126 | Day to day AI efficiencies - Maximize AI benefits in emails, docs & more with Nancy Bain

0:00Hello and welcome to another live episode of the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, grow your business, and advance your career, you know your business, but once I'll explain, you'll understand. We cover every single week a very practical way use case of AI, like how to do business strategy, data analytics, sales lead nurturing, creating presentations, identifying your ICP, creating marketing content, and so on and so forth. Many amazing AI use cases. And we do all of those in search of business efficiencies, right?

0:50That's the whole point. How do we get more time? How do things better and faster? But the reality is that this is not what we do in our day-to-day. Some of us do, but on the day-to-day, we all do email. We all do look for documents and try to make sense out of them, either documents that we have in our drives or documents that get sent to us. We all create Excel files and spreadsheets and so on. So on our day-to-day, a lot of the stuff that we do is our business day-to-day. And we've never talked in this show before about how you actually use A to get amazing efficiencies in the day-to-day stuff, the stuff that you literally just do regardless of your position, your industry, your expertise.

1:45We all do these things. We all write emails. We all search for documents. We all do spreadsheets. We do all of these things. The reality is today with Copilot in Microsoft and Gemini in Google, you can do amazing stuff that is going to save you a lot of time. Now to help us through the process, we have today with us Nancy Bain. Nancy, if you missed her previous episode. First of all, she has been the co-founder and the CEO of Supernova Media HQ. So for the past 15 years, she's been a solopreneur. And as such, she developed every single system, process, and method to save time. And she's literally a time and efficiency guru.

2:29I've never met anybody that is so good at her as finding little systems and processes to save her personal time and obviously her client's time in the same process. And she's going to share with us today exactly how you can do what I said, how you can save time and get more efficiencies on the stuff that we all spend a lot of time on every single day. At the end, we have a little bonus thing. So don't leave us before the end. We have something really cool to share with you. But with that, I want to thank all of you for joining us live, whether you're with us on LinkedIn or whether you're with us here on the Zoom.

3:09If you are interested in asking questions, just write them in the chat. Feel free right now to introduce yourself, say where you are, where you're from, give people your LinkedIn profile so they can find you and connect with you. And with that, I'm very excited to welcome Nancy Bain to the show. Nancy, welcome to Leveraging AI.

3:33In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host, Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

4:13Hi, everybody. It's great to be here. And I chuckled, Isar, when you were listing the really creative use cases for AI. When I first started using ChatGPT, it was about a year and a half ago, and I spent probably the first three months training ChatGPT to sound like me. And I've since discovered that it's absolutely the weakest use case. I want to free up my time so that I can write like me. I don't want AI to write like me. I want to write like me. And I want to stay within my zone of genius. And so for me, that meant streamlining the mundane and routine tasks that were sucking the energy out of my life and eating up my time.

5:13And so I did a bit of research because I was curious how many other professionals were in my situation where admin was their biggest time suck and how much time were people actually spending on admin and I learned that for the average professional they are spending 28 percent of their time their time each day managing their email and I could absolutely identify and relate with that further studies show that an additional 20 percent of your day is spent looking for files so there's half your day gone and for solopreneurs if you're anything like me you get up and you start your day, you've got your to-do list and so many things or so often rather things get pushed to tomorrow.

6:15So you're lying in bed at night and you're thinking about all of the tasks that you didn't accomplish and you've pushed to tomorrow. And so getting a handle on your admin will give you more time to stay in your lane, stay in your zone of genius and cross more things off your list. I love, I've been a Google workspace user my entire career. That's before some of you were born and having Gemini built into the apps that I use every day is an absolute game changer. And humans say game changer too, okay? But not just AI, like it's a game changer and I don't care that it's a commonly used AI term. They got it from me and I've been using it for a long time when I get really excited.

7:13So Gemini, and I think that people, I write a lot about Gemini and the integration into Google Workspace. And I think that there's a common misconception because often people compare it, Gemini, the standalone app to ChatGPT, and they just feel that it doesn't measure up. And I'm the first one to agree as a standalone app for completing the tasks that you mentioned at the beginning of the show I for creative uses I use chat GPT for admin automation I use Gemini so I I honestly I can't live without either at this point and and I use them in tandem So I'd like to, I think most people actually aren't getting that Gemini lives within the Google Workspace apps.

8:25So you don't go to the Gemini, google.gemini.com link. You go to your Gmail and you activate Gemini within your Gmail. and it's okay. I just want to pause you for one second. For those of you who are listening or watching or are with us live, however you're consuming this content, for the people in the Microsoft universe, you have the same exact thing in the Microsoft world with Microsoft Copilot, where you can go to Copilot, which used to be Bing, which used to be whatever they had it before, but now there's like a Copilot website and a Copilot app that you can run. It's not what we're talking about.

9:06We're talking about Copilot within the Microsoft Office tools, whether it's Excel or Outlook and so on and Word. And so the beauty of these tools, they're custom tailored to the specific application they're running in. So you cannot use Copilot or Gemini, Google Sheets or Excel to write you your next blog post. It's just not going to work, but it will do some really cool stuff within the environment that it's in. And from everything Nancy showed me, and we're going to share with you all of those use cases in a minute, you will see that if you learn to use those, it becomes an extension of that tool.

9:46It actually becomes to an extent your interface to that tool. So instead of using the tool the way we used to use it, you use it through the Copilot or the Gemini interface, which gives you superpowers within the tool itself, which I find absolutely amazing and again to be completely honest i've tested it a little bit i'm like yeah whatever and i never actually played with it until nancy showed me the stuff that she's doing and now i'm telling you i'm going to do the same and you will probably do the same whether it's on copilot or on gemini so how about if i share my screen yeah let's jump right in and for those who are just listening we're going to explain everything that's on the screen so you're not going to miss anything.

10:29Okay. And I'll be sure to do that because I'm excited to show you my BFF. Okay. So this is Gemini, the standalone app. Okay. Gemini.google.com backslash app. And from the conversations that I've been having on LinkedIn, what I can gather is that most people are coming here to use Gemini or to try Gemini. And I think this is why they're feeling underwhelmed. However, you can supercharge another AI term, your Gemini experience here by enabling extensions. And you do that via the admin panel. So what I mean by that is now I'm in this standalone app and I can use the at symbol here. One second here, my keyboard working.

11:38Yeah, I can use the at symbol here to call my Gmail, to call Google Docs, to call Google Drive. It can, while I'm in the standalone app, it can search and reference my Gmail files. It can search and reference my docs. And it can search and reference my drive. That's huge because, as I mentioned earlier, if you're 20 % of the average professional's time is spent searching for files, Well, now you can have Gemini take care of that for you by enabling the extension within the app. But I rarely go here in favor of the side panel where Gemini is integrated within my apps. Let's go over and have a look at my inbox here.

12:34I got so many windows going on here. Okay, so there we go. Now it's at the bottom and I can see better. So here's my inbox. Don't be nosy and scan what my correspondence is. That's not what this is about. And here's how you enable and disable Gemini with this icon up here. You're going to note that there are some, I'm going to move that again. There are some pre-formatted prompts here. You can ask, just click the button here and have Gemini scan your unread emails. I usually say, show my unread email. I'll click that prompt. Show my unread emails from this week and list action items. I generally don't like to include, have it work while we're on the show, because sometimes it takes a little while.

13:32But that is a way to leverage the pre-formatted task prompts that are already there. You can see that it has referenced six source files. And you can have a look at each of those source files if you want to. you can click this button and it will insert it into a an email i think you'll see that soon you'll be able to insert this within a task and this will be great for collaboration i'll be able it'll come we're we're using this insert button i'll have a choice where i can insert it into a task and then tag one of the team you can those of you who are for those of just listening to the podcast, just a few things about what we're talking about.

14:23So on the top right corner of every Google tool, and by the way, same thing in the Microsoft universe, just with a different icon, you will find the Gemini icon, which looks like a ninja star or something. I don't exactly know how to describe it. It looks like a little star. It's in the top right corner of your bar. And if you click on that, it opens a bar, like a whole section on the right of the screen, where you can type a prompt. One of the default prompts that shows in there is show me my unread emails. But what Nancy added is show me my unread emails who has action items. And it literally listed a bullet point list of the action items coming from different emails.

15:00And then it's showing her underneath that the links of the email. So you can click instead of searching through your entire inbox. And if you're like me, you have, I don't know, 7 ,000 emails in your inbox or more. And then with one sentence, It finds you everything from the past week, from the past month, from whatever you want that has action items in it listed. And you can see the actual emails and jump to them without having to search for them. To me, that's pure magic. And the other button that Nancy mentioned is at the bottom of it, next to where the prompt is, there's a few buttons that you have.

15:31One of them is a copy if you want to copy the information. But the other is an arrow pointing left, which is basically pointing back to your inbox. And if you click on that, it opens a new email copying the action items or copying whatever the outcome was from what's on the menu. And you'll see in other examples, that's extremely useful because with one click, you can get a response, a reply, an email that's going out for somebody, and so on, without having to search and summarize and things like that. thank you for celebrating that all over again because it's not it's just like the sexiest thing you've ever seen i'm telling you so again you can click here to insert you can click here to copy and take it to a doc and you can retry with google search so you also have search capabilities within your gmail it's absolutely brilliant and there you can have it search your drive files and Isara is going to show you that example.

16:34But I just want to show you a couple of other ways that I've been embracing digital minimalism and keeping my distractions to a minimum. I have - I want to pause just for one second before you continue, Nancy. There's a question from Shannon on LinkedIn. She's asking if you're paying extra for these features. Yep. The Google Workspace is costing$15.80 a month. And then I have the Gemini add-on, which is$20 a month. So these capabilities and tools are under$40 a month. It's some of the best money that I spent. I pay my subscription annually because, and I get excited about it. It's some of the money that I just don't.

17:25It's like my Canvas subscription. I don't mind paying that. I feel good every time I pay that$100 because it's my top five tools. I think it's having a personal assistant for$20 a month. Absolutely. A very solid, consistent, always there, 24-7 personal assistant for$20 a month. It's a no-brainer. Exactly. That's how I feel. So back to digital minimalism and maintaining your focus. What I'm loving that Google is doing now, and this isn't necessarily a Gemini feature, is that if you note here, as I hover over some of these emails, I get an automatic opportunity to unsubscribe. I signed up for so many newsletters.

18:18I've been in business, again, since before some of you were born. And I've been signing up to newsletters since then. And so it was time to call some of these subscriptions that were no longer serving me. And if you've noticed, don't judge me, where's the scary number? 17 ,955 emails in there. Now, again, you know, don't judge me. My research tells me that the average professional, and I felt like I was in good company, and I guess I'm the average professional because 17 ,000 is an average number for professionals to have inside of their inbox. Back to digital minimalism, again, I'm totally digging the unsubscribe feature.

19:11However, there are some newsletters that I just absolutely can't live without. And see what I did there? I had already put Gemini to work on this email previously, and it remembered it. So I used the three dots at the top to clear the history. For my newsletters that I absolutely can't live without, I use the summarized email and I don't say a more detailed, I say provide a brief. Thank you very much. Bullet point summary. Okay. And then it will help me stay informed for all the latest and greatest and in for my newsletters. And so I absolutely love it for that. Now again, quick recap, those of you who don't know the unsubscribe button, it's obviously an AI feature in the back end that just shows on the subject line in Google.

20:16And literally, if you hover over it, if it knows it's a newsletter, it will give you an unsubscribe button right on the subject line. You can click on that and then you have to open and look for the unsubscribe link and click on that and feel like why you want to, like all of that goes away. You literally click on one button goes away. But the flip side was, here's a long email. By the way, it doesn't have to be a newsletter, just a long email from somebody. And in the side, you say, summarize this for me in bullet points. And instead of reading 10 paragraphs, you have three bullet points of the important things from that email.

20:48And then you can decide whether you want to read the details or not, whether it's a newsletter or a long email from somebody. It just magically summarizes it for you within your email environment, right? You don't have to go anywhere else. And so then you can take that and insert it into a Gmail. And I'm looking forward to the time when you can insert it into a task and tag your team. You can insert it into a doc and easily save it to your drive that you can have Gemini reference later. And it's just beautiful. So that is, I want you to show them the example that you had saved, Isar, where you had asked it to provide a summary of all correspondence with a particular person and also have it reference relevant drive files.

21:48Now that's huge because so it's gone through all past correspondence here. And it has also down in the sources, you'll see at the bottom of the response there from Gemini, you'll see that there are three sources. So it has referenced a drive file, you could click that to open it if you wanted to. And it has referenced two emails there. So again, at the bottom, you can click that little funny left arrow button to insert that into an email. That would be a great way to follow up with Clay and bring him up to speed or re-engage him, bring him up to speed where you folks had left off, easily copy that to a document to save to your drive.

22:37And again, you can bring a Google search into the equation with the little magnifying icon. It's a brilliant story about this very particular use case. And I got to jump in and I apologize for stopping you because this is so brilliant. Because the three things that this references is two emails and a proposal that I've written. The reality is I haven't sent this person that proposal. There's no email showing that proposal. I shared the file with him from Google Drive because it's a joint proposal. We both written together for a joint client of ours. So it's not, if I would have searched for this proposal in the regular search button, in the regular search bar on top of Gmail, it wouldn't have found it.

23:28And I know that because I met him yesterday at the gym and he asked me, is, okay, where's the proposal we're working on? I said, I send it to you. I said, nothing in my inbox. I'm like, that can't be. I know I sent it. And then I went here and looked for me where I sent it and it's not there. And I'm like, how can that be? I remember sending this to you. And what I didn't remember is that I shared it with him. I didn't send it to him. And that doesn't show in your inbox. By the way, that's one of the biggest bugs in the Google environment that when you share a document with somebody and you write them a note, it doesn't show us as a sent item in Gmail, which it should because it's actually sending them something on your behalf.

24:06But I'm putting that gripe aside for a second. But the fact that this finds it in five seconds, so a quick summary of everything we talked about across Stephen emails, plus it finds the document that I shared with him that doesn't appear anywhere in Gmail is absolutely magical because now I can open it and see it and reference it and do whatever I want to do and all the things that Nancy said. It's an extremely powerful feature. i have a hot tip for you let's go have the screen yeah let me have the screen back i'll stop sharing i'm gonna solve a pain point for you right now see this little button we still don't see your screen so no oh okay i'm just too excited share desktop share now can you see my screen yes okay see this button right here yes this is called mail track and it's free okay and it's free yep it's free within google and if you install this it will let you know when somebody's read that note to your shared file you're welcome so what is it called for the listeners who are not watching this it's called mail track and i love it so those of you again who just listening it's an extension that she installed that then appears next to the gemini logo on the top right bar and then you can click on that and it will tell you probably who opened and read every email including the shared stuff from the back end okay very cool that's right yeah you're welcome i know I'm just here solving problems.

25:49Okay, so I feel like we've had we've given a good overview of the capabilities within Gmail, leveraging Gemini. Let's go have a look at sheets. Okay. If you're anything like me, bookkeeping, spreadsheets, as a solopreneur, this is one of the tasks that I procrastinate. As a solopreneur, you wear a whole bunch of hats. My finance hat fits the worst. I learned a thing or two about how to wrangle data last year, and I'm leveraging Python now to gain insights into my data that I wasn't able to see before. But it was just a year and a half ago that if you said Excel to me, my eyes would roll back in my head.

26:50And within Sheets, you are able to create this sheet I created with a prompt. Okay. So what this is a CRM example, I did a poll on my LinkedIn last week or the week before. And I was asking solopreneurs what CRM they were using. And a good half of them weren't using a CRM. And I wasn't surprised by this. There's a lot of bootstrapped solopreneurs out there and subscriptions for things can get quite expensive. And not to mention the learning curve involved. For many years, I was managing my CRM within Google Sheets. And it is a very effective, cost efficient way to do that because you're already paying for the tools.

27:49It's a little labor intensive, certainly before Gemini came around, and you could prompt the format and the template. But in fairness, this spreadsheet looks pretty robust. And it is. And although I'm not a fan of copy and paste prompts, I do. Is my desktop on? no although I'm not a fan of copy and paste prompts I did go to my chat gpt desktop app which is always running and I usually speak I usually push my microphone button I talk to chat gpt more than I talk to anybody else in my life and I had chat gpt help me draft the prompt for this spreadsheet. It looks something like this. Create a CRM spreadsheet to manage my client interactions and sales pipeline.

28:54Include columns for email, phone number, last date contacted, deal value, all the good stuff. So this is what is possible. By the way, for those of you, again, who are just listening to this, it's a really beautiful version of an Excel file with colorful drop-down menu and color coding and all the stuff that you have in a CRM that was created magically by this prompt. All the columns, all the drop-downs, all the aggregations and filtering capabilities, including notes for each client, including last date contacted, including all of that was created by this prompt that Nancy didn't create because Chachupiti created the prompt based on Nancy's request.

29:41And so it's really amazing how you can use different tools together to create something that is really useful on the day to day. I do have, though, a question for you. Do you manually or you found a way to connect this to Gmail or other Google tools? So how do I keep my updated? Yes, I can't see you. I can't see you anymore, by the way. I've pushed something that has... Stop sharing the screen, and then I think you'll be able to find me. Okay. I can stop sharing the screen. I found you. You're back. Okay, good. Promise you'll still hear. So that's another level of automation, okay? And there are two ways to accomplish that, and one is more simplified than the other.

30:37The first is using Zapier. So I have a bunch of automation set up in my inbox. If when something happens that it triggers an automation with Zapier, but a more simple way to manage that is using if this, then that tool I F T T. And so I'm going to write a tutorial about that. it's half built right now on how I'm using if this then that to do exactly this to keep my CRM up to date so you can look forward to that but that is next level automation but don't be afraid a lot Zapier can be a bit of the learning curve if this then that so much more simple and so I encourage you even in advance of seeing a tutorial from me to go check out.

31:34So here's the spreadsheet. Again, we can insert that. We can copy it. We can ask it to regenerate. You know that this regenerate option wasn't there in Gmail. I really want them to put that there. I sent them a note and I don't think they've got it yet, but they're quite busy over there. So you can ask it to regenerate here and you can also again have it search the web i quick question from the chat on zoom the drop-down menus that you have so you have three drop-down menus in your crm one is lead source the other is status and the third is cell pipeline stage the question is did you ask in the prompt to create it or it did it on its own so here's the prompt it's back here and and give you the opportunity to read the prompt.

32:27Create a CRM spreadsheet to manage client interactions and sales pipeline. Include columns for client name, email, phone number, company, lead source, status, last contacted date, next follow-up date, deal value, sales pipeline stage, notes. Now, again, this is the beauty of working with ChatGPT to create this because I know I'd have thought of half of them. Okay. Maybe a third. And so that's why I encourage you to, and again, I love voice for that. I just go over to my ChatGPT desktop app and I click the microphone icon and I just ramble exactly the way that I'm rambling to you right now. And it's able to make sense of it all.

33:24If you're able to articulate, and I'm confident that you are with your voice, Chachapiti will help you create these prompts for your sheets. So to answer the question, it created the drop-down menus on its own. It did. Yeah. Actually, no, because you'll notice here under sales pipeline, it says closed negotiation and initial contact. And I've asked for that. Initial contact, negotiation, closed, and won. Okay. So again, that's chat TPT work. Yeah. But what I'm saying is you did not define it to create it as a drop-down menu. It thought about that on its own. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome.

34:12You just told us what options should be in there. Exactly. Now, as an example, in getting ready for this show today, I was putting in the most simplified prompts that I could think of. And for this exercise, I said, create a CRM to help me manage my contacts. And you know what? It looked so close to this, it wasn't even funny. Really, your prompts don't need to be as robust as the one that we copied and pasted from Chad GPT. I really encourage you to play around with it. Enter a simple prompt and maybe you're satisfied with that. Oh, there's one more thing that's missing from Gemini in all of my apps, and I want to speak to it.