cox (she/her)
streamline it, turn it into an outline, summarize it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's also like this, you know, like I'm getting ready to do a training next month. So we're recording this in January, 2024. So in February, I'll be giving a training all about giving and receiving feedback in a compassionate and empathetic and effective way. And one of the things I did was I input all of my notes for that training and I said, okay, give me a summary.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Give me five things people are going to walk away from this workshop learning. Give me x, y, z. Take what I've created and give me some summarized version of that. So then you can use that to write your own social media captions, your own newsletters, your own promo content. But it's still your content. It's still your creative energy and expertise and brilliance. And we don't want to lose that.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
And I think that's too something that we're really concerned about with AI is that we're taking the humanness out of the creation. But that's where the beauty and the brilliance lies.
Abby Herman
Uh-huh. Yes, because a machine, a computer program, it doesn't have empathy. It doesn't have lived experiences. It doesn't have emotion. Like that just, it doesn't exist. I will tell you though, so I wanna share an example of how you can use AI
Abby Herman
to create something from scratch in a way that I believe is very ethical and appropriate to save like tons and tons of time. So, and I actually walk this through, I have a podcast episode coming up in a couple of weeks that actually walks through exactly step-by-step how I do this. But let's say for example, you want to create something that you know is important to,
Abby Herman
your team, your customers, your audience, whoever, and you're like stuck. You don't even know where to start. So this is actually something, I literally did this just recently, ask ChatGPT or whatever, and I keep saying ChatGPT because that's what I use, but there's lots of other options out there, but ask your AI to create or to give you a list of topics. So you could use this for
blog articles, maybe it's for trainings that you need to offer. Excuse me. Maybe it's trainings that you wanna offer to team members, marketing, whatever it is. Ask it to create an outline, or I'm sorry, a list of topics that you should cover and let it come up with a list of topics. You, with your own...
experience, knowledge, expertise can look at that list and say, yes, nope, yes, yes. And you can eliminate some things. Then you can take that list and you can turn around and ask ChatGPT or AI to create an outline of what a training might look like for that topic. Let it do the outline with your experience and your knowledge.
your expertise, go in and you can edit that and, you know, make it yours. So you can use it to start from the scratch, but then you are going in and you're making changes. I generally will take whatever output that the tool gives me and I'll copy and paste it into a Google doc and I'll do my work there and then I'll copy and paste it back when I'm ready for like the next step, but you can do that in a way that like.
I have, I've done that for my own podcast episodes where it will come up with things that I wouldn't have thought to put in the episode otherwise or in the email or in the social post or whatever. It will come up with things that I wouldn't have thought about, but that are valuable and I will always put my own spin on it and use my own expertise on my own attitude, I guess.
Abby Herman
And you can do the same too. Like you only, you know your team better than anybody else, certainly better than a robot. And so you can tweak and refine any outline or anything, you know, before you actually take action on it. So it is sort of constructed content, but it is still created with your expertise and your knowledge base and your experiences and so on.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
This is such a perfect differentiation, right? Because I think in my mind, this is more the research that comes in the developmental phase of content creation, right? Like it's our responsibility as business owners and content creators and thought leaders to research our ideal clients, their pain points, their needs, their frustrations, what they're struggling with to better understand how to share the brilliance that
Ashley Cox (she/her)
we have and the expertise and the knowledge and the experiences and all those things that you mentioned. And sometimes, you know, you sit down at that blank Google doc and you're like, I have to write a podcast, you know, script today, or I have to write a newsletter. What do I talk about? You know, like, kind of like, you know, what do I do with my hands sort of situation? And I think that it's so, so helpful as a tool to help you research what are some of those hot topics, because it's pulling from the conglomeration.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
of people talking about those topics. And so I think that makes so much sense the way that you put it. And I think that if you go down that slippery slope of to say, okay, now write me a blog post for this topic, that's where we start getting into, okay, well, are you really doing the work now? But I think there's kind of a, there's a feeling that you get.
Abby Herman (12:30.75)
Yes, exactly, exactly.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
when you read certain posts or newsletters or captions that you're like, mm, I'm pretty sure that AI wrote this. You have not done that.
Abby Herman
There are some dead giveaways. Oh my goodness, I have a list.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
I knew you would. I was like, let me just put this out there because I bet you've got some thoughts around this.
Abby Herman
Oh my gosh, yes. So you can totally tell when someone takes something from AI and copies and pastes it into an email or a LinkedIn newsletter or social media posts. Like, yes, you can tell. Would you like me, I won't go through the whole list, but would you like me to share some of the things?
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Pffft.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Maybe maybe give us like the top three to five and also I'm taking notes.
Abby Herman
Okay, so number one is, oh gosh, I don't even know where to start. So obviously, I think that the obvious one is a lack of personal stories, a lack of empathy, all of that is, I mean, I think that that's pretty obvious. If the grammar is perfect, probably written by a robot because we as human beings, that's not how we write.
Abby Herman
That's not how we communicate. We're not all English teachers and grammar nerds and all of that. Yeah, so if it's got perfect grammar, probably written by a robot. In a blog post or an article, there's generally like a formal introduction and a formal conclusion and closing that is like called out. In conclusion, specifically the conclusion part.
That makes it really obvious. When on social media posts, when there's lots of emojis, usually like there's like a quote unquote headline and there's an emoji on either end of it, that's probably copied and pasted from a bot, from chat GPT.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yeah, I feel like there's a really typical or standard way that chat GPT specifically, because I know that's the one that you and I use. Like when I see that formatting in a caption, I'm like, that came straight out of chat GPT. Like you gotta zhuzh it up a little folks. You gotta change things up and make it fit your brand voice and your style. And we like a lot of emojis over here at Sprout HR, but not everybody does. And ours also aren't formatted.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
in that same sort of typical output way. So we have to change things up when we get those captions and make it sound human. All right, what else? Anything else you wanna share?
Abby Herman
Yes. Yeah. So there are some specific words that, um, chat GPT uses. I think the number one is delve this week. We're delving into or diving into, and oh my goodness, I hate the word delve now.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Ooh, and then I can guess the couple.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
I'm going to need some rest.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yeah, yeah, it is way overused. I'm like, give me 10 synonyms for the word Delph. Use those.
Abby Herman
Uh-huh. I actually have, I've started putting into my prompts. Do not use the word Delve.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Now I naturally use dive into because I think that's probably a throwback from my corporate days and I tried to get rid of as much corporate lingo and you know, jibber jabber as I can, but that one kind of sticks with me. But one of the words I see come up in my content all the time is transformational. Everything's transformative and transformational and we're transforming everything and I get it. Like I literally wrote a book called Transform Your Stories. So I get that, right?
Ashley Cox (she/her)
And I don't even use that word every single day in my content, but boy chat GPT, it just wants me to use it.
Abby Herman
Yes. Other ones are like, yeah, I actually have that one written down in my list and join me on a transformative journey or let's embark on a journey of tangled in the web of, you know, like whatever two things you're comparing with each other, unleash the power of, you know, I mean, it's just wordplay. It tries to be clever.
Abby Herman
So it's so important that if you are taking a transcript from something and asking ChatGPT to create social media posts around it, that's totally fine. Like do it. I do it. It's fine. But review what you're writing so that you have some empathy, you have some personalization in there so that you like use words that you actually use in real life.
Sometimes I'll get really frustrated and I'll type into the prompt when I'm asking it to rewrite something Write like a human I'll say write like a human humans don't word to use delve I'll literally type that in there because it is okay to like, you know Ask it to rewrite. I have done that rewrite with more empathy You know, sometimes I will ask it to include a personal story and it will come up with a personal story
I use the paid version of chat GPT. And so sometimes, so there's, you can create, I think they're called GPTs. I think you can create, so for different purposes or different clients or different audiences, you can create a separate like prompt that's supposed to be remembered. Like you're supposed to be able to train it. You really can't.
But sometimes you can, it will remember like previous posts or previous information that you've put in there and so it'll make up a story.
Abby Herman
So sometimes it will come up with a personal story and sometimes they're pretty interesting. They're kind of funny to read and to listen to. And then I can make it my own. Like it can give me a place to start and oh, and I will come up with my own personal story, delete what it wrote and type in my own. So.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Oh, I love that. Yeah, I've definitely asked chat GPT to write in a more fun and personable way. I've told it to not be so cheesy because I was like, where did this even come from?
Abby Herman
Uh-huh.
Abby Herman
Yes, yes, or write like you're talking to a friend, but not that good of a friend. Write like you're talking to your mom, because you want it to be friendly, but not, sometimes when you tell it to be friendly, it takes that in a whole new direction, and it's way overly friendly or really casual, much more casual than what you would want to include. So write like you're a mom.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yeah, so you do have to give that some co-opening.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yeah. Or it uses a bunch of slang. Yeah, it uses a bunch of slang that I'm like, I would never say that. Or in that way, right? It does. It definitely takes some zhuzhing. It takes finessing. You have to read the output that GPT is giving you or any AI technology and make it your own. You cannot just let it come out of the box. And I think that's important to know, too, when you're working with a team.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
You know, I think that that's where a lot of that, you know, that content strategy comes into play, the brand voice, the way that we sound as a company, the way that we show up online, so that everybody on your team, whether there's you and a VA or you and 20 team members, can be able to look at that guide and say, here's how we use this AI software and how we still sound like us. Do you have any tips or guidance for folks on
Ashley Cox (she/her)
on using this with their team and really making sure that customer experience is cohesive and well branded.
Abby Herman
Yeah, well, I think it's always important to have prompts, like consistent prompts that you are feeding into chat GPT based on who you are, your brand voice, your customers, the type of content that you're creating, know what that language looks like so that when you're asking any kind of AI tool to perform a task for you, you have that language mapped out. And so it's literally a matter of
copying and pasting it into whatever tool and then adding the additional information, what you want it to create for you. So being really consistent in that way, I think it's important. So that means your team has to know, like you just said, your brand voice and personality and things like that.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yeah, yeah, so important. So we are coming to the end of our conversation, Abby, and it's been an incredible conversation. I think it's so much value and so much, you know, just actionable, common sense ways that we can implement AI into our businesses in a really, really effective way and still sound human, because that is like so important. And if you've been listening to the podcast for any length of time or you've heard me on other podcasts,
Abby Herman
Yes.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
I'm always talking about bringing the humanity back to business, bringing the humanity back to team, to customers, to the way that we interact in the world. And I think that this is so in alignment with that. And I just appreciate you being here so much today, Abby. So it's time for our final segment. Imagine the impact, everyone's favorite. I don't know, I keep saying that and I've had people tell me, but it really is my favorite because this is where we get to have.
Abby Herman
Yeah.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
You know you help us paint the vision for the kind of impact that our listeners could create in the world Through a key thought or a takeaway or an action item from today's conversation Whether it's something you've already shared or something new that you haven't had a chance to share yet
Abby Herman
Yeah, so I think that using, AI is here. It's not gonna go away. It's already completely infiltrated every part of our lives. And so I think it's important to embrace it and use it in a way that works for you and that feels good to you. Not necessarily, you know, using it in every part of your business or every piece of content that you're creating.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Mm-hmm.
Abby Herman
but I think it's important to learn and to try it out. When I first heard about ChatGPT and just these writing tools in general, I was like, oh my God, my business is gonna fall apart. I'm gonna have to go back to teaching. I'm gonna have to do, you know, I was in panic mode. And then I thought, no, I need to learn about this. I need to educate myself because
A, not everybody wants to learn it or, you know, and there will always be like the need for human impact. So I think that, you know, learning about it, finding a way that works for you and knowing that chat GPT AI is never going to replace humans. Yes, it will replace some of the tasks that humans do.
But think about the possibilities. If you're able to use technology to, you know, take over some of the like automated tasks that people in your business do and leverage like your employees or your contractors, your teammates thought leadership to do other things, bigger and better things. Like think of the impact that you could make if you did that.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yes. Oh, I love this so much because it frees humans up to do what they were designed to do, and that is to be creative in this world. And so let's get rid of the tedious, let's get rid of the boring, let's get rid of the mundane and the humdrum and the have to do it tasks. Let's let AI handle that. And let's let people be the creative, brilliant, genius people that they are.
Abby Herman
Yes.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Imagine the impact that could have on your business. I mean, it's profound, it really is. So, Abby, tell us where, I know people are gonna wanna connect with you because this was such an amazing conversation. And I know that you also have a resource for folks if they are interested in getting some more support with AI. So tell us where we can connect with you at and learn more and grab that resource.
Abby Herman
Absolutely. Uh huh. Yes.
Abby Herman
Yes, thank you. I'm on Instagram at the content experiment. I'm on LinkedIn, it's abbymherman. Feel free to connect with me there. And then yeah, I have a chat, I've been talking about prompts and inputs and things like that. So I have a guide to help you with creating those chat GPT prompts for your business. And you can get that at thec slash impact. It is not free. And the reason it's not free,
It is because I plan to spend a lot of time updating it and because chat GPT has changed so much over the years, over the years, over the year and a few months that it's been around as of this recording. So I plan to continue to update this guide and put out new versions and send that out to the people who purchase it. It is priced.
to sell, it's priced to be accessible to those newer business owners that I talked about at the beginning of the episode, because it's so important that, to me, that there's affordable resources out there. So it's under $20 as of this recording, so.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Yes.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
January 2024, but don't hold us to that price point. If you're listening to this in 2026. Yes. No, I love that though. I love that it's going to be a living, breathing, ever evolving resource for folks because it is changing at the speed of light. And so knowing that when you buy this, you're going to get all of those updates along the way is invaluable for sure. And I would encourage the folks that are listening who aren't quite
Abby Herman
Yes. Exactly. Yes.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
ready yet to hire a team or you're just starting to toe into the idea of getting some support in your business, help yourself with this AI guide, help yourself buy hours of your life back because that's literally what AI and specifically chat GPT has done for me and my business and I have team. And so I think that it can be for people who don't want to hire a team, who have contractors, who are just hiring their first employee or who have multiple employees.
It could also be a resource for someone on your team. Maybe you don't have to be the chat GPT or AI expert, but somebody else might be really interested in learning and having a tool and a resource and someone like Abby to be able to go to could be incredibly valuable for that team member as well as for your business. So grab that, I'm gonna link it up in our show notes along with everything else that we talked about today. But I just wanna thank you one more time, Abby, for joining us on the Impact Ripple. This has been such a fantastic conversation.
Abby Herman
Yes, thanks again for having me.
Ashley Cox (she/her)
Of course, and thank you dear leaders for tuning into our conversation today. I hope that you found it educational, inspiring, a little funny, because, you know, we try to just keep it real around here, and that you've found a resource that can really support you in navigating what can sometimes be a little scary, a little confusing, and a little overwhelming in the artificial intelligence space. So as always, it is an honor and a privilege to be here with and for you on your leadership journey.
