280 | Build a Marketing Machine That Runs Itself with Claude Cowork (Without Losing Control) with Dr Nici Sweaney

20:37Claude Cowork:The really important work is understanding exactly how you would like it done, and exactly how you do it now, but also how you can make it even better when you're not limited by the confines of human resources and time and capacity. And then it is the minutiae detail to which you describe how to approach and execute on given tasks, which becomes your skills files. And what I think is, you know, my background in science and research gives me quite a kind of edge in creating skills files because I come from a background of let's look at the best evidence. Let's look at what's saying, who is saying what about this subject.

21:17Claude Cowork:Let's look at what the data suggests around it. Let's look at what's current. Let's critically think through what applies to me and what doesn't. Let's try and find the gaps in that story. What's the evidence that this is the best way to do it? Who exactly am I aiming this for? So my skills files are huge because I put so much research into finding out what is the best information, particularly in places where, you know, this is not like I'm not from a marketing background, but I understand how to find evidence and weigh it up and choose what feels right for me. that makes my system work for me and my audience and doesn't just make it AI generic slop that kind of just blurs into the background.

21:58Dr Nici Sweaney:A hundred percent. I'll say one more sentence and then let's dive into what are skill files and how to build them and how they work together. But the, for me, a very similar approach and all I'm doing is I'm amplifying what you're going to say. Like my marketing system is very different than this, but it's identical to this. Meaning it, you know, So because I have the podcast, that becomes the source of everything for me. But the system knows how to monitor what's happening right now on the different social platforms. It's looking for cues on what's currently working and not working from a style perspective, from a length perspective, from a graphics perspective, from a, uh, how long are the sentences?

22:37Dr Nici Sweaney:What are the gaps between them for the different platforms? And then it looks for my content, the stuff that I speak at stages and I have recordings off, my weekly AI Friday Hangouts community thing that's happening every single week, the podcast, all these things. It then looks for content in there, things that I say, that I think, that I analyze, and it puts it into the formats that are currently working successfully on specific platforms. Kind of like what you're saying, this is the science part of it. The science part of it is I don't need to know what's working. I can mimic what's working because these systems are very good at analyzing that.

23:17Dr Nici Sweaney:But there still needs to be me in the content. Otherwise, it will be the same vanilla thing that everybody else can create out there, which is not interesting.

23:26Claude Cowork:Exactly. And the point that you just said there around, you know, you don't need to know what great is, but you can ask these systems to look for great. But that even in and of itself, you still need to remember to ask for the system to look for what is great. Like you need to understand the metrics. And that comes back to process, right? The process by which I decide what is worth talking about isn't just to Google search AI news. It's around, you know, women in AI. It's around tech developments. It's around equity and governance and regulation changes. And then of all those headlines, how do I rank what is worth talking about?

24:04Claude Cowork:because I only usually talk about kind of four or five news headlines in any given newsletter. So how do I make those decisions? And then how do I articulate how I make those decisions so that a system can understand how to go about the same thing? Which brings us to skills files. So people may have played with skills files already. There is certainly, I've got to say, my recent post about how to make clawed skills has got to be one of my best performing pieces of content. And, you know, everyone is on fire about skill sets. But skills files work regardless of platform when you get into the land of AI agents.

24:38Claude Cowork:All a skills file is is a markdown formatted document that uniquely describes how to execute on given tasks, right? So when we create a skills file, what happens is, especially when you're working with agents, I liken it to like a transformer, right? So a Transformer, so an AI agent is going along and it looks like Bumblebee. It's a car and it's like, yeah, I'm pretty cool and I'm fast and I can do stuff and I'm useful. And then it's faced with a situation. And in that given situation, it transforms into the appearance that it needs to take on in order to deal with that scenario. So when we're working with AI agents, it's like the same thing.

25:19Claude Cowork:It's like a Swiss Army knife Transformer vibe, right? If you've got hundreds of skills files that describe all of the ways that we do particular tasks in our business, and then we task an agent with executing on something, that agent can say, all right, I've got to transform. What is a unique set of skills that I've got to pick up and push together in order to make me the best person to execute on this job? so the more skills the merrier right but what it does you know before i talk about the technical setting them up but what it does is it pushes us to re-evaluate what's possible because when we describe roles in the past and even when we're talking about custom bots and assistants and workflows when we describe a role we are confined by how that one role would work we think about it like humans.

26:10Claude Cowork:If I hire a marketing person, you know, I hire someone that's great at emails and copywriting. And then I might have to hire somebody else that's really great at social media, because I have to have that differentiation because not everybody's great at everything. When we work with agents, we're no longer confined by I have to have an agent for this and an agent for that. You can have an agent that has access to a huge amount of skills, and the agent can pick out whatever the best combination of skills is to execute on that job so how you create a good

26:41Dr Nici Sweaney:skills file that's where you're just for one for one second just to comment on that to help people understand how this works so many of you listeners i assume have built at least one custom gpt or a cloud project or a gpt project doesn't matter one of these things and really a skill file is kind of the same thing with two so it has instructions which is that markdown file it's just a document think about like a word document and it has access to other pieces of content which would be like the knowledge base of the tools and it can use tools that is accessible to whatever you give it access to so this is a file the markdown file but when you built really sophisticated custom gpts you would build three or four of them to complete a process or five or six.

27:34Dr Nici Sweaney:And then you would move from one to the other to progress through whatever big project you're working on or a more complex process. This is very similar, only you don't have to figure it out. It knows how to call the right capabilities and the right skills, the right quote unquote custom GPTs as it needs them, when it needs them, depending on the specific tasks that it's working on. So think about, going back to what Nikki said, think about having a toolbox and the more of these skills you build, the more things are in the toolbox, which means now when you run a process, your different agents that talk to one another can pull any tools they need in real time.

28:17Dr Nici Sweaney:You don't have to tell them which tools they need to use. They figure it out on their own. And that's where the magic happens. Going back to what Nikki said, I don't need to know how this works. I just need to know that they have the tools to make it work and to make it work well. And then you just see the magic happen.

28:33Claude Cowork:Exactly. And so your skills is really where your competitive edge comes into. I talk to lots of businesses around what the future of work is going to look like in the industry. One, no one can tell you because no one really knows. But two, what I always say is that your competitive advantage will just be the humanness in how you execute on your AI processes. At some point, like right now, yes, it's very cool. You know, you and I are talking about our marketing systems and there might be people listening that this is newer information to and they're like, wow, you know, you just do like three lines of in your computer console and suddenly you've got 20 pieces of content every week that are on brand that actually perform well.

29:12Claude Cowork:Yeah, it's really cool. But at some point this will be so accessible and so frictionless that everyone will have the ability to just say, I want a marketing system. and we will have AI tools that go ahead and create the databases and the brain context and those skills files for you. That won't be a competitive edge. Your only competitive edge is how you construct that process and your special humanness that you insert into these AI personas. So when it comes to skills, I really advocate for spending a lot of time on your skills files because that's how we insert any sort of personality into our processes.

29:52Claude Cowork:So for me, it comes down to, all right, let's go through a research process of what does the evidence say around what does well in this particular thing? And that could be marketing. It can be admin. It can be email triage, you know, hacks that you see on YouTube. It can be things around what makes a good operations person that writes fantastic standard operating procedures. Anything that we do in business, there is evidence and there is research online, easily accessible, that shows you what excellence looks like. And that's particularly important when it's not your area of expertise. So it's doing research and obviously leveraging AI to help you do that research as well and help synthesize it.

30:32Claude Cowork:It's deeply knowing what good would look like to you. So if this system performed really well, what are we aiming for here? For me with marketing, it's driving more engagement to get more people onto my email list. And it's also having kind of clear objectives for every piece of content. It's not content for content's sake. It's content around certain objectives that I have in the business. So you have to really understand your goals, research what is good. And then it's about combining those things. And again, leveraging AI to help us flesh those documents out. but really combining those things in an easy, in a structured way so that it makes it easy for AI to digest and to understand what's important, which is where the markdown of it all comes into so that we can structure this text in a way that AI can disseminate and actually get to the truth of what you need it to know.

31:24Claude Cowork:And it's understanding that we really want to break down all of our tasks into the most kind of nuanced, smallest piece possible. So when we think about that something like marketing. So for example, when my marketing system repurposes it into social media, it not only has a huge task file on how to repurpose long format content, but it also then has sub reference files on exactly what my LinkedIn voice sounds like, a whole file on how to write hooks that grab attention, an entire file on how to construct good carousels. It has a whole file on our brand manifesto, who we're speaking to, and the actions that we want to create in our audience.

32:06Claude Cowork:So you've got all these kind of sub-files that are informing how that bigger skill set works as well. The more flesh that you can put into those, the better. But for people listening, it really does start with good research on what excellence looks like in that given piece. And again, leveraging AI to help you find peer-reviewed literature. I love using Sight AI. You know, we want AI that can transcribe fantastic and well-performing YouTube videos on a given topic so that we can learn about it. It's scraping news headlines. It's looking across forums about what performs well, what differentiates the top 1 % of businesses in this niche.

32:43Claude Cowork:Where could I get to? Because you're not limited by time, money, resources, and human capability. You're not limited by the help that you can afford to hire. You're only limited by your imagination. So if you can choose that top 1%, you can emulate that into your systems. And then also human quality control. So the last thing I'll kind of talk about in skills is it's really important that your skills understand what they are allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do and where they should look for help or guidance or input from humans and what they're allowed to have access to and not have access to.

33:15Claude Cowork:So I talk a lot about ethics, but that's always a really important part of any kind of structure and instructions to AI. And particularly when we get into land of AI agents, there has to be really clear parameters around what is in your remit and what is not. And that's true of human positions as well. So it's not unlike hiring someone and saying, yeah, this is your job, but this is not your job. That's my job. Don't step into this territory.

33:39Dr Nici Sweaney:Two things. One is, if you think about what Nikki said, it's basically having really good SOPs, which most companies don't have, but that's basically what it is, right? Yeah. And it's SOP at the very granular level of every aspect of your business. And I think the interesting thing that is going to happen in this world, which so far has not been the case, and then what I want to do, so I'll give you time to maybe prep it. If we can open one of these files, one that you can show and you don't have a problem sharing, and we can go on how it's structured, how it's built so people understand. but we're going through an era so far a job was a set of tasks that was the definition of a role what's your job i'm a marketing specialist i'm the head of this department i'm okay so what does this job mean oh i do these 65 things that's going away the job will be what is it that you need to achieve for the organization, which what a job actually is, and the tasks will be done by this, right?

34:51Dr Nici Sweaney:And so the way we have to start rethinking about work is the role and the tasks are completely separate things. The role is you're in charge of achieving this goal or these goals for our business.

35:09Claude Cowork:Yes.

35:10Dr Nici Sweaney:You don't have to do the tasks. You have to achieve the goal. And now you have this endless minions that can help you do it. You still need to define the strategy and you still need to monitor. You still need to create new ones when there's gaps. There's still the critical thinking, the management, the strategy aspect of it, which like you said, many, many, many, many people don't have those skills, but they will have to develop them because everything else will become irrelevant.

35:39Claude Cowork:Yes, exactly. And, you know, there's really good data and predictions around what the future of work will look like for humans, given that, you know, probably humans will stop having a job and they will just have many smaller jobs for lots of different organisations where they kind of manage these AI systems and they provide that oversight because they're injecting that special human quality or that special quality assurance lens or a particular way that they approach things that makes these systems better. And that will become our job, right? Because, you know, lots of, almost everyone has a mix of thinking and doing.

36:17Claude Cowork:And it's usually heavily weighted towards the doing in their jobs. But as you said, when that goes away, then how do we fill our 40 hours a week? And in my business, I have chosen to work part-time in my organization. So my entire team, nobody works full time. If you work four days a week, then you get a full time wage. But we've made that choice because we use AI so much that, you know, I'm kind of like, well, I've got to walk the walk as well. If I'm saying it could save you so much time, I've probably got to try and take a day off and really kind of live by that standard. But, you know, I'm no fool.

36:53Claude Cowork:I know that most businesses are not going to necessarily make that choice. We'll just want more done in the same amount of hours. So the role of the human will become, yeah, this manager of AI systems. And you might have to do that for lots of organizations to create the same sort of full-time job because organizations won't need you to also execute on it. Once you've made the decision and you've delegated and you can provide feedback, then you're on to the next. Okay.

37:20Dr Nici Sweaney:So let's dive into a skill file or skill files.

37:24Claude Cowork:Yeah. Cool. All right. So let's have a look at a couple. Okay, so what I'm going to open up. Okay, so I'm showing you here, this is just my folder with my skill files around my copywriting, right? So this is for how I write things like sales pages, landing pages, even how it informs how we structure emails as well. It's not necessarily always around a marketing sales objective, but it's one of these skills that if I'm doing a new offer in a landing page, it would rely heavily on this skill. Whereas even when I'm sending out my weekly AI newsletter, we're still referencing this skill set because it still informs kind of who we're talking to and how we speak to them.

38:11Claude Cowork:So there are five files here. So there is the main skill file that describes this is how I do copywriting and persuasive copywriting. and then to inform that skill, and I'll switch to these skills in a second, but we have four subset reference skills. So we have one entire skill document that is all around my voice and my lens on ethics and how that interacts with the way that I approach sales psychology. The things that I will and won't say in my brand that feel aligned. Then there is one that's specific around format playbooks. So this is how we do the difference between a long format, short format kind of online forums, wherever our copywriting is appearing, what does that look like?

38:55Claude Cowork:Then we've got a whole document that shows all the research into biopsychology for our particular audience, what makes them tick, what are their towards mechanisms, what are their away from mechanisms. And then we have a whole piece on our authority and differentiation. I rely heavily, you know, there's a lot of people in the AI space. So my key point of differentiation is coming from a data science and business consulting and academic background. So there's a really big file on what makes me me and why I think I'm worth kind of listening to. So if we just open up.

39:25Dr Nici Sweaney:I'll say one thing before we dive into the actual files themselves. So you now, if you're listening, you're starting to understand two things. One is why this is different than a lot of other things you see online. Like, oh, get my a hundred prompts and you'll be able to make a hundred thousand large. This is very, very different than that because there's a lot of strategy and data and research that goes into that. The other thing that I will say, because that's the scary part, like, oh my God, this sounds really, really scary. It sounds like a lot of work. And I don't know if I know how to do this or if I have the time to do this.

40:00Dr Nici Sweaney:And I'm sure many of you are thinking of this right now. The reality is, yes, it is a lot of work, but it's a lot of work that if you set it up once, now you have a content machine that grows your newsletter a thousand people a week and gets you a lot of business when you write one sentence. And so the ROI is not 5%. It's not 20%. It's 5 ,000%. Yes. What that means though, is you need somebody in your organization, doesn't have to be you, but you need somebody in your organization who have enough white space on their calendar. And I can tell you for myself, and I'm based on what I'm seeing Nikki doing right now versus what we talked about just a few weeks ago, she did something very similar.

40:48Dr Nici Sweaney:I blocked most of my calendar for January, February, March, until the foreseeable future to build these things. In the short term, I'm working harder than I worked before. But every one of these processes, and I'm usually building three or four in parallel at any given time. Everyone I figure out, I now have a new department, a new group, a new process in my company that now runs 90 % on autopilot with 10 % supervision by me or other people in my team. And yes, it is a lot of work. If you cannot do this because you don't have the bandwidth, you need to hire somebody to do this. Or a year from now, two years from now, all your competitors will be able to do better work than you at 5 % of the effort.

41:36Dr Nici Sweaney:And then you'll, you'll be really busy finding a new job. And so that's kind of like the big picture. It's not, there is no, oh, I download this thing and I click a button and it works. There is work that needs to be done, you know, to agree to this quality of output. Yeah.

41:54Claude Cowork:And it's such a good point. And I think the other thing for people potentially listening is, you know, because there has been so much change in this space, I get people that say, you know, well, if I do all of this, will there just be something that comes and makes it all redundant tomorrow, right? So I think that that's really important to acknowledge because you and I have just spent all of 2026 rebuilding everything and, you know, really kind of fascinated with all these bits and pieces and how do I make that tick and what can I do with this now? But what I tell people is it's still a competitive advantage to be ahead.

42:26Claude Cowork:So the businesses, you know, for example, some of my longest running continuous consulting programs are now running over two years, right, of continuous work with them. What happens in those businesses is because they started so long ago, they're able to really quickly pivot to the next thing because they already understand the fundamentals of having to be very assertive, having to be very discreet in terms of like how much information and how well they put it together of understanding that, like you just said, these need to be detailed SOPs. I always describe them like they need to be recipe equivalent of SOPs, right?

43:06Claude Cowork:Because quite often people, even if they have SOPs, they're writing SOPs based on what they already know and giving it to somebody else in their team that already works there. So like you go and get the thing from the file and then we save it to the downloads every week. If I say something like that to somebody on the street, they're like, what file? What downloads? What are we looking for? How often do we do this? When do we do it? What qualifies if I don't do it? A recipe is designed so that you at home can make the cake from start to finish and actually get it to presumably look like the picture and taste okay without a chef or anyone that's ever made that cake before in your kitchen with you.

43:48Claude Cowork:So what I tell people is like, when you're thinking about this, that's the equivalent. I need to hand this to someone on the street, like a clever person on the street, but a random person on the street. They should be able to sit down at a computer and execute and get to 90 % of what I would have done. So that's the sort of detail that we need to have. So in the skills files, oh, and the other part about, you know, not having time. Yes, blocked out lots of time. The other thing I do is I do it in the car. So, so often I actually travel a long way to airports because I do a lot of travel. But every time I'm in the car commuting, I have a list of all of the departments across my business that I'm wanting to automate.

44:31Claude Cowork:And I pick one of those departments. And then in that department, I ask AI to interview me about what are we currently doing? What are all our processes? And then I just pick a process off that list and I just go to town. I will talk for 15, 20, 30 minutes about exactly how I do it, what I think about, where I make decisions. And then I say to these tools, if anything is unclear, if you couldn't exactly replicate this, if I'm missing edge cases, I want you to ask me questions back and gather as much detail as possible. And then just get these tools to help you put all of that together. And so that's how I kind of tick through them.

45:11Claude Cowork:So this is exactly example of that where I was talking to Claude to have it execute on what I define as persuasive copywriting, who my audience is, what I like, what I don't like, what are we talking about. So in this persuasive copywriting file, they have an overall description. I always have an overall purpose and objective. And then we go into all of the things that matter. So you can see here straight away, it's saying when you're doing copywriting, I also need you to have a look at all the reference files underneath this before you write anything. But we have sections in here through why I'm different to everybody else.

45:51Claude Cowork:The AI education space is flooded with people who do X, Y, Z. This is what I don't do or this is what I do differently. This is the context for it. The authority must be real, how I approach. You know, I come from a science background. I find marketing quite uncomfortable because in science, you're never allowed to speak in absolutes. You can't say you're the best. You can't say you're the most. You can't say this absolutely will save you X, Y, Z hours. You're not allowed to say that in science. So I find that quite hard in marketing, but striking that balance between how do I make people feel confident that this will deliver results while feeling true to myself that, you know, I can say this is what I've done with it and this is what other people have done with it, but you know, this is up to you.

46:31Claude Cowork:So this is painting the before and after pictures of everything they have. These are the steps of the exact workflow that will follow. So step one, step two, all the way down. And then this is the core message that you have to keep in mind. So you can see that that's approaching a fairly long document, but not only is that the document, but we also have all of these subset documents that run through. Why am I the authority? What sets me apart from everybody else. Who is the audience? What is their psychology? And again, I leveraged peer-reviewed literature around the psychology of my particular audience.

47:06Claude Cowork:What would make them buy? What is keeping them up at night? Let's look at what Google searches they are performing. What questions do they already have? These are my format playbooks for how I write across each one of these platforms and exactly what that looks like. And then this file goes through the essence of my voice and my stance on ethics and the words that I hate and the tactics that I hate and the things that I really like and those non-negotiables around how I approach my marketing, given my particular lens on ethics and equity and all of the quality checks that you have to perform before you write.

47:41Claude Cowork:So those five files are involved every time I'm copywriting on top of the files that say, this is how we organize our funnels. On top of the files that say, this is how I write on Instagram on top of the files that say, this is what our offers are and this is how we launch campaigns. And we're using that transformer approach to gather and execute on a given task with access to all of these skills files. So I would probably approximate at the moment, and I'm only kind of fully through marketing and admin and operations. I have not fully gone through every other department in my business yet, I would say I probably have 60 or so skills files across those two sectors.

48:29Dr Nici Sweaney:Incredible. I want to say a few things because we're starting to run out of time and I could probably again talk to you for the next five hours and we can keep on going deeper and deeper. A few things. Number one, as I said before, this is not a magic wand that you wave and it just happens. It requires you thinking about it. Number two, if those of you who are watching the screen, it looks kind of like code. And that's how a markdown file look like. Now, you don't need to know how to write markdown. I have, I don't know, 50 or 60. Yeah, you know, probably 50 or 60 files, kind of like similar ballpark.

49:05Dr Nici Sweaney:And I'm adding a few every single day. I haven't written a single one. The AI actually writes them. So as Nikki said, I just explain to the AI what I want and it decides in many cases how many subsets there are. Sometimes it makes wrong decisions. So I always ask it and it's built into the system message. It said, ask me before you decide what skills go where so I can tell you whether I agree or not. And there's probably 50 % of the cases where I disagree and I do something different than it suggested in the beginning. going back to what Nikki said that's kind of like how I bring myself into making the process better but you don't need to know how to write these things the AI knows how to write them it knows how to store them it knows how to then pull them as it needs them the question that I have to you which the more technical people are asking and the rest of the people will potentially ask after we explain every one of these tools has a limit on the context window a context window is the amount of data that any AI tool you use have a limit of how much data they can run in a single instance.

50:13Dr Nici Sweaney:Once you run out of that data, one or two things happen. Previously, until a long time ago, about two months ago, they would just get drunk and start forgetting things. And now they have this process, they go compacting, where they basically for themselves summarize what happened before and then continue with more space in their knowledge. But it still means that as it's getting started, you just say when you want to write something, you need to read 20 documents that already consumed most of its context window. How do you A, work around it and B, what are best practices to maybe limit the issue or minimize the impact?

50:56Yeah.

50:57Claude Cowork:So there's a couple of different ways that we kind of go about it. I mean, one part is especially the things that you're going to do on high rotation. It's creating the full skill files and then also creating a brief version of the skills files with the core information that you need to execute on that given task. So, you know, when I'm doing, for example, the newsletter, the marketing automation that I was showing, we are particular around which skills that we're telling the agent to use in order to execute on that. So we have one that is how do I write my newsletter? And we have one that's repurposing.

51:35Claude Cowork:And then when we're repurposing, we then say, okay, now you're going to have access to X, Y, Z skills, right? And so when you can kind of execute on this, because you can create these agent swarms that go off and execute different parts of it, you can kind of leverage various context windows for each subtask as part of that larger task. The other thing that we're also doing is I'm currently playing around with building a dashboard for my agents where they start to log their decisions at key points throughout whatever the process is that they're doing. And so what that is, what I'm hoping that will enable me to do, I haven't fully fleshed it out, but stay tuned.

52:13Claude Cowork:But what I'm hoping that that will enable me to do is track key decisions to one, improve the way that the agents work to give them a starting point for when they are coming up with those compacting issues so that I know that they have remembered the right things. Because when we let agents compact, yes, they're going to make a decision. They normally get it pretty correct. But particularly when we're doing something complex, I want there to be somewhere where I can control what information they're acting on. And through that improvement process, what I'm hoping is I'm also going to build a bit of an agent verification system where every now and then the agents can use that memory in order to decide what can be trimmed from their context files.

52:53Claude Cowork:So I'm kind of like a startup with everything you can possibly think of, take pieces out of it if you need to kind of shorten that context window, and then over time also improve and refine that process so you're just really nailing it every single time.

53:07Dr Nici Sweaney:Awesome. Again, my two cents, something very similar to what you described. I have two files, three actually now, so it keeps on changing. But as of this morning, there are three different files that go across all my projects. And there are different kinds of lessons learned, like organizational knowledge. And they're on different topics because they started getting too big. And I'm like, okay, this is ridiculous. They don't all need to know all. but there's one file that defines what's in the other files and the agents before they load so in the system message of all of this it tells it to go and read that one file and then it decides based on that which are the other files so there's ways that you can build into your quote-unquote agent infrastructure that that reduces the amount of thing they have like every project i'm running has a project progress file.

53:59Dr Nici Sweaney:That project progress file, when it gets above a certain length, the older stuff gets archived because otherwise, as soon as it reads the document, it's out of context before you do it.

54:10Claude Cowork:Yeah, that's a cut out. So the reason I ask you the question

54:12Dr Nici Sweaney:is because people need to keep that in mind because otherwise you will literally run in an agent that can't run because you give it so much information that it doesn't have enough memory or capacity to do the thing that it needs to do. And it's just something to take into account.

54:28Claude Cowork:yeah and it's also um you know if you think about this like i i'm always telling people to think about this like we think about interacting with with people human brains are almost limitless right but whenever i walk into a workplace i have so much context and experiences and life experiences and different things that i that i know about i don't use all of that to execute on a given task so when i think about what makes great skill sets and how you kind of build out your infrastructure yeah I'm like document as much as you possibly can get it all out of your head we want everything having a system a process you know data behind it evidence behind it a persona a personality what they can do what they can't do but then as you execute on tasks and this is a little bit of trial and error and this is why you know people like you and I find it so exciting but it's very understandable there's also lots of people are like this is very overwhelming and I don't want to engage because that's where, again, that work comes into it where I've got everything.

55:28Claude Cowork:Now what do I actually need in this given scenario? And, again, a little bit like a recipe, you know, we don't dump in all of the salt and pepper straight away and then find, oh, wow, it's inedible and you can't undo that. It's kind of like a slowly stacking of skills. So, again, while I talked about making all these skills files, I also give people the advice of, like, start off with the basics first do as little as you think will be relevant. If that creates the outcome you are looking for, you don't have to add more for the sake of looking clever. You can do it just like that. If you find actually I'm having to edit it or give it corrections or it's not quite always taking the right action, that is your sign that you need more context in there.

56:10Claude Cowork:And then there are different ways of managing how we can structure that context as well.

56:15Dr Nici Sweaney:Awesome. Quick recap and then I'll let people know how they can work with you, hire you, find you, learn from you. So the new universe is very, very different than what we had in 2025 in the sense that literally anything that can be done in front of a computer, you can build AI agents and skills to do instead of you and or your team. This is not future technology. This is the current present. To do this well, you need to understand the tasks that you're trying to perform or the outputs and the outcomes that you're trying to achieve and what great will look like in each and every one of these things.

56:56Dr Nici Sweaney:And then from there, you can reverse engineer the different steps and AI can help you in each and every one of these steps. And the last thing that is very critical that I do and Nikki does is you still have to have the human touch points and oversight. So Nikki does it in Notion. I do it in ClickUp. I have some things running through Slack. I have some things running through WhatsApp, but it doesn't matter. I have ways to interact, impact, change, manipulate, verify the AI outputs because otherwise you have slop, vanilla that everybody else has. And the fact that you created it is not going to make you different.

57:33Dr Nici Sweaney:It's just going to make you be like everybody else. And then nobody's going to hire you and so on. And yes, you can get away with this in the next two to three months, maybe six, but then it will be over. Nikki, this was absolutely brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. If people want to learn from you, take your courses, hire you to build this stuff for them because they're terrified they won't be able to have time to do this on their own. What are the best ways to do that?

57:59Claude Cowork:Yeah, absolutely. So you can reach out to us. You can send us an email at hello at AIHerWay.com.au or find us on the web at www.AIHerWay.com.au. Or you can also look me up on Instagram, AI underscore her way or on LinkedIn as Dr. Nikki Sweeney, always willing to chat. I always share a lot. We've got a lot of free resources as well. You can come in and you can try our courses for free. We've got a whole bunch of systems that you can take and have a go at. You know, we also have these systems that interview you about your work and then give you skills files back. So if you're struggling with that overwhelm, we've got a lot that can really help.

58:36Claude Cowork:And for overseas listeners, I'm obviously based in Australia. I'll be over in the US in April and May this year and then in South America. So look, lots of places to catch me. Would love to have a chat.

58:50Dr Nici Sweaney:Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. This was absolutely fantastic. I hyped it a lot in the beginning and yet I think you over delivered. So I really, really appreciate that. I really appreciate you. We're going to meet in person in April. So I'm really excited about that as well. Very excited. Yes. Have a great rest of your day.

59:09Claude Cowork:Thank you so much for having me on the show.