[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.

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Search Interviews:

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

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

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

In this episode…

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments

Action Steps

Sponsor for this episode…

#1 Our Predictable Podcast ROI Program

#2 Our Comprehensive Corporate Gifting Program

Episode Transcript:

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