[EO Seattle] Making AI Practical, Fun, and Profitable for Businesses With Nicole Donnelly

Nicole Donnelly is the Founder and CEO of AI Smart Ventures, a company that helps businesses leverage artificial intelligence to work smarter and accelerate growth through hands-on training, consulting, and practical AI implementation. A serial entrepreneur, Nicole previously built a global baby brand from her kitchen table and has been a leader in AI-powered marketing since 2015, amassing over 8,900 LinkedIn followers and guiding clients to achieve remarkable results like dominating 60% of AI search results in their industries.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[03:34] Nicole Donnelly shares which AI tools her team tests and recommends for results
[07:35] Secrets to creating photo shoot quality images with AI
[13:00] How AI video and avatar tech have evolved to game-changing levels
[16:08] Nicole explains how she scouts and vets new AI tools for her team
[19:09] The latest on AI-powered search and dominating AI SEO rankings
[24:04] Hyper-personalized email strategies that skyrocket open rates
[26:42] How predictive AI saves companies millions in product design
[36:19] The essentials of securing your AI systems and sensitive data
[44:34] Nicole’s favorite AI-powered productivity tools for massive time savings

In this episode…

Artificial intelligence is evolving at lightning speed. But how can everyday businesses keep up without feeling overwhelmed or left behind? Between flashy new tools, endless updates, and confusing terminology, the real challenge isn’t access to AI; it’s knowing how to make it work for you. What if exploring AI could actually be fun, hands-on, and profitable all at once?

According to Nicole Donnelly, a former pro athlete turned entrepreneur and AI educator, the key to adopting AI successfully is curiosity and experimentation. She explains that her team dedicates time each week to test tools and compare models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to see what performs best for real business scenarios. She highlights how businesses can use AI not just to automate repetitive tasks but to unlock creativity. The impact, she says, is transformative: teams become more efficient, more confident, and genuinely excited to innovate.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz speaks with Nicole Donnelly, Founder and CEO of AI Smart Ventures, to discuss making AI practical, fun, and profitable for businesses. They explore how to choose the right AI tools, use automation to boost engagement, and create personalized outreach that drives results. Nicole also shares insights on AI security, team training, and the importance of maintaining joy and curiosity in the AI journey.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments

“We dedicate a minimum of an hour every week just to experimenting together as a team.”
“If you can pull it out and help people to not do the things that they don’t like to do, you will have such a happier team.”
“The AI tools allow you to really get out there and reimagine how you’re engaging with people.”
“I have to believe so firmly in myself and what I’m doing, and not as the antithesis to what someone else says about me, but just because that’s who I am.”
“My big personal bag is to bring joy to a billion people, and right now I’m doing that with these sessions with AI.”

Action Steps

Experiment with AI tools weekly: Regular experimentation keeps your team adaptable, creative, and confident in using new technologies effectively.
Prioritize security and compliance in AI adoption: Protecting data through secure models and clear use policies builds trust and safeguards sensitive information.
Personalize outreach with AI-driven insights: Tailoring communication using automation and analytics enhances engagement and fosters stronger customer and partner relationships.
Train teams on workflow automation: Empowering employees to create AI-powered processes improves efficiency and helps them focus on high-value, strategic work.
Cultivate curiosity and joy in learning AI: Encouraging a playful, open mindset toward AI drives innovation and long-term enthusiasm across your organization.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:12

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is definitely no different. I’m super excited to introduce Nicole Donnelly. You can check her out at AISmartVentures.Com. And we’re going to talk about all things AI today.

Everyone’s favorite topic. Nicole, before we launch into it, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out since this is, you know, actually I have a lot of cool EO members on right Nicole like yourself and highlighting some of those some great stories. And I feel like EO members also get vulnerable and don’t just share the big wins, but they share the challenges along the way. And so, you know, I’ve had on Robert Hartline, Robert Hartline, you know, Nashville built you know, I don’t know if you know Robert, you do. Okay.

Everyone knows Robert I feel like but he built up a chain of cell phone stores. And he has also a software. And he’s now, you know, helping companies with EOS. Ethan King, EO Atlanta talks about his companies as well, and some interesting kind of apparel personalization that he was doing and some of the interesting people he created that for. And Mat Zalk of EO Tulsa, just talking about he was investing in properties.

And then he’s like, this is a pain to manage these things. So he decided to be that solution for other people. So he started, you know, does property management across Tulsa in Oklahoma and Arkansas and those things. So check those out. More on inspiredinsider.com.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a few ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast.

We do the strategy, accountability and the full execution production. Also, number two, we’re an easy button for a company’s gifting. So we make gifting and staying top of mind for your clients, partners, prospects, even your staff. From a culture perspective, simple, easy, affordable. And you know, you just send us the addresses and we do everything else.

So, you know, Nicole, we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that are running in the background to make it stress free for a company to build amazing relationships. And I found like the number one thing in my life is relationships. So I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And personally, I find no better way over the past 15 years to profile the people I admire and share with the world what they’re working on on the podcast and sending them sweet treats in the mail. So if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at supportrise@25.com

I’m super excited to introduce Nicole Donnelly, a former pro snowboarder turned entrepreneur. She built a global baby brand from her kitchen table and that’s an incredible story. Now she leads AI Smart Ventures, and she helps businesses use AI to work smarter and grow faster. Who doesn’t want to work smarter and grow faster? Nicole, thanks for joining me.

Nicole Donnelly: 03:22

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:24

I want to start off and we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of AI, but just start off about AI Smart Ventures and what you do.

Nicole Donnelly: 03:34

Yeah. So after I sold my first company, which was the baby company, what I learned in that experience is that I’m naturally good at marketing, and those were the things that I like to do. So I started a marketing agency, and in my marketing agency we started using AI back in 2015, so we’ve been using AI for the last ten years to make our jobs easier and adopting the tools along the way. And we still have a marketing agency, and in January of 2023, we consciously put new business development on the back burner for the marketing agency. And we launched our AI courses, and we did that because of course, we see this opportunity, and we had been using AI prior to that, you know, for seven years.

And so we have this hands on daily experience using AI. And in 2023, my goodness, if you were paying attention to AI, tools were never developed so fast. And it was the year in my, I think my whole life that I learned the most and it was constantly trying to keep up with things. Now it’s settling a little bit. You know, there are still updates every week, but it’s not 10,000 updates every week.

And it’s I like to play with it. It’s fun. That’s how we started getting into it. And we have people on the team now with different expertise, and we test out tools in the different areas that people care about. And we dedicate a minimum of an hour every week just to experimenting together as a team.

And then we publish on this site, actually the AI Smart Insiders, there’s a resources page and we publish the tools that we are currently using. We actually just updated this list yesterday, and it just a little blurb about what we use them for. And we teach how to use the different tools in class. Why you might want to choose one over the other. We also cover different AI models and what they’re good at, what they’re not good at, and it changes all the time.

And so this is something we were just talking about before, and we did a bunch of testing yesterday on the different models with a set of prompts that we’ve been testing quarterly for three years. And yesterday Gemini one big we used Gemini free and paid Jasper. We use ChatGPT free ChatGPT paid. We did four, five and five. Oh, and we did Claude free.

Claude paid, Copilot free and Copilot paid. And we tested all of the prompts and used the different models inside the tools. And we have a set of four prompts that we test every quarter. And one is code, and we have a math prompt and we have what are the top ten Netflix movies in the US today. And that might seem simple, but Gemini was the only one paid.

Gemini was the only one that got that right, you know? And so this is like, that’s what we do for fun. We play with the tools and we test them out.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:05

You have John’s dream job. That’s literally he wishes he probably could do that all day long. So let’s talk about this page for a second. And if you’re watching if you’re listening there is a YouTube video on this. And you can see where I Smart Ventures.

And then we kind of navigated over to a smart insider.com. And we’re on the resources page here. And this is constantly updating. So in this point of time this is what it looks like. Let’s maybe talk about some of these I don’t know which category do you want to start on.

Nicole Donnelly: 07:35

And we can start at the top okay. And the reason why we have this little collection of tools that we use, things like Leonardo, you can do a lot of things for free, and people outside of the US can still get tools like Veho, which is Google’s video tool, because they’ll put it inside of Leonardo and that might be a reason to choose. It is because you’re across the border and you might not have access to it. Leonardo is really fun. You can hand-draw things and it will create realistic images.

You can make realistic images and make it look like hand drawings. You can do video, you can do product shots. You could do product design in here. And it’s really inexpensive, easy to use. Midjourney is the super high quality.

If you’re somebody who is a cinematographer, graphic designer, and you know how to describe what you want, Midjourney is kind of the most it requires the most description to get the good images. And you can do images that can replace a $20,000 photo shoot. because if you know the language to describe them that well, it will produce photo shoot quality images in sizes big enough for a billboard. Firefly is Adobe’s online tool. You can do a lot for free, and you can get paid.

But then Firefly will take your images.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:04

And I’ve seen so many commercials on this, I think. Are they just heavily. Just pouring a bunch of media into this. Do you see the same thing?

Nicole Donnelly: 09:14

I mean, Adobe’s a big company, so they have the money and Firefly is the most intellectual property safe model that’s out there because it’s Adobe and everything’s watermarked in there. And they create vector images out of the images in there. Which means if you’re a Photoshop person, you know, there’s layers to your images. And so in Firefly, they’ll create the layered images so that you can apply. You can adjust anything in the picture and pull it apart and put it back together how you want it to.

And so anybody who’s on Adobe Suites, probably using Firefly and there’s AI built into Adobe, into Photoshop and all of the others now. But we want to show Firefly because it’s a design standard, Adobe’s design standard, which, you know, our designers use Adobe as well. And then ideogram is like the cheap version of an image tool where you don’t own the intellectual property, you can do celebrity likeness and ideogram says when it’s off of our platform, we take no responsibility for what you do with these images. And so it’s not IP safe, but on ideogram it’s really easy to design things. You can use other people’s prompts that are on there.

It shows the prompts to get the images and I just I designed some stickers. And if somebody wants some AI Smart Ventures stickers and they want to use my images somewhere, I’m okay with that. You know, it was just the easiest place to go. Design some stickers because ideogram does a good job with text on the images. And the other models are getting there more now.

But ideogram was the first one to do a good job with text on images. Which is still a challenge in ChatGPT. It’s getting better. Video audio picture is really simple, not sophisticated. You can get great videos and you can start with anything from a PowerPoint presentation to a pile of photos, and you can make videos.

And it’s a really easy one to use. So and you can do voiceover in there. When I go speak at IO chapters they want a video. And so if it’s the same topic, I have a standard video that I use and I just rerecord the voiceover Silver, and it includes B-roll in it, too. But I just rerecord the voiceover and say, hey, yo, Panama, I’ll see you here.

Hey, yo, new Jersey, I’ll see you on this date. And the rest of it stays the same. And it’s like, just so easy to use. I’m not a video editor by any means, and I can do it. Hey, Jen is really good for us.

We have our training in multiple languages. We can use the dubbing and change the language, and they actually match the mouth movements to the new language. Does a really good job with that. It does the avatars too. So I have avatars of me that my assistant can make videos with.

They’ve just updated to this avatar for it’s so good. You and the photo avatar, you can just take a photo and then it gives you a lifelike video. It does user generated content. It’ll take a page from your website and create an ad out of that page for product or service, or if you have an Amazon store, it’ll do that too. It’s Heijn is a more sophisticated one.

We are Heijn partners, we love the product and we use it every day.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:48

Do you feel like. That’s gotten better? I feel like when it first came out, it seemed a little granulated. I don’t know what pixelated, I guess. I don’t know, it seems like it’s gotten better.

Nicole Donnelly: 13:00

Leaps and bounds. So we’ve been using this one since September 23rd and it’s so good now. They just did a really big update this last week, and Veo Gemini’s video tool is inside Heijn now too. So you can create videos from nothing and you can make them speak and speak multiple languages and make user generated content from it. And then if you have a long video like this one we’re doing right now, I drop it into opus clip.

Opus Chops up long form video and is great for the content on social media. So if you wanted to say. If you wanted to have a specific part of this, cut out and say, only show the clips where Nicole is talking about video and audio tools. It will select those sections and you can choose the length of section or leave it open. You can edit out ums and ahs.

You can equalize the audio and you can put the image the text on top. Add some music. You can do all of that inside of opus. They just keep improving it to Soon-ho is music. You can make your own songs is unbelievable.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:20

It’s crazy what you can do with.

Nicole Donnelly: 14:23

Have you played with it?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:24

Yeah, I was, I was I’m with someone and it was a past guest of the podcast Guest, and I just kind of copied their homepage, put it in a pseudo because we were just chatting about rap and country music or whatever. And so I said, create a rap and in like probably less than two minutes, I created a rap and country song with their company, all about their company, and then post it on LinkedIn. And they were like, you know, it just blew their mind, you know, that you can do that.

Nicole Donnelly: 14:57

Yeah, I used it. I spoke at the Women’s Summit in Montreal and we each had walkout songs. And Jenny Feder said she wanted Jenny from the Eastern Bloc. And in a couple minutes I had a version that was her walkout song, Jenny from the Eastern Bloc, made with snow.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:16

Unbelievable.

Nicole Donnelly: 15:17

Yeah. And then loom. So loom is a traditional tool that has embraced AI and embedded it and loom. For anybody who doesn’t know, you can make instructional videos Like with, you know, with your mouse going around with the cursor going around. And a lot of people do training videos with loom.

Or if you have a problem with some. Application you’re using, you make a loom video and send it to the the tool company. And now they’ve got all sorts of AI tools in there to help you out.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:54

How do you discover these new things? Or I mean, like if a new pseudo like software comes out or another Heijn competitor comes out.

Nicole Donnelly: 16:08

And there are competitors that we go back to and test these things. But I am in so many WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups where people are talking about these tools. I go to webinars, I subscribe to a bunch of different emails. So I will find out from a lot of different sources. And and if a lot of people are talking about the same thing, then I might go there.

Or if there’s something new like Open Forge. I heard about that from a WhatsApp group. I missed the webinar on it and I got a demo. We signed up for it and it’s wowed our clients. So and then I also can text the developers because it’s a new tool and say, hey, there’s an issue with this thing or that thing.

Open forge is really new, and it’s an AIO or AI SEO search tool that shows you the results. This goes to a Calendly link. This is a very you can go to open AI. And it will show you, your competitors who’s showing up for what. Queries on ChatGPT because ChatGPT data is available to use that way right now.

And we want to show up in AI search and this tool helps us show up. We have a client that ranks. They get 60% of all search results for their keywords. And we’ve done a lot of SEO with them over the last two years. And we want to make sure that they keep their position with AI.

And so we have been optimizing for the AI search as well. And that’s something on our blog. We have a a geo AI SEO post that we update all the time to talk about what you should know about AI search and showing up in AI search results, because there is this arbitrage opportunity that if you are flexible and you can adjust your site, you can show up in search when the big guys aren’t because AI can’t read their sites yet. So for us, there are some really big competitors for AI training like Udemy, you know, like that’s a huge one. And Coursera, but they don’t show up except for the occasional AI search result, because their sites aren’t friendly for the AI to come and read and find what is on them.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:45

We’ll keep on talking about, you know, the outreach and social piece. But maybe I know that you talked about the that construction company. Anything else to mention on that where they’re getting 60% of their search results or some of the do’s and don’ts of we’re talking this is early on kind of people are still trying to discover what’s going on with AI search.

Nicole Donnelly: 19:09

Yeah. Well, so some of the things that are different about AI search than traditional SEO would be that the ChatGPT needs a JSON file. The other ones, you would have a text file that would be the sitemap. And so when Google would come and read your site, having that text file, you know, behind the scenes was important. Now you need JSON files and you need to have it.

There’s there’s some of the stuff behind the scenes that is the same. It just matters more now. And on the front end, AI search takes into account your social media presence and especially it takes into account Reddit mentions YouTube, Wikipedia, Pinterest. You know, all of these places where if you have been good with social, then it’s going to help you. And if you have not, then you definitely want to make sure that your and your posts have to be optimized in a certain way to.

But they it takes into account social media a lot more than traditional search when it serves up Results.

[Continue to Page 2]

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:22

Awesome. Yeah. So it’s like about just continuing to do maintain social content?

Nicole Donnelly: 20:31

Yeah. Maintain social content and really good content that answers the questions that people are asking on chat. And if you have a Wix site, you’re not going to be found or some of those others because they don’t present the type of files that AI is looking at. So your sites will just get ignored. You need to have something like a WordPress site and have those JSON files on there, so that AI search will read them, at least right now that’s how it’s working.

And so we’re seeing small companies outrank big companies because their sites are more geo friendly.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:11

Outreach and social.

Nicole Donnelly: 21:13

Yeah. Outreach and social press jockey is really cool if you’ve ever used Haro. Have you heard of help a reporter? Oh, yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:22

Totally.

Nicole Donnelly: 21:22

Right. So you can take in Haro quoted and all the others into press jockey and it will. You can organize what queries you see, what press inquiries you see based on what you set. And then AI can write your responses. Once it knows you, you can put all your company and brand information in there and then you can start replying.

And also this one. Yes you can. You can automatically set it to reply to certain types of press responses or press queries. And we also know the founder at press jockey Cahill right there in the video. So if there’s ever any issues you can directly get in contact with him.

And that’s like that’s a great tool because it makes it so much more efficient. And then I don’t have to be the one responding. I can have somebody else and they know, like the different things that we respond about and have those pitches ready. And then instantly kind of do the same thing where you can use them to do LinkedIn messages, but also part of your bigger cold email outreach. For us, the things that we build kind of plays into that.

So if we’re doing some cold email outreach, let’s say somebody you get an email and it says, hey, are you interested in learning more about Geo. And then I might send you an article on LinkedIn through Zipify. That was the most recent one we did on Geo, because you replied to that email and said, yes, you know, there may be something in there or we probably wouldn’t do it exactly like that. But is the the LinkedIn side of things. And so you can automate the messaging, but we want to do it in a really hyper personalized way, and you can use it as your mix with cold outreach.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:32

And then instantly same thing.

Nicole Donnelly: 23:34

It’s similar because sometimes you’ll burn through your accounts and you have to use a different tool to you have to be careful, you can’t do too much outreach or else you’ll get banned. Your account will get locked. You have to be careful with it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:50

Maybe talk about. Nicole. Hyper personalization because I know when we were talking before we hit record about email and hyper personalization and and you’re like, you use that heavily. Maybe talk about that.

Nicole Donnelly: 24:04

We do. There are a few different techniques that people are using for hyper personalization. And if anybody is a business owner, I’m sure you’ve received these emails in your inbox too, where somebody was obviously reading what your last post was on LinkedIn, which AI can do or it reads what you commented on somebody else’s post, and then we’ll take from your LinkedIn or wherever it’s scraping from, and craft a really personalized email message. And based on your response, likely you get tagged in a system of theirs to take different actions. And and then for us, we bucket people in our system.

We use tags and use automations. Not just AI, but we use automations that will note the actions people take in our email newsletters and then put them into the right streams. And once we have this information, we have some lists where we get 90% open rate consistently because we know what those people are interested in and they have clicked through and really engaged a lot. And those like seeing 90% open rate consistently is unheard of. You know, I’ve got a friend who is getting 140% on one of his campaigns.

And you might wonder, how can you get more than 100% open rate? Well, people love the content in the email so much. And it was personalized videos. There was a case study associated with their title and job position. And he used hey Jen’s API for this.

And they passed it around to their colleagues and friends because they thought that the emails were so good. So he had more reach than the original list. So he had 140% open rate because he was using AI in a way that really wowed people, which is hard to do if you’re a business owner, you probably get a lot of solicitation. And so the AI tools allow you to really get out there and reimagine how you’re engaging with people.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:17

I imagine the hyper personalization stuff is really good also for for e-commerce companies, right? Because people go, they click on things they may not add to their cart right away, or they add to the cart and abandon. Do you find people are using it for that as well?

Nicole Donnelly: 26:33

Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:35

I mean, I. Know you had e-commerce, but you also were, you know, across worldwide in in retail also.

Nicole Donnelly: 26:42

Yeah. Yeah. And with retail it’s that upsell. You know it’s like what’s going to what else do people buy. And so it’s the if this then that kind of a setup which is more the automation because they know what people like.

They can sell more of that. You know what people in certain audiences like. And there’s there are predictive analytics around this sort of activity too. And they’re using predictive analytics in images for product design. So you can upload to this tool.

You can upload all your images. There’s a couple that do this now. And it will show you the things that people will like about it and things that they won’t like about it. So you can change your images until you get this higher score that would be more likely to get clicked on. And Harley Davidson used it in their motorcycle design.

It saved them millions of dollars in design by using a predictive AI image tool to help them design their new models.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:51

I always thought about that. It’s like they invest so much money, all these car companies in a new design, and you’re like, I mean, I guess they do focus groups. I don’t know how they do it, but that seems like a nice way to test it out.

Nicole Donnelly: 28:08

Yeah, and if you can. Well, in our last newsletter we talked about this too. As your AI modeling environment, Waymo has been doing this for a long time. The CEO of Waymo would make these virtual environments to test the cars out and how they would perform given different scenarios. And Toyota is doing that now, too, with in collaboration with MIT and their research lab to model out scenarios in 3D so you don’t have to build the things.

So in a way this is like their version of that. And we can have a consumer version or like a small business version of it, even just on images that you’re putting on your website, blog posts, social media to see how it would perform before you put it out there. And so you could actually upload 100 images, find out which ones ranked the best, fix those and use them and the ones that rank the least. You know, if you need to fix them, you can. Or just get rid of them.

It makes that iteration process a lot faster.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:12

And then we have obviously you mentioned open open for G. I don’t know if there’s you have AI smart GPT and AI PRM. What are those.

Nicole Donnelly: 29:22

And Jasper. Jasper we’ve been using Jasper.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:25

Been around forever.

Nicole Donnelly: 29:26

Yeah like six. They’ve AI for.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:29

World.

Nicole Donnelly: 29:29

Yeah. I mean, if you were on clubhouse, you heard about Jasper during Covid. They do content. They produce content. I mean, you use it just like you would use ChatGPT.

But the unique thing about Jasper is that they have multiple models sitting below the tool. So you’re you’re pulling from multiple AI models, and then you also have your knowledge base. It kind of acts like your own custom rag or your knowledge base of all your information about your brand, and so you can have junior people in your organization producing content. We have a client that’s highly technical, and every blog post would have to pass by their engineers. Nobody on our team knew about that product.

It was us winches and capstans for tugboats and oceanographic research vessels. Right? It was very.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:23

Obviously an expert at that. Yes.

Nicole Donnelly: 30:25

Yeah. So we uploaded all their specs to the to Jasper and all the information about their company, and we could write blog posts. You know, our 24 year old could write blog posts that the engineers would approve without edits. And we couldn’t do that before we we were not that good because it was such a technical product. The engineers would always edit the articles.

But Jasper really bridged that gap. And it can it can do a really good job if you set it up right. The AI smart GPT will help you answer branding questions. Marketing questions. It’s just a custom GPT that I built.

Somebody asked me yesterday how many agents I had had, and I said, I don’t know. I probably have built a good at least 30 myself. But in our organization, I’m not sure each person has so many. Our operations person has multiple, and it’s so easy to build for these things that you do all the time. And so we have our AI smart GPT, and then AI is a prompt library that if you download the Chrome extension, you can have access it access to it inside of ChatGPT or Claude.

And before custom GPT were even a thing, we used AI and created all of our prompts in there, and then we can share them With anybody publicly and we could use them internally. So we created a bunch that we can just reuse.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:06

Can you explain? Again, I’ve heard various explanations and definitions of an AI agent. Yeah. Maybe just touch on that because you mentioned obviously. Oh, I created this AI agent in ChatGPT.

And what that what that means to you?

Nicole Donnelly: 32:22

Well, we use the term agent loosely. I was on a panel the other day, and there’s a company there that builds agents. They have this strict definition that an agent does tasks for you autonomously. Where I think we are, though, is a custom. GPT can be an agent.

If you are in copilot and use Microsoft, they actually call those agents. They look the same, you build them the same and they call them agents. You go over to Gemini, they call them gems. But anything that any little bit of AI like a custom GPT that’s designed to do one job for you really well. We call those agents.

Now you can build big, complicated agents that can do 40 steps for you that have AI, automation, and multiple tools. That’s also an agent. But these ones are like baby agents. They’re they can they can do these.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:16

Maybe you should coin that baby agent baby agents.

Nicole Donnelly: 33:20

Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:20

Fitting for your past e-commerce brands.

Nicole Donnelly: 33:23

It is. That’ll be our platform baby agents. And some people would call them bots early on, like over in like, Poe and Perplexity. Poe would call them bots, but they were what we would call agents now.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:39

So now we could see what people are confused because everyone has a different definition, I guess autonomously. One example, be someone builds this. I don’t know if this would be really a good example, but like obviously we have like this that you built and like, you don’t have to do anything with this because the user is interfacing with it and it’s. Would that be an example of an autonomous or like obviously if you wanted an output in, you know, this smart GPT, you’d have to interact with it to, you know, feed it at least some of the branding specs or something like that. What would you what would be some examples of autonomous agents?

Nicole Donnelly: 34:20

Something that I would consider more autonomous. There’s we’re working on with a client is when it’s for the accountant. So the accountant receives an invoice in his email and it actually goes straight from his email. There’s, you know, a little bot in there watching. So when these keywords come in it, there’s two paths that it can follow.

And it depends who it’s from. So it’s going to go in one path and get processed in one system, or it’ll go in this other path and get processed in this other system. So it pulls it out of email, it puts it into QuickBooks, or it puts it into this other system that they use. And then a human would review before it gets paid. In theory, it could just get paid.

But it’s something that’s happening without the person in the middle. And there is a stop gap that’s a human. So usually we recommend having a human in the loop at some point. For most of these processes, our little bot here on the website could be called an agent to it’s trained, it has a lot of information, and there are different ways that people are using these. So we could have a bot call you on the phone, you could do a live video chat on our website, and you can book a meeting automatically with a human or get transferred to a human, depending on how the conversation goes.

And so you could say it’s acting autonomously to a certain point, you know, to the end of its ability. Because it could get as far as booking an appointment or getting somebody to sign up for class, you know, whatever, whatever the person is looking for.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:04

What’s it brought up? You brought something up with the the invoice stuff. And I’ve heard you talk about this, the importance of security and how do you build security into these systems.

Nicole Donnelly: 36:19

It’s more like building AI into secure systems because some AI is more secure than others. Like, I would never use Grok ever because it is not secure. It’s not private. We know this. The most secure way to use an AI model is to get a version that you could download onto your own server.

Imagine you have a physical server sitting right by you. You’ve downloaded a model. So now the AI is just this brain that is trained to think in a certain way, and then you can put that on your server. You can also download N810, which is a platform for creating agents or workflows and agents. You can actually download that onto your server too.

And so you’ll have to do manual updates to it. And then you want to make sure that your server is secure. And you can do this in the cloud as well. You can have these, you know, you can have the the self-hosted versions of some of these AI models, and then it doesn’t pull from anything except for what you tell it to pull from. And so you’re just borrowing the brain of the AI.

And it’s not connected to the internet. It’s not connected to different places like our CRM is on a HIPAA compliant server, because we do deal with government and even in foreign governments, if it’s HIPAA compliant, it compliant. It usually meets their standards. And for us, we just want to know, like we do know, the tools that fall into the different compliance. Some are HIPAA compliant like Zapier is not HIPAA compliant.

So you don’t want to use zaps, but you would need net10 self-hosted. If you need HIPAA compliance, can we do work with some life sciences? We work with some financial institutions as well. And so they have higher standards for compliance and regulation that they have to adhere to.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:14

You mentioned the not secure list. Grok is one of them. What are some other ones people should be wary of?

Nicole Donnelly: 38:22

Deep seek you could download and have deep seek offline. But as far as deep seek online goes, I wouldn’t use that either. As if you need something that is secure, having something that your number one pay for it and look at their terms and conditions. You know, ChatGPT. Whatever version you have.

Hey, that’s a paid version. Look at what their privacy policy says. Drop it into ChatGPT and look at what your liabilities are, because there’s different levels. And the more that you pay, the more security you get with that and more privacy. And then you’ve got tools like Claude.

They won’t even let you upload a customer list, even if you were just reorganizing or doing something with it, because they don’t want to post information that could potentially leak and get out or be used in nefarious ways.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:22

That makes sense. Design.

Nicole Donnelly: 39:28

Design. Oh, well. Gamma is what we use for Dex. I love it so much. I’ve not done a PowerPoint deck or an A deck on anything else since gamma.

You could start for free over here and in like a minute you’ll have a gamma if you just click the start for free button. On the upper right hand side of that one.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:55

Love it.

Nicole Donnelly: 39:56

Yeah, it’s it’s so good. It’ll do a deck for you so fast. You can take an outline and put it in, or you can create from nothing. It’s it’s magical. And then Canva.

Canva is what a lot of people are using. If they’re not on Adobe Suite or even if they are, a lot of times a company will be using Canva for any of their images, brochures, things like that, and they keep adding AI features to Canva. You can do video and audio. Hey, Jen has an app inside of Canva. So Canva has multiple design apps for most of the AI tools right inside of it, so you can use it in there.

So if we have videos in Hey Jen, we can easily pop them into something that we’re doing in Canva.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:44

Organization. My favorite organization processes.

Nicole Donnelly: 40:48

That’s your favorite?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:49

Talk to me. Yeah, exactly.

Nicole Donnelly: 40:53

Well, OS CRM is built on go high level and it’s got some extra AI features. And this is where we have all of our chat bots are built in here. They’re native. And you can do AI phone calling inbound to AI outbound with AI right in there. You can get all the call recordings, see how they go, and you can have humans call from inside of here.

But it’s our pipeline. It’s our CRM system. It is also our LMS for our classes. It’s our community. We do everything inside of there.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:35

I so if people get this Nicole. I mean, you’ve built you’ve customized this to the nth degree, and and people can get that. The same stuff that you’ve already built essentially. Is that is that right?

Nicole Donnelly: 41:46

Yeah. Yep. And so we have people with sub accounts to ours so we can push everything to them on our training. We have licensees and we can push all the stuff that we’ve built to our licensees, to all the classes too.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:00

That’s cool.

Nicole Donnelly: 42:01

Yeah, yeah, we really like it. We love go high level, and I would never suggest going to go high level directly. So the OS people, for us, they build out our funnels and provide the customer service but go high level doesn’t do anything like that. There’s another nifty CRM and they do the same thing. They don’t focus as much on AI voice.

So if you need that then it’s OS. But yeah, I, we do everything operationally in there except project management which we do inside of Clickup, which is not on here and we should add it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:38

We use Clickup. We love Clickup.

Nicole Donnelly: 42:40

Yeah. Yeah. Our goal is to be project manager free and to stay, like, not having a PM. And with that, we have so many. Our ops person has built out tons and tons of automations and AI things with Clickup.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:55

So you have like the upgraded AI version that they.

Nicole Donnelly: 42:59

Yeah we do. And they’re new.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:01

What do you think.

Nicole Donnelly: 43:03

The new like this last couple of weeks it got it just got way better.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:08

It’s very enticing. It’s very enticing.

Nicole Donnelly: 43:11

Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:12

For sure. You just have so many users. And John and I were actually discussing it this morning, and I’m like, oh my God. It’s like it’s only I think it’s $9, but it’s per user, right? So like, oh my God, that’s immediately thousands and thousands of dollars a year.

So do we really want to do it. And maybe Nicole be like, yeah, of course you’re stupid if you don’t. But We haven’t pulled the trigger yet on it.

Nicole Donnelly: 43:36

Well, if you could save one hour of their time per month.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:41

Trust me, John was doing everything to sell it to me. He loves the AI tools.

Nicole Donnelly: 43:46

Yeah. I mean, for us, we do the math on it and decide, like, we pay a lot for the enterprise version of Jasper. And Jasper keeps metrics on how much time it thinks that we saved, and we think we saved more time than it tells us. And it was almost 100 hours in three months.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:06

Yeah. I mean, it’s when you do the math. I mean, I use text expander pretty heavily. Yeah. And it sends me a report and SaneBox to like, organize my inbox and it’s like, you saved blah, blah, blah.

I’m like, yes, thank you, I will keep I mean, that’s again, these are no brainer purchases. I think Sanebox is like $100 a year. TextExpander is like $3 a month. So it’s like, yeah, but they’re still justifying it via time savings for sure.

Nicole Donnelly: 44:34

Yeah, and Fyxer is what I use in my inbox. That’s a little farther on the list. I love it so much. I had Sanebox before and some of the others. And Fyxer for me is the most like.

It feels the best. I my trial ran out and I didn’t have it for a couple days and it was terrible. So I will I love Fyxer and not everybody on the team uses it because not everybody needs it. And we have a team account. But we don’t have to pay for each seat in it.

And because just not everybody gets the volumes of emails that I do. There’s a there are a couple of us that do. And so I think 2 or 3 people on the team use fixer right now. I, I pay for it in my personal inbox, too.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:19

Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.

Nicole Donnelly: 45:23

Oh, I was just to say, Read AI is the tool that we choose to record all of our meetings. And the reason we go with Read, we have a YouTube video on this where we compare different Read firefighters.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:41

Yeah.

Nicole Donnelly: 45:42

And I still have an Otter subscription because I’ve had it since 2019 and I have so much stuff in there I need to download. But we decided to go with Read because Read has sentiment analysis. So if I want to see how a client meeting went, I just look at this little graph. If there’s any parts where it dips, I can click in and see what they’re talking about. I can watch the video.

It’ll pull it up at that part. And I love I love that and it does coaching and it keeps track of just the the stats and data about a meeting, not just the the summary and the it does the to do items. And we have those go over to Clickup you know so it’s like all integrated to with automations. But we all use Read read and then. Usually this is something if you need people to get better with speaking a language and better in their communications, like sales.

That’s cool. You you can have you watch a call and give coaching and there’s tons there’s a coaching library inside of Uli. So when we were doing, you know, when we have new people doing training, then we have you, Leon, so it will give them notes as they’re going to to either slow down or speed up. They’re using a lot of filler words. Whatever it is, it it goes into those sessions, the sessions with them.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:10

That’s interesting because I was just talking to. Ephraim Epstein yesterday about he’s got like a $30 million IT company. And he said like one of the main things that makes them successful is training in role playing constantly. So I’ll have to share that tool this episode with him. And also I’m sure he’ll he’ll love to experiment with that.

Nicole Donnelly: 47:39

Yeah. Please do. It was it’s a product from Seattle to they. The co-founders got into Allen Institute for AI to which incubates these AI companies. And so I’ve met the met the founders here.

Yeah. And they they have gotten a lot of money doing a lot of improvements. And you can reach a human at the company. Chatbots was the chatbot thing that we were using originally. So if somebody doesn’t have a CRM with the chatbot built in chat base is really simple to set up.

And you can yeah, you can easily set up a chatbot.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:21

Chat base is the one that was on your website. Is that we.

Nicole Donnelly: 48:25

And not anymore. But this is what we used to use.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:27

So if it’s not this one.

Nicole Donnelly: 48:30

No, that’s in our CRM system.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:32

Oh I gotcha okay.

Nicole Donnelly: 48:33

Yeah. It’s native in our in CRM system. And if somebody doesn’t have it native in the CRM system, chat base is really easy to set up and it integrates with all your social as well. Like all the social media channels. And it’s been around for a long time.

This one’s been around probably since I’ve heard of days for sure. Yeah, I think I probably started using it in Covid times.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:59

Covid times.

Nicole Donnelly: 49:00

Yeah. Tocador is not AI and it is something that we put into our workflows and use a lot. Tocador with Polkadot, I put a slide up at the end of my presentation that has a QR code, and it’s got some questions. So by answering these questions, we have it tied into our CRM system so people get tagged and put in the right pipelines. And sometimes it’s a not interested pipeline or, you know, section bucket that they go into.

Sometimes it’s I only want the newsletter. Sometimes it’s I want to book Nicole as a speaker or sometimes it’s I’m interested in this service or I’m interested in class. And then it captures testimonials to that I can use on social and also know the founder. And they do a lot of updates and they’re open to feedback. And they have a great community of speakers.

And now I have a dashboard that I could show you of all the gigs that I’ve done and my speaker scores for all of the gigs as well, and what the feedback is. So then as a speaker, I can show you this and say, look, look how good I am here. It’s all clear. This is how many people I’ve spoken in front of this is what they’re saying, you know. And as a speaker, it’s a really helpful tool.

I’m sure you work with a lot of speakers, and I would bet some of them use Talkatoo.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:32

It’s smart because it’s also kind of has its built in virality, you know. Yeah. For people are sharing it with their their audiences.

Nicole Donnelly: 50:44

Yes. And talk it out will send out the first email. So if you heard me speak and you you do the QR code and I might want to give you the resource list or some handout. It’ll handle the first email.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:57

That’s nice. Yeah. That could be a pain to set up.

Nicole Donnelly: 51:01

Yes. Yep. It auto sends. Yeah. Well I mean once you set it up it’s auto sends whatever you want to send to people. Who.

So who is going through sort of a rework right now, but who can sit inside of Slack. It can sit inside. It can be on during a meeting and you wouldn’t know that it’s on. It can be on my phone and it keeps a to do list for me from all channels. When it it it does the recording, but it does it with the intention of making a to do list.

Which was a big problem for me because I, my assistant, keep a to do list for me and keep on top of me to do it. You know, because there’s some things I have to do, some things she can do. And so who monitors all the channels and aggregates the list and then fixers the inbox? And then here’s another custom GPT, the workflow and SOP creator. We use this if you want to start creating agents start you know, bigger agents define your workflows.

Maybe create an agent that takes care of your 26 step SOP. You can define your workflows and SOPs with this tool. It also has the RACI matrix built in and KPIs you. It’ll help you with your tech stack. You might already have your tech stack, but it will help you build the pieces that you need in order to give really good instructions to agents, or to a company that’s going to help you implement an agent.

You have to define all these things, and this will walk you through that process. There’s a lot.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 52:43

Oh my God, I know.

Nicole Donnelly: 52:47

And then people want to know about AI use policy. And every company should have at least an internal use policy. And if you click on the link you can get an example that a lawyer made for us to start with. And this is the short version of an AI use policy, an internal one. And you can use that for your business.

Oh this looks like our external one. So we have an internal and external. We’ll definitely have to change the link on that. Because we have an external one. People aren’t surprised that we use it, but it’s posted on our website of how we use AI and how we will use it or won’t use it with your information.

And then you want the internal use policy, because most liability insurances for business don’t cover AI explicitly, and you want to treat it like part of your cybersecurity insurance. And you want to make sure that everybody knows how to use it, that they’ve signed off physically on the AI use policy and done whatever training that needs to go along with it. And then emotionality is an emotional intelligence tool. Cyclewise is for women, and it helps you even out your cycle and the emotional up and down and the physical up and down that we experience. This is an AI that I trained, the first version that’s up there right now, and it’s for women to just to help us out.

I’ve taken every class on menopause that a doctor would have to take, like if they’re going to be menopause certified. And this is trained on perimenopause, menopause data and also just hormones and cycles. So you can get suggestions for any symptoms that you might be feeling. We’re working on the version where you’ll create your account. We’re just having trouble with the Google Calendar integration right now, and that should go live soon.

But for any women who want a little buddy for any women’s issues, this is a good one and it will help you with conversations with your doctor too. Whether you want to try a different medication, this can give suggestions for you. Things to talk to your doctor about.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 55:13

You actually, Nicole, there’s an interview where you actually do a deep dive on on this whole topic. It was a guy. I think you’ve known him since 2014, if I remember. And you were talking a lot about this topic. I’m curious, is there anything that you found in the research naturally that you recommend naturally from like a supplement or food perspective that helps women?

Nicole Donnelly: 55:38

Well, I think that, you know, as an entrepreneur, we and in this kind of Western world, we are taught to push, push, push no matter what. And there is a lot to say for rest. And when we are in our PMS time, that’s when we need to rest. We don’t need to lift as hard. We need to take a break.

So on our team, it’s women. We know when people’s periods are and they can take the day off. There are other organizations that are progressive in that way. But if you are not feeling well, we can kind of see where that would be. And I want, you know, I want society to be able to have more grace during those times.

For women overall, young and old, I know my child suffers with terrible cramps, you know, the first couple days and there’s no there’s no grace for that at work. And so first, as women, we have to give it to ourselves. We have to give ourselves that time of rest. And we don’t have to push every day. We can take that downtime.

And as a professional athlete, like, you know, having done that and having this lifelong athletic history, I was pushing all the time. And now I can see the ebbs and flows. And if I take it easier here, I’m going to have a steadier month and I’m going to have it easier across the board. Aboard. And I think most people, when they get to my age, they they are feeling that and maybe not intellectually knowing it or what to do about it.

But we all have this these times when we might feel burnt out or something. And if and this I wanted to do this to help regulate. So just noticing how you feel throughout the month. And then there’s little things you can do like eating legumes like beans. Day 13 14 15.

Then you won’t have as bad of cramps.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 57:40

Most women won’t. That’s interesting.

Nicole Donnelly: 57:42

I don’t know what’s whatever’s in beans. And there’s some silly little natural things that this is why I started doing it. Because I won’t remember to eat them. I won’t remember when I’m on day 14. And I wanted I wanted it to automatically go into my calendar to tell me to eat legumes today.

And so I started building it for myself. And then I hit my technical limitations and how to get. I’ve got a friend who’s helping with his programmers to integrate technology to these two. I wear an aura ring and we’ll have all this stuff integrated. Yeah.

But I wanted to build this for myself, build it for my daughter. And the goal is to have it be free for women forever. And I’m speaking with some corporate sponsors that can pay for it, because this is this is important for women to understand and not have to read medical journals to just get an idea of where to start, you know, so you can go to cycle wise, have conversations with the AI, and it can give you some suggestions. And a lot of, you know, intermittent fasting is really popular, but if you’re perimenopausal, it can be really detrimental and not work and stress your body out more. And like we need to get the 30g of protein in the morning, and some people will argue about that.

The experts, the doctors will argue about that. And there are plenty of studies to back up the 30g of protein first thing you know. So there are some changes that I made to to eating and activity levels and, you know, supplements and stuff that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 59:23

What supplements do you like or do you take?

Nicole Donnelly: 59:26

I take so many. I take so many. For female hormones though, evening primrose oil is a really good one as far as evening out the the period related emotions throughout the month and also physical symptoms. Evening primrose oil is an inexpensive, highly effective thing like my my daughter will take it and you know 20 minutes later is in a better mood.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 59:54

Is that like an everyday thing or only certain times?

Nicole Donnelly: 59:58

Well, so when I was younger it was only certain times. Now it’s every day because I. I found myself being a feeling, just irritable. So irritable all the time. And, you know, there’s some things that I’ve done that have helped with that.

But evening primrose oil helps a ton, so I’d take it every day.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:00:21

What are your other favorites?

Nicole Donnelly: 1:00:24

Definitely good pharmaceutical grade multivitamin. And I, I take like Usana brand is pharmaceutical grade grade. Which doesn’t mean you need a prescription for it. It means that it’s that the nutrients are in your bloodstream within 20 minutes. So it’s highly bioavailable.

And so I’ve done bone density scans and I did it with my forearm. We did this little challenge I think I was I don’t know this was a while ago, but the guys were 40s, you know, ish. And I was the only one that had high bone density. And I was the only female, which it shouldn’t be that way. But all of the guys had low below normal bone density.

And then we did another we we all had different goals, and we did another scan in six months because we did this challenge together. And so I got them taking this pharmaceutical grade vitamin D, and they all increased their bone density in six months. And so I attribute like some of that to taking high quality supplements. But vitamin D is definitely a big one, especially for women because we lose bone density as we age.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:01:45

It’s also good for immune system. There’s so many benefits of Vitamin D2.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:01:49

Yeah. Yep. And mood. It’s good for mood. But seeing the the Dexa scans of everybody, you know, and it’s it’s black and white.

Well, it’s actually colorful, but, you know, it’s like it’s so clear in a picture. What’s going on?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:02:06

Nicole, first of all, thank you. I have one last question. This has been fantastic. I know I’m exhausting you with all this AI talk. This is what you talk about all day, but it really is fascinating stuff.

And I am sure there’s stuff that people have not tried, tested or used at all. And so I really appreciate you sharing your, your knowledge. And I just want to, you know, share. People can check out, you know, her website, as I mentioned, AI Smart Ventures.com or we’ve been on AI Smart Insiders comm. She has she has courses and maybe talk through some of the ways people work with you.

And my last question. Just is more about mentors. You know, because I know we all have business mentors throughout our career, but but talk about how do people engage with you.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:02:55

Yeah. So we do have classes that we run that are kind of open for whoever to take that are mixed. Different companies will be in those classes. We’re always we’ve run them quarterly and we do private training. We’ve done corporate retreats, do workshops at corporate retreats.

And what has been the most in demand lately is consulting, where we meet with teams every week to make sure that implementation is going well. So then we can help them be accountable and then also overcome any technical bumps that they might have, because we can go to our resources in between our sessions and hopefully solve for the problem of that week. Because with these projects, what we have seen, we wanted to do consulting earlier, but people weren’t ready. Now people have spent money the last year or two years on tools that their teams aren’t actually implementing. That’s more on the venture side of things.

Oh yeah, this is the. The big course will get a coupon code to. We can give you half off of that. And I think it’s E0 50 or something. But we’ll I’ll give you the code for that in the notes.

And what we see is people have been using tools or paying for tools for their employees. And their employees aren’t using them and they’re frustrated. They say, you know, our marketing copy sounds like ChatGPT. Our internal emails sound like ChatGPT. I’m sick and tired of it.

I know that people aren’t using it well, and I feel like I’m wasting all this money. And the research shows MIT research, Forrester Research, McKinsey research backs it up at all sizes of companies. This is what’s been going on. And so then we get into a company and see what needs to happen, and we’ll do an AI strategy and help them implement that over time. It’s typically 12 months and we’re there.

Depending on the pace that people want to go once a month to every week and we help to do training, role specific training and implement agents, you know, it depends on the company, what they need, but we’ll go through this process with them and help them suss out what would be really beneficial and save them the most time and money, you know, make people happier. So that’s what we’ve been doing a lot of lately is this hand-holding and we like to do it. It’s fun for us to get into other companies and help them. You know, like my my big personal bag is to bring joy to a billion people. And right now I’m doing that with these sessions with AI.

And I did one at EO global today. And they’re doing their retreat, and everybody in the room, like, was audible with excitement when I showed them something and I showed them something based on a survey they took that they’re all struggling with, and I showed them how fast it is to do. And everybody just, like, exploded with excitement about this thing that they can now do. That was such a pain for them. And every company has those things.

And if you can pull it out and help people to not do the things that they don’t like to do, you will have such a happier team. And, you know, I brought joy to to some more people today. And and that’s like for me, that’s what it’s about. And right now it’s taking the shape of of these AI tools and, and moments in workshops.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:06:35

You know, you used to have a condom company. So that would have met that goal also.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:06:40

Yes. But and baby legwarmers.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:06:45

Yes of course. And then there’s also the the AI your operations course as well.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:06:51

Yes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:06:52

And these are live courses in addition to like a virtual modules.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:06:56

Yeah. Yeah. They are AI ops also AI your agency where in four weeks we go through how to define your workflows so that you can turn them into AI agents or automations. And we go through this process, we we handhold so that in the second two sessions we we define everything. In the first two sessions we get it really clear, and everybody picks a project that they’re going to do and make an AI agent out of, or, you know, an AI powered workflow. And then in the second two sessions, we implement and we show them how to build on whatever platforms they’re using internally. We’ll show them how to build what’s best in the best way for their organization.

And in these, like AI, your agency, sometimes they’ll get a group of a bunch of different like marketing, advertising, creative agencies all in one together. And it’s fun because then you get to see what everybody else is doing too. So sometimes I’ve had it where a forum goes through this together and they bring their team into it. So we might have, you know, six different companies and then everybody gets to see what things they’re building. So we have had like the CFO in there.

We’ve had marketing person in there, we have an admin in there. And they’re all together learning how to do these AI and automation agents.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:08:22

What I would say, first of all, this is awesome. I want to just hear some of your mentors and then I don’t know about you. This is like, I’m going to need a lot of time to process this. My brain is like fatiguing thinking about all these things. So I would just say, anyone who’s listening, maybe just try one of these things and test it.

Check out the page. Don’t. This is all overwhelming information, but I always like to say, what’s one thing that just kind of stuck out to me that I want to go deeper on because there’s so much, you know, you can do with all of these tools. So just know you’ve been really overly generous with sharing all these things. Who’s affected your life? It could be a distant business mentor like meaning books resource, or it could be personal. Someone you’ve learned from and some good advice they’ve given you.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:09:16

That is a that’s a really good question. I need a moment. What is the one thing that you will take away from this today?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:09:26

Me? Yeah. Wow. I mean, I don’t know if you could see this, but I have like pages of notes here that I that I wrote down. So I have a number of things circled here, but you know. And it’s for me. What stuck out for me is the prompts, I think. And that kind of we talked about this, about the mindset and I the one thing is maybe looking at seeing the the AI PRM really stuck out for me, right?

And once I have the it helps me get in the mind of other people, maybe shortcut some things and maybe I’m thinking about things incorrectly or not thoroughly. And that can be applied to any of these platforms. So that one piece out of all of these things, there’s so much here that sticks out to me that I probably will start with.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:10:19

Okay. Well thank you, I appreciate that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:10:22

Yeah.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:10:27

So when I think about that, the people who come to mind are all the ones who said that I couldn’t do it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:10:36

And I think that. Michael Jordan’s, like, Hall of Fame speech.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:10:40

Really?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:10:42

I remember this. You know, I don’t remember his whole Hall of Fame speech, but he definitely pointed out some people that you said. I couldn’t do it. It drives people.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:10:52

Yeah. And because I have this idea and I feel very clear in who I am. So when I was snowboarding, I was determined to get to the X games. But in the beginning of it, I had coaches. I was on the Park City snowboard team the first year it existed, and my coaches ignored me at the top of the boardercross for my first race.

They would not talk to me or look at me and they said I wasn’t good enough. And there was a woman who coached at a private snowboard school, and I would always see her with her kids hiking the halfpipe, and she would coach me too. So she gave me pointers on where to speed check. I didn’t even know what speed checking was, but she would tell me like, where to slow down and where you know how to look at the course and pick my line. And so she would be somebody who I like.

I love because she’s so freely supported me and believed in me, whereas my coaches didn’t. And so I always looked up to her. And, and the way she was with me and my coaches, you know, I went to a competition, won first place in halfpipe and I came back to practice and they’re like, hey, where’d you get that board? You know, I had a new snowboard. And I said, just like, oh, I want it.

I got first place at this halfpipe competition. But they would not they wouldn’t support me competing, you know. And I had so many of those instances. For whatever reason. But it’s like I still would pay attention to that little voice inside or that desire, that thing that I wanted to do with baby lakes.

I knew that every parent’s life would be made easier if they had these little leg warmers. It would make diaper changes easier, potty training easier, and all the parents would talk about that. Yes, they were cute, but it would make their lives easier. And for me it was a really stressful, scary time. When I first had my daughter and if I could make all the parents lives easier, then I’m on a mission to go do that, you know?

And so you get all these naysayers. But I’m just like with blinders on as much as I can be on this mission at the time.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:13:07

What were you thinking? You know, where the coaches weren’t paying attention to you? Was your mindset like, I’m going to show them at that time, or was it more defeating? And then you found someone who was mentoring you? Because I just always think my daughters, when I think of that, maybe they get passed over for something.

And sometimes I think that’s the best thing that could happen, right? But maybe not. Also From a self-confidence perspective, but it does. Does you know which direction do they go? They go.

I’m going to show this person or it’s defeating. And maybe I don’t know if it was that additional person that actually said, you know what? I did have some support there. But these, you know, it showed the contrast and I could see both sides of it, I guess at the time.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:13:55

Yeah. I mean, for me, I was set on something so far beyond these coaches. I wanted to be in the X games. Right. Like I had to figure out how to get into the X games.

So I have this noise coming in like you’re not good enough and it’s not I’m going to show you. It’s just I’m going to keep doing what I want to do, and I’m going to make it to the X games, and I’m going to do what I need to. And maybe you’re not my supporter. I still learned what I could from them. I still showed up for practice, and I met this woman who was wonderful and helped me out, you know, because she was kind and supportive and believed in me.

And so I guess it’s like not everybody has to believe in me, but I have to believe so firmly in myself and what I’m doing, and not as the antithesis to what someone else says about me, but just because that’s who I am.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:14:46

Yeah, you had this. You had a goal and you’re like, you’re on board to support my goal. You’re not. If you’re if you’re not, then I’ll you’ll help me as much as you can. But I don’t care.

I’ll find someone who will. That was your mentality.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:15:00

Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 1:15:03

Cool. Nicole. Thank you everyone. Again, check out AISmartInsiders.com and as AISmartVentures.Com. And we’ll see you next time. Nicole.

Thank you.

Nicole Donnelly: 1:15:14

Thank you so much.

Outro: 1:15:16

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