How to Use AI to Make Money, Save Time, and Be More Productive

Welcome to Business and the podcast for people making it all happen. Running a successful business completely takes over your life. But I'm a believer that there is still room for some ants, like health, wealth, beauty, and maybe even some fashion. On this podcast, I'll share with you what's working for scaling my nine-figure business, while keeping you up to date on the latest trends, news, and fun binds. This is a place for business and let's dive in. Welcome back to Business and we are talking about systems using AI. AI is wild because you just have to stay on top of things. I am on that side of TikTok and Instagram intentionally so where I get all sorts of tips and tricks, what people are using AI to do and how they're using it to implore and force business changes to happen. And one of the fun things that I'm really playing a lot with these days is notebook LM. If you haven't started using notebook LM, it's freaking amazing. I feel like I've learned 10 times the amount of things that I used to be able to learn in a fraction of the time, all because of the way that it displays information, how it can spit things out to you in a podcast. But that's more of a tip and trick. This episode is talking more about systems so that you don't just use AI as a hack. You don't just use it to find one little thing or ask it a question or respond to an email, but you actually start leveraging its capabilities to create systems that allow your business to scale so that you aren't stuck in the day to day and you have systems that you can really rely on. So with that, let's dive in. Principle number one. Use AI to design how decisions get made not to make the decision. In 2023, MIT economists studied how AI actually improves productivity and what they found was very clear. The biggest gains don't come from using AI to answer a question or to generate an output. They came from using AI to redesign workflows and decision processes. In other words, AI creates leverage when it helps people change how decisions are made repeatedly rather than providing a single answer in the moment. So here's what's really happening. If every decision requires fresh energy, clarity disappears under pressure and then urgency replaces importance. The leverage isn't in the answer that AI gives you. It's in removing the need to decide the same thing over and over and over again. When you keep asking AI what to do, you avoid building the system. And when you avoid building system, you avoid scaling. So instead of just hopping on chat, GBT and randomly asking AI questions throughout the day, lock into your new rules. Ask this. Help me design a simple, weekly decision framework. So I always choose priorities based on long-term impact, not urgency. Then reuse that same framework every single week. That's how you stop rethinking and start running an actual system. Now, the next principle goes against what most people think about problem solving. Use AI to see the system that's creating the problem. Looking back on our growth from start up to where we are today, it wasn't the big conferences or the flashy moments that created the accelerated growth. It was the small, daily operational checklist. Now, this sounds so boring and the opposite of sexy, but these boring routines were like the scaffolding, supporting the actual business. They allowed the team to run without me constantly intervening. When something feels off in execution now, I don't immediately correct people or jump into the solutions. I can take a step back and I actually look at the system. How are the priorities set when decisions were made? What information did people actually have? What delays or incentives might be tied to that behavior? I use AI calmly to walk through a sequence so that I'm not solving the wrong problem emotionally. Just a couple years ago, we had a new problem in our business and the problem was we had so many incoming leads from all of the social presence that we couldn't actually get the right person who was qualified on the phone with our sales team. What ended up happening is our sales team had an abundance of leads, many of which weren't actually qualified for the exact product. And so this created us overhiring sales people, us having too many leads with too much admin in order to find out who should be called when. Insert Jarvis. We built a specific AI that is responsible for reaching out without any human intervention to our leads to best understand what their problems are to pre-qualify them. And just in the last few months, this tool has generated 5,000 book meetings for our sales team. You see, here's what most people miss. Research from MIT's system dynamics group shows that recurring problems and organizations almost never come from individual failure. They come from feedback loops. They come from the way that incentives are created and tiny and decision rules that all interact over time. So if you don't fix the system, you end up managing the same problem forever and wonder why your business is stuck. Problems feel personal when you're in them, but when you can zoom out and you see the patterns, all of a sudden that pattern reveals a structure. So next time, anything goes wrong. Do not jump into the solution. Instead, ask AI, walk me step by step through the system that produced this outcome, including decisions, timing, incentives and constraints. Once you can see the system clearly, the fix becomes obvious and permanent. If you're struggling to figure out creative ways to leverage AI in your business, find me on Instagram and DM me AI so I can send you over a resource that my team poured hours into in order to help any business owner start to leverage and harness the powerful effects of AI. That brings us to principle number three. Use AI to replace willpower with pre-decisions. What kept me stuck for years were the hundreds of tiny decisions that I would make every day. Because instead of actually using my time to make big important decisions, I was exhausting the one resource that I needed to ensure that I was heading in the right direction. And here's a crazy stat. Judges are significantly more likely to deny parole late in the day than early in the morning. And this is not because any cases were worse, but because their mental energy was exhausted. This research on decision fatigue shows that the more decisions people make throughout the day, the worse their judgment becomes. So as mental energy depletes, people default to easier choices, procrastinate important work and avoid hard decisions. Even when they know that those decisions better. This is why I no longer rely on motivation to read. My mornings already include 45 minutes of a reading block. There's no social media, there's no emails. This is my block to read and the decision was made a long time ago. And the way AI has helped me with this is I use tools like chat GPT pulse, which learns what I'm interested in. And then summarizes the areas that I most focused on. That way I don't waste energy deciding what to read or why I'm reading it. Chat GPT pulse culminates all of the articles of things that it knows I'm already interested in that are tied to my long term goals and feeds it to me on a platter every single morning. So I can spend that dedicated time knowing that I'm getting the right information, not having to sift through all of the different articles that all the different new sources are putting out there. It's tailored to me exactly to my goals and giving me articles of information that I need to know in order to get there faster. You see, if progress depends on how you feel, it always collapses the moment that stress shows up. And most people think that discipline is just about trying harder. It's actually about deciding what you're going to do earlier. Principle number four is something that completely changed how I approach personal growth. I use AI to build systems for personal transformation. Every Sunday, I sit down and look at my goals next to my actual calendar. I ask whether the way I'm spending my time reflects the person I'm trying to become. And then I use AI to pressure test that alignment. So I'm not just lying to myself. I don't know if you know this, but AI, chat GPT, Claude, all of the models can connect your calendar to them. So they can start to understand where you spend your time and make recommendations for you. So when there's a gap, you don't just judge it. You can redesign the entire structure of your time. People don't change because they want to be different. They change because their environment cues them to act like the person that they're becoming. And here's why this matters. If the system doesn't support the identity, the identity collapses under stress. Most people try to change themselves without changing the structure of their week. That's why new years resolutions fail by February. When you avoid redesigning your environment, you avoid becoming the person that you say you want to be. I used to spend every new year's eve so upset myself because I was rolling into the next year. And despite whatever excitement and new years party was going to bring, I was incredibly disappointed with myself because I hadn't actually done what I wanted to do. I hadn't become the person that I wanted to be. I wasn't proud of myself going into the new year. It felt like a pseudo reset that I was just going to lie to myself about to make myself feel good about new year, new me, but those actions never actually took place. And you can now use AI to reinforce this for you as if you have a coach with you in order to help you get to your goals. So instead of asking AI how to improve yourself, use it to redesign your environment. Ask, review my weekly schedule and habits and tell me where they don't support the identity I'm building. Then change the structure, not yourself talk. Next is principle number five. Use AI to standardize your best thinking. Here's how I protect my thinking capacity. After my first meeting of the day, I intentionally block time to work on the most important thing. That block exists so I'm not reacting to emails or conversations that pull me into short term thinking. I use AI to guide how I think during that time, what questions matter, what trade-offs I should consider and what good judgements. looks like in the moment. Even on tired days, the thinking quality stays high because the structure is already there. Research on judgment and decision making shows that unstructured decisions increase bias, especially under pressure. I've learned this as our business has gotten bigger. It is less dependent on me making a great short term decision for today or even for next week. In order for a business to grow and continue to grow, you have to be focused on three quarters out, four quarters out, maybe even two years out, the decision today is actually not the most important thing for you to spend your time on. Somebody else should be making those decisions. So how do you put frameworks in front of yourself to ensure that you're actually making the best decision for the future that you are trying to create for your business? If you're thinking quality fluctuates, your outcomes will too. And the 1% don't rely on inspiration and feeling good in order to make good decisions. They standardize the process so that good thinking becomes automatic instead of starting from a blank page every time. Use AI to lock in your thinking process. Ask, create a simple decision checklist. I can use every time I'm prioritizing work or making a strategic choice. Then reuse it. That is how your best thinking becomes the default. Lastly, principle number six. And this might be the hardest shift to make. Use AI as an operating system to reduce your cognitive load. Some of my clear thinking has always happened during my 20 minute commute. When I don't listen to a podcast or take any calls and I make intentional time to let my brain work, the problem is to be that those ideas would disappear as soon as my day started. I'd go into the office and I would have meeting after meeting after call after follow up. And I wouldn't remember what I had thought about that morning in order to move those decisions and move those ideas into my day. But now, AI is where those thoughts go. I can externalize my ideas, decisions that I'm circling, priorities that I'm weighing. And it is a place for it to live. And this makes sense because cognitive load theory shows that working memory has a limited capacity when it's overloaded, reasoning quality drops, and errors increase in your prefrontal cortex. So externalizing information, riding it down and structuring it outside your head, frees your cognitive resources for higher level and better thinking. When your brain is busy remembering, it's hard to evaluate. So over time, that leads to shallow thinking and quiet burnout. Successful people don't try to keep everything in their head. They design systems to hold the complexity. So their brain stays free. If you apply these six principles, you'll stop relying on motivation and start building systems that make progress inevitable. And that's how you scale anything, your business, your income, your life. If you enjoyed this podcast, you are going to definitely not want to miss out on my new newsletter. It just dropped. I just started creating this content and I am obsessed. 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