You’ve heard the hype about AI, but how can you tactically and strategically use it to manage and grow your Soloist business? Global AI consultant Heidi Araya—who says “experts should be experts, not task-jugglers”—gets highly specific on how we can best use AI right now:

Why your most productive use of AI starts with where friction currently lies in your business.

Saving time: buying or building AI assistants for the time-intensive tasks typical with knowledge work.

Creating a “librarian” to answer questions from your existing content—internally, externally (with or without monetizing).

Protecting your proprietary content from being used to train large learning models (LLMs).

Strategic use cases that may surprise you (and replace the thousands of dollars you might otherwise spend to uncover this data).

LINKS

Heidi Araya Website | LinkedIn

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Heidi Araya is a global consultant, keynote speaker, and patented inventor who has dedicated her decades-long career to driving multimillion-dollar business improvements using a people-first approach.

Fueled by a desire to continuously learn and push boundaries, Heidi pivoted from leading large scale change initiatives inside organizations and has embarked on her third career, first upskilling in AI and then starting her own AI Agency. Leveraging her deep expertise in business operations, coaching, and change management, she now empowers solopreneurs, startups, and small businesses to unlock their full potential in the AI era.

Heidi's passion lies in bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI technology and practical applications for small businesses. She doesn't just talk AI, she implements it. Her people-centric approach focuses on AI enablement, AI automation, and productivity coaching, allowing smaller businesses to compete with larger corporations.

When she's not empowering businesses with AI, she enjoys raising butterflies, tackling home improvement projects, and staying active.

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00 - 00:18

Heidi Araya: I had 1 creative agency who their clients were asking for competitor insights. So it could go out and actually look for the competitors on the internet and come back and deliver a report and summary of whatever the competitors were so that they could go back and save them like 35 hours of work for each competitor report that they had to run.

00:24 - 01:10

Rochelle Moulton : Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm joined by soloist and AI consultant, Heidi Araya. Heidi is a global consultant, keynote speaker, and patented inventor who's dedicated her decades-long career to driving multi-million dollar business improvements using a people first approach. Fueled by a desire to continuously learn and push boundaries, she pivoted from leading large scale change initiatives inside organizations and has embarked on her third career, first upskilling in AI and then starting her own AI agency. Leveraging her deep expertise

01:10 - 01:38

Rochelle Moulton : in business operations, coaching and change management, she now helps solopreneurs, startups and small businesses unlock their full potential in the AI era. And when she's not empowering businesses with AI, she enjoys raising butterflies, tackling home improvement projects, and staying active. Heidi, Welcome. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here today. I love the combination of AI with raising butterflies. Somehow that just feels so perfect to

01:39 - 01:46

Heidi Araya: me. That's great. I just released 2 of them today this morning. They emerged. I was so happy to see them take flight. Oh,

01:46 - 02:20

Rochelle Moulton : I like that. I think we're going to work this metaphor into there somehow. So 1 of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is that there is so much hype on AI right now. And I feel like you are the AI soloist whisperer with your smart, practical advice. It's like you jump over the hype to see what we can make work right now. So let's dive in. So first, before we talk about AI, let's talk about you And how you decided to focus your business on AI like if I remember rightly you started

02:20 - 02:22

Rochelle Moulton : out with a BA in Russian Yes,

02:22 - 02:58

Heidi Araya: yes, correct. I did start out with my BA in Russian But that part of my story is as soon as I graduated the Soviet Union fell So my dream of linking Soviet and Americans and building bridges was basically dead even before I got my diploma. So I had to pivot right away. I became a researcher, a technical writer, found my way into agile ways of working and what's called lean. So I was doing these large-scale transformations inside organizations and I always found these processes were broken and people were miserable at work because they couldn't actually get

02:58 - 03:30

Heidi Araya: work done. So it became my mission to alleviate misery in the workplace. And I don't think that's really changed. I think when I noticed the decline of my previous career in leading agile transformations inside large organizations, it just seemed like people, they need the help, but the companies didn't want to invest there. So luckily, I saw that AI was coming on the scene for years. And so I launched the opportunity to say, this is an opportunity that I can leverage, learn from, and then help other people. And at the time, when I first started thinking about

03:30 - 03:49

Heidi Araya: it, I thought, well, I'm going to lead, again, some initiative inside an organization. But by the time I ended my data science program at MIT, I had decided that, no, I have to go with boots on the ground talking to people. This is something that I want to impact small businesses and solopreneurs because I've just seen people struggle too much. So I was done with large organizations.

03:50 - 04:27

Rochelle Moulton : Well, I can totally relate to that. I just love this movement from Russian to MIT to AI. And so thank you for sharing that. I really wanted listeners to see that pivoting can happen fast when you've made up your mind to provide value in new ways. All right, let's 0 in on soloists and especially soloist consultants. So we are typically doing some combination of tasks from admin for the business to serving clients, maybe we're writing reports or we're conducting assessments to marketing. At least I do, I feel like I spend a ton of time doing that.

04:27 - 04:46

Rochelle Moulton : Writing articles, running podcasts, engaging on social media, managing an email list of prospects, and of course, their pipeline. So I know what we want to talk about here is some use cases for solos, but before we do that, should we start with where the listener is feeling friction in their business?

04:47 - 05:14

Heidi Araya: Yeah. Well, actually, the solopreneur consultants that I speak with and coaches that I speak with, you've hit it. They don't have enough time to work on their business, they're working in their business, they are struggling because they're, well let me give you 1 example. I was spending 5 to 10 hours a week creating meeting notes and task action items. After you meet with a potential customer or a customer, you have to send out action items and send out those emails. And I was never getting to it, or it would be late, and I would be so

05:14 - 05:42

Heidi Araya: exhausted. And so I actually automated the process. And I have an AI note taker that attends my meetings, like my little executive assistant, and then creates summary with task items. And when the call ends, within 5 minutes, I open up my draft emails. And I have the draft email with summary and action items. All I have to do is hit send because it's pre-populated with the people who were in the meeting. So I guess I just look for ways for people to reduce the things that they're doing. That's what I would call drudgery. So we can

05:42 - 06:07

Heidi Araya: free up time. Now I don't spend that time with that. And I already, the automations and the AI that I use inside, for myself, I guess I feel empathy, right? Because I am a solopreneur and I'm struggling with those exact same things. So I know each solopreneur has maybe slightly different struggles, but I think we also have a lot of similarities, like the marketing content creation proposal creation, responding to emails as some of the things that we have to time slice across our day.

06:07 - 06:33

Rochelle Moulton : Well, it also makes AI so much more accessible that we're not having to sit back and go, oh, how can I use AI instead of saying, okay, where's the friction? Where are the bottlenecks in my business now? And especially, what do I not like doing that maybe there is another way to do? Yes. So let's talk about those use cases. I know you've been developing and working with clients on quite a number of these. So where should we

06:33 - 07:10

Heidi Araya: start? Yeah, so I guess the first 1 that's very popular across my clients today is a custom AI assistant, I'll say. You can imagine it like chat GPT, but it's trained on you and it knows everything about you. So we train this robust backend on, you might have like 1 client, 17 years of blog posts, books, podcasts, talks, whatever it is, your website. So we train it on all the content that you think is relevant, and then that's accessible then. You can imagine that second brain knows everything about you that you have ever shared with the

07:10 - 07:40

Heidi Araya: world that you just chose to share with that. So then we actually build a brand for the person and find the brand voice. And so that's there as their own little personal assistant. So I use mine multiple times a day to everything from, you know, help me write this email to, I need to write a proposal, rephrasing things. And even for social media, that's 1 of the struggles we have as solopreneurs is we want to write more resonant content in social media that's not just coming from chat GPT. So now when that second brain knows all

07:40 - 07:46

Heidi Araya: about us, we come up with much more resonant content in minutes instead of hours.

07:46 - 08:00

Rochelle Moulton : So I just want to dive into that just a little bit more. I want to make sure that people understand this. I want to make sure I understand this. So you train it. So you're putting in audio from podcasts, you're putting in blog posts. Can you do books

08:00 - 08:07

Heidi Araya: as well? Yep, you can do books. And I have 1 client who has put all of his 28 books up in his second brain.

08:07 - 08:16

Rochelle Moulton : I love that. And so you could use this internally, right, to help you. I love that a byproduct of this is getting clear on your brand voice.

08:16 - 08:39

Heidi Araya: Yes, it is amazing. So that was 1 of the realizations. I wasn't sure. I tested it. I just wasn't sure how it would turn out. I was like, let me just ask, what's the brand voice? But it turned out amazing. So actually, we have a system where we work with clients to figure out certain things. Let's say they don't have a lot of content yet, but they want to get there and they want to start building their brands. So we have them fill out a little paper and we meet with them and we do a recording.

08:39 - 09:01

Heidi Araya: And that's part of the first thing that we would get up in their content. It turns out that the audio recording is so much richer than the blog post that you write, and you just communicate in a completely different way. So the content that comes out after you've done something like a recording is just so rich, and I guess that's what they find value in as well, right? This rich content that gives them really great stuff that they can use right away.

09:01 - 09:07

Rochelle Moulton : I'm sitting there thinking of 7 years of weekly podcast audio. Right.

09:07 - 09:38

Heidi Araya: Yes. And now, so that's an internal use. I know that you have a client who used it externally. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So I have several clients who they're actually using it externally as well. So 1 of them is, well, I have a few authors there. But 1 of them happens to have really high usage. It might get like 100 chats per week on the chat bot. And I guess the value there is so this person's content is in English, but people across the world want to understand this management philosophy

09:38 - 10:05

Heidi Araya: that he has. So people talk to the chat bot in up to 100 languages across the world 24-7. And so now he's seen as a thought leader in his space because he was the first 1 to have that there and people are getting value and I see some of the chat logs are, you know, thank you so much or this is the best response I've gotten on that. So people ask it anything from help me write a job description to how do I run this activity, to all kinds of things. So I view it as really

10:05 - 10:33

Heidi Araya: crucial for an author who wants to maybe expand their reach globally. And 1 of the other things is people don't have time to read whole books now. So they can now ask a very specific question. How do I do this particular thing, right? And get that answer right away in real time. So it's bite sized learning. Now in in that case, did this person monetize it or are they doing this? So actually he has to. 1 is open on his website and he did monetize the 1 with the 28 books.

10:34 - 10:39

Rochelle Moulton : Okay, well that makes sense because if you're giving away your book content, eventually nobody buys the books anymore.

10:40 - 11:05

Heidi Araya: Right. His website traffic is up 25 to 35%. He's getting more people purchasing the books and I mean now you know his you can just see the engagement everywhere that you know his posts are He also does actually share the funny things or the valuable things that people get out of there So from time to time he'll be sharing a little snippet of the chat bot gave this answer or someone asked this question. So it's also fun. Well, plus that sounds like

11:05 - 11:25

Rochelle Moulton : a social media post that just wrote itself. Yes, true enough. Yeah. So what do you say when authors are worried about putting their proprietary information into a chat bot that somehow this is going to wind up in the master scheme and be used inappropriately. How do you deal with that concern?

11:25 - 11:59

Heidi Araya: Yeah, so the unlike when you upload it to a public platform like chat GPT none of the data or none of the LLMs are training on your data. So it's secure from that perspective. It's not going to be trained. We're just accessing, you know, what's called the API. So it doesn't have access to your content. But otherwise I also have a very secure platform. That's ISO 27001 GDPR and SOC 2 compliant. So it's from that perspective they're very secure platforms now that customers don't have to worry about that. Maybe even someone hacking into the platform right.

11:59 - 12:18

Heidi Araya: So they're very secure platforms And there's another way where you can sort of upload it and then delete the actual source material so it stays trained, but no 1 can actually go and download the material afterwards. So there's various ways that you can secure it if people are concerned. And this person was actually concerned. This is his livelihood. So he wanted to make sure it was very secure.

12:18 - 12:50

Rochelle Moulton : Interesting. Interesting. So is this what would you call this the librarian? And you know, I've had this conversation with a couple people on the podcast where we said, gee, what we really want is a librarian, Because we have all this content. I mean, I do have 17 years of blog posts and 7 years of weekly podcasts. And it would be awesome to have, I'll say, somebody, in this case, something, go and be able to pull answers to certain kinds of questions from content. Is this the application that you would use to do that,

12:50 - 13:21

Heidi Araya: or is there another 1? So you could. I have a very robust platform that offers citations. And so, for example, if you asked a specific question and it referenced a podcast, like I have another customer who's an attorney and when it references some of the material from the podcast. For example, it's going to pull that in a citation and then put it there in the chat so you can see exactly where it came from. So unlike chat GPT where you just don't know where the answer came from, this actually tells you where in your content it

13:21 - 13:35

Heidi Araya: got that answer. So you also feel safer that it's not hallucinating, which is another thing we can talk about if you want to, and that you know exactly where that content is. So I've had customers say, "'Oh, I forgot about that blog post. Yeah, that was a good 1.

13:35 - 14:01

Rochelle Moulton : Yeah, I could see that. Okay. I mean, this is really interesting because there's a lot of people that really have concerns about this. And I think sometimes the concerns are really warranted. And I could see why you'd want to think twice. And in other situations, there are opportunities to manage the risk. So what else are you seeing, especially soloists and consultants, use AI for?

14:01 - 14:32

Heidi Araya: Well, a lot of them actually are looking to grow their brand on LinkedIn. And...