How to Monetize AI and Build the Life and Career You Want

18:32Alicia Lyttle:Like, give it so much information on who you want it to be. If you could think about that person that's going to help you, who do you want them to be? What do you want their history to be? What do you want their success rate to be? and be realistic. That's why I said, you know, 92 % instead of 100%. But then it will give you your game plan. All it knows about your business, where you were and how to get to where you need to be. And then you're like, oh my gosh, show me this game plan every single month. What do I need to do every single month? And then the last thing you say is today is day number one.

19:01Alicia Lyttle:What do I need to do today? And it will tell you what to do today. And then it becomes your responsibility to go back at the end of the day and say, this is what I did today. You told me to call five people. I called six, two of them. I set appointments for next week. Tomorrow's day two. What do I do tomorrow? So you literally would go back to the AI with your results and self-report. Absolutely. How careful do you think people ought to be around putting in proprietary information? I know that you mentioned to put the safeguards up, but how much should we feel comfortable sharing? If you do have a small business, are you uploading your financials, for example?

19:38Are you sharing client information? Those two places would seem to me like absolute no-nos, but I'm interested to hear your perspective.

19:45Alicia Lyttle:So you're always, whichever tool you're using, you're always going to get the business version of that tool. So spend a little bit extra and get the business version of that tool because at the business layer, they have it defaulted to the information that you put in is not used to train their models and it's more secure. So you always want to check security. If you're using a free version, you are making the biggest mistake. Don't ever use a free version as a business owner because in the free version, usually the terms and conditions say we're going to use the data to train its models. Is that usually the, sorry to interrupt you, is that usually the biggest difference?

20:19Like the, like safety or are they like, as you upgrade, you're really thinking about like premium service?

20:24Alicia Lyttle:Yeah, as you upgrade, you're going to get better outputs and you can put in more content and longer outputs. So you definitely want to think about that as a business owner too. So once you start to upgrade, you'd be like, I wish it would have, you know, when I was using the free version, I wish it would have been this good. Like, is this what good is like at the paid level? So at the paid level, you're going to get better outputs, longer outputs. I mean, they're saving their premium for the people that are paying. Yeah, no doubt. But you advise small business owners immediately upgrade. You're like, that's the first thing that you should do.

20:54Yep.

20:54Alicia Lyttle:And then the thing is, when you're buying these tools for your employees, make sure that you're buying them in the workspace. So for example, Claude, I just added a few new team members to my Claude workspace, but I'm making sure that I'm adding them with their company email into the Claude workspace. And then our rule is that when you're using Claude, please use it from the business level, the business workspace, not your own personal account. Because I know that the safeguards are there when they're using it at that level. I think that's really important for everybody to understand. It's absolutely true.

21:23Alicia Lyttle:And whether you're using ChatGPT or Claude, like all of these tools have the levels now. They didn't have it when it first started, when, you know, back in 22, 23, but now they all have these levels for corporate and for teams. and you want to make sure that you're using that. Well, and also just back to the point of what you said, like you are teaching the AI constantly. And so you want to also retain that information in the business AI tool, as opposed to it all being, you know, spread out all over the place. And then I would say the next thing is that all of these tools also have in their security settings, like multi-factor authentication.

21:54Alicia Lyttle:Because not only do you want to protect the data that you're putting in, but you also want to protect your account so nobody else can ever get into your account. So set up that authentication where the notification comes to your phone or they have to have your authenticator app in order to log into your account because that's another level that you have to make sure you're securing your account, not with just good passwords, but with that authentication level that a lot of these tools have in their security settings. I can imagine for some people sitting there that they're like, oh my goodness, I'm going to try this straight away.

22:22But for others, right, it can feel so foreign. It can feel like here's a bunch of other stuff that I need to do. Here's another password. Here's another system. Here's another, you know, cost. How worth it? and when do you think it's worth it for a small business? Like in your experience, based on like all of the consultancy you do, is there a threshold at which you say, you know what, at this revenue level, you ought to be investing in enterprise AI? Like what does that look like?

22:49Alicia Lyttle:Yeah, so usually what I tell a business owner is are you really ready to grow, multiply and expand your business? If you answer yes to that question, then you need to put part of your budget into these AI tools. And I'm not saying to put a lot. I mean, just for Claude at that level, you can pay$25 a month for your team members to be on Claude. So just look at where your budget is, cancel something else to make sure that you're getting these AI tools because it will change what your team can do for you as well. You know, Ali that you had on, she was talking about having an AI first team, right?

23:18Alicia Lyttle:Making sure that every member on your team is also using artificial intelligence when they go to complete a task because it's your, like as a company's money as well, you're paying them. You want to make sure that every team member is the most efficient. One of the things that I've read about from you is that you've kind of created a team that would otherwise cost you$30 ,000 a month. And so I'm so curious to understand, like, what are those roles? What does each one look like? How can people replicate that at home? You know, especially if they are on their own, they're running a business, they're feeling unbelievably stretched.

23:52Like, talk us through what that actually looks like in practice.

23:55Alicia Lyttle:And so this is called an AI team or your AI staff or your AI agents, which is what it's most commonly called. And so what I did, how I started off is I started to think about, all right, in my dream company, the roles that I'm not hiring for right now, maybe it's because of budget or I can't find that person. Sometimes it's not budget, but you can't find that person. What would those roles be? And so those roles are, okay, for my business, I need a sales copywriter. I need an email marketer. I need a social media caption writer. I need a video editor. And so now that I look at those roles and then you say, well, what would I want those people to do?

24:31Alicia Lyttle:And then you say, all right, so can I create those roles? Can I create an AI agent who can do those things? So sales copywriter, absolutely. So all you have to do is start off with training it. And so I would go to ChatGPT, Claude, whichever tool and say, I need to create an AI team member. And I want this AI team member's name to be Penny. And what Penny does is she's our sales copywriter and here's the type of copy that she writes. here's our industry, create the instructions for Penny for how she should act as our AI team member, what knowledge she should have, knowledge about our company, knowledge about sales copywriting.

25:04Alicia Lyttle:So now you've got the instructions for this team member and you can build it in different tools. So you can build it in ChatGPT. You could build a super agent in Base44. You could build it in Claude. The easiest way to do it for a beginner, so a complete beginner is like, oh my gosh, I don't even know where to go to find these tools. Whatever tool you're using, you can create that team member in the chat. And then you say, lock this team member in your memory. And so now ChatGPT will use as an example, Penny, sales copywriter, writes copy like this, all this stuff, lock it in your memory. Penny is locked in my memory as your AI team member sales copywriter.

25:41Alicia Lyttle:Done. Two days later, I open up ChatGPT. Hey, Penny. Write some sales copy. I'm like, hey, Penny. And then it comes up and it says, Penny's here, your AIT member. What do you need today? I need some sales copy. And what happens is it'll say thinking for a minute because it's going back to the instructions. To figure out how she does things. How does she do things? And then it will write the sales copy. So you don't have to go through that whole process again of this is a sales copy and this is how you should do it. And this is, I always want a PS on my sales copy and you have to have this because she's already been trained on it.

26:13Alicia Lyttle:So it makes you're going from idea to execution so quick because you've trained whichever tool you're using how to do this. And how automated can you make that? Because I can imagine right now, if you're listening to this and you're a team of one and you're like, okay, I've been desperate to hire these three roles. I have an org chart, but I have not quite the infrastructure, not quite the revenue to be able to hire these people. I'm going to go and train and I'm going to create three, you know, three team members. You then have to figure out how you're going to utilize them. you've then got to like be able to call on them when you need them.

26:49How much of that can be automated so that you are literally working as if, you know, you come in the office at nine in the morning, you say hello to everybody in your office and go off to the races. Or are you having to start afresh every day?

27:02Alicia Lyttle:Of course, it depends on what they want, but the tool that I love to do this with is Claude. And so because Claude can also create, let's say in my case for my business, landing pages, images, ads, those sort of things. So I would go to Claude and I would say, hey Claude, let's call up the team. Or you just call up the one person who runs the team. I say person, AI agent who runs a team. So for us, we have Mark. He's a product launch specialist. We name all of our AI agents. So we give them a name. Oh, you would have to. Yeah, we have to. We give them a name. We even create an AI image of what they look like.

27:35Alicia Lyttle:They have a resume. They have a job description. No, you don't. You don't create a picture of what they look like. Of course. of course, because you need to visualize them on your org chart. And then you need to also, if it's not just for you, also for your team members. So when we call on Mark, I know what your real team members or the team members that live in AI? Your real team members. So your real team members. So here's, here's the thing. When I first started to integrate AI agents into our business, I was like, all right, we're going to go use the press release bot. Nobody wants to use a press release bot.

28:05Alicia Lyttle:So everybody was like, yeah, yeah. So you're in your team meeting. Come on, everybody. We're going to use a press release bot today. So then I said, well, how do I usually integrate new members into my team? I was like, oh, I always show them the resume, the job description, what this person is going to do, what they look like the day before they're coming onto the team so we can all welcome them. Well, let's try that with an AI agent. So then it's like Franny was one of our first team members. So I show a picture of Franny, her job description, what she does, everybody laughs. And they're like, this is really an AI team member?

28:34Alicia Lyttle:I said, yeah. I'm trying not to laugh at you, but go ahead. Yeah. But you're for real with this. I'm for real. When you say you've created like this team, you really created the team. Correct. Yes, you really created the team. And they are a bunch of AI agents that are phantom team members doing real work within your company. Correct. And they help out the real team members so much. So the real team member that had to write the press release now goes to Jerry, who's the press release writer, and is trained on how press releases are written for our company. And she just says, hey, Jerry. and Jerry said, what are we writing a press release about today?

29:08Alicia Lyttle:She answers the question. He asked five questions and then a perfectly formatted press release comes out. So, you know, the way that you integrate them, the way that you integrate them in your team is so important. So that's how I integrate them into my team and it's worked. And I integrate them into our clients' teams that way. So when I'm, and of course, if you're somebody who's looking to like sell AI integration to a client, imagine you go to this client and you're like, hey, I've created your AI team for you. Here's the org chart of how they all look. Here's their job descriptions. Here's their resume.

29:39Alicia Lyttle:So your client is looking at that and saying, okay, I understand all these AI agents and who they are and what they're supposed to be doing. Now show me the next step, how I'm supposed to use them. So, you know, when I called it the press release bot, go use the press release bot. Nobody wants to use it. But now I'm like, go call on Jerry and have him write your press release. Everybody laughs and they go call on Jerry. It's an easier way to integrate it into a human team. So talk to me just a little bit about like an onboarding process, because this is something that I am absolutely like militant about.

30:10Because when you come into one of our companies, we spend a long time integrating you into the culture, showing you what the product is, talking about mission, vision, values, making sure, you know, there's even like a buddy system where somebody for a month is going to look after you to make sure that you get in, you know how all of the systems work. you have somebody that you're going to lunch with, you know, all of the things. Inevitably, in all companies, there are problems down the road. Like I'm asking you almost two questions. The first one is that I want to know, how do you do this in the most responsible way for the people, the real people that are working in your company, but also for the business?

30:47And have you encountered any issues?

30:50Alicia Lyttle:Yeah, let's start off with issues. Yeah, there were some team members who said, I'm not working with AI and they're not with us anymore. If that's not something that you want to do, I'm not going to tell you to stay and do it. But, you know, as we grow, multiply and expand our business, we are using AI and that's been our biggest multiplier is integrating and using AI in our business. So there's team members who haven't stayed and, you know, it is what it is. But that's a decision that I made as the CEO of the company, that if you're not willing to work with AI, you're not going to be as productive and as efficient as everyone else.

31:22Alicia Lyttle:And they're going to leave you behind. So you can say bye. So then flip that on its head. What does it look like for you guys integrating those team members in and making sure that everybody is working well together? Because that's what I'm asking. As you decide that more and more of these bots or these agents are coming in, how do you include them? And also like, how do you set them up for success? Because I'm sure there are those naysayers that are like, I'm not working with Mark, this weird, like, you know, press release bot. What happens then? Well, here's the thing. Everybody wants their job to be easier.

31:56Alicia Lyttle:Yes, they do. Right. And so if I say, hey, if I introduced a tool that can make your job easier, are you interested? Yes or no? Are you interested? I'm interested. Yeah. All day long. Right. And so we have a girl on our team, Ava. She's been with us nine years and she used to have to do the transcription for the sessions that I did. She had to listen to the transcripts and make notes from them. Now I'm saying, if you just put it in this AI tool right here with this one prompt, you don't ever have to do that again in your life. Are you interested? What do you think she says? She's like, sign me up.

32:24Alicia Lyttle:Hurry up. I feel like every single person that's listening at home is making a list of all the shit parts of their job that they can train somebody else to do. And that's what you just said is like the golden ticket. If you think about the parts of your business that you don't want to do, and you say, can AI do this for me? And then you're like, yes, it can. Your life will be completely different. So the one thing that I don't want to do is check my emails. Emma, I am so bad at checking my emails. Are you good at checking your emails? I am absolutely beautiful at checking my emails. I go to sleep almost every day with like a minimal amount of, you know, I'm one of those crazy people.

32:58I have to have everything like fully opened. But, you know, I'm psycho and I'm kind of up at midnight looking through emails and messages. I will tell you that you are very rare. No, no, I know this. I have a husband who has 7 ,000 emails like unopened. So like, I know that I'm not the norm.

33:14Alicia Lyttle:Yeah, you are not the norm. But the average person that has a lot of emails, they're saying to themselves, I don't want to do this. Email overload. Most people have email overload. So if I said to them, I will show you an AI agent that's going to check your email, read your email, respond to emails for you, action on anything, add things to your calendar, you're going to have this executive assistant or chief AI officer on your team or AI agent that's going to do the work for you. Are you interested? People are like, yes, I have 437 ,234 unread emails. How can you help me? And so today for me is day 93 without writing an email, like without typing an email myself.

33:53Get out of town. No, it's not.

33:55Alicia Lyttle:Yeah. So my AI agent. You haven't written an email for three months? Correct. So my AI agent. But I'm the best. Show me your email. I need to understand. Are they like grammatically correct? Are they saying what you're saying? Better than I've ever, you know, I am grammatically incorrect sometimes. I can't even fathom not writing emails. Because if you don't write the email and then such and such writes back, are you reading all the emails? Like, how are you keeping tabs? You're just, you're not in the conversation anymore. You're not the decision maker. I am the decision maker still, but the AI agent is telling me the emails that are coming in and asking me how to respond to them.

34:26Alicia Lyttle:So I have an agent. I talked to my agent on Telegram or WhatsApp. You can choose what tool you want. And my agent, his name is Maximus, by the way. And so - Love these names. Maximus. I love these names. I could have great fun with all my unused kids' names that I have on my phone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is great. I love it. So Maximus actually will tell me the emails that I have coming in and then how I want to respond to the emails. I connected him to my calendar as well. Yes. So he tells me about my flights. Like when I landed, Maximus said, oh, welcome to, you know, you're now here and I hope your flight was good.

35:00Alicia Lyttle:Don't forget this, this, and this. Here's your hotel. Here's the address. Because it added the things on my calendar when the hotel was booked. So I'm able to use AI to make my life better and more efficient. And so everybody will tell you on my team and the partners I have and that I've worked with that I am the best email responder now that I've ever been in my life. Like my entire life as a business owner, I've been in Austin for 26 years and I've always been bad on my email, but I'm not missing things anymore because my AI agent is checking them for me, telling me how to respond, what to do.

35:31Alicia Lyttle:And then sometimes I'll have my AI agent send emails as Maximus. So it'll say, I'm Maximus, Alicia's chief AI of staff. and then the answer to the email and everything that they need to know. He'll attach my headshot and my bio if it needs to be attached. So I give him the information that he needs to be the most efficient assistant for me. And my assistant who used to do that and used to help me with that, he's off doing something else that's more high value in our company right now.

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37:06So talk to me about what has to stay human, because in your experience, and you do have real life employees, like what does that even look like? Like what have you tried to augment with AI that hasn't worked?

37:18Alicia Lyttle:Yeah. So relationships, you, you know, the level of customer service that we provide and the relationships, and we do a lot of live events. I mean, we've hired more humans in this AI team, you know, the AI revolution right now we have, We've hired more people than I've ever hired in the 26 years of being an entrepreneur. Because you've become so much more productive. Correct. And so much more able to service your clients through the use of AI. And our business is growing and scaling so much. But as people want to learn AI, they want to learn it from people. They don't want to learn it from a chatbot.

37:48Alicia Lyttle:They want to learn it from people. And as we go in and upskill, we do a lot of upskilling in corporations and government agencies. They want to learn from a human. So we're going in and teaching them and training them how to upskill their whole workforce on AI. So where are the lines for you? Where are the places where you say, no, thank you. I know in my own businesses, we've been very, very clear about like, let's say the use of AI models. That's not something that we're taking advantage of right now, despite it being easier, more cost efficient, better from a time point of view. Where do you look and with everything that you know and say, you know what, like that's a, that's a line for me.

38:26Alicia Lyttle:Two answers to that question. One, I hired a compliance officer. So someone who has experience. Yes, a person. Her name is Adilsa. She's a human. We're going to need to just distinguish this stuff. But she comes from a cybersecurity background and security background. So she's looking at everything that we're doing and making sure that the things that we're doing are secure and saying yes or no, Alicia. So, you know, that level of security is there. So I tell people like, as your company is growing and scaling, hire someone who knows about what you can and cannot do so that you do have that level of security for the company.

38:59Alicia Lyttle:So even if you have these grand ideas of what you want to do, they're like, bring it back just a little because we can't do that for this client because of these different type of regulations or laws. And then I will also say that we also think about our customers first. Like the customers don't want to experience AI on these different levels. So how can we make sure that the customer experience is better that we're using AI? We have more time to do the things that matter to our customers because we're not spending all the time, I'm doing these things that are not as important to the customer.

39:30Alicia Lyttle:So now everything that's customer facing, I am more customer facing now than ever before. Yeah. My point of view is everything in business is better when you put the decision making through the lens of what is best for the customer. And so if you're always ultimately in service of your customers, you're going to make the best decisions for your business. And I actually think even as you think about AI, that's a really kind of safe way to start thinking, okay, what should we do and what shouldn't we do? So give it to me, like, as you said something, you know, that blows my mind right now, because I can never imagine not writing my own emails.

40:03But for those of us that are seeing here, we're running businesses, top three things that an entrepreneur, a founder, a CEO, a leader of the company ought to do. Sure. If email is the first one, what are the other two things that we should do to just increase our efficiency?

40:19Alicia Lyttle:Yeah, I would say marketing, because we all need to do more marketing. So whether that's social media marketing, content creation and writing. Outsource your marketing. Outsource your marketing to your AI. So you could create, I created 245 ad campaigns in just minutes with Claude Code. So the marketing that would normally take weeks to do, I'm able to do it with AI. And then I would - And you're talking about marketing for your company to your clients. Correct, correct. Or to potential prospects. Correct, and if you're doing client work as well, you can get so much done so much faster. And then the last thing that I would say is that definitely use it for prospecting.

40:53Alicia Lyttle:So as you're looking to get more clients, you're asking yourself, how can I get in front of my clients? And what are different ways? Where are my clients? You can use AI for just really great research that will tell you how to get in front of your clients. So every day, my AI chief of staff gives me 10 different ways to get in front of new clients where I live in Atlanta. These five events are going on. You should go to these events today. Here's what you can plan for the rest of your week and how to position yourself at the events. and here's five people that you need to lean into and have conversations with.

41:26Alicia Lyttle:So you can use AI to give you, to bring opportunities right to you that you might not be thinking about. And if every day it brought you 10 opportunities that you should go after and you just pick one a day, you're doing so much better in your business than not having that. So you're saying email, business to business, marketing, prospecting. Correct. Take those three things immediately and you're just going to increase your efficiency. Correct. What do you think? Tenfold? Twentyfold? It depends on how - Give me a number. It depends on how hard you are. Right? We did it sevenfold in our business.

41:57Alicia Lyttle:So it depends on how good - Really? That much? Yes, that much. Wow, that is bloody impressive. That's actually crazy to me. It's crazy. But you really have to say, I'm going to lean into AI and see how AI can help me. But if you don't actually take action on the different things that it's doing for you, then what good is it? Let's name names. I want you to get like sharp on the actual tools that you're using and what you're using them for. So I use a tool called Base44 for creating what we call super agents. And these are the agents that can talk to you on WhatsApp or Telegram. So think about it.

42:34Can I just ask you, when you say WhatsApp, Telegram, I'm English, that all makes sense to me. Why WhatsApp and Telegram? Because in America, I feel like nobody's on WhatsApp. Yeah.

42:42Alicia Lyttle:So then they use iMessage or Telegram, right? But you can use anything. You can use anything. Okay, fine. You can use anything. Base 44, you said. Yeah, base 44. And so basically what base 44 says is that your AI agent can talk to you where you communicate with it most. I'm on WhatsApp. So I use WhatsApp and Telegram, but other people use iMessenger, however you're going to communicate with your agent. And then you tell your agent what you want it to do and you connect it with the tools that you want it to have access with, right? And I always recommend testing it out first. Test it out on your personal Gmail before you would ever do anything else.

43:14Alicia Lyttle:So test it, look at the security base. 44 has some good security in it, but I like doing that. And then it can also build mobile apps. So I build apps and you can either launch them in the app store or you can put them right on your phone. So I have apps for my community on digital literacy so they can learn AI more. It's not in the app store, but I send it to them and they can save it on their phone as a mobile app that they can go to at any time to have their learning with them at all times. So it can build websites for you. So I really like that tool. I like ChatGPT for its image creation right now.

43:46Alicia Lyttle:it's crazy what ChatGPT images. They look really good. Gemini, so Google's tool is great at image creation too. Gemini Nano Banana. Manus.im is my favorite tool for presentations. I've tested every presentation, like for PowerPoints and slides, I've tested every tool and no tool can beat Manus when you know how to do it. And so when you know how to use that tool, and here's the trick. So you tell it exactly the style of the presentation that you want, and then you tell it to create the presentation as if you had paid$20 ,000 for it. So once you give it that parameter, you'll see the presentation will change so much.

44:23Sorry, I'm laughing because back in the day, you know, I was someone who charged$20 ,000 for presentation. So I would have been out of business. That's just it. My marketing days would be well and truly over. Thank God I'm out of that.

44:34Alicia Lyttle:But when you tell it that, so I tested it before and I was like, eh, not so good. And then I actually worked with a client. The client was like, do you know how much we pay for our presentations,$20 ,000 to get our presentations done. So I typed it in there, act as if you were paid$20 ,000. Boom. Such a beautiful presentation that blows people's minds away, especially like the whiteboard style presentation. So I love Manus for presentations. All of my presentations are done on Manus. Claude has released so many new products so quickly, and they're really good from everything from, you know, writing different things, content writing, to once you learn how to use Cloud Code and Cloud Cowork, it can do so much for you, creating your images, creating videos for you all in one go.

45:20Alicia Lyttle:It's really amazing. My favorite part about Cloud's new tools is they have a Chrome extension. And so the Cloud Chrome extension, you can put it, let's say you put it on your website and then you open up the Cloud Chrome extension. And so you can find this in the Chrome store. So the Google Chrome store, and it lives in your extension toolbar, but you have to be on Google Chrome. And then you're like, look at my website and tell me all the ways that I can improve my website. Act as if you're a website usability tester. And you'll actually watch the tool, click on every button on your website. It'll say your navigation button FAQ is not working.

45:55Alicia Lyttle:The colors are off. It will tell you everything that you need to know. And you will sit back and you will watch it, scroll your website and click on everything. And you're like, this is amazing. I'm going to go get some coffee, come back, or in your case, tea and come back. and you watch it do all of the work and then it's done. So, I mean, it's so crazy. I'm really interested in your point of view because there's so much chat right now, specifically when AI, I guess, advice is aimed at women, right? And a lot of it is aimed at women right now. And it's almost like this idea of like, either you learn this or you're going to get replaced, learn this, or you're going to get left behind.

46:32I'm interested what you would say to people that are really worried about AI right now. Mm-hmm.

46:37Alicia Lyttle:So first, with what you're saying about women, here's the thing about women and artificial intelligence. And LinkedIn puts out this data. So in 2026, LinkedIn put out data that says the number one job or opportunity to have right now is an AI engineer. And only 18 % of those roles are had by women, only 18%. And then an AI consultant and strategist, which is what I am. And it's like only 20%, 20-something percent of those are held by women. So traditionally, traditionally artificial intelligence roles and those who dig into artificial intelligence are men. So the thing that people say about women and AI, I would say, listen, when women get their hands on AI, they are unstoppable because there's so many things that we are multitaskers, right?

47:22Alicia Lyttle:I'm a multitasker. But if I can have my AI agents doing all this work and I can watch the multitasking going on, I'm in heaven right now. Like this is the best thing. So you're watching all the AI agents do the work. And in that case, we are so excited about what AI can do for us. So my audience is mostly women that I teach and train. I'm probably over 90 % women that I teach and train, and I've seen them do such amazing things. And they're teaching and training AI in government agencies, organizations all over. So I do love that. And then when it comes to other, just generally women and men and their fear of getting started with AI or their reluctance are not getting started right now or they don't think that it's for them, I would always ask them like, what are your bottlenecks that you're having?

48:08Alicia Lyttle:Like if you could just pick one problem to solve with AI, just one, just pick one problem to solve with AI. And when AI solves that problem for you, you're like, let me pick another problem AI can solve. And then you become to be more of an AI user the more that you use it. But we all have problems that need solving, whether it's in our personal life, our business life. We all have problems, but is there nothing about AI actually replacing jobs that concerns you? Yes, of course. You need to know about the risk out there. You need to know about, you know, the security. But do you feel like we're being educated about the risk in as much?

48:42Because listen, I am so interested in what you would never have you on the show if I didn't think that you could genuinely help people and specifically help people around their small businesses. But I want to understand like the counter argument to that. And also just for awareness to make people understand. Is there nothing about what you're doing where you're like, well, this does feel a little concerning. This is something that I'm worried about. And there are some ways that we can future-proof ourselves. Yeah, sure.

49:08Alicia Lyttle:I mean, we're teaching AI on such a level that I'm like, anybody that's a, you know, executive assistant doing what Maximus can do for me right now, I'm really worried about you. Because if we really do teach, you know, anybody who has that executive assistant that's managing their calendar and their email and their appointments and booking their tickets, they should be very worried because AI can do that role for them. And then when we start to think about the AI training that we're doing in corporations and government, there's people that don't want to lean all into AI and they are definitely going to suffer because what companies are also saying right now is we're gonna lay off the people that don't want to dive into AI, that aren't AI literate in order to hire.

49:52Alicia Lyttle:So they're still hiring people, but they're hiring people that are AI literate when they are hiring. So you think it's actually a form of protecting yourself in an organization? Definitely. And, and I tell, we teach a lot of professionals that work in organizations and government. And they said, I don't want to be replaced by AI. And this is my only way to future-proof myself is to learn AI because we're in the AI revolution and AI is not a trend. It's not going to be like, oh, I didn't learn it. Now I don't have to, because AI is gone. No, we're just going farther and farther into this AI team, you know, into this AI world.

50:24Alicia Lyttle:and so people really need to learn it. And I do understand the hesitations and I am an optimist and an AI enthusiast. And so when I teach people AI, I'm saying, well, right now, look at how you can benefit from it so that you do get ahead. Look at and see how you can benefit from it. But the big thing I tell people with the advancements coming so quickly is you better learn it and teach your family as well. So in our family, we have a family password. So if anybody ever gets a phone call and they think it's me or they think it's somebody in our family, the AI never knows our family password. So the kid or my mom can say, what's a family password?

51:04Alicia Lyttle:And that AI can never do it. So you need to understand AI enough as well in order to protect the people around you that you love because there's, you know, we see AI, of course, duplicating our voices, duplicating. So many, so many scary things. And I love that you mentioned that in your kids. How are you, and listen, you're in the, in the best place to answer this question. But how are you thinking about AI and children and how you bring them on board, how you give them enough exposure that there's an interest level and there's, you know, because kids are adaptable, right? They're going to move from whichever platform to whichever platform.

51:37But how do you do that in a safe and responsible way?

51:40Alicia Lyttle:Yeah, so we do a lot of kids' events and the kids - You do? We do. And the kids, let me just say this, they are so much faster at everything that they learn than the adults are. So we'd say, all right, This class is going to take three hours. An hour later, those kids are done. And they like the things that they're creating with AI. A really good example was I did an event for girls. And a girl in the audience, we were teaching AI images. What type of age? This was eighth grade. So they're mostly eighth grade. So we were teaching AI images. And so we say, okay, show your work now. So she came up and showed her work on her computer.

52:16Alicia Lyttle:And she said, I always wanted to be in fashion, but I can't draw. and I took drawing classes on YouTube and I couldn't draw, but I was able to tell the AI what I wanted and I was able to create this. And she showed it to the class and she's like, it's off of a game. So she created this, you know, fashion dress off of a game. And she said, I can now live my dreams of being in fashion and I don't know how to draw because I can tell the AI. So we moved on to do other things in class and I called on her, how are you doing with it? And she's like, I am so sorry. I just created my whole fashion line.

52:45Alicia Lyttle:And she was so excited. She kept going on what she had seen as her win, but, you know, they're able, kids are really able to say, all right, what have I always wanted to do? Maybe I can do something like that with AI, but they also need to know what they can and cannot do, especially for school. So when it comes to school, every school has to set their parameters. The teachers have to set their parameters. And, you know, especially in college, we're seeing that employers only want to hire college kids. You know, we're looking at 75 % of the hires have to come with some AI skills. So if the college is saying, we don't want our kids to use AI at all.

53:20Alicia Lyttle:But the employer is saying we're only hiring college graduates that are AI literate, have an AI portfolio, have done stuff in AI. Then are you doing them a disservice by not incorporating AI into the classes before they graduate? Well, a million percent. And I mean, what concerns me is, you know, as a woman in her early 40s, like you would want to have that same AI portfolio, right? You would want to understand and have enough that should you want to change your job? Should you be thinking about a pivot? You are so right. It needs to be in your back pocket. You are so right. And so that's why, you know, we need to lean into AI.

53:52Alicia Lyttle:So what I like to do when I train people, I was like, okay, open up whatever, chat GPT images, put this prompt in, make a flyer for your business. And they put the prompt in, they make a flyer for their business. Upload your picture, talk about your business, put your website in there. The flyer comes out looking amazing. And they're like, I never knew I could do that. I never understood it. That's what I think it comes down to.

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55:26So if you are just starting out and you want to, you know, really just use AI to take a little bit of the weight off, what's a starter plan that you would give someone to dip their toe in? Because I think you're right. There's some people, some of us that are using it like a search engine, some of us that are like way more progressed and have figured out a couple of apps outside of the new, like the more obvious ones. And then you have those super advanced people. But what is the best way for somebody to say, I actually just want to increase my education

55:54Alicia Lyttle:like wherever I'm at? Yeah, that's a really good question. So for someone who just wants to increase their education, they can go to ChatGPT or Claude, whatever tool you're using, open up the tool and say, you know, this is who I am. This is what my job is, or this is the business that I own. I want to be more AI literate in the next 30 days. Could you devise a plan for me to help me increase my AI literacy in the next 30 days? I'm going to come to you every single day to learn something new. Give me a challenge. Give me a prompt. I want to learn images, video. And then the AI tool will come back and say, absolutely.

56:27Alicia Lyttle:I'm so glad you asked. I will be your AI coach for the next 30 days. And I've done this every day, every single day, something new, but it's up to you to report back. Okay. I did this. Here's my result. And you'll see the AI tool grows with you. And this is where the memory function of these AI tools comes in really handy because it starts to learn about you and what you're doing. And the next lesson will either feed off of something that you did, or it'll be more relatable to you and your business or your profession. But I've seen people do this. And at the end of 30 days, some people do it longer, they are at a totally different place when they started.

57:03I'm always so impressed with you because, and again, you've been praised quite a lot for your ethical use of AI, but what does ethical AI look like to you in business most specifically?

57:13Alicia Lyttle:Sure. And it's different for every business, but when we're talking about AI and the use of AI, it's really teaching people how to use it responsibly and then teaching them what that means and what bias means as well. And the output of these different AI tools. And do I trust what AI gives me the first time? And how do I really understand where the source came from? So in teaching people these different things, they know that, okay, now AI is not a tool that I go to and it's a magical tool and I get the right answer every time. No, it's a relationship that you have to have with these tools. And then also what you put out there that's generated by AI.

57:50Alicia Lyttle:Are you saying that it's generated by AI. Right. Because it's an embarrassment to that, right? It's still right now, right? I would definitely not feel comfortable generating a bunch of questions from today's episode and passing those back to my producers and going, I did this on AI. Like that would feel to me like a cop-out somehow. Right. And so you have to think about for you. So that's for you, right? Everybody has to think about for them, how much are they willing to generate with AI and put their name on it as well. But it's also so much about your, and I'm interested to explore this with you a little bit, because to me, it's not just about the ethics of it.

58:28It's like, well, who am I and what am I doing and how do I progress and learn? And so for me, what I do is like, I like to have a starting point. I like to use AI to like elevate what's already there, right? It's like, I take what I know and my point of view and what I was thinking, and then I put it in and I'm like, make this better. Do you know what I mean? But the starting point has to be me. Like the starting point needs to come from a place of my viewpoint, my life experience and all the rest. And of course, you're absolutely right. The AI learns you and that's amazing. But I feel like I don't want to be brain dead, right?

59:07It's like, I want to be always in learning mode. And so it's like, I have to, and again, I say the same thing to my kids. I'm like, you can check any type of work you have, but have an answer first. And then pop your answer in and see how you can refine it and how you can make it better. But there has to be like a baseline.

59:23Alicia Lyttle:And then you'll feel like that work is more genuinely you than anything else. Because you can tell AI generated work and that they, if somebody hasn't put any effort into - You saw that sermon, right? That was the worst one ever, the priest. Yes. And then read the prompt at the end of the thing. I was like, girl, I'm so annoyed that that was a word. I get emails sometimes that says, this is the perfect email to send Alicia a poll in. And you're like, oh my God, at least delete that. But then I was like, well, at least your email was organized really well. And I understand that. Well, you would see the bright side of it.

59:57But I think the ethical thing is important. And again, laying claim to what you're allowing AI to do for you, I think is an important part. If I was sending emails out that were auto-generated, I would say that. mostly just to cover my tracks and go something fucking weird is in there. But I think that there's a part of that that we've got to learn the etiquette around AI and we've got to learn what our comfort levels are. And then we have to, you know, it's almost like share that information so that there's a baseline of understanding of what is AI, what is real, what is you, what is me, and what are we.

1:00:33That's right.

1:00:33Alicia Lyttle:And a lot of times when my AI twin generates things for me, she's like, hey, this is Alicia's AI avatar. She's off doing something else today. So we incorporate that into the message even and people respect that, oh, it's coming from, you know, it's her AI twin. It's not actually her, you know, that's doing something like that. So when it comes to money and revenue, like what does that look like? When you start to talk to AI about increasing revenue and again, if you were starting from nothing, that would be an absolute like must. Right. So give me the, like, what would be the questions and what are the ways that you've actually seen revenue increases?

1:01:09is like forget about the time and the staffing. Like I'm interested to understand like how AI can actually help you make money.

1:01:16Alicia Lyttle:So I went to AI and a couple of years ago, and I said, this is what I'm doing. Where is my opportunity? What am I not seeing? What am I missing? And it's saying you're teaching in corporations, you're teaching in government. Where's your certification training the trainers? You can't multiply yourself. You can't go off and teach all these places. Why aren't you training other people? And I'm like, why am I not training other people. And then it gave me some projections on if I could do that. And so it helped me to - And you trusted those projections? Absolutely. I've exceeded those projections.

1:01:47Alicia Lyttle:And so sometimes you can't see what's right in front of you. You can't see that. And so I was like, well, let me try this because what do I have to lose? Absolutely nothing. So you started this phase of your career based on something AI told you to do? Absolutely. Absolutely. That time that I spent with ChatGPT. That was literally a game changer. Yeah, it was literally a game changer for me because one of the biggest questions that I asked ChatGPT, I said, you are free right now. And so many people have gotten on you faster than they've gotten on any other tool in history. What's the projection looking like for the next few years of people that are just going to want to know how to use you?

1:02:27Alicia Lyttle:I wasn't even thinking about the tools that we're going to come after, but people who want to use you. And it was like, well, every corporation, every agency is going to need to upskill its workforce on artificial intelligence. So I would go all in on everything AI. And that's one of our things that we say, all in with AI. It's one of our mantras for our business. And so I had to have that hard meeting with my team that says we are a digital marketing agency before that. I said, we are not going to be a digital marketing agency anymore. So first of all, when I had the team meeting, everybody thought they were going to get fired because I spent two weeks with ChachiPT.

1:03:03Alicia Lyttle:But I'm like, no, we're just... She's replacing us. We're about to become a bunch of agents with weird names. Right? I was like, no, we're just going to go all in with AI because I believe, and ChachiPT told me that this is where the world is going. And it also said that we're in the beginning of a revolution. I was like, watch, this is going to be the start of the AI revolution. and then it taught me about the history of revolutions and how things change. Jobs will be lost, more jobs will be gained and it just gave me a big overview of that. And so we pivoted our company and we went from a company, we used to be called monetized marketing and now we're AI innovation and we made that pivot, which was the best decision I ever made in business.

1:03:42Wow, good for you. Thank you. I'm so, so happy for you. I'm so glad to see that this is working out so well for you. I mean, honestly, I watch you online, I binge your content. I feel like I learned so, so much from you. It's unbelievable. Thank you. But you happen to have an incredible, not just teaching style, but I think more than that, like a way of speaking so that the information is like digestible and applicable immediately. And I think there's so much that people, that we all have to learn, right? But you do it in a way that's just really easy. And I can see why you've been so successful beyond like actually understanding AI.

1:04:19You're just, you have to be great in business. Is there something right now when you think about the future for both yourself and for your company, what does that look like for you? What are you aspiring to next?

1:04:31Alicia Lyttle:I'm really aspiring to train more people and to make sure that I can teach as many people as possible to cash in on the AI revolution. So when you see an opportunity in the time of the opportunity, like let's go all in. So where I see our company going is growing so much bigger with our certification. So we're an accredited organization. We got accredited. Our courses are accredited. So I'm leaning all into the certification because with certifications and a community of people that help each other, those people are rising to such great levels. They're outdoing me in their successes and their success stories.

1:05:07Alicia Lyttle:You know, my mission and vision is just to really build communities of amazing AI enthusiasts who are out there teaching and training in the world and helping people to not get left behind in the AI revolution and to take everything that they learn and leverage it. We train in a way that we call dramatic demonstration. So if I can show you how I do something and you're like, oh my gosh, that's amazing. And then you can do it and you're like, I'm amazing. Right? And now we've got you excited about it. And I know that that can change your life and change your business and change your trajectory.

1:05:40Alicia Lyttle:So we're really excited about building a company that really looks at how we can train as many people as possible and then train those people to go off and train as many people as they can. If you fast forward, not too far into the future, but take me five years into the future, like what does this all look like? I used to say when I got asked this question, it all looks like we are doing less work. Our 40 hour work week is now 10 and we're watching our AI agents doing all the work. But now that's already happening. So I was like, hmm, what I said five years was gonna look like is already happening right now.

1:06:15Alicia Lyttle:I think it's just going to happen at a more intense level. So the work that we're doing right now, a lot of that work is going to be so automated and so AI. We already see people with humanoids in their house folding their laundry and doing the things for them. Yes, I do have a robot that vacuums my floors. And I lean into technology as much as possible, but we're going to be in a place where AI isn't, it already isn't so much that we do, but in everything that we do from our homes to our personal lives, to our families, to our business and our jobs. And so, yeah, I think we're going to be watching the AI agents that are going to be doing all the work.

1:06:58Alicia Lyttle:Be like, you could do better. Do it again. You could literally be doing better. I think I know the answer to this. Worried, not worried. Both. Fair. Fair enough. All right. I'm going to take you to some rapid fire. Okay. First question. All right. What's a tool you were skeptical of six months ago that you now use every day? Clawed code. Really? Yeah. It's the one that we use the most. Yeah. Yeah. No doubt. What's a tool everyone is hyping that you don't actually use? Open claw. Really? Yes. And why not? Just because of the security concerns right now around open claw and I can get Claude Code and other tools like Manus to do what OpenClaude does.

1:07:36Alicia Lyttle:And my clients, most of my clients don't want to be anywhere near that. Who is the voice that you're listening to for news and for information? I'm listening to many voices for news and information. I would say that for AI news, I love Matt Wolf. So I watch him on YouTube for his AI news. For information, I get information every day from my AI agents from multiple sources. And then one of the things that we did on our team was we hired one person who every morning at 9am tells the whole team what's happened in the past 24 hours. Person, person? A human person, yes. Just checking, just checking.

1:08:14All right, the last question that I like to ask absolutely everybody, is there a book that changed your life?

1:08:19Alicia Lyttle:When I was younger, I read The Babysitter's Club and this changed my life because it started my entrepreneurship journey. So inside the Babysitter's Club, there was a chapter where the kids made a flyer and they started their first business. And it was for pet sitting and for house sitting, pet sitting, walking and house sitting. And me and my sister made the same flyer. It was in the sixth grade and we made it out of crayons and put it in all of our neighbor's mailboxes. And our neighbor hired us that weekend to watch his house and babysit his dog and pet sit. And that book changed my life because that's the book that turned me into an entrepreneur was the Babysitter's club.

1:08:55That is unreal. I love that. And so an entrepreneur was born. Congratulations. I'm so happy for you for all of your success. Well done to you. Thanks, Alicia. Amazing. You're so great.

1:09:09If you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite listening platform. While you're there, give us a review and a five-star rating and share an episode you loved with a friend. We'll be so grateful. Aspire with Emma Greed is presented by Odyssey. I'm your host, Emma Greed. Our executive producers are Ashley McShan, Derek Brown and me. Executive producers from Odyssey are Asha Saluja and Leah Reese-Dennis. Producer KK Sublime. Stephen Key is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Bill Shultz. Angela Peluso is our booker. Original music by Charles Black. Video production by Phil Sweetek and Carlos Delgado.

1:09:48Social media by Olivia Homan, Catherine Bale. Special thanks to Brittany Smith, Sydney Ford, my teams at The Lead Company and WME, Josephina Francis, Hilary Schuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchinson-Rose, Tim Meikle, Evan Cox, Kurt Courtney, Andrew Steele, Sean Cherry, and Lauren Vieira. If you have questions for me, you can DM me at aspirewithemagreed. Greed is spelled G-R-E-D-E. That's aspire, A-S-P-I-R-E, with Emma Greed. Or you can submit a question to me on my website, emagreed.me.

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