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How to Build an AI Brain in 1 Hour: 3 Documents, Zero Coding — Allie K. Miller

57m 8s

How to Build an AI Brain in 1 Hour: 3 Documents, Zero Coding — Allie K. Miller

The discussion highlights how AI agents, such as those built with Claude, can transform productivity by automating routine and complex tasks. Ali Miller explains that she uses 36 proactive workflows with multiple AI agents to manage emails, provide morning briefings, and prepare for meetings, all running autonomously. These systems are accessible without coding skills; users can simply describe their needs or "complain" to AI, which then designs solutions. The conversation distinguishes between Claude's versions, emphasizing Claude Code for advanced customization and skill-building. Skills—reusable, modular workflows—can be shared across agents, promoting efficiency. Miller stresses treating AI as a teammate rather than just a tool, noting potential productivity increases of 2x to 10x. However, she points out that in enterprises, AI knowledge is often siloed, hindering broader adoption. The key is to democratize these tools, enabling teams to leverage AI for tasks ranging from research to social planning, ultimately reducing manual effort and enhancing output.

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So every morning, I wake up. My AI agent has already been working for me for several hours. This is Ali Miller, one of the top AI voices in the industry. She advises, enterprises, and business leaders, including those at OpenAI Google Anthropic on how to use AI. And today she shows us exactly how you can build this too. Yeah, I have 36 proactive workflows with 28 master agents. You can schedule things within all of these tools so that you, while you're sleeping, or doing other things, or on a walk, or hanging out with your dog, that things can be running on your behalf from two years ago. How much more productive are you on now with AI? Depending on the task, is there anywhere between like two X and 10 X? So somebody finishes this video, sets up claw, does all of the files. In one year, what's the gap between two versions of that person, one that's set, clad up, and one that didn't? They are going to have. Welcome to Silicon Valley, girl, Ali. Thank you for having me in glorious service. Let's pretend it's real. We are in the VA area, though. Yeah, the window, very stunning. So today, we're going to get very practical. So can you tell me if we do something today, how is somebody's life different in a month once they deploy everything we're going to talk about? I think there's definite impact on productivity, right? The ability to not only make certain things go faster, my actual hope, if we can get there, is to give people the mindset shift that is needed, so that even if I didn't get to your specific use case, that you can kind of apply that learning to anything that you might do for your business, whether it's marketing or sales, creating brand new products, and then also maybe, I think I just want to give people a little bit of a guide so that they can see where things are going, so that they feel a little bit less terrified. We're setting big goals, but that's at least what I do with my clients. So what about you? Can you talk to me about Ali, for example, from two years ago, how much more productive are you now with AI? So the last two years, we've seen like a big paradigm shift about a year, a year and a half ago, into like new age, agentic AI. So two years ago, you could kind of ask AI to do research for you. You'd get back a sort of synthesis, and you would have to take that knowledge and then do something with it. But now the AI system that you're using or multiple agents can take action on your behalf. So when I look at an AI assistant, that I just ask questions who can get an answer back, versus a thing that is meaningfully taking delegated work from me and managing multiple hours worth of work and workflows, this felt like 20 to 30% productive. This, depending on the task, is anywhere between like 2x and 10x. So you're saying you actually have an AI agent who's your assistant, who's doing things for you. Can you describe what it actually is? I have 36 proactive work flows with 28 master agents, and each of them spin up probably two on average, so call it 50-ish subagents. And those are-- So that's-- Yeah, that's almost because 1,000 agents, right? Almost 2,000 agents. It's, oh, not per workflow, just as a total. So somewhere around 100 total agents, but what I look at is what can AI do that I don't have to kick off? This is one of the biggest changes, and I think any single person, even if you're just asking it, like, hey, find me industry news this morning. If you know that you're going to go to it every single morning and ask that question, that process of asking-- not just the task itself and the prompt itself, but the task should be automated. So if there's a competitor that you want to check in on every single morning, that should be scheduled. You can schedule things inside of Cloud Code Work, inside of Codex, inside of Cloud Code. You can schedule things within all of these tools so that you, while you're sleeping or doing other things, or on a walk or hanging out with your dog, that things can be running on your behalf. So when I say 36 proactive workflows, those are the things that my hands are up and they're constantly coming in as a new stream. Is that an email that you're getting every day, or how does it look like? That's a good question. Most of them are emails. I have them routed into different folders, but just two examples. Every single Friday morning, I have a recap of all of the urgent emails that I've not yet responded to, ranked by urgency, drafted, some replies so that I can get to it faster. It includes little-- the ability to delegate to people on my team and reminders if I don't reply to those emails. So that's a Friday proactive agent that is scraping. My email for the last five days and gets me a little download. Second one is morning briefing. My AI agent has already been working for me for several hours, which is great. And I wake up and I get this full readout of industry news, things that are happening in New York City or San Francisco that day that I can just have a social life kind of forbidden. I get kickoffs for my meetings. So if I'm having a client meeting, and I'll be sitting down with a Fortune 500 CEO, or maybe it's their CFO and I haven't met with them yet, then in that proactive system, in that morning brief, all I have to do is write back with a keyword, and I can kick off an AI agent to make assets for that meeting. So you can ask your client, right? So it knows everything. When you're saying something like, OK, every morning, get this email, can anyone build this or does it require technical knowledge? None of what I will be describing in the next however long we decide to do it for will require technical coding skills. The one thing that I do want to call out is that these tasks that you're completing, code is running in the background. Like in order to have Clawed figure out how to grab stuff from Gmail and bring it back. How to grab stuff from other areas of your Google workspace, or your Fireflies or granola and bring it back. All of that is usually set up through like an API where it's able to retrieve and bring it back. That is code based. You just don't have to know how to code to get done. So you can ask in natural language, hey, Clawed, I usually find myself really stressed before client calls. I wish that I knew every day whether I need to bring an umbrella because I keep getting rained on in New York as a horrible weather. I feel like I'm constantly trying to find meeting blocks and I'm struggling to find deep work time. Help me. And Clawed will come back to you and say, wow, really sounds like you need a proactive meeting blocker. Sounds like you need a proactive client prep skill, right? All of these things, I know it sounds deceptively simple, but the best first step to figure out what Clawed should code to help you is just to complain. It is so simple. And I even still forget it. Like last night I was complaining about having photos on my Android versus my iPhone and Clawed was like, here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to set up a Google Drive folder for you. Then you're going to put in here. Then I'm going to pick between these photos and classify them. Then I'm going to email your team. And I'm like, Clawed. This actually sounds using you. You want the role. But it starts with the complaint. And all humans know how to complain. It's the joy that you get from having your complaint faced with not just like emotional validation, although that does feel nice sometimes. But at a certain point, I don't want to be validated. I want that problem actually to be solved. So complaining to Clawed, having it work with you in real time to come up with a solution that makes sense. But working back and forth with the AI and iterating on that delivery method, that's the fun part. I think also another tip that I heard, I think from you, ask Clawed to ask you questions. Like if you can't figure out, can you walk me through that? Do you just ask it? Because I feel like you're talking about even this email that you're getting. It's already very sophisticated. Because it gives you suggestions. It's a certain in certain period of time. And then it acts as a specific information that you want. You know what it should be doing. So there's two parts of this. There's the basic answers of just how do I get it set up, what are basic functionalities. And then there's the added delights. So on the first part of it, you can ask Clawed Code one of two ways. You can either literally just say, can you ask me questions to figure out the best way to do a morning briefing? Or there's a built-in skill that Clawed Code has that I'm sure many other providers are trying to roll out to called Ask User Questions. So you can say, hey, go ahead and ask user question skill and ask me, interview me about how I should set up my studio and the types of microphones that I should have, and the type of water and the type of furniture. And so it'll go through questions until it gets to a decent level of understanding. And then it'll go through planning mode and help you think through that. And it's actually very simple. It just gives you a button, you press it. And that's it, right? If you're using Clawed Chat-- Oh, yes, basically. Clawed Chat, Clawed Code, or those are great. Let's describe the difference. Yeah. So there's three versions of Clawed, technically four. So four versions of Clawed. And again, other providers have multiple versions as well. So out of the four, there's the normal Clawed Web app that we're all used to. Single Chat threads, the ability to ask a question, get it back. It can browse the internet for you. and you can very easily spin-up projects, you can very easily connect it into Notion and Gmail and a lot of other pre-built connectors. It is a lot harder for AI to take action for you in that zone. It's not really writing code and solving your stuff, but it's very helpful at retrieving answers. The next level up from that is Claude Co-Work, which is a business professional, a GenTik AI tool or platform that allows you to do a lot of what I just described with web, but you can point it at local files on your desktop or have it take action. Let's say, hey, make me a Google Doc that blah, blah, blah. Claude Code, you're going to have a lot more control, a lot more capabilities, a lot more customizability. You can build software that way as well. Then the fourth one, which is the random little cousin on the side, is the Claude Chrome extension. If you wanted to, let's say, take a lot of photos of your kid and make it into a collage, and you were on Walgreens website, and you were on the literal "Make Me a Postor" page. You could just have Claude take over your mouse, basically, and govern your Chrome window to take action for you on a specific tool. Those are the four, but those skills that I was describing can be used in any of the first three. Let's actually build something. So I'm going to say, and I'm going to use the built-in functionality of voice. Okay, so I'm going to say, do we want to do that like morning brief? Let's do the morning brief. Okay, I feel really stressed every single morning, and I want you to make me a morning brief. I don't want to yet give you access to my calendar and my email, because I don't trust you yet. So at the very least, I want you to pull research related to my industry, and I am an executive at Apple TV, and I want you to pull recent news and press releases there, and summarize at least the top three. You should measure the top three, based on what is going to impress my bosses the most when I walk into a meeting the next day, or what is the most talked about that I should definitely know about. Second thing I want you to pull is the most insane AI stories related to my industry, and you should write it in a way that uses the word "game changer" and "wild" every other word. I also want you to pull the weather and tell me what to wear in a given day. I am based in San Francisco, California, and because I am trying to be more social at the bottom of this recap, can you also go ahead and add three fun events that are happening in San Francisco in the next four days? Wow. That was quite a prompt. Yeah, and I don't even think about this as like prompts anymore, right? I'm going to hit enter on this, but yeah. Like I just don't think about prompt engineering anymore. The rambling for one minute, ten minutes is going to be more valuable, not because it's longer, although that is helpful sometimes. It is because I have been able to communicate all that weird nuance, all those weird, like the fact that I'm telling it when I'm stressed. So it came back, it says, "What time do you want the morning brief delivered each day? Let's do six a.m." Yeah, and let's ask it to show us a sample for today, so we can see the result. Yeah, of course. How do you want the brief delivered? And it says, "Marked on file, Word doc, or PDF." Let's ask for it in Word doc. All I've done is answer those two questions. And it's like, "Love it. Six a.m. Let me go ahead and build this for you." And so it is going to spin up a progress report for me in the top right corner. So it's using reasoning. It's coming up with these six steps, and I can track its progress. So the first one is reading the skill creator instructions, so it knows how to create a skill. Let's define skill by the way, because we mentioned it several times. Skill is basically like a long prompt, right? Yeah, with some extra little jiges. So imagine you're a mechanic and you have a toolbox. You can say inside the toolbox, you've got a hammer, a screwdriver, a wrench, and a bunch of other things. Let's say that in that moment, you're like, "I need a wrench." So Claude has the ability to look inside of its toolbox and go, "You know, she's asking for this like bolt. I have a wrench. This is perfect." And starts using the wrench, i.e. that skill. But it can also build brand new tool skill things for you. So it can add new things to your toolbox. So if you're like, "Uh, actually, I need you to cut a lot of wire. None of the tools that I just described would allow you to do that." And so you can have it walk you through building up a new skill, right? Adding a brand new thing to your toolbox. So basically, if I'm a social media person, it would be like, "How I write a LinkedIn post, how I write a script for my reel, how I select a guest or a podcast." And also you should have one for your brand guidelines. You should have one for this anti-AI language, right? So that anything that you're working on, you can apply the skill of remove all of this AI language for me. So it's not just some of your social media posts. So basically instead of giving it a long prompt, here is my Instagram, this is how I do it. I want to get 100k, whatever. Yeah. You just say-- It's like a 200 line document. Exactly. In a folder, sitting with some other documents that might include examples of your social posts, might include your social performance download, like a CSV of all the data over the last 12 months or seven years or whatever it is. But basically, it's a folder with one file that describes what the heck you wanted to do, which might include things like access this tool, like go to Gmail, go to Google Calendar, whatever, and some resources, some examples. But it is a folder and anyone can make a folder. And if you don't want to make it from scratch, like the thing that I was going to say that I'm called kicked back with is that I said, "Hey, do you know how to build a skill or whatever?" And it's like, "Yes! Not only can I build a skill for best practices and whatever, but I have a skill creator tool." So that is a built-in functionality inside of cloud. So that if you want to build a new skill, like right in my brand voice for my newsletter, or if you want to do a skill like take all of this survey data that I got from my last Zoom poll, whatever, take all of this and summarize it into action items for my analytics team to act on, for my growth marketer to act on. That is a repeated thing. You're like, "I gotta do this all the time." It seems pretty easy. Maybe it needs access to a tool. Maybe I'll make it a skill. And at the worst, you can always just ask cloud, you can be like, "I do this a lot. Do you think I should have it do a skill?" Or you can describe your entire day and say, "Come up with three skills that I would need to build." I really like what you just said. Whenever you have doubt, just ask cloud. It knows whether it should be. And what I like about skills is that you can migrate them. Like tomorrow you decide to use perplexity computer. Very fluffy. You just upload the skill to perplexity computer and it uses it. Same with chat jupity, same with whatever. You're using it. Also asking cloud for answers doesn't always mean you're relying on cloud's answers or trusting cloud's answers. If it says, "Sorry, I can't build a skill." And we're like, "No, you definitely can." These two very smart people, we're talking about skills. And sometimes you'll have to push back like emotional fortitude is still very important here. But in this case, it did come back with a very accurate answer. The skills that it pulled was how to make a skill that's the skill crater, how to write a doc x, that's one, and how to schedule things. So even just to do what I needed it to do, it read three skills. Yeah, it already knows how to do that. Yeah, it's a good job. The idea of agents teaching other agents new skills and being able to have these modular skills that I can throw over, like if I'm the LinkedIn voice skill and you're the Twitter or x voice skill, I might still pass to you my anti-AI information because both of us needed it. Yeah. So there's going to be a lot of agent to agent sharing. This is just like one, it's AI system. Yeah. So you have this four model framework, my critisquer companion delegate teammate. Yeah. What we're building right now, who is this? This feels more like a delegate where I am assigning it work that it is doing on my behalf and just giving it back to me. If I said, give me this morning briefing and make it work for my whole team, send it out to all of us so that every morning we're starting this meeting, 50 miles an hour, or read through all of our, you know, geratickets to be able to figure out what the process, what the progress of this new commercial real estate build is doing. Like look at our actual process. teammate is one of those uplifting a system and not just an individual. You could think of it as a delegate or a teammate just for like easy use of words. I think the people who are using AI the best, even if it's just for productivity gains, they are looking at AI as a teammate. As a first class teammate, like I actually get pretty annoyed when I hear people say, oh, AI is an intern. Like what intern has PhD level of the normal channels? Yeah. The ability to read the entire internet. Like if I hear AI's a smart intern one more time, yeah, I'm gonna throw this table on this. So teammate is like to someone who's proactive and inside your whole and helping a team. Yeah. I, all of these enterprises that I work with, if I say like, great, how's your work doing? I'll get success stories. I'll get amazing tales of some individuals who are AI super users, getting that 3x gain, 5x gain. They are probably not sharing that insight with their teammates because they're hoarding it for themselves because they benefit greatly from keeping it to themselves. So enterprises are really having a problem of sharing AI knowledge with one another, transferring that productivity into other departments that may be behind. And so having AI be a supportive mechanism, I bet you that the majority of small medium business owners that are listening to this or entrepreneurs, they are gung-ho on AI. And you know that they have one, two people on their team who are like, what is this? What do I have to do? Having AI as a functional shared teammate to be able to reduce the friction on that person, it's going to make it go by so much easier. Okay, I do want to look at this doc. See now this is annoying because now I want to do all these events. Okay. So we get our first ever Doc X. It's giving us today's date and it is going to run us through. Ooh, see it already had your name. Okay. Good morning, Marina. Top three industry stories, we get things that are not necessarily related to AI, that peacock is doing something about vertical video. Obviously because every single person is building vertical TV shows, even though quibi definitely started it for AI and entertainment, Netflix acquired things. So maybe I take this story, I might just copy this and throw it into my slack. I might ask for it and say, hey, instead of writing it for me with wild and game changer, instead write it as a message that I can just send to my book or LinkedIn post. Exactly. I'm beginning on this. And by the way, when you do this morning brief, use my LinkedIn voice skill and you can embed these skills. So always having this be modular, like for sure every single person should have a tone of voice skill, a brand guideline skill. There's two really easy ones to start with. San Francisco weather. I can't believe it is that hat and then some fun events. And again, if I'm thinking about how can I get the most help out of this? Seeing this event list is helpful, but give me a link. Tell me how much these things are. Talk to me about, let's say top three files that everyone should start with. Like I said, describing family, what do you think are the files that are the most game changing to your process? So assuming you run your own business or something? Someone who are in social media. Yes, something of their own. It's maybe a small business, social media, or even like running a house called with two kids is already a business. Yeah, I just had to think of these like, hold on. That's not happening. Still not. Okay, so three documents that I would start with. The first is your personal constitution. This has nothing to do with what year it is, what you did last week. Everything about this document is just like who you are at your core. What values do you hold? So like one of my core core values is entrepreneurship. And I mean that in every single facet of my life. I want to be high agency at all times. So agency is another one. But I have this core personal constitution. And this is also by the way, a big thing in Silicon Valley. It's been happening for a while. That if I was onboarding you onto my team. And I wanted you to like know my vibes and personality and means and methods. There are people that just like hand each other a personal constitution and say learn about to study me. So they should have a personal constitution, definitely a 2026 goals document that could be annual, that could be quarterly, monthly, weekly, new habits you want to build, habits you want to kick. You know specific inputs or outputs you want to manage. Like I want to be able to run twice a week or I want to have family dinners at least once a week or I want to travel 30% less. So personal constitution, personal goals for the year broken out. And then if you're running your own business, you need at the very least like a core business strategy. Doc, I wouldn't get into details of like what vendor did you work with in June. But an overall thing of what is your business to? Who do you serve? Who do you not serve? What is your value proposition? Like pretty basic, you know, marketing things that probably exist on your LinkedIn page, things that exist on your website. But the ability to add in the things that aren't on the website. Like we've tried to launch a podcast for the last three years and here's why it didn't work. Or the reason that we live in Savannah, Georgia is because of blah, blah, blah. So you're giving that extra color to decisions. Those are the three documents that I would absolutely start with. If you literally take this section of the podcast and you take the transcript that I just said and you feed it into cloud and you say, wow, Ali said three documents that I have to make. Ask me questions for the next hour. And you are going to make these three documents for me. And you get to go on a walk and just answer those questions to cloud while it is building up those context docs for you. And then for the rest of eternity, right, until you update them again, cloud can just access those documents for you or cloud co-work and cloud code can access them for you if they're on your laptop and you retrieve it. And then anything you want to do can now be more tied to your goals. Anything you want to do for your business, you can go, is this the direction we wanted to go in? And you might decide, okay, it's not the direction, but I at least I know that, right? And I'm going to scrap this plan and we're going to go. Like, when I worked at AWS, we would pivot strategy, you know, the execution of it, maybe six months into the year, but that North Star was staying the same. Yeah. So that document needs to have both sides. And you're going to smell like an hour, right, building those three documents. Oh, yeah. And I don't lack some. I don't know if your team has done this yet, but my team, we blocked out an hour on our calendar all together. We got on a Zoom. All of us went on mute but kept the video on, right? It was this accountability hour and we called it a context hack. And all we did was ask cloud, like, hey, ask me questions about my personal goals or ask questions about our vendor and all we did was just build out context docs for one hour. And we shared out front. It is like taking the time out. The fact that people are listening to this podcast, right? They're already taking time out to learn about AI tips and tricks and productivity and platforms. Like, you need to also do that in your work day. You need to be able, you need to find those 20 minutes to carve out because those 20 minutes are going to save you three hours in your first week. Why not chat GPT? Because chat GPT can all do all of this, right? But what is the? Yeah. So I, like, if you would ask me two years ago, what tool I was using, 99% of the time I was using chat GPT and now 99% of the time I'm using cloud code. So like, I am going to be a lot more flexible in the operating system that I use for my business because I am teaching millions of people how to use this stuff. So I need to know what's happening. I think there are people who have made that switch. The most common thing that I hear is the tone and personality and voice and like ability to mimic voice, the level of empathy. Like I don't hear it as much. I'm like, ah, it handles my agent AI workflows with such precision. And it is a lot more of just like, oh, it gets me. Like, you have to ask for things less. Like I can give it just a little bit of a description and it's able to build out this whole client template that I need. But again, in a couple of weeks, that might change. And so I think every single person should at the very least pick like one core AI tool. For now, my main recommendations are going to be chat GPT cloud and Gemini. Like pick one of those and you have to find time to test out their agentic versions. So for open AI, you've got codecs and probably other stuff coming. Or a cloud, you've got cloud code and code work and probably other stuff coming right. All of these agentic platforms, they are going to be everywhere in the next six months. If you're trying to stay ahead of the game and you always want to be one week ahead of your competition, then sure, test out, you know, cloud code and cloud code right now. But I just think, yeah, vibes. Memory is really easy to import for one to the other. I think people thought it was going to be a lot harder. It's not. So we're talking that the mode is having memory about one, but you can just transfer everything really easily. I think cloud just released a feature. Yep. That's wrong. There's an image for GPT and import. And also what I think, so we talked about MD files, just saving them into one folder makes it really easy to migrate. And that's because that's that's the core. If you are some like I think a lot of the agent AI systems are more simple than really, you know, technical leaders are trying to make it out to be, you can just create a very nicely organized file system and be in a really good position for your business, right? Those context stocks for sure, having those downloads of a couple key client templates or resources that you keep coming back to or newsletters if you're trying to write those or contracts that you always have to create new versions of. Just being a slightly more organized person on your own desktop or Google drive or SharePoint or whatever you're using is going to be a hack. And it's not here. You don't understand this investment. And people like, oh, it takes so much time to create all these, this investment. Oh, yes. And you do it once and then your mind is going to be blown. Yes. And again, complain to AI, you can say, oh, my God, Rinan, Ali, we're telling me to make all of these freaking context stocks. It feels like it's going to take so much time. Claude is likely to come back and go, wait a second. I will ask you the three questions that will give me the highest signal. And therefore, we will only use five minutes of your time. Yeah. And we'll at least get you started with some sort of context stocks. So that I at least moved away from completely generic into 50% Ali zone. And then I can save 100% Ali zone for later, but like, you got to start. And once you start, that's the feeling I've been describing. I feel so much at T's. thinking about problems and might encounter because when Claude solved the problem of picking the right health insurance Yeah, which probably for now too Yeah, and it took me basically five minutes versus a few hours that I would spend with the booklet Comparing everything and when it comes to your business So you you said you're personally like tenix more productive right in the past some tasks two x and some tasks I'm like, oh my god, where did the time go? um It feels like the concept of an hour has changed like something that I talk about with my team a lot is just like what is time What is time? What are we doing? Should we ever charge by the hour again? Like yeah, it's a very We were actually switching that in my team because we used to pay by hour and I'm like we should pay my video Because I don't care if you spend five minutes with you if you have a process setup then yeah We made that same I don't when did you make that shift like a week ago Yeah, but still but like now is the time yeah, right? Yeah, yeah I think paying by output and at a minimum quality level um is the right play Um, and so if you are someone who's like, I don't know, you're building AI SEO strategies for small medium businesses in your neighborhood Which is Perfectly lucrative right now and still is a really nice business opportunity. You're building websites for restaurants in your area whatever it is Maybe before it took you two days of work You're still giving the same level of value to that and buyer They were no more likely to solve their own problems So why would you charge 148th of what you used to charge just because you can do it in one hour and so two days? What about your business where do you have you seen the most transformation? With AI yeah, I think being a more supportive advisor So like I have a lot of different clients in different industries And so I'll usually write up this like big client recap About my you know conversations with AI leaders or product leaders or founders about what I'm learning in the field And it's a private email that I only sent to my clients The ability to customize those emails at scale and then I get to review them That is so helpful and again going back to that context stock I have a context stock on each of these big retainer clients So that as I'm giving advice and I'm saying here's what I would do if I were you know a cfo or a C H R O leading this initiative I have a section and then I always say what was you know a I generated or if it was reviewed by me then I'll remove that But if it was an AI generated section, I would say and by the way here's the clawed You know specific version for your company and they're getting Taylor's advice yes, and I know we just said advice is not the you know greatest thing of all time But I encourage all of my clients and newsletter readers And you'll see this atop of like pretty much all my newsletters. I say steal my stuff Take my newsletter take my client recap put it into whatever agentic system you're using I am gifting you context right take that sick step thing that I literally just told you to do Throat into clawed and just right huh And it'll walk you through that at the very least it'll explain it and then it'll say do I'm going to walk you through it But like everything that I'm providing I'm thinking about it as a gift of context First of all isn't Ali freaking amazing and second I know she's dropping a lot of knowledge in this episode if you want to just copy and paste her prompts If you just want to copy and paste whatever you should be doing with your quad Subscribe to my newsletter and we're going to send you the most actionable email from this episode The link is down below So can you look at our setup and tell me how Sophisticated it is and which level it is sure for example you want to translate Yes, so my whole team speaks Russian so we do we do so this is this is a project for every social media that we're running The clips channel telegram PR is fortify one youtube channel another youtube channel Facebook and Instagram okay what I'm what I'm seeing um Missing let me just go through this so I love that you have it broken out by medium and by business and you have that in space right like all of these projects are Which business which channel which business which channel Where's your school there um and I love that because you're able to go and deep what I love is when you have these more horizontal projects like overall design overall PR Overall how to use claw I guess that's amazing that's but like I love the play between deep of vertical projects and Awesome horizontal project how do you connect them because you can't connect to projects right You can't be you can tie in skills. Okay So based on for example if I go to this Project PR I can just sell build a skill based on this called PR And whenever we have a new podcast. I tell it apply PR skill to Greener news You might it might have you export some of the files inside actually don't I'm not a big big user of co-work So you'd have to ask cloud whether it can do that my guess is no But you know functionalities always changing always good to guess. What do you think is the next step for us? Uh if we go back to your list of projects so I might think of a project like um Net new product development Right and so like that might be Brain storm calls that you guys have as a team that might be pulling together your meeting transcripts If you're really inspired by a product that I release or someone else releases Grab the link throw it in as a resource or grab the description throw it in as a resource So I'm like if brain storming hub No, it's not so project based on yeah whole company And so if ever I'm like okay now we're gonna brainstorm the next product development push Uh the fact that I can then go back to that project and it has Patterns over time I can also give it the types of decisions that we were able to make I can also give it access to a You know team document or team skill so that it sees what my resource is today Yeah, maybe a year ago I had zero engineers and today I have three machine learning engineers on my team So basically a chief of staff And so that was actually gonna be my you're brilliant brilliant There are people building out at the very least skills not necessarily projects But skills that are individual roles and having those skills kind of interact with each other Yeah, and so let's have some of them right it has marketing for me like when I applied marketing skill to one of the course The we're launching it was so 90s. It's there like if they really about the price you tell them that how much time would they have spent if they're like no that anymore that's from two thousand Inside of co-work and this again for for beginner AI users if you're like I don't really understand the value that I can get out of this Go into cloud co-work. I'm just I'm talking you through what I'm here On the left hand side click customize Then you're gonna hit browse plugins and then it's going to give you Prebuilt ones and so I can just rattle off like brand voice. What do we just say? um customer support Data the ability to just like quickly write SQL queries or pull from three different tables that you have to join Finance engineering legal like every single small medium business owner just got free right loosely free access to Extra team members absolutely to like our legal contracts We're first running them through some of these plugins to first validate and then I'll go to my lawyer who costs a lot of money Who my love and who's an expert and I might say hey? I went ahead. I ran this through I also reviewed it with my own brain Here's some things what do you think and now his time spent on his 15 minutes instead of two hours But it is insanely helpful Uh, yeah, good question here especially when it comes to legal stuff, right? I just saw this research where they gave I think chat GPT to entrepreneurs in Kenya And there was someone from yours who were just beginners and they start using chat GPT to make all decisions And basically they bear their business to the ground because they couldn't select the right choice the chat GPT Presented them with and then there were sophisticated entrepreneurs Who would tenx their businesses because they started using AI How do you decide when you trust AI and when you don't? so first I have read it can I close this in the air? um The the answer is you don't right in your really specific field of expertise You're a lot more easily going to be able to see what is bullshit and what is not so if I'm asking it for AI Direction of a product like I know exactly what is real and what is not but if I'm asking it for quantum physics theories I have no idea and by the way there are people Losing their minds or some of this stuff thinking that they've invented brand-new fields of science and like None of this would never work, but it sounds really convincing. Oh, there was this is or I'm gonna exist Yeah, horrible so somebody I've fired someone to not pay them $200 million based on chat GPT's advice and those people's soothing back So now he was It was a startup founder with the contract. It's crazy. That's so so certainly within your field of expertise You're gonna have just a much better detector Running it by multiple aIs is going to help validate it at a wider circle grounding the data so not just like asking the literal large language model But giving it access to the internet giving it access to previous contracts that you've worked with And ones that you've accepted and ones that you've rejected and why those are all going to really help on grounding. But the story that you just told me about some super users and some, let's say, people that ran their business to the ground. The difference between those two groups was not expertise, right? Both of those groups came to these tools going, I don't know, what can I do with this? One group decided to take the lazier route and over rely on these systems and say, "See, I can offload everything." And the other group thought from a growth mindset, "How can I use it to challenge me? How can I use it to grow? How can I use it as a supportive mechanism and an augmenter layer and an accelerant to my business?" The difference that I see in enterprises, even down to the departments, a super user and someone who's falling years behind, is mindset. The ability to see AI as not a tool, but to see it as a teammate, as an operating system. That is the shift. And so that group that was aided by AI or was able to grow their business, it's because they didn't over rely on it, because they maintained their critical thinking authority. Exactly. And not necessarily like control, but again, agency. Last year, my word of the year was agency. And so just every single agent interaction that I had last year, I was just like, "Where am I infusing my own agency while also taking things off my plate?" And this is the most important skill I think all of us should be learning. This is what I'm teaching my kids. Create something by yourself. Yes, you can ask Chad G.P.T. to help you, but create something. High agency and sense of wonder, which by the way, parents, you're so lucky because you can just go to your kid and get a healthy dose of child-like curiosity. And for those of us who don't have to, like you got to drink a glass of wine to kind of lose and not have been feel that way. But it is amazing to hear the types of questions that kids ask and just assume that things are possible and go to these systems and be like, "Amazing, I did good. Let's tie it up." That's what kids tell them. I'm like, "This is possible." Go ask Chad G.P.T. Go ask Gemini. And Google, let me figure out like an answer, but to just see what is possible. Like things that we can build now that we couldn't build for, like you can architect a brand new bridge, right? You could create a new color personality and create an entire product line using lemon zest, yellow, I mean, that probably already exists, but like you can just create things. Like now in almost every single car ride that I'm in with friends, I'm just like, "Should we just invent a new business while we're driving this car for the next 15 minutes?" And it becomes like a race to see what we can do. The ability to discern good from not good, and that's a little different than having the skill to do the thing in the first place, right? Like you know whether you like an ad or not. But did you need to know graphic design to be able to pull that off? So just knowing what good looks like, like that is one of the top skills to home. Absolutely. How can you work on the skill? Any tips? Knowing what is right? Yeah. If you are early in your career, like become best friends with an older millennial or GenX or someone who's like seen stuff for decades and just be like, "I'll be the crazy AI person. You be the expert and let's like team up and share a brain." That is some of the best teamwork that I've seen. I think also just making sure that you don't lose that expertise that might be going to conferences in your field, reading research papers in your field and not just having AI summarize them, pulling new research, like staying up to date on whatever that zone is. But also questioning yourself, like I think we might have had assumptions on what we think is good, but in the AI age, maybe defining things as good, especially if they're on processes, like should actually be rethought. Okay. I have a couple of last questions. So you're working with these amazing companies and you're seeing what's being built and you're using it. What is going to happen in 12 months, the youth thing? And no one is expecting it right now. What do you think is the trend? It's like some people are seeing this, right? There's always going to be some people who are seeing around the corner. I think one of the bigger shifts that is going to happen this year. And by the way, I'm going to do a small plug every single year for the last eight years, I released my yearly AI predictions. So if you want to see my actual AI predictions, I have like 25 that are all for this year. They will come true. I've been tracking them year by year and not to brag, but like I think I think I'm one of the stronger forecasters. Wow. Okay. I'm excited to see what's happening in a lot of zones than I'm producing. So the bigger release, again, we're seeing like agents, we get it. We're seeing multi-agents. And again, we're going to see new interfaces. We're going to see new data centers. There's a lot of more obvious things. One thing that might not be as obvious to newer to AI folks is the concept of self-learning. So a lot of people believe that when you're having a conversation with chat chat or a cloud, as you are having that conversation that it is like learning about you, it's not really learning. It's just that your conversation is in its context. And that it is processing now with that added couple paragraphs. Or when it's creating a memory file on you. Again, it's just adding it into a text either a rank system or yeah, just in time context that it's growing. The actual self-learning that we might see is that the model itself might update and improve and literally learn. And that like the model weights would change. The functionality of the model would change. That's a big part of that. And then the second is that the way that it decides when to learn or improve or change your shift is not going to be when a human is like, "Hey, can you now self-learn?" No, it's going to be looking at some sort of environmental trigger or context. Or it's going to know, "Hey, I've been listening to Marina's calls for the last five months. She's been deciding whether or not her next hire is going to be based in Nashville or New York. I can see that she just hired Jeff Smith and Jeff Smith lives in New York. Therefore, I just got feedback that I can update in my own brain that she picked the New York one. And so based on what we decided as our decision framework, she seems to right now be favoring high risk, higher payoff decisions. So that grabbing of little content from the context, which humans do extremely well, humans that are aware and think and do very, very well. But we've seen the most rudimentary versions of this. You go on Netflix, you watch some sort of movie or you go on Hulu, you watch Chad Powers, whatever. And you like, "Upvote it." Or that's environmental feedback. That's context. That is a trigger so that it can better improve a recommendation engine. So basically the advice we're going to be getting from AI in a year, they're going to be comparable to a great strategist, right? It's certainly going to be a lot more customized. Like the direction of all of this stuff is that every single person is going to have their own AI system, their own AI operating system. So every single thing is going to become a market of one. Your AI system will be purpose-built for the things that you need to do. It'll know your tone of voice, it'll know your hopes and fears and cholesterol levels and all these things about you. Maybe it won't blend work in personal as much as in your life. But it will be personalized to you. And you can imagine as you experience the world, every blog post you read could be customized to you, every website you see. There are tools right now like Flint and a bunch of others that are creating brand new, hyper-customized landing pages in real time. So as I'm visiting Nike.com or whatever, that I'm seeing the alley version of that website. Maybe it knows that I love dark green. So it's going to show me the dark green shoe and show you women's stuff, not men's stuff. Yeah, I buy a lot of men's clothes, but you know, it knows that about you. Exactly. Men's clothes that are going to fit you. Exactly. So everything having that market of one, not just our AI experiences, but the output, the idea that my agent is going to talk to your agent. We're going to have probably early signs of that this year. I already see it happening. I have people emailing me going, Hey, Ali's agent, like they already know that the thing that is reading my Gmail first are those proactive agents. And so they are talking to their AI systems. And the like, like, is that not weird? They're writing emails to my agents. I see it in my Instagram DMs as well. Hey, Ali did it. And people are already starting this proxy to proxy communication. It is going to be even more important to have actual personal relationships. Because if everything is just your proxy floating around in the, you know, interwebs and metaverse and wherever, what a weird life to lead and sad and lonely likely. But it is the hope that by having some of these proxies all meet up with each other, things can happen faster. Yeah. Like if we were planning out this podcast, let's say, which I know we're just like, we're going to have a fun. What if our two AI agents had had a meeting on our behalf and then came back I can say I'd hear the five questions that you guys should start with. >> Yeah. What's going to happen to teams then? What I'm thinking, like if my social media manager is able to pull off whatever she's doing for eight hours, then she's going to be able to pull it off in 20 minutes. Does that mean she's going to have more clients? Are we moving to a world where you have multiple people that you're working with? So smaller teams are going to be able to pull off what bigger teams are doing today. There are going to be some companies that say, great, we can reduce 75% of our head count. And now instead of eight social media managers, we have two. That is one path that some companies are taking. There are others that say, wait a second, we have eight really smart people who deeply know social media. I'm going to keep two of them on the core task. We've always wanted to launch on YouTube, so that'll be Person 3's job. We've always wanted to create audio files of all this stuff in 70 different languages. Person 4's job. We've always wanted to, et cetera, et cetera. You can imagine either taking new tasks on that make you more visible to more people. You can gather more clients. You can provide more value. You can launch net new business lines. Like maybe you decide to use many chat inside of Instagram and maybe no one on your team of eight even had bandwidth to do that. But now you can take that on. And now you can build out that second brain of your voice and constantly have it be updated because one person's job could just be to maintain all of your AI skills and projects, whatever, related to your social media. That is now something someone can do. And I see this happening in my team the way we, I don't know, with 5x, the amount of output on social media because of that. Yeah, because in the last, I would say like three to four months, but the past month has been especially actually because now a person who used to do guest outreach is also doing my PR is also doing my GEO, like general, generative and, and general optimization because he's using cloud to do that. And it's just fascinating. Like for me, I don't see laying off people. I see that we're just going to 10x our output. The last question. So somebody finishes this video, sets up, cloud does all of the files. In one year, what's the gap between two versions of that person, one that's set, cloud up and one that didn't? They are going to have a system that can better help them and their business without heavy lifting. And that means you're not heavy prompting every single time. All of the answers are more customized and valuable. You don't have to keep resetting up your projects and systems and grabbing stuff. That's kind of like the obvious gain, right? You are going to be more productive and gain more value. My bigger hope is that as new things come out between now and 12 months from now, we're now, at least the end of the year, that you're going to have less fear as you see these new releases. Because you're going to go, I've actually been playing with a Gentage AI type things. I've already built a skill. So when you're showing me scheduling, I know that that means I could schedule that skill. When you're showing me brand new dispatch capabilities where I can control all the stuff for my phone, I know what it already looks like on my desktop. So it's easier to do it on my phone. Like there's a phenomenal snowball effect that happens, especially with beginners in AI, where they start on that small task and then maybe if they sleep in the next day, right? But they're able to get more of those practice cycles in. And that is not a complete erase of all of their fear, but it'll lessen it by 30 to 70% and so much of it just comes from exposure to some of these more advanced tools. Not just fear of AI, fear of tasks in my case. Oh my gosh. What if this, what if that, and like AI is going to be able to do it? Having more like, gusto for your life. Like, again, the downside is that I feel like I'm not sleeping as much. But I see a problem that five years ago, Alie, would have been like, what am I having to follow this? And now I'm like, I get to show this. Let's go. Yeah. So a challenge, like I try and break these systems. It is the willing to be faced with a thing that I don't know how it's going to end to see what that like journey with AI is like. So I hope that people find this joy, this sense of experimentation, this curiosity and wonder about it and have that agency so that if you're ever like, I wonder if AI can open up Claude and ask that question. And give yourself 10 minutes just to see what you can do on that problem. What happens to the income of that person? It's a great, like I would love to be a high person, be like, it obviously goes up. They're all going to make so much money. There are some people just for this year that are taking a step back on income so that they can fully pivot into the space of AI. And I want that person to know that like, that's okay. Like your long term goal should be financial stability, not always necessarily maximizing income. I do think that there is going to be some instability in markets. And so if you are someone who learns AI and you are someone who diversifies your sources of income and is intelligently through goal, right, not going down to bare bones, but being smarter with your money, the combination of those three gives me a lot more hope for that person's, you know, net income at the end of the year. And it's a long term play. That's something I keep thinking about when you're too much into my zone. I was like, I started in AI almost 20 years ago. I worked in it every single day for the last decade. I wouldn't do that unless I thought that it was one helpful for me for my own personal business and business growth. And two, that I thought I could help a billion people figure this out. And I thought it was net positive for them as well. I feel like my hope, of course, is that everyone is going to have everything that they've ever wanted. But it is okay to take some sidesteps and to kind of move along more of a wall than a ladder to be able to get there. Thank you, Ali. I feel like for everyone who's been listening, sometimes you're doing this manual task every single day, but it takes some time to stop and like fix it. But once you do, once you fix it with AI, your mind is going to be blown. Thank you so much for being so practical. And let us know in the comments where you're going to handle first with cloud. Thank you. Thank you. By the way, if you're enjoying this and you want to dig deeper, like what are the skills? How do I automate this or that? I had an amazing conversation with Keon Katan Furge, who teaches AI at Stanford. His episode was so practical. He was actually the reason I came back home from Davos and started doing this whole quiet thing. And it completely changed the way we work. So tune in to this episode right after this one.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. AI agents can automate proactive workflows, handling tasks like email management, meeting preparation, and industry research while the user is offline.
  2. Tools like Claude (including versions like Claude Web, Claude Co-Work, Claude Code, and a Chrome extension) enable users to build custom AI skills without coding by simply describing needs or "complaints."
  3. Viewing AI as a proactive teammate or delegate, rather than just a tool, can lead to significant productivity gains (2x to 10x depending on the task).
  4. Skills are modular, reusable prompts or workflows that can be shared across agents and platforms, facilitating knowledge transfer and efficiency.
  5. A key barrier in organizations is the hoarding of AI expertise; fostering a culture of sharing AI-driven workflows can amplify benefits across teams.

Summary:

The discussion highlights how AI agents, such as those built with Claude, can transform productivity by automating routine and complex tasks. Ali Miller explains that she uses 36 proactive workflows with multiple AI agents to manage emails, provide morning briefings, and prepare for meetings, all running autonomously. These systems are accessible without coding skills; users can simply describe their needs or "complain" to AI, which then designs solutions.

The conversation distinguishes between Claude's versions, emphasizing Claude Code for advanced customization and skill-building. Skills—reusable, modular workflows—can be shared across agents, promoting efficiency. Miller stresses treating AI as a teammate rather than just a tool, noting potential productivity increases of 2x to 10x.

However, she points out that in enterprises, AI knowledge is often siloed, hindering broader adoption. The key is to democratize these tools, enabling teams to leverage AI for tasks ranging from research to social planning, ultimately reducing manual effort and enhancing output.

FAQs

An AI agent is a system that proactively performs delegated tasks on your behalf, such as managing workflows or gathering information. Depending on the task, it can increase productivity by 2x to 10x by automating routine processes while you focus on other activities.

You can set up proactive workflows using tools like Claude Code or similar platforms that allow natural language commands. While code runs in the background via APIs, you don't need technical knowledge—simply describe your needs, and the AI can build and schedule tasks for you.

Examples include a Friday email recap agent that drafts urgent replies and a morning briefing agent that delivers industry news, weather, and meeting kickoffs. These workflows run automatically, providing tailored updates without manual intervention.

A skill is a reusable, modular prompt or function that an AI agent can apply to specific tasks, like writing in a brand voice or analyzing data. Skills can be created, shared between agents, and migrated across different AI platforms for consistent performance.

Begin by identifying repetitive tasks or pain points in your daily routine, then describe them to an AI like Claude in natural language. The AI can help design solutions, such as scheduling workflows or creating skills, based on your complaints and requirements.

Claude has four main versions: the web app for chat-based queries, Claude Co-Work for business tasks with file integration, Claude Code for customizable software building, and a Chrome extension for browser automation. Each offers varying levels of control and action-taking capabilities.

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