Episode Summary

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, host Melissa Swink discusses the integration of AI tools in her business operations, focusing on how they can enhance efficiency. She shares the most common tools her team is using, including the ways she is creating this podcast with AI support. 

Key Highlights:

• AI tools can enhance efficiency in your business. 
• Systems and automation are essential for scaling.
• AI should complement human input, not replace it.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone. Welcome to the Make Space for More podcast, where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink. And in today's episode, I'm going to be sharing the top five AI tools that our virtual assistant team uses with our clients. And the idea behind today's episode really came from conversations that I'm having with other CEOs, business owners, entrepreneurs, when we're talking about

hey, what's working really well in our businesses right now? What are some of the things that we're looking to improve upon or tweak? Maybe some systems that we're implementing in terms of sales funnels or client journeys and things like that. And naturally, AI has become a part of that conversation because there's so many ways to leverage AI to make these things more efficient where we're not having to build these things completely from the ground up anymore.

So we're talking about these conversations with other business owners, but then also I have a regular marketing strategy call with my team and we were brainstorming some podcast ideas and somebody did mention like, hey, do we wanna talk about AI tools and how our team is using them? And I thought, yes, fantastic, let's go ahead and let's address that. And so I actually polled my team and came up with the top five that they're using.

and sharing a little bit about how they're using them or why they like them. But before I dive into those specifics, want to share a little bit more with you about how this fits into the overall Make Space for More framework. If you want to dive deeper into the framework, check out some of the earlier episodes of the podcast where I explore these in detail. But basically, in the Make Space for More framework, there are four main steps.

for growing and scaling your business. Number one is to get really clear on your priorities as the CEO and owner of your company, as the entrepreneur, as the executive director of your organization, what have you, getting really clear on your priorities and how you spend your time is number one. Number two is looking at decluttering or eliminating what's not aligned for you and your business or your organization.

moving forward because we don't want to be investing any more resources, time, money, people, et cetera, if there are things that are just no longer aligned. And then the third step of the Make Space for More framework is systems, processes, workloads, automations. And that is where AI fits in because we want to look at that as a next step before we look at step number four, which is delegating and building a team. Because if there is a solution,

like a simple software or some type of automation that can be set up in order to remove manual labor from either your plate or one of your team members' plates, we want to be doing that first. And so this really fits into step three of the Make Space for More framework systems in automation. Now, before I share with you more details of the top five AI tools that we're using, just want to share a couple of, guess, we'll say the fine print.

So the first thing that I would say is that we use AI tools as a team to make our time more efficient and increase our capacity to better support our clients. AI is not about cutting corners or saving time or cheating clients out of the time that they're investing with our company or our team or anything like that. What this is, to give you an example, is

Let's say the task was to generate 25 social media captions. Okay? Now, if somebody were to sit down and manually come up with 25 social media caption ideas, it could take what? It could take a half an hour. It could take an hour. For me, it would take me a lot longer than that probably, because that's just not how my brain works. But if we are able to smartly engage in AI tool,

to come up with social media captions for such and such type of client and industry, what have you. And let's say it spits out 100, we can take those best 25 ideas and refine them, personalize them, and then create content from there, just to give you an idea. So now instead of that taking an hour or more of time, now we've shrunk that down to say 15 minutes.

And we're able to do more for our clients because that time and energy and capacity has been freed up. The other thing that I want to share is that we never solely rely on AI tools. We're never just putting something into AI, copying and pasting it and calling it good and sending it out. That's not quite where we're at yet. And I know AI tools are being improved upon all of the time. And I think that they're just getting smarter as more people are using it. But...

What we do is anything that comes from AI. We are reviewing it thoroughly. We're personalizing it, we're customizing it, we're reviewing it for accuracy. I was thinking the other day that I saw a meme on Instagram about somebody had asked a question, I think they typed it into Google and said, like, how can I thicken up my tomato sauce? And one of the suggestions that AI spit out was,

and add glue to it. Now, I don't know if this is true, but it did crack me up, right? Because AI is smart and getting smarter, but we also need a human to review it to make sure that the information is accurate. And then, of course, we want to be refining this for brand voice, and we want to make sure that it's relevant to our audience. So we're never solely relying on AI. Copy, paste, check the box. This is done, but we are reviewing it.

And of course, human beings are the ones inputting the information in the first place. So all of that being said, I want to share the top five tools that our team is using with our clients. But then also I'll share a couple of AI tools that I myself am using that have been beneficial for me and the work that I'm doing. number one, and I always goof this one up. So it's Chat GPT-4.0, particularly the paid version.

The reason why our team members mention this as the number one thing is for how much that it can do. And they like the paid version because it handles more complex prompts and just has overall more capabilities. So some of the things that our team is using chat GPT-4.0 for is research, creating graphics and images, assisting with writing letters or emails, things like that.

taking transcripts and notes and creating more complete standard operating procedure documents out of those, content creation, also list building. One of our team members had mentioned that she was working on an outreach project for a client and she was looking for some very specific companies to reach out to for that information or to reach out to with this information. And she used chat GPT to

help build that list. So I thought that was really impressive as well. Again, saving from hours of going online and doing Google searching and combing through information. Sure, maybe that list needed to be edited down, but it was a great starting point and saved a lot of time. The second tool that our team is using is Grammarly. So of course it helps with spelling and grammar. And when I first was thinking about this,

It's like, I don't know that I need that. Like we use Google Workspace for our email system and we certainly use Google Sheets and, you know, Drive and Docs and all of that kind of stuff. So my kid usually flags me if something isn't right. But what my team was explaining to me is that Grammarly can also take that one step above and just improve your overall writing tone. Like maybe there's a better way to say something. Maybe there's a more concise way to write that sentence.

And it just helps with improving your writing overall. And it's not limited to just your email or things like that. You can have it on your desktop and they're just running simultaneously with documents you're creating or presentations, things like that. So that is why they love Grammarly. Number three, for our top five AI tools that our team is using, I lumped these two together, Gemini and Jasper.

Now I separated these out from chat GPT because these seem to be more marketing focused and our team is being is using those for more targeted marketing campaigns. They're certainly using it for social media content, blog posts and things like that. I know that I did a brief training with my business coach on Jasper. I think it was last year and it was really impressive on how it can

really understand your brand voice and your writing voice and just can continue to refine and tweak and improve upon those blog posts and that information that's coming out. So just wanted to mention that as well. Okay, the fourth tool that our team mentioned, perplexity, which is more of an answer engine. So when I did a little bit more digging into this, really the team had said, it's great for giving step-by-step instructions, just very how-to, number one, number two, number three.

They also said it's great for checking web developer code. Now that is not an area that I play in. Please don't ask me any more of that. Or if you do have a question about that, send it in. I can forward it to the team member who uses this for this. But I could see the value in double checking these things when we're making website updates and things like that. So that is one way that we are using Perplexity. Okay, last but certainly not least of the top five AI tools that our team is using.

Again, I lumped these two together similarly to what I did with Gemini and Jasper is Microsoft Image and Canva AI. They're using these tools to generate, create, edit images and graphics. So I know that I've been a fan of Canva for a very, very long time. I have a Canva Pro subscription so that I'm able to access more templates and higher quality stock photos and things like that. But this just takes it one more step.

and can be very, very specific on, know, maybe you want a blue frog sitting on a log and you can type that in and make that happen. I think my daughter loves to spend time playing around in my Canva and she'll use Canva AI to say things like, you know, draw a green tiger or something like that. And she enjoys doing that just for fun. But anyway,

Creating graphics, another great way to use AI in your marketing and just improving upon the content, the visual content that you're creating. So that is the top five tools that my team is using to improve the work that we're doing with our clients and enhance the work, I should say, that we're doing with our clients. I personally, I do not do a lot of direct client work at this point in my business. So I don't...

personally leverage a lot of those tools. I'm playing around with Grammarly right now. But when I was thinking about what AI tools am I personally using in my life and the two app too that came to mind, Riverside, this is what I use to record my podcast on, but I really love this because it has AI generated show notes. And of course, my podcast manager generates those show notes from Riverside.

sends them to our copywriter so that she can review them for accuracy and maybe polish and perfect and make sure that it is on point with our brand. But it's a starting point. We don't have to send in a transcript or an audio file to be transcribed to have the copywriter go in and generate show notes based on that summary of the transcript. It saves a lot of time and energy from our team to

create these show notes for you guys. So it also helps with creating video clips for social media. So we're able to kind of pull little snippets out of these episodes and share them on our social media pages. So we have valuable information going out to those different platforms as well. So that is Riverside. And then the other AI tool that I personally have been using lately is the

AI companion on Zoom. I don't know if you guys have seen this. I know Zoom has done a lot of updates recently. I feel like every time I launch Zoom, it looks a little bit different. But the AI companion has been a really great note-taking tool. So I was using these in my meetings earlier this week, and after the meeting, it's been giving a really good summary of what was discussed, but then also the action items.

from each of those meetings. And I thought that was really, really helpful. And I can leverage that with conversations I have with my clients, particularly in strategy or when we have team calls. And so check that one out if you are a Zoom user and you see what you think of it, see if it helps you just kind of summarize your meetings and clarify some of the next action steps. Again, it is AI generated, so it's not 100 % perfect, but I think it's a

pretty darn good start in terms of meeting notes and next steps. Okay, all of that being said, if you know a business owner who is not in position to hire right now or to add a member to their team, but has too much on their plate, would you share this episode with them? Because they may discover one tool that could save them hours of time and energy. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope that you found this information helpful.

and I look forward to sharing more tips, tools, and strategies for growing and scaling your business in our next episode. Have a wonderful day. Bye bye.