Learn More about the Life First Business Lab : https://www.deeplyrootedbusiness.com/lfbl?podcast

Have you spent hours setting up ChatGPT or Claude only to feel like the output is still generic, off-brand, or takes more work to fix than it saves? You're not alone.

In this episode, Jessica and Rachel break down the six most common frustrations business owners have with AI—and why the problem usually isn't the tool itself. From forgotten context and bland writing to endless prompting and AI that agrees with everything you say, they're sharing practical fixes that help AI become a true business assistant instead of another task on your to-do list.

You'll learn why building a "business brain" matters, how to train AI to sound more like you, and the systems that make AI actually save time instead of creating more work.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why AI isn't giving you the results you want
• How to improve outputs with better systems and context
• Training AI to match your voice
• Common mistakes that waste time
• The framework we use to make AI actually work in business

The biggest issue isn't usually the AI tool—it's the architecture behind it. When your business knowledge, voice, systems, and processes are documented and organized, AI becomes dramatically more useful. The better your business foundation, the better your AI outputs will be.

Check out the Life First Business Lab: https://www.deeplyrootedbusiness.com/lfbl?podcast

A plug-and-play AI employee membership designed for non-techy business owners who need real support without building everything from scratch.

Meet Your Hosts

Jessica Walther is the founder and CEO of The Launch Collaborative and Sustainable Success Systems. As a launch strategist and systems consultant, Jess is dedicated to helping solo business owners and small-but-mighty teams build businesses that deliver both peace and profit. She specializes in creating sustainable growth strategies that align with her clients' values and lifestyles.

Rachel Lopez is the founder and CEO of Gal Marketing Agency, a boutique email marketing and strategy firm. With over a decade of experience, Rachel helps heart-driven entrepreneurs craft intentional marketing strategies that attract, nurture, and convert leads sustainably. Her human-first approach ensures that marketing efforts feel authentic and effective .

Together, Jess and Rachel blend systems, storytelling, and soulful strategy to help you grow a business that's deeply aligned with your life—not just your revenue goals.

Connect With Us:

• Jess Website
• Rachel's Website

Hang Out & Say Hi!

• Deeply Rooted Business Instagram
• Jess Instagram
• Rachel's Instagram

All right, I want to read to you something that is a real thing that we recently had a conversation with a peer business owner about.

And it was that basically, Claude chatgpt everything that they've built, they built the brain, they fed it their contacts, and they still feel like it's producing stuff that isn't 100% there or doesn't sound like them, or they're just having to spend way too much time tweaking it.

And this person wasn't a beginner.

She's very business savvy.

I'm sure she's tech savvy.

She is someone that I was like, oh, once you get this AI tool set up, you'll be able to run with it.

But she was still pretty frustrated with it.

And I think that is the conversation that we need to have, because right now I feel people are kind of getting AI fatigue or it was like something that everybody was really excited about.

And this is going to change the way that I work in my business.

And I think we're getting to a point where that honeymoon glow has started to wear off our way.

I When you're starting to see that the capabilities that we thought it was going to do, maybe it's not producing as much that as Claude's bff, I'm here to protect him.

And I think setting true expectations around AI and what it is and what it isn't, and then also just really knowing some tips and tricks on how to get it to perform better so you're not as frustrating can be really, really helpful.

So that is what we're going to get into today.

We're going to be breaking down six specific complaints that we hear people making about AI, and we're going to be giving you some information or some tips on kind of how to fix this.

Yeah.

So I want to do a quick energy check before we fully dive in.

I think this topic brings up a lot of feelings, whether it is because, you know you're super excited about it but can't quite figure it out, maybe you've tried it, you're exhausted by it, or maybe it's because the impact on the environment and all of those things.

It's.

There's so many different elements of the impact of AI, whether it's from your own usage or just globally of what we all see happening everywhere.

So all of that is so valid.

So I want to make sure that when we're going into it, you're really thinking about it in that intention, of what you want it to do, how you want it to help you, how you need it to exist in order for you to feel good about using it.

Certain areas of it that just kind of feel like essentially it's not all or nothing is what I'm trying to say.

So once you just take a deep breath, take this like, you know, if you're on TikTok and you get those tarot readings, take what resonates, leave what doesn't, don't try to force it, and then let's just kind of absorb the information that we want to work with today.

All right?

So the number one complaint I hear about our friends, our robot friends, is that it forget everything the moment that you start a new chat and that you're having to waste time re explaining your business, your voice, your offers before every section, and you're unsure about how to really connect the context from one chat to another one.

And you kind of spend more time prepping AI than actually using it to complete the task.

This is the part where people say the output just sucks.

And it's because, one, you're either too exhausted to give it the context that it needs, or it's just you haven't built that process out together.

So I think this is where so many people are either starting from whether that's a blank slate or they're just assuming that it's going to put all of the pieces together.

And that's not necessarily the problem, but it's more so the source that the architecture is where it's pulling from.

Yeah.

So let's talk about some steps that you can take to mitigate this.

Number one, if you do not have it already, you need to build your business brain docs.

Even if you don't plan on using AI and you want to have employees, these are so important, and it's crazy the amount of business owners that kind of operate without this.

So basically, these are your brand guides, your voice, your icp, the frameworks that you use and talk about all the time, your offers, who they're for, how much they cost, what's included, the content pillars or niches that you talk about.

If you don't have these docs built for your business and you're just kind of going into AI saying write me a caption, and it has none of the context on all that, this is where you're going to get the very generic output.

When we start working with any new client that we work with, we first build what we like to call their copy bible, which essentially includes all of this.

And before AI, this is what we Use to make sure that we were writing in the right context, delivering in the right context.

But now with AI, now that we have these stocks, we can give them to AI and stop getting that generic garbage.

Yeah, and I think this is where when people don't or they're not operating from this copy bible, the business brain, or whatever the case may be, all of these new evolutions of AI where they say quietly all those words that we all hate so much, this is where you set those guidelines and those barriers.

We went into this in the Roots episode where we broke down how to build a proper prompt.

But essentially the business brain is there to reiterate what you like, what you don't like, what you think works, the voice of the customer and all of those things so that ultimately you stop having to re brief it a hundred times.

And when you are rebriefing it a hundred times, you're bound to get lazy in the process and just be like, okay, just remember it already.

This is how you kind of stop the laziness and then the poor prompting from the get.

Yeah, yeah.

So then my second tip around this too would be so you don't have to keep giving it these things is to have a dedicated cloud project set up for your business.

So the way that I have it set up for in my cloth is I have one for my business, I have one for deeply rooted business, and then I have one for each client.

I think sometimes when I see people's clients, they've got one for almost every single task that they're doing in their business, which that's not the right way, that tasker skills, projects or context.

So if you think of it that way, and then another crazy little tweak, which hopefully they will fix this.

I don't even know why it's separated, but when you go from Claude Chat to Claude Cowork, the projects aren't the same projects.

That's very confusing.

So you, when you start to use Cowork, you have to migrate your projects over to Cowork or you can go into your universal instructions.

And this is kind of how I have mine set up and say before responding to each chat reference, my business brain and I have all the links to these ICP documents in my notion so that any new chat kind of references these things if it's for my business first, before it goes to that.

And that kind of have keeps you from having to type a zillion things, read upload documents.

But the more and more I'm using AI, the more I'm finding it's really important to be really organized, which is nice that I'm used to, but the more organized you are, the easier it is going to be.

And if your business and your systems are hot mess behind the scenes and you've got things stored in your notes app and some in Google Drive and some in Notion, that's where your frustration is.

Just finding those things.

And once I set up a very neat folder hierarchy and all of that on my computer, it definitely started to get a lot easier as far as context go.

Yeah.

And I'm going to be bold and say AI has made me a better business owner because one not to selfishly plug our life first business lab, but when going through the onboarding with onboarding Ola and she created my external business brain inside of my notion where it broke down everything that she pulled out of my brain, where it was the voice of the customer, my competition analysis, all of those various components that purely did exist just inside my brain.

And when we are talking about these hypothetical business owners that are re prompting from scratch every single time we're talking about me, period.

I had all of these frustrations.

Yeah, we both have been in this spot where we have tried to systemize things but ADHD gets the best of me constantly.

I have gone back to my little paper notepad because I for the life of me have not gotten into the habit of having my tasks in notion.

Thank you, Jess.

But sometimes when I'm feeling that resistance, whatever the brain chemical is that like don't do it, you don't have the urgency for this.

I go, okay, fine, I'm just going to write it here and I'm going to just do it one way or another.

But I will say that AI has helped me in a way to externalize and have to stop doing the invisible labor of pulling it out of my brain every single time because it was never the same.

And this has helped me also with my human a my human virtual assistant because she's not starting from scratch designing, she's not starting from scratch with client work.

She's not starting from scratch anywhere.

Which is what I was doing in my previous hiring process, which was chaotic.

And what kind of croned me to think, oh, I suck at hiring, blah blah blah blah, it's all connected and how we are becoming better versions of ourselves.

I mean my whole view on AI is like it's an employee.

So if you're bad at managing employees, you're going to be mad at bad at managing your AI assistants.

But it's A skill that you can learn.

And my goal with building all of our lab employees was kind of to make them AI for dummy, whatever, where they are asking you what they need.

So you're not forgetting that they're trained on that, because I know that that is a obstacle.

All right, so the moving into frustration number two, it's the output doesn't even sound like me, or you're getting generic stuff.

And one of the things that I've done with our podcast, Claude has all of our transcripts for every single podcast episode, our speaking transcripts.

And it's so funny because Rachel and I, we both have a tick where we say, like, a lot.

And Claude picked up on that.

It was like, oh, say like in the scripts, but don't say it when writing, because we edit it all out.

We're writing it all, but it even picked up on that.

And now I have a little automation where it goes and pulls our transcripts and kind of reads it, so it can stay up to date and pull out any new frameworks that we share on the podcast or quotable quotes.

So voice training is super important, and it's really important that you kind of keep building on it, because as you keep using it, you're gonna learn, oh, I don't like this.

Or I do like this, that sort of thing.

Yeah.

And I think this experience that people are going through where they're like, it's just not working for me, or they don't really have the right word.

Sure, what you gave me is great.

Technically this is fine.

But emotionally, I would probably never say this, or it just doesn't hit the way that I normally would.

And I think that that's one of those things that I think is really important.

When I was working with copywriters for websites and for SEO and all of that, the amount of depth and research that they put into it before any project is ever started is how we should consider using AI for writing in our business, which is it has to have depth.

It has to pull from a source that is human.

Right.

It has to be able to say, okay, this is the source of this person, and really make sure that it validates on it, or else it's going to still sound okay, but not great.

Yeah.

And I think for both of these two that we just covered.

One of the other things that I think keeps people stuck and it was keeping me stuck for a while is tool jumping.

So I would go to chat for this, or Claude, for this perplexity, this use notion, AI for this.

And I realized that even though some of the tools perform a little better in certain context, it wasn't worth the additional effort of having to bring that tool up to speed on the context.

So if you find one that you like and you vibe with, you know, for me and us, it's Claude.

Not just because we think that their outputs are a little bit better, but they're kind of the most ethical AI company.

I feel like they really do talk about their responsibility with this.

They even have a model that they didn't release because it was too smart.

And it basically was hacking into banks and stuff like that.

And they gave it to the banks and they're like, here, here's everything that we, like, found.

You guys need to fix this before somebody else's AI figures out how to get into here too.

So, I mean, they're my tool of choice, but if you like chat, that's fine.

But the, the thing is building a system around it to where it's not a very sporadic.

I'm going to jump over here, I'm going to jump over here because then of course you're going to get frustrated because of that.

And one of my favorite things with Claude, if you have the desktop version is you can hit the space bar.

There's a space bar, and just speak into it.

It'll turn on your recorder and you can just start talking to.

And it'll pull you up everywhere.

So once you go deep into a tool, you start to learn how to use it better.

And I feel because we've had so much AI shiny object everywhere, everyone's jumping here and here, here, they haven't really had the chance to go deep and really see all those features that really will unlock more time and better outputs for you.

All right, so frustration number three, which is kind of like, well, I did see a TikTok on this where it tells you kind of just what you want it to hear.

And, you know, I think this is something that I think they ran in the TikTok.

It was the various, you know, AI tools and likelihood percentage wise for it to just agree with you.

And I think that that is hilarious.

One, but two, it's real, right?

Because maybe you're like, okay, well, I asked it to audit my sales page and it told me that it looks great.

I asked it to poke this type of holes and it really didn't give me much of anything.

It doesn't really give you that second brain to kind of feed off of.

I don't know just what is your experience with this?

But I Teach people AI.

Maybe I just do this naturally.

But one of the things that I do with AI is before I send a new proposal to a client or instructions to my team or a brief to my team, I'll be like, act like you're my client.

Act like you're a member of my team.

What questions do you have, what hesitations, what's unclear?

So that's one way that I'll go out and look at it.

And then also for sales page launch strategy, email strategies and all that, I like to act like they're a bunch of different people so that it'll give them a different response.

So I'll be like, act like you're like Alex Hermosi, Jenna Kutcher, wandering aimfully, because all these people's frameworks are on here.

And give me your view of what the sales page is doing.

And then you're going to see them start to rip it apart from different angles.

And then that's where you can take your business brain, because you know your clients the best and what they respond to, and pick and choose what advice you want to take and what advice you want to leave.

That way, you're not letting AI just build this from scratch with no input, I guess.

Yeah.

So at the end of the day, maybe it's not necessarily just agreeing with you, but it's just kind of doing what it's designed to do, which is be helpful and supportive.

And so I think there are certain settings, and Jess, correct me on this, but there are settings in the top where you can give it instructions of level of the criteria that is supposed to do.

So you can tell it, like, don't agree with me the first time time, find us a happy medium kind of thing.

So you can definitely have it the way that Jess is saying, where it's like, pose it as, Tell it to argue the other side, tell it to, you know, look at it in the lens of these three different people and then find the end result.

But you can also build it into the instructions where you're saying you can build it.

Universal instructions.

I had mine turned on like that for a minute, but then when I have quick things that I just needed to get done, I didn't want it disagreeing with me every time.

So I'm like, come on, we just need to get this out.

Stop fighting with me about it.

Just.

Just do it.

What I think is a better way to go instead is to create a skill that's maybe a sales page critic and that is trained on this or a proposal critic.

Or just when you're in the chat to prompt it.

I saw somebody post about on TikTok.

I'm like, oh, yeah, let me try to do that.

And then it was like 20 minutes later.

I'm finally getting the output because I've been arguing back and forth with a really opinionated employee for a while.

So I turned off.

Okay, frustration number four.

Take us, take us through.

So a lot of times this is one of the things too.

It works for a while and the output is getting worse.

And I find this happens a lot when people are having these very long conversations.

And I think it's counterintuitive to where if you got a good vibe going with AI, to when that little alert says, shorten your, you know, your conversation is long.

So we're going to compact it to start a brand new one.

I've just did anthropics, like official training because I just kind of been outside out here, guerrilla style learning.

But they do say that they recommend once your chat gets long, just starting a brand new chat because it starts degrading and starts not being able to reference everything better.

And the better thing is to be like, okay, give me a summary of the key points and then move it to a new conversation.

Because if you're ADHD like me, I will start building a lab employee and then go to writing 15 blogs.

And now we're writing emails and now we're doing this all in one conversation.

And then not only does that make it really hard for the AI to know what you're doing, but when you need to go back and find stuff, it's like, where did I write this email?

And it's labeled Building Blog Builder Bruce.

Because after I had it build Bruce, I was like, let's write some blogs and then let's turn these blogs in the email.

So start a new conversation, every single task and really rely on the skills and your brains to bring this context over.

Definitely.

I think this next frustration is one that the person we're talking to was really strong.

It was just basically was taking too much time.

Everyone is saying that it's saving me time and I feel like I'm spending so much time going back and forth with it and really never getting there with the output.

Yeah, I think if you go into it with that mindset of like, oh, I just needed to save me time.

I needed to do this without acknowledging that there is a learning curve, that there is foundations that need to be built, that there's all of these things that need to be done.

I think that's where you get into that problem where you are kind of working against the grain here a little bit.

You're the mindset of like, I just need this to save me time because I'm very busy, blah, blah, blah.

But you're skipping so much of the things that are going to actually help you save time.

So it's anything in business, right?

Everything like that.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

And where, how you do one thing is how you do everything.

And so if you're kind of just trying to skip to the last part with an employee, it's going to, you know, fail you with branding, it's going to fail you with copywriting, it's going to fail you.

All of these things is really important.

So you have to really sit down and actually build your brain.

You have to do your onboarding with ola regardless of how much you want to skip through it.

It's super important because then you start saving time.

Yeah, well, and I think where the.

Lab and our pre trained employees come in so clutch because you're not having to spend the time training them.

Because I have fought with them, Rachel's gonna fight with them too when she starts building some guys.

But we've kind of used our credits, our usage, all of that to go back and forth to get to the output that we expect for our clients.

One of the exact quotes was like, oh, like I trained this blog guy, blog writer to make sure that I rank on Google.

And the person was like, oh, well, are they really going to rank on Google?

And I'm like, yeah, because the output I'm doing is the exact output that I'm doing for my other clients who have gotten to write on Google.

I'm not just like, hey, AI, work your magic and make me write.

These are proven strategies that we're building into the tool where we're not letting the tool dictate what the output is, but we're telling it, this is what we know works, do this, do that.

But that again, takes time.

And if you don't have the SOPs, if you don't have the system set up to where those things are already really well documented, then it is going to take a lot of time.

And now we're getting to the point where Claude and Descript, what I use to edit the podcast is has AI built into it.

And one of the ways that the outputs have become so good for us so quickly is because I'm giving it templates.

I'm not having it like, hey, create a Carousel post for this.

I'm like, here's our branded carousel post.

Now you just go in here and update the text or whatever.

Here's our brand guide for videos.

Here's the sounds we like to use, here's the graphics and how we like to change up the captions and do that.

And now you just do it.

And then that's where the time saving comes is once you've figured out the system.

But if you haven't figured out your system first and you're trying to go into AI and get it to do it, yeah, it's going to take you all freaking day to do it.

So then, last one, right?

Is this the last?

Yeah.

So let's talk about frustration number six.

And this is kind of what we kind of already covered.

But basically I hear a lot about it's not acceptable or it's not up to my standards or doesn't sound like me.

And I think that's where really important where it goes back to the context training where you know where you're sharing more about.

You have to be so specific.

So for example, when we were writing all the blog post for the AI blog articles, instead of like the first output that I got from Bruce, I was like, write me these 14 articles about this.

And they were good, but they were super generic, kind of boring.

Anyone can write them.

The bones of this are good, but we need to infuse a little more of us and into it.

So can you mine out some stories that we can integrate in here or frameworks that we can integrate in here?

So what Bruce did is he asked me a bunch of questions and I just voice dictated.

I'm really a fan of voice dictation because it's hearing you and you're kind of just flowing.

It's not refined so it gets even more of you.

But I kind of just voice dictated our stories or how we felt about certain things or how we look about some certain things.

And the outputs of the blogs were much better.

So basically it's give it you and then templates and it will color and inside the lines.

Yeah.

And I think this applies AI or not AI.

Right.

The things that we have said that work really well in conversion strategies through your email list or during launches or during whatever the case may be outside of AI.

Right.

Your whole marketing strategy works well when it's fed from your perspective and when you're sharing, your client wins.

I remember, gosh, when I was helping somebody with a client launch maybe a year or so ago and her social strategy was like, share this podcast, share this.

And I was like, but you have so many testimonials.

You can just start cranking out case studies and people would probably appreciate that and get results from it.

And then maybe you record case studies on your podcast.

And the thought of just being like, oh no, I'm not really going to share too many of this because they didn't know how to build that storytelling element to it.

That works in AI and it works outside of AI.

All of these strategies, what we've said from the beginning, it's important whether you're hiring, it's important whether you're being a solopreneur, trying to manage life and manage business without drowning in work.

All of these different layers to everything super foundational just to be running an intentional successful business.

And your stories in your comments, like real stories, real case studies.

I think that was feedback we got when we first started podcast.

It was gals episodes are great, y' all have great frameworks.

But I want to hear about actual clients you work with.

So now we're kind of intentional about that.

But let's bring it all home because this one is a long one.

So let's just do the six reasons AI keeps failing you.

So number one, it forgets everything.

The fix is the architecture.

Not big, better prompts.

So make sure your systems are set up to where your brain lives in one project, in one space, and not something you have to go find and track down every place.

Number two, if it doesn't sound like you, make sure that you're giving it real samples of your writing, your speaking, a list of banned words, signature phrases, sentence patterns.

Love giving its transcripts, Love speaking to AI because something about my ADHD brain some days I can't type, but I can talk.

Number three, it's too agreeable.

The fix is explicitly prompting it for pushback, either given a specific Persona or specific person or a bias, so that it kind of gives you a alter ego to kind of look at things.

For number four, if it drifts over time, make sure you're starting a fresh chat with your guy.

You can bring context over from longer conversations or threads.

Number five, if you are burned out from it just taking too much time, just know that the setup is everything.

The better your systems, your strategies, your SOPs are documented.

The more lines AI has to color in, the less you're going to have to tweak it to get it to where you need it.

And then number six, if your output feels generic or just not up to your standards, the fix is to give it your real numbers, your client language, your real stories.

That's really going to make it sound like you.

Yeah.

And so all these six have the same root cause.

Right.

The architecture isn't built to kind of hold all of your business context.

And this is honestly what we have spent the last several months solving for, because it wasn't.

It was something that we both needed.

So the Life First Business Lab is built around this exact problem.

Before you ever even get into your first weekly AI assistant, you build, what we keep referencing is the business brain.

You get your four core documents that help you from the start, which is your voice, your ICPs, your offers, your content pillars.

You build it once and then every single tool draws from this, Every AI assistant references it, and then ultimately every single assistant that we have put into this lab has been pre built and pre tested and loaded with our own strategies so that you're not just hoping and trusting that whatever AI pulled from the Internet is the best and the greatest.

You don't have to set it up, you just install it.

Takes you 10 minutes and it works that day.

You can load Bruce up and get four blog posts that have been vetted and everything almost immediately.

It's amazing.

And the thing that I love most about this, because I am somebody that buys a course and then abandons it after an hour, is that it's no curriculum, there's no homework, there's no courses that you have to sit down and try to understand it all.

It's just tools that actually know your business and do the work for you.

So if you are interested in this, we'll put the link in the show notes for you to take a look.

All right, so if this episode hit home, make sure you share it with a business bestie, the one that is talking shit about my friend Claude right now and decided that he is not useful for his business.

Share it with her.

Hopefully this can change your mind.

Make sure you drop us a DM on Instagram Deeply Rooted Business and tell us which of these six resonated the most with.

And let us know what other questions you have about integrating AI into your small business.

And until next week, we're rooting.