212 | AI tools conquer busywork: Claude & Gemini unify company data, ChatGPT agents execute tasks with human-in-the-loop accuracy. A step by step guide with Isar Meitis

0:00Hello and welcome to the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and I've got a really fun and interesting episode for you today. As you probably know, I'm the CEO of two companies. One company is called Multiply, spelled with AI in the end, and that's where I provide consulting and education services about AI implementations to many different companies around the world, large and small, multiple industries, and that's most of what you know that I do. The other company is a software company that is still in stealth mode that is called Databreeze that is using AI to completely revolutionize and replace the world of data entry across multiple aspects of the business.

0:39So between these two companies, I'm really, really, really busy. And the thing that enables me to do all the things that I do is a combination of two things, lots of AI tools and automations, and my amazing assistant Joyce, that without her, I couldn't do everything that I'm doing. Now, there's a lot of conversation right now about how AI can be your personal assistant or how it will replace your personal assistant. And I wanted to put that to the test. I wanted to see, can I actually use AI to do some of the things that Joyce is doing for me? Now, the reality is my plan is not to replace Joyce by any means.

1:12Like I said, I cannot run my businesses without her. But my goal is to take some of the tedious tasks that Joyce is doing right now so she can take care of much bigger and more important tasks that actually allows us to grow the business. Now, you may not be a CEO or you may not even be a manager, and yet I'm sure you have a lot of tedious things that you need to do as part of your job, things that you don't like doing, and you may not even have an assistant to do some of it for you, but this episode will help you get a great understanding of what AI can and cannot do as of right now, what is it good at, what tools it can connect to, what kind of insights and benefits and processes it can do effectively, and which ones it does not and requires some additional human attention.

1:53So I think you will find this episode very practical and very helpful. And so let's dive right in. In 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.

2:42The use case that we're going to look into is a combination of two things. One is managing your calendar and your activities, and the other is booking travel when relevant. As somebody who delivers training to businesses on a regular basis and speaks on different conferences on many other cases, I get to travel a lot. The next few months after the summer are always a really busy time for anybody who deals with public speaking. And combined on top of that the fact that everybody wants to get AI training right now, I have many things coming up on my calendar. And so I wanted to figure out if AI can help me map all the different activities that I have planned moving forward and then help me book the travel for all the different things that I need to travel to.

3:24Again, your use case might be different, but still has logistics of day-to-day business, whether it's tracking emails, following up with different clients, doing research. It doesn't matter. There's these tedious tasks that we need to do regularly. So what I did in this particular use case, I broke it down into two different steps. Step number one was how do I map with AI all my different obligations? And step two is what travel requirements do I have and what are my best options when it comes to booking this travel? So let's start with the first one of mapping all my obligations. One of the problems that we have as business people, and that's true for everyone, is that this data resides across multiple different aspects of the business.

4:02I've got my CRM, I've got my emails, I've got my calendar, and I've got the proposals that in my case are in a Google Drive, but in your case may be wherever they live. whether on a SharePoint drive, your CRM, your proposal management tool, etc. And so I wanted to put to the test how good these tools are in A, researching all these different channels, and B, in actually aggregating all this information together into a cohesive, unified data source that I can look at to see everything that I have planned. And so for the first step of mapping all my obligations, I use Claude and Gemini with the same exact prompts in order to see what kind of information they can get.

4:40So let's start with Gemini. for those of you who are driving then i'm going to share with you everything that is on the screen for those of you who want to see exactly what i was doing you can click on the link in the show notes and go and watch this on our youtube channel but since this is mostly going to be large language models with text i'm just going to read to you what's on the screen so if you're driving walking your dog and doing whatever it is that you're doing walking on a treadmill you'll be able to follow along with no problem so the prompt i use for gemini is you are an expert personal assistant who specializes in managing senior executives, commitments, and for travel.

5:12I am a regular speaker and an AI educator, and I have multiple commitments in the next few months for speaking gigs and company-specific workshops, as well as just conferences that I'm attending. I would like you to go through my inbox looking for any information related to speaking opportunities workshops or courses. I would also like you to review the entire opportunities folder on my Google's Drive and look for proposals for such engagements. And then I would like you to go through my calendar for the next few months and look for full day events and meetings on relevant topics. Once you have all this information, please compile the following output in a table with five columns.

5:49Date range, company and organization name, location, name of the event or description of the workshop, links to the sources in parentheses where you found the information. Please do a diligent job, review every document, every email, and every calendar meeting in detail, and create a comprehensive list of upcoming events without missing a single one. Now, the reason I decided to do this first and foremost in Gemini, because Gemini is a Google tool, and I live in the Google universe, and Gemini, by default, without me having to set up anything, has access to Google Drive, Gmail, and my Google Calendar, so I didn't have to do any setup in order to make this work.

6:29And the result was actually surprisingly good. So if you did not know that Gemini has access to your entire Google universe, now you know. You heard me say several times on this podcast how much I dislike the concept that there is Gemini for Google Sheets, Gemini for Google Drive, Gemini for Outlook, and then the general Gemini and how I think they should be unified. And Google are actually making great strides in the right direction. Very different, by the way, than Copilot that still is very far behind when it comes to integrating all that information. I'm not saying that Google is perfect. I'm saying on this particular topic, now they're pretty far ahead.

7:01So really, I didn't have to do any setup in advance. And I got a very solid table. The table actually has the date range of the travel arrangements that I have, a list of companies and organizations that I need to travel to, the location of the activity, the name of the event or the description, and the links to the different activities. So as a face value, it did a pretty good job. It consolidated information from three very different, distinct sources, from my emails, from my calendar, and from the proposals that I've written. And it combined it all into a great table that is better than information I have in my CRM, which is actually really, really cool.

7:37The two main issues that I saw, one that it missed a few events, and the other is the links, don't actually lead to the source information, but instead it leads to like the websites of the companies I'm going to be meeting with, which is not exactly what I wanted. The reason I wanted the links is I wanted the links there because it will allow me to easily verify the information that it found. If I can click on the link to see the proposal or the email, I can see the exact dates. I can see the location. I can see everything. And right now I will still have to do this manually. And so my follow-up prompt was, this is a good start, but you missed a few things.

8:09As an example, on October 6th to 8th, there's a meeting on the calendar for speaking at name of conference, which I'm not going to mention, which means you missed it. I would like you to review the entire information again and look for every relevant meeting, email, or proposal. Do not miss anything. Also, please add another column to the table that would be remote slash in-person, and the value in the cell should be either remote or in-person or unknown. The goal will be to understand where I need to plan travel and when I just need to prepare. So then it created a new table and it gave me additional information.

8:45It added that extra column and it also found a few other events, but it did not include the links in this particular case. So I gave it the following prompt. The links in the first table are not actual documents or emails. Is there a way to link? Is there a way for you to link into these assets? So then it recreated the table and it gave me links. In some of these cases, these links are actually okay. So if I click on the proposal, it actually opens the relevant proposal that I have created, which is awesome. But if I click on the email thread, it takes me absolutely nowhere. It just goes to a page that doesn't exist.

9:19So the deep linking into the actual event is still not something it can do. And then I ask it for an additional workshop that was missing. I ask it to add it. And I also asked it to change one of the things from a in-person to an online workshop, because it was a recent change that happened, which it may have been confused about because there's contradicting information and that was just a recent change. So then it created the final table in which I can see all my upcoming obligations. There are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 different things that are coming up that I need to either do in person or online in the next three months.

9:56Most of them are company specific training and some of them are just speaking opportunities. That is obviously a lot and most of them are in person. So then I said, okay, let's test the same exact thing with Claude. So in Claude, the process is a little different. Claude is obviously not a Google product. So you need to set up those connectors and you actually do this in a very simple way. There's a section to add and connect different tools and you get to it by clicking on this button next to the plus sign inside your prompt box. If you click on that, yours is going to show a lot less things that mine does, but you can see here that it has extended thinking as a built-in option.

10:34It has web search as an option. And then it has Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Calendar as options that you can turn on. If you turn them on for the first time, it will ask you to log in to your Google account. It will ask you to approve the permissions for it. And then it can see your Google Drive, your Gmail, and your calendar search. And since I did this in the past, I can use the same exact prompt I used in Gemini in order to see how it is going to perform the task. So I copied and pasted the same exact prompt, and then it went to work. It went and researched multiple things on my Gmail account, and then it went and did multiple searches on my Google Drive, and then it did several different searches on my Google Calendar, and then it went back and forth between all of them, and then it created the table for me.

11:16So similar thing, the table came out, well, very similar to the other one. It actually missed even more events than Gemini, so Gemini did a good job, and also the links to the different assets don't work here either. The cool thing is, is without me even asking, it broke it down into three different categories. One is August of 2025. The other is ongoing and recurring events. And the other is potential proposals for different things that hasn't materialized yet. And hence, they don't have final dates. So good overall, decent results from both not perfect results from either of them. But if you're paying for Gemini, Gemini will give you better results.

11:50If you're not paying for Gemini, then you can definitely start with Claude. I did not move on here with additional prompting and requests, but I assume in two or three prompts, I would have gotten to very similar situation that I got to with my Gemini attempt. So overall, decent results from both, but you still need somebody to verify the accuracy of the information, which is good best practices, regardless when you're using AI, this is not a bad idea. So this concluded step one in the process. I had a detailed list that shows all my obligations for travel in the next few months, which is a lot.

12:23What I had then is I had Joyce, the actual real personal assistant, go and review all that information, verify that it's accurate, which takes her significantly less time than actually aggregating and collecting all that information. And within about 10 minutes later, I had an approved list with all the final and accurate information with all the meetings and so on, which leads us to step two, finding flights to all these destinations. And since searching flights is a lot more complex task than just skimming through information on my Google Drive and email on my calendar, I decided to use the new agent functionality from OpenAI.

12:57So those of you who don't know, just over a week ago, OpenAI released their agent mode. Agent mode allows you to do significantly more complex tasks like searching the web, making decisions, deciding its own flow, and evaluating different things. It's extremely more powerful and flexible than just doing regular LLM stuff. And you get to it when you click a new chat in ChatGPT under the tools sections inside your prompt box, there is a bunch of tools. And one of them that is not appearing on my screen right now, because I've already used all my credits for today, is agent mode. And what I gave it, I gave it as an input, the output table from the review that Joyce did on the work from Gemini and Claude.

13:38So I took the output from the AI, gave it to a human to evaluate. She made some changes, updates and fixes in order to make sure the information is accurate. And then I took that information and uploaded that information into the agent and I gave it the following prompt. You're an expert personal assistant that's specializing in finding the best travel arrangements for every business engagement of an executive. Attached is a list of all the coming engagements that I have. I would like you to only look at the in-person events because as I told you before, there are some events over there that are online, but there's a column that was created that shows whether it's online or in person.

14:11So we'll know how to filter those. And I'm continuing with the prompt and then research the best flights for each destination. You should search multiple sources including flight aggregators as well as specific airline websites such as Southwest. The reason I mentioned Southwest is because in many cases they do not show up on the aggregators websites and this way it will look for that as well because in many cases they have the cheapest and definitely the direct flights to destinations that many people do not travel to which I would obviously prefer. Continuing with the prompt your output should be adding two more columns to the table.

14:42flight option and pros and cons for each of those travel destinations and events you should add multiple rows each with a specific flight option and its pros and cons since it is all domestic travel i'm looking for the cheapest reasonable option while preferring direct non-stop flights no need for business class unless the price upgrade makes sense and then the agent was working and evaluating and reviewing and doing different things and it worked for six minutes and provided with an output the output is exactly what i requested it's the original table plus two additional columns with flight options, as well as pros and cons for each and every one of those options, which is really, really great.

15:18But to be fair, I wasn't prompting it very well. I forgot to ask for a link to actually book the flights. So I will then have to go and do the whole work myself, or not the whole work, but at least going and searching for the same exact flights, which doesn't make sense. The other thing that I noticed is that it gave me a price range versus an exact price, because it didn't look at the exact dates that I provided, because it's not exactly what I asked for. I kind of assumed it's going to figure it out, but it didn't. And so my first request was, please add another column with a link to book each of the flights you suggested.

15:47And it thought about it for a couple of minutes, and it added the link to the airline. But the problem is, it just added a link to the airline. It did not add a link to the exact specific dates of the flights that I requested. And like I said, the pricing was a range of pricing instead of looking at the specific dates and giving me a final price. Again, this is on me. I should have thought about it when I was prompting it. So then I wrote the following prompt. Let me be more specific with my request. I would like you to search the exact dates for the events. I always need to arrive a day before the event starts.

16:17The link that you provide in the final column need to be a deep link that includes the dates of travel, the destination, et cetera, and save me the time of adding all that information myself. Because you have the exact dates, I would like you to provide me an exact pricing. I'm a single adult traveling. Obviously, it needs that information in order to know exactly how to do its search. So then I got a much better result. In this particular case, you can see how incredible this is. For every single destination that I'm traveling to, so Anaheim, San Francisco, Scottsdale, Cleveland, Albuquerque, Greenville, Spain, London, Riga, like all the places around the world, for each and every one of them, I have several different rows, each and every one with recommendations for different airlines.

16:55So if you look at Anaheim, it has Frontier nonstop MCO to LAX for$153, Southwest nonstop from MCO to LAX for$322, and Delta with$337, each one with great pros and cons, such as the lowest fare is Frontier, but it's saying it's very basic service, extra fees for carry-on, check bags, etc. Then the one from Southwest, it's nonstop with two free checked bags and no change fees, friendly service, et cetera. And then the third one is major airline with SkyMiles, including carry-on and in-flight amenities. So it really is very helpful. And the links actually work. If I click on the links, they take me to the specific dates with the specific destination so I can see all the flights that it suggested.

17:37Very, very helpful. It would have taken me and or Joyce probably a few hours to create this list with all the different options for all the different airlines, for all the different destinations that I need to go to in the next few months. And this happened in a few minutes, most of the time while me doing email in the background, waiting for it to finish. But then, because it gave me the idea where it said it's the lowest fare, nonstop flight, but it's basic service and there's extra fees. So I'm like, oh, that's right. If you fly with Frontier or Spirit or one of those, there are going to be extra fees for those things.

18:08So I went and added another prompt. This is much better. Thank you. I would like you to add one more thing. For each of the airlines, I would like you to research their extra fees, especially for local carriers. I'm always traveling just with a carry-on and a backpack, so please check how much is that going to cost if it is extra and add it and show a final price. This way, I can compare apples to apples. Please mention the breakdown and the total price in the relevant sales. If the price includes everything, like on the major airlines, just provide the final price. And then it had issue with providing me the file, but eventually it did provide the file to me.

18:42And the outcome is actually really great. What it did, it on its own added another column that says carry-on fee RT, which stands for return travel. So basically going there and coming back, how much is this going to cost me to take my carry-on bag and my backpack with me? And you can see that it varies between$70 and$90, which is a lot, but then it also gave me the total price so I can compare that to the other airlines. And it also gave me the deep link in order to do the booking that I want to do. So great work, lots of research that would have taken me a lot of time to complete and with all the information that I needed.

19:15The thing that happened here is that as soon as I got to this final step, I ran out of credits to continue to use the agent mode for this particular day. Now, lucky for me, this was after I got to the final stage of what I wanted to receive. But what it means, it means that you need to be very specific and very good in your prompting, especially when you're using agent mode. So let's talk about, first of all, what we did today and then talk about conclusions and recommendations. What we did is we looked at an actual real business need that I actually have and looked at different ways with different tools on how you can solve it.

19:48So that's one thing you need to start learning how to do is developing this muscle of understanding which AI tools are good in what different operations and then learn to use these tools. And it's perfectly fine to mix and match like we did today. It's perfectly fine to test two different tools to do the same thing if you have access to both of them. And it took me another, I don't know, 20 seconds to copy the prompts from Gemini to Claude in order to be able to then merge the information from both of them together. Definitely worthwhile. So this is the one thing. Then we were able to use an agent in order to do serious research and comparison for us.

20:23Again, a work that I would have hired in all days, a travel agent, and now my assistant would have done. Either way, it would have taken several different hours. And in this case, it took a few minutes in which I had to just give prompts every now and then, significantly more effective and very helpful in finding such information. So what are the conclusions? Conclusion number one is LLMs are not yet good enough to do this on its own without any supervision. It missed several different important activities that I had on the flights. It didn't think to find specific information that would have been helpful, but overall it was extremely useful and it saved me and my assistant hours in doing this process.

21:01So if you want to use it as a first and second draft and then give it to a person to do the final touches, it is definitely worthwhile because as I mentioned, it overall did a great work both in the first step of aggregating and finding all the information from the different sources and definitely on the second step of doing the research for flights. Now the other very important component here from a conclusion is that good prompting makes a huge difference. Again, And you saw that I had to re-prompt in several different cases in order to get all the things that if I would have thought about in the beginning would have saved me time.

21:33This became even more important when prompting the agent because the agent has very limited tokens that you can use every single day. And if I would have ran out of tokens before getting to the final conclusion, I would have needed to wait to tomorrow in order to continue the process. Now, this may not be the end of the world, but if you have a deadline that you have to meet, that might be a very big problem. So thinking about all the things you want to get, thinking about all the different things you want in the outcome and doing it in one prompt is very helpful. One of the things that I do in many cases, which I did not do this time, is I have a conversation with ChatGPT or any other tool in my voice explaining what I want to do.

22:08And then I'm asking it to ask me questions. And then I'm asking it to plan the prompt. And I'm asking it to ask me questions for any additional information that it requires. This dramatically improves the prompt that I'm going to be using because it covers a lot more bases than the things that I can think of. and I go back and forth several times and then I ask the LLM to actually write the prompt for me. I make some small tweaks and then I drop it into the agent and I'm getting much better results. So what are the recommendations from all of this? Number one, be aware that this is possible, right?

22:36These agents may not be perfect, but they're doing a lot of things pretty good, more than the average person and definitely significantly faster than most people or all people. And it's a great step in order to help you save time as long as you are aware of the fact that somebody has to review this before you actually use this information. Recommendation number two is you should test all these use cases across several different AI tools with several different prompts until you find the one that works best for you, both the prompt and the tool, save the prompt to your prompt library, share it with your peers that needs to do the same thing, and then everybody benefits from getting the best results.

23:10It is also okay to run this on several different tools if you have access to them, and then mix the results from both of them in order to get a more comprehensive answer. Recommendation number three, agents are extremely powerful tools for complex tasks. And you can also use other agents, not just from ChatGPT. So I'm also using Manus and GenSpark, which I did a whole different episodes about it before. And you can go and check that out. That was episode 196, where we specifically reviewed Manus and GenSpark and how to use them safely. And then the last and very important recommendation that became very clear again in this experiment is that you or somebody from your team still needs to review and verify the results of everything that you are doing with AI and preferably do it every single step because otherwise you may deviate from the logical process very early on, which will make a bigger deviation as you move down the steps of the process.