ProductiviTree: Cultivating Efficiency, Harvesting Joy

AI for Beginners - Simple Hacks to Automate Your Life - Marnie Wills

• Santiago Tacoronte • Season 2 • Episode 40

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In this insightful conversation, Marnie Wills shares her journey from avoiding technology to embracing AI as a daily tool. She discusses the accessibility of AI, its competitive advantages for businesses, and the importance of AI literacy for future generations. Marnie emphasizes the need for human connection in an increasingly automated world and provides practical tips for using AI effectively. The discussion also touches on the transformative impact of AI on jobs and the necessity of integrating human expertise into AI-generated content.

Takeaways

  • Marnie transitioned from avoiding technology to using AI confidently.
  • AI tools like Jasper and ChatGPT can enhance creativity and productivity.
  • Many people fear AI due to a lack of understanding.
  • AI can be seen as a strategic partner rather than a complex technology.
  • Generative AI can amplify human intelligence and creativity.
  • AI literacy is essential for children and future generations.
  • Using AI effectively requires context and collaboration.
  • AI can transform job roles rather than eliminate them.
  • Human connection remains vital in an AI-driven world.
  • AI can help solve complex problems and improve efficiency.

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Manny Wills is an AI consultant and trainer who helps non-technical leaders and entrepreneurs harness AI to save time, scale their businesses, and reclaim work-life balance. She's a former fitness entrepreneur, and before she will avoid tech altogether. But one day she had a breakthrough with that transformed her entire approach to productivity. She discovered the power of AI. Today, she is on a mission to make AI fun, practical and accessible for everyone, showing beginners how to automate the boring stuff so they can focus on what truly matters, creativity, human connection, and growth. Marnie is an natural force, an AI positivist, and she's here with us today to tell us how you can start and make the most of AI. Marni, welcome to ProductiviTree. uh Hello, thank you so much for having me, San Diego. You used to avoid tech altogether. What was the exact moment that turned you from outsourcing everything, and I don't want to know anything about IT or digital or technology, to confidently using AI on a daily basis? Yeah, so my first journey started back in the end of 2021 with Jasper AI, which is a copywriting tool, which I stumbled on when trying to franchise one of my businesses. I loved it because I almost didn't know what I wanted and the AI could give me a whole lot of options that I'd never ever thought about. And if you've worked with a copywriter before, they ask you a lot of questions. But sometimes if you don't know what you don't know, it's really hard to answer that. Whereas using Jasper, I realized that even if you don't know what you don't know, an AI tool can more than happily drag something out of you, which was just mind blowing for me. So fast forward to the end of 2022 and ChatGBT came out. So I'd been using Jasper for almost a year and I'd also used a lot of automations through Zapier and I felt very confident then. to just start using ChatGPT on a daily basis. So basically, since it started at the end of 2022, it was a natural go-to to me. But here's the thing, I don't see it as techie because you don't need to be technical, you just need to open up the webpage and start chatting, which is nothing like the other technologies that we've ever used before. yeah, I think I naturally was drawn to generative AI. because I'm a bit of a talker to be honest oh and it comes naturally to me just to ask questions. Many people say that AI is too complex for me. You just touch upon it a little bit. But from your experience, is this true or is it just an excuse to not to get close to the technology and digitalization? Yeah, said with love to anybody that says that. That is just you burying your head in the sand, you getting a little bit worried about a new technology, which is very common. I mean, we saw it in the internet days. We saw it in the social media days when people were taking ages to jump onto social media channels. You know, we saw it when people weren't switching from a normal Nokia or a BlackBerry to a smartphone. So we've seen it before, but said with love. Please don't hesitate. Please don't wait. because you don't need to know anything about technology. All you need to do is be able to download the app on your phone and start talking or typing just like you would in WhatsApp or open the website on your computer and start talking. That is literally all you need to do. This week, Mani, I was on the internet of our company, Mondelis, and there was a colleague from IT that has posted a prompting m document. Very techy, very well structured. I'm sure it's extracting the very best of the um LLMs that we use. But do you think that um people with non-technical backgrounds might have an advantage? because as you well said, it's natural talking, natural communication versus tech people that gets very uh fancy about how to prompt charge GPT and other tools. I love that you picked that up because that is so, I honestly believe that. I think that the AI models, so the large learning models from when we first saw them come out in 2022, where you needed to give them lots of context about what you wanted them to do, why you want them to do them, how you wanted it to act. But now where we are now, you know, towards the end of 2025, especially with the release of CHAPGBT5 and GROCK4 are probably the two biggest models that have just had their upgrades, to be honest. I think the best thing that you can do is literally have a conversation and you need to have this one mindset shift and that is that this generative AI, this large learning model, yes, it's seen as artificial intelligence, but I need you to think about it as amplifying your intelligence. So use it as a strategical thinking partner, use it as a collaborator, pretend it's your best friend, pretend it's your intern, pretend it's your boss, pretend... It's somebody that has information that you need, but also remember that you are an expert in whatever you do. And actually it's the job of this AI to extract your knowledge as well. And we've gone very much full circle with using AI. When we first started using it, we were putting in not very good prompts because we've got this amazing edu, we've got this amazing tool that no one's educated us on to now not even to now. We put in not very good prompt, probably get out not very good content, but we've come full circle where actually the less you give it sometimes and the more you have a conversation with it, the better content that you get out of the large learning model. Is AI a hype right now or is it already indispensable for beginners and small business owners? Is it a competitive advantage? Oh, 100 % competitive advantage, especially if you go that next level. And what I mean by that is if you have trained your AI or AI assistants or agents, and we are moving into agent world. So if you think about our large learning model, it's a chat bot, it's going back and forth and it needs a lot of human interaction, but inside your um AI model, so say you use chat GBT or maybe Claude, You can use projects if you're on the paid version, which I highly recommend. It is worth it for anybody. In projects, it becomes your AI assistant. You can give it, you can upload files, which I like to say is your second brain. So anything related to you personally, whether it's related to health, whether it's related to your day-to-day life, whether it's related to business, your job role, whatever it is. And then on the other side, you need to give it instructions. and that is where you can ask the AI to write the instructions for you and that is that prompting. So you are an expert productivity manager that is going to take my day to day, my goals, everything about my business and help me stay on track. You would go in deeper than that and the AI would help you write it. But all of a sudden you have a project called your productivity expert, which becomes your AI assistant that not only knows everything about you and your role or the business, but it also has the role of being your productivity expert. That there is the next level on using um generative AI, so large learning models on a day-to-day basis. And then the next level is using agents. So agents are um connected to a large learning model. So you can talk to an agent and you can tell it the outcome that you want. And that's all you have to do. You don't have to give it anything else, but tell the outcome that you need. So for example, I might need to do some deep research on this podcast. So I go right to the agent and I say, need to do some deep research um and the agent will go away and think about where it needs to get it from, think about the steps, think about how I want the um content produced to me. I might have said I want a presentation and then it goes off and the agent does the task and then comes back with the outcome. So very different to the chat um or an AI assistant to an agent and we are moving to AI agent world. So for me, the biggest advantage is the ability to train the AIs. to know anything and everything about you. Hmm. Marni, like a few weeks ago, was in back in the Canary Islands where I'm from and I went for breakfast with the family. had a lovely breakfast at the coffee shop and the waiter, when I asked for the bill, the waiter had everything written in paper and he summed everything very quickly. I asked him, wow, you must be one of the few that's still making numbers and very impressive at what speed you're doing it and very accurate as well. And he answers, well, the thing is that people is becoming dumb because I see my kids that they need to ask Chajupiti even to some what is 10 plus 15. Is he right, Unfortunately, yes, I think the initial change that we're going through will be rocky. It's not going to be smooth at all. However, we have been through it before. If you think about all the changes. So when we moved to the internet, we lost the ability to go and research in a library and look at books. know, there was a knack and there was an ability to that. We lost that. Obviously, calculators were way before that. we also relied on calculators. When we got the smartphone, we used the smartphone for directions. So instead of using maps, you know, a paper copy of a map, we now use our phone. So yes, the way we are learning, because AI is changing our human operating system, the way we access information, the way we communicate with each other, the way we make decisions, it's not the first technology that's done that, but it is doing that. Because it's doing that, there is... There is definitely going to be times where we don't think for ourselves as humans. We are asking the AI to do the thinking for us. However, what AI will bring, there's two points to this, what AI will bring will be the ability for us to ask a very smart, artificial intelligence that is currently at PhD levels, any question we like and it's all about the questioning. So what if actually, We might stop thinking initially for ourselves, but actually we'll be able to solve bigger problems because we'll be able to ask the AI questions that will allow us to then think about, how will that help me with the outcome that I want or the problem that I'm trying to solve? And then we'll be able to reverse engineer and use the AI to help us solve a problem. So there is two parts of it. think the initial bit of always asking AI and not thinking for yourself, yeah, massive. And we have to be really conscious of that for the children. But just like I only grew up with a calculator, I don't remember having to do too much mental maths, if I'm honest. So, yeah, but has it stopped me in life? No. As humans, we always have to play to our strengths, And that happens to be a strength of his and he obviously enjoys it. And that is fine as long as that's not letting him fall behind. I don't see the issue with that, I think what is also very important is teaching our children, especially the education of AI, not AI in education, the education of AI. What is AI literacy? So how do you prompt? What questions do you ask? How do you use AI as your strategic thinking partner? Number two, the security of AI. We know that we're not, you know, it's just like any data security. AI is a massive threat the amount of times that any of our personal data can be found or sometimes we accidentally put the wrong information into AI. So, you know, data security is the other AI literacy. And then the third thing for AI literacy is what can AI actually do for it for you? Are you using it? had. Manny, should we give AI to kids below 10 years old? What do you think? When is the right time to... I'll tell you one thing, my daughter, we were in London this year and we were doing a virtual tour with Chagy Pt. The thing was telling us all the time what monument was that one. It was fantastic. Since then, she asked me every day, can I have a little bit of Chagy Pt? And I'm still on the, better not. What are your thoughts? Well, I'm obviously biased because I think um AI is the most amazing thing ever, right? uh I my perspective is very much from um It's a main it's made me feel superhuman It has allowed me to excel in business and I feel like I'm a better version of me um because of the way I use because of the way that I use um chat gbt as an example. favorite AI tool by the way is Claude. um However chat gbt is most spoken about so I often use that. So the answer to that question for me is yes I have an eight-year-old and she has been using AI for quite a while. Like you we used it as a tour in February when we went to Rome. She was very obsessed with um the Romans because she'd done it the term before and actually she had created a PowerPoint actually it was on the Aztecs. She created a PowerPoint on the Aztecs and I said to her do you want to make into a website she's like yeah okay how do I do that I said okay so we went on to gamma.app free She uploaded her PowerPoint and it created this amazing website. Now it took her about another 30 minutes, it took two minutes to create, but it took another 30 minutes because I made her fact check that there's some of the content that the AI had written using ChatGBT. And I also showed her how to change the images. So AI images were created and I showed her how to upload from Google or something she'd already had on a slide or to prompt the AI to create new slides. She was so... proud of herself for changing this PowerPoint to this website. She sent it to all the family. She sent it to a teacher who didn't acknowledge it at all, which I was very disappointed about. But anyway, that's where we are in education at the moment because teachers don't know what they don't know. And they are thinking about AI in education instead of the education of AI. So that is where we have to do a little bit of work from as leaders that are using AI, right? But that's just one example. gladiators I don't know if you get gladiators where you are but she loves gladiators so she asked Chachi Biti to write her a song she came up with her own gladiator character called Wave write her a song and then we would put it into Suno to add in the music so she has so much fun with it and then recently using Claude artifacts I created a maths um a uh mental maths challenge for her so in 60 seconds um it creates maths challenges, questions for her to answer and she's got to try answer as many as 60 seconds. She loves it and she puts on Claude every day, goes to her maths challenge and practices. um And then I created her languages on lovable.dev again no coding experience all through verbally requesting. m I created her a language tool because I noticed that she the that the school was giving her was quite boring. was like learning the languages but not relevant to what she likes. And I know she likes many languages. She likes Italian, French, Spanish and Japanese because she does judo. And um she loves to think about things at school. She likes to compare her schooling and the things she does at school to there, to other cultures. She loves the food element. She loves travel. So it was all things related and pop music and it was all things related to that about the languages and then we gamified it on this app using Lovable. So yes, my daughter uses as many AI tools that I believe that help her in her learning journey. Hmm. Imagine or let's make something for our listeners that are not yet started in the AI journey. What's a simple starter recipe they can try within 10 minutes and that, you know, we'll put them in the, on the track of using AI for good. Okay. I actually think the magic is in talking to the AI, so using voice mode. That's where I think the magic is. So I would download, again, I'm really biased. I think Claude is actually really, really good. So I would download Claude.ai and I would start talking to Claude. However, if you already know about ChatGBT and you want to jump on ChatGBT, 100 % do that. Both are free, both have free accounts. And you press the voice mode and you just start talking. And where I would start, would be for me being a female in business and running a household as well, it's the mental load of life and I feel like it's the mental load of lots of things I've got going on here, especially being summer holidays that actually then stops me from being really productive in my day, especially when I sit down to work because there's still a lot of things going on. So I use it every single day for a brain dump. And what I mean by that is I just say, hi Claude, I have these five things on my mind today related to things I need to do or things I've got coming up. Can you help me break down each one? Either into a to-do list is what I call it but you could just put it intentional list or action steps. or ask me why I'm worried about, why that's sticking in my head right now when it shouldn't be, because maybe it's in two weeks time, right? And I just have a little conversation with Claude and I get it off my brain dump and often at the end I'll just say, okay, summarize everything and give me an action for today. Done, that's where I would start. Well, you've mentioned chat GPT, cloud.ai and lovable.dev. Can you give us a couple of them more for people to start the journey or continue their journey? Some of your must have AI tools in your work and daily life. Yeah, I also mentioned Gammar, which is the presentation app. Now Gammar can do slides, websites, and social media content and documents. it's a very, very easy tool to use. Like I said, my eight year old used it. So I wouldn't be doing it justice if I didn't mention that. I think my daily AI tool stack is actually an app on my phone called Voice Pen. PEN and VoicePan allows me to record a voice note. It will transcribe it. and then it will transcribe it into any different copy that I like. So it could be an email, it could be a summary, it could be a to-do list, it could be clear and concise, it could be just punctuality and grammar so I can send it straight on. And I use that every day because I'm often driving, mum's taxi is what I like to call myself sometimes. And I will have some emails to write or some clients to follow up with or even some type of brain dump like I said about things I've got to do so I will talk into voice pan and then by click of a button it gives you so many choices of how you want to repurpose that content and I'll just put email right and then I send the email off so that is probably my fast like my go-to and makes me extremely productive I think the second one that I use a lot is, but again this is for my role, is called Genspark. G-E-N-S-P-A-R-K. Genspark is an amazing agent. It's called a super agent so it can do many things. It can do AI documents, slides, it can create infographics, it can do deep research. and it's a super agent that can literally create your website if you want to. So I use Gensbach a lot because I work with a lot of startups that they're either starting a business or they are launching a new product or service. And my guarantee to them is that we um some stuck to scaled um in 14 working days. And that includes a website and my go-to tool that literally does everything for me is Gensbach. um Notebook, last one, Notebook LM. If no one has heard of Notebook LM, it is from Google. It is phenomenal what you can do with Notebook LM. I use it a lot for education. So as you know, I have to keep up with everything, AI. That's my job. And it does get overwhelming, the rate of which there are new tools out or there's new ways to prompt an AI or... honestly it can get so so overwhelming so I will have my go-to YouTube's or articles and I will always so notebook LM is free and you open up and you upload sources it's called sources and you can upload up to 250 sources so what I will do is I will upload the YouTube videos and maybe the articles maybe some websites and then from there I can create a mind map I can create uh podcast I am I'm an auditory listener and love podcasts hence why I'm here so I learn from podcasts um and it can also now create instructional videos um like creative videos um And then you can also chat to Google via this notebook. So all of the YouTube videos and podcasts and websites and everything, I can just chat and go, okay, what were the top 10 AI concepts that I need to know about going forward so I can share with my clients? And again, because Notebook, I've customized it to know about what I do and why I do what I do. It will give me... relative answers related to the sources that I've uploaded and to me about my role. So if I didn't have Notebook LM, I wouldn't learn anywhere near as fast as I do. That's very interesting, Marni, and gave me an idea of a topic I need to learn about for work. And it's quite dense. Listen, you mentioned you touched briefly on agents as the future of AI, because right now we are exchanging information with AI. You prompt and you get an answer. But I understand uh agents as AI doing things for you. Can you give us a couple of examples of how an agent could help people on their daily lives. Yeah, sure. So you could have an agent that is connected to, mean, the real basic one that probably lots of people heard as email, right? So you could have an agent inside your email that you could literally just give one prompt at the beginning of the day, or it could even be scheduled to do at the beginning of the day. Have a look through my emails from yesterday and send draft replies to me or... let me know if there's anything urgent that need to reply to. And the agent can also then go off and put it into different folders for you, delete any, and then maybe even just give you a summary of all your emails that you received yesterday, right? So you know what to action. So that there there now, there's a lot of agents that do that. So that's quite an easy one. Another agent could be uh booking travel for you. And this is an example, it is out now. So if you went into Google Gemini, which I love to use for travel and planning, You could go into um Gemini and you could say, need a flight to New York at this time, along with needing to stay at a hotel. These are my preferences. And all of these things, you can train the AI. So you could give it information so it always does it, so you don't have to give it to it all the time. And then from there, it will come back. It will give you the results. And you go, OK, great, book. and it can book because it might have an MCP connector to your Visa card. Now without getting complicated, the MCP is just a piece of code that the visa has that connects to Google that is connected to your card. So you could just go off and have say, yeah, that one looks good, book for me. And the agent will do all the booking for you. So that is just one example for travel. I think the other example is probably related to life is, and this is an example. I needed to change my youngest daughter who's three and a half. I needed to look at changing her diet. She was getting quite lot of skin condition. She was um getting quite... um grumpy at times which she wasn't normally getting grumpy and initially I thought it was kind of like a development leap but then I realized I think it might have something to do with her diet. So I did some deep research. I used an agent and I used Chachi Petit deep research which is an agent and I basically just said here's the details about my daughter these are the things I'm worried about go away find me the research and give me a conclusion about what you think it will be and why. and the changes I need to make. Now that is an agent, that is an agent going off and doing the work, because it researched 72 websites for me. It also went off, I connected it to a GPT. Now a GPT is generative pre-trained transformer, so it's a chat that has, just like when I talked earlier about creating your own assistants, it's got context and it's got a knowledge base. So I also connected it to a medical GPT. And when it came back with that deep research, I then went to the medical GPT and I said, this is where I think... this is the issue I think my daughter has and what type of dietary changes do you think that I should be looking at. And they were two agents that went and did it and I think the whole thing took me about 15 minutes including a new dietary plan for my three and a half year old. Again for people that is starting, are your uh do's and don'ts for prompting? Someone that goes to GPT, what do they need to do to get good, efficient results? I'm going to be a little bit controversial here and say, I'd rather you not worry about it. I'd rather you have a conversation with the AI. Like, okay, so probably the don't would be, don't just ask it to do something without giving it context about what you want it to be an expert in or context about you and the outcome that you want. So probably don't do that. But I would just say, uh example yesterday working with a client she's a keynote speaker and she was um created we were doing a deep research task on all of the keynote opportunities that she might have in the UK in 2026 so she can apply. So I think the prompt went something like we are looking for, we first engineered it, we looked at, we asked for information about the 2024 and 2025 events already, because that's quite easy to find. So we asked for that and then we went, okay, these were the events from last year, can you find similar events or that company's events for 2026 and 2027? So basically the problem went something like... We are looking for keynote speaker events for a motivational speaker that talks about leadership and resilience. And again, we uploaded a document, again, because giving it context, a document about the keynote speaker. And then we said we're looking for internal company corporate days and business events from 2024 and 2025. We need a list of the event details, the speaker list and the themes. And then we said right at the end, and this is the key bit, if anyone takes this away, this is the key bit, ask me any clarifying questions for you to be able to do this task better. And then it come away with normally five to eight clarifying questions. And initially you might go, gosh, I've got to answer these, but I promise you it's worth it because the outcome is so much better. So I don't use a prompting frame as such. I just say, this is what I want. and then this is what I need you to ask me clarifying questions. I don't tell it how to do it because again, we're dealing with something much, much smarter than us. So if we tell it how to do it or if we say, do it this way or I only want this outcome, then actually we're stopping it using its full capacity. So yeah, that's kind of where I stand on prompting. Money, artificial intelligence, like any disruption, has a controversial side. From examples that you just uh talk about, let's go back to your daughter. You probably skipped a visit to the nutritionist or something like this. So what's your take on people saying, well, AI is helping us, it's BS, AI is taking over jobs? um Well the answer is yes. It is. But then so did the internet. And actually there was an article I read that the internet, it was uh a European article, the internet actually for every job that was lost it created 2.4 jobs. And I think social media and smartphones are the same. There were lots of jobs lost. There was lots of jobs created. And I think artificial intelligence is the same. There will be jobs lost, but there'll be lots of jobs created and there'll be lots of people that are able to do more. in their job and have a better sense of fulfilment and purpose because I know there are jobs out there that people are doing that they need to do for money not because they enjoy it. and actually is there an element of adding m AI or changing the job description. So maybe the job role doesn't go, maybe it's the job description that changes that then gives us humans a better opportunity to feel fulfilled. And a human need of ours, I believe, is to be seen and heard. And many jobs that we do don't allow us to be seen and heard. So what if AI could be... added to that job to give us an element of being seen and heard or give us an element of making more impact. We generally as humans, am confident that you know a part of where we um feel like we add value is within a community and by adding impact. you know, by doing good things for people, you know, that's why nurses love their jobs most of the time is because they're doing good things for people. They didn't do it for the paycheck, you know, because it's hard work, you know. So what if, what if the nurses could use an AI tool to help them do their job, you know, many times, whether it's talking to the AI, just giving brief notes about that patient, right? So then they're going from one ward to the other, and then they quickly listen to the AI that gave them notes about the patient they used before and then the AI suggests and says, don't forget, know, patient A loves to talk about their daughter. So you go straight in as a nurse and you go, how's your daughter today? You know, that is just adding so much value to the nurse, makes her feel like she's, you know, more purposeful and changing the quality of care she's giving to her patients. So I see the use of AI as... not taking jobs as such, although it will, and you know, let's not sugarcoat it, it will, but actually I think it gives the jobs that it would take, think it gives it an opportunity for people to do something better, different, more, you know, purposeful for them. And then I think it's gonna change the quality of work that we're able to do. And I honestly believe, and this is a keynote that I'm working on, is I honestly believe that... using AI as our new operating system without thinking about work or business or jobs, just generally as us as humans, I honestly believe it's going to bring back human connection because I feel like we live in such a busy world where we're always on our phone and we're always doing, you know, admin tasks or, you know, things like that where I think that AI can do things a lot, do things for us a lot quicker, a lot faster, a lot better. What if we had fun doing that and then all of a sudden we didn't want to talk to the agents anymore and actually we wanted to be present with the family. We wanted to do leisure activities. I think the businesses that are going to boom in the next five years are leisure businesses where people want to put their AI down, whether that be on a phone, which I don't think it will be going forward. I think it might be on a wearable or glasses or maybe even a pin. We'll do talk to our agents via a pin, I'm not sure. Yeah, the world is changing, we can't hide from it and I have a mindset of curiosity and abundance and I think that it's an exciting time to live right now. Mani, I used to be active in LinkedIn. I wrote articles, I put my thinking there, but I had to run away because it's a wall full of regurgitated AI created nonsense content. What's your take on us humans consuming this feedback, endless feedback loop of consuming information created by a machine and creating more information by your machine. Where is this heading? Yeah, it's rubbish, isn't it? And it's rubbish because we're lazy users. We're lazy users of AI, but we're lazy users of AI because we've not been educated. We've been given this amazing technology and as lazy humans, we just try and do things quickly. That's the world we live in, you know, but... actually we all have to step up as humans and we all have to remember that this is here to amplify our intelligence. And we ask an AI to do a task for us, but that mindset needs to change. I've talked about it already. You ask the AI to collaborate with you because like you said, content here, no one's changing anything, content out, and then we're all consuming that. It's not, there's no human interaction there. There's no human perspective, right? We, humans, have domain expertise, our knowledge, our experience, and our perspective on something. every time you use AI, please add your domain expertise by just asking it to ask you questions about what you think about that or where, you know, it could be asking the AI say, ask me clarifying questions or ask me my thoughts on this or dig deep and ask me to dig deep about a story that can relate to this topic, right? So I did this as an exact example just yesterday and for a post that I'm going to do a LinkedIn today. Last weekend I was competing in a sports competition and I didn't want to go and write about that sports competition about, I won and I won an MVP and I did this, I didn't want to do that. But I did. want to add some human element to them. I wanted to show people that I'm a human, that when I close my laptop or I'm not, you know, mum's taxi, I'm going to play sport because I love it, right? So I wanted to show that bit but without kind of just saying, oh, I went and did this. And I thought, I've learned some business lessons here. I don't really know what they are yet, but I'm going to ask Lord to ask me where I think the synergies were, right? And yeah. I think if I look back the conversation was about 10 minutes long and it was about Claude chatting to me and asking me about where I think there were synergies from the win or the team. It was around team culture, was around patience, it was about execution of strategy. Right, because in business we go, well I do, shiny object syndrome. You know, I'll put a strategy and I'll get bored and I don't see the results and I'm not patient so I change strategy. We're in a game scenario, I play touch rugby in a game scenario, you have to follow processes. You have to trust the process, you know, you have to grind the game out before the results come sometimes. I linked, um, Claude helped me link that back. So my learning and my takeaway here, think is We are being lazy users and I think each and every one of us need to step up our AI game and we need to learn to use AI as a collaborative partner that adds ads of main expertise and therefore the content that gets put out has so much more value. But what I will say is social media has been full of junk for a very long time and that's why we have some mental health issues for mainly Gen Z because they were comparing and contrasting. You know, they were... They were, I don't know, believing everything they seen on social media. This was before AI. So I don't think anything's changed. I just think that you're right. The content out there is rubbish because people aren't adding their domain expertise. And I think all of us, doesn't matter what you do, whether you've used it before, start using AI as a collaborative partner and everybody wins. Let us do five rapid fire questions. You ready? Number one, what's the worst beginner mistake you see people making with AI? uh using it like Google, find me this place, do this, create this, and adding no context or knowledge. one underrated tool everyone should try today. giving you my favorites. One underrated tool, I'm gonna say controversial and say, I think everybody should try Grok, which is m XAI. um It's a very, very unique large learning model, which I think everybody should potentially take a look at. you only had 30 minutes per day, a limit of 30 minutes per day, what will you be automating first? okay. okay. I would, 30 minutes is actually a really long time with AI. um I would, related to me and my business, I would do some deep research on different business use cases with AI, um probably using perplexity AI. um because it is like Google on steroids and you can use different AI models. So can use ChatGPT, you can use Claude, you can use its native models called Sona. So I would do some deep research on perplexity around AI business use cases. I would then take that information and I would put that into GenSpark and I would ask GenSpark to create me a useful um website for business owners and I would give a niche um that would allow them to use these. business use cases, so add value and do step by step. And then Jen Spark would probably create it for me and then I would probably take that link and post it on all my socials and in my email. 4. What is one thing AI should never replace in human life? This, us talking, human connection, having good conversations, um being present with your children, um you adding value to a community to help somebody and never replace the empathy that a human can give somebody. Number five, do you see AI as a productivity drug or as a life balance restorer? I'm biased, a life balance restore. Mani, uh for people that is listening, oh who feels curious or even intimidated by AI, what are the first baby steps they should take in the next 24 hours, in the next day, in the next two days? download either Chatjibutee, Claude or maybe even Gemini. And every time you go to want to do a task that you would normally go to Google for, go to one of those AI tools, start there. And this is, always, I probably over said this now, if anybody has listened to any of my broadcasts, they probably hear this a hundred times. But the way I actually started was I put a sticky note on my computer and a screensaver on my phone that said, can AI do this with me better? and more creative and more creative and that changed my mindset straight away. and it was on my like I said it was on my laptop and it was on my screensaver and I think that really excelled my journey with AI and I think I realized that AI is fun and practical and you can do so much with it and that that's how I enjoy that's how I enjoy using AI it's fun and practical. How can people know more about you, work with you, and get in touch? um I am at Business with AI Strategist on Instagram, LinkedIn company page, TikTok. Sorry, my little daughter's woken up. And I live on LinkedIn and I'm Marnie Wills on LinkedIn. This is Evie. She's just woken up. Very cute. Mani, uh thanks so much for this very insightful and resource-packed conversation. If I take one thing away, is the way you are putting and placing AI as an enhancement of us humans, as a superpower almost. The example you gave about creating a language application for your daughter with lovable.dev really struck me because you never get this level of customization anywhere, but now you can have it so you can motivate and use AI to motivate your kids, your friends to learn something, to do something different. So thanks for that moment of... uh bringing AI into a positive light, complementing humanity. And thanks again for the very insightful conversation. you're so welcome. It's been great. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, bye bye.