Discover how small business owners can use AI without losing their voice or brand identity. Branding expert Phil Pallen shares practical tips for leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT to boost productivity, enhance content creation, and reclaim valuable time.
IE 449: Ai for Small Businesses with Phil Pallen
Phil Pallen has been a branding consultant for the past 14 years, helping people and companies’ position, build, and promote their brands. Personal branding has been his focus and the foundation of his reputation.
He works with companies of all sizes, including start-ups, small businesses, and big multi-nationals on branding, strategy positioning, and brand identity development, including visuals and social media.
His fun job is working as a content creator. He started doing that after he sent a client a tutorial about how to update a blog on their website. The client told him the video was entertaining to watch and asked if he had considered making videos.
He decided that creating and posting YouTube videos was a great way to show his thought leadership. He didn’t know that it would attract opportunities to partner with brands in the way it has. He has made close to 400 YouTube videos over four years.
Now, every video that he publishes is sponsored. He has partnered with more than 100+ brands in the last few years. His biggest brand partnership is with Adobe. He is at a point in his career where he is happy, fulfilled, and challenged. He wakes up every morning loving his job.
Video is important now. A lot of people have the feeling they are fighting against AI because they are not seeing it as an assistant. They are seeing AI as a replacement for themselves. Video is one of the many ways you can stand out. It lets your voice and personality come out.
How can small businesses start using AI without feeling overwhelmed?
AI can be overwhelming, which is why Phil has written a book called AI for Small Business.. He connected with his book publisher, Simon & Shuster, via YouTube because they liked how AI is explained in simple terms to people who might be overwhelmed.
Phil sympathizes with that feeling and has dedicated his personal brand to addressing the overwhelm.
On the topic of AI, there are many different lanes. People will talk about the latest chip technology, evolutions, and all that geeky stuff. Phil’s lane is AI tools.
His perspective on AI is enthusiastic for small business owners who can use AI as a tool for productivity. He doesn’t think that working longer and getting more done in the day.
Sometimes productivity means getting done what you need to do faster so that you win more time back to live, to go outside for a walk, instead of feeling overwhelmed.
He doesn’t believe that if you don’t jump on the AI bandwagon now, you will be too late. With every day that passes, AI tools are becoming even better at handling human and conversational commands and language.
Many tools beyond ChatGPT are free, “free-mium,” and some are premium. In many instances, some are well worth the investment if they help you win back time or help you delegate to your team to focus on high impact.
Phil is uniquely interested in how AI is not a tool for laziness but instead a tool that enables us to be even better at our work.
To battle the overwhelm, remember that it doesn’t need to be done overnight. It needs to be done by focusing on the business challenges that you need to tackle and how AI might help. That is the starting point.
The more information you provide ChatGPT with, the better it helps you, your business, and the way you are going to prompt it.
What are some common misconceptions about AI that small business owners should let go of?
Phil calls these the “Golden Rules of AI.” He believes there is no right or correct way to write a prompt. He is not a big fan of copy-and-paste prompts.
Content is what you say. Personality is the unique way that you and only you deliver information. You cannot dictate the language of how you must use AI. That isn’t human. Listening to what others say is content. Remembering how you say something is personality. There is no right way to write a prompt.
Phil recommends using a tool like Text Blaze to save your most frequently used prompts. Instead of trying to memorize them every time you need them, have them available at near instant recall.
Text Blaze is a free Google Chrome plugin. You can write backslash / and a single word command will prepopulate the text you have saved, so you can perfect the prompt instead of trying to recall it.
Our brain is for generating ideas and not for storing them. As we lean into the things AI is great at, we are reminded why we still need humans and the human element day to day and in AI.
Whether it is social media or AI, Phil’s job has been to identify the human and create a brand that amplifies what makes someone great and uniquely human.
Personal branding is the way you are going to be able to set yourself apart. The more you lean into it, the easier it becomes and the more your audience knows who you are and what you are about.
In what ways can AI help small businesses save time and increase efficiency?
Jenny feels that AI has made the biggest difference in increasing her efficiency.
Here is how Phil uses AI daily. At a surface level, this has allowed him, in some instances, to double his hourly rate because he is doing a better job and doing it quicker.
Phil thinks ChatGPT and other AI tools get a bad rap because a lot of people haven’t mastered how to use them without losing their own voice. Phil has a freebie called “Avoid Words” that he has saved to tell AI words that he doesn’t want it to use.
Phil uses ChatGPT to write his YouTube scripts. By the time he goes to record them, using a teleprompter, he can record them in less than 10 minutes and usually in one take.
Phil doesn’t use AI to be lazy, although it does help him record videos faster. He uses it because it makes him better.
First, he puts in the brief description of what he has been provided for his video.
Second, he goes to the sponsor’s website, copies everything on the homepage, and pastes it into AI. He tells AI not to take action at that time because he is still giving it input.
His third step is to give AI two recent scripts that show his style. Once he has all three of those pieces input, he asks AI to draft a script. That gets his script about 90% to completion.
The output is better because he has taken the time to input information that AI can use. A conversation is two-way. Remember that when you are interacting with a generative AI tool, to get a good output, you have to take the time to give it good input.
It will try to take a shortcut and give you quick output that isn’t good unless you give it 3-4 phases of input. Tell it not to take action until you have finished your input.
Another good prompt is “It is okay to disagree with me, just tell me why.” Those are two biases that he finds often and how to deal with them.
The input phase is the step that most people are missing. They think they can ask AI a question, get information from it, and be done. They are not providing AI with the input or information to give better answers.
Once, Jenny uploaded a PDF copy of one of her offers so AI could understand what she is about, and where she was trying to go with her content. She then provided a PDF of her book. That was helpful.
We are missing the input phase and expecting to ask questions, and it will know who we are. If you can provide it with actual data, like a script you have used in the past or copied from a website, AI is going to understand your voice better and provide better results to you.
Specifically, with ChatGPT, people need to be careful about the data they are providing. You must own the copy you are inputting. There are tools like Adobe Acrobat AI assistant to help.
“Acrobat AI Assistant is a conversational engine, allowing you to chat with your documents to find quick answers, generate one-click summaries, craft emails, brainstorm ideas, and generate talking points for presentations. Generative summaries include citations that show you where in the document the information was retrieved, enabling you to double-check the relevance and validity of the answers.”
It is a little rainbow button in the top right corner of a PDF. This tool does not train the model on your intellectual property. In most cases, ChatGPT does.
Phil pays for a higher level of ChatGPT because he occasionally deals with confidential or sensitive data when he is consulting. Adobe Acrobat AI assistant has the capability to handle up to 600 pages. ChatGPT does train on your data, so tools like Acrobat AI assistant help with sustainable use of AI to include privacy.
What’s your advice for small business owners who fear AI will replace human jobs?
It is a good reminder that we can be replaced by anything. There was a study done by Goldman Sachs that discovered 63% of jobs in the US are complemented by AI and allow people to do their job even better.
Technology is adjacent to what you are doing and can help you remember things about people that you might not.
You are the conductor and have to conduct the symphony, but you don’t have to play every instrument.
- In 63% of jobs, AI is complementing.
- 30% of jobs unaffected by AI (cutting grass, for example).
- 7% of jobs will be replaced by AI.
That is a relatively low number, but we should all be thinking about how we can avoid being replaced by technology. What is it in your work that people pay for?
People don’t pay Phil for knowledge. They pay for access. They want his opinion based on the fact that he has branded more than 400 people in 14 years.
It isn’t necessarily knowledge. You may be able to recall the knowledge on ChatGPT. People pay because they want his attention.
In your job, what is it that makes you irreplaceable? It is the experience and the story that you have lived through. Your knowledge then impacts the people that you are helping because it is the human element that they need.
Guide to 200+ Vetted AI tools for Your Small Business
This is a guide with a curated list of artificial intelligence tools—tested and vetted for small businesses like yours. They are organized by categories and digitized with filters, links, and access to videos Phil has done. Phil has tried and evaluated many AI tools. This is a sample of what AI tools are available and what they do.
Phil has lots of other freebies here.
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