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Let's be blunt. If you're using AI in your salon at all, you are probably using it wrong. You might be asking a few questions, maybe getting it to write an email or the odd social media post. You're treating it like a glorified Google search. Today we're going to stop chatting to AI and actually start getting it working for you. All your salon. Hello. My salon friends, Phil Jackson here, your Queen of Salons coming all over the internet with another dose of our wisdom. How on earth are you achingly? Well, I hope here we are right at the beginning of a brand new quarter and what are you going to change this quarter? Maybe one of the things you're going to look at is getting to grips with AI because I'm sure you know that AI could be doing a lot more in your business. I'm sure you know that there's loads of potential there to make life a lot easier for you, and you're probably only using it like a little chat bot. Got some good feedback on our last episode. You enjoyed your Uncle Phil geeking out a little bit. So we're going to jump into AI today and I want you to move beyond seeing AI as this thing that you just chat backwards and forwards too. It's a really limiting way of seeing how AI works and I think it's a mistake that's costing you time, money, and an awful lot of opportunity. The thing is, this isn't going away. The future of this stuff isn't about getting slightly better answers. This wave of change is coming and you can either surf that wave my darlings in your Speedos, or you can drown under it. So we're going to build some systems that actually give AI a proper job in your salon business. So I'm going to show you why you need to stop chatting with AI and start actually putting it to work. And I've got three ways to do this, three apps that I want to use without mentioning chat GPT at all. So I want us to move away from that backwards and forwards chatting with chat GPT away from the simple gimmicks into making AI a productive employee for you. So why does this matter? Well, we lose an awful lot of hours to jobs that don't make us any money. Answering the same questions over and over for clients trying to figure out your stock order onboarding, new team members staring a blank screen trying to dream up an Instagram post. It's bloody exhausting and it's really hard to justify that time when we can't see it actually making a return. We can't see how it's putting money in the till. And while you are stuck doing that, some of your competitors are starting to catch on. They're not just asking AI for ideas, they're using it to start automating some of their day-to-day operations. And the gap between the salons using AI like a toy and those using it like a tool is going to get wider every single day. So we need to move beyond the chat bot. We need to start getting into actually putting this stuff to work and that shift is happening right now. We want to get away from AI as a prompt engineer, AI as a writer, we want to get to AI as a worker who wanted to actually do some work for us. So I've got three tools that I want us to jump into. Three types of AI workers that you can hire today, either for free or for very little cost. And what we're going to be building is a set of tools that you can actually bring into your business really simply and actually get some decent results very, very quickly. Some nice easy wins. And the first one is a piece of software that doesn't get anywhere near the attention it deserves because it's a cracking piece of software. And actually if you're already in the Google universe, you already have access to it. And it's a tool from Google called Notebook, LM and Notebook. LM is an expert in the things that you tell it to be an expert in. So where most ai, if you ask a question of chat GPT and it doesn't know the answer, there's a really strong possibility that it's going to make up an answer that sounds very convincing, but isn't actually true at all. It will hallucinate or it will give a really good guess. It's a generative process and that's the problem with chatbots. Like chat GPT, they're trained on the entire internet, so they have breadth of knowledge, but they don't have particular depth of knowledge. And also they don't know much about you only what you've taught it. So they don't necessarily understand your salon's price list, your unique brand voice, your training protocols, Notebook LM is different. And think of it as that smart notebook and it's only going to base its answers on the documents that you give it inside that notebook. So let's put some use cases and it'll become a little bit more apparent. Imagine you've got a new starter in your business. So instead of you spending hours answering all their questions, you could just give them access to a single notebook inside Notebook, LM. And inside that notebook you might have uploaded your employee handbook, your list of services and prices, your supplier details, your training guides. Now the new therapist or the new stylist can just ask Notebook LM, who do I need to speak to about taking annual leave? Or summarize the main difference between these two services and the AI will give them the answer instantly, but also show them where in those documents the information came from. But if it doesn't know the answer, it's not going to make anything up. It's only going to give answers based on the notebook information that you've given it and it gets even better. There's a feature called audio overviews. So you can upload any set of documents that you want to a Notebook. LM will turn them into an audio briefing or a kind of podcast episode so you can listen and get up to speed on anything you want to while you're driving to work or cleaning the salon. It can create quizzes and flashcards from your documents to help your team revise. It can create video overviews and slideshows now. So this isn't just a chat bot that knows a bit about everything. This is a really important central brain for your business and it's also completely private. Your data isn't going to be used to train the language model and it's free to get started. If you've got a training academy, you need to be looking at Notebook LM because it's a brilliant use case to give it some training information and get that information back in lots of different ways. So if you have students that learn in a particular way or have a different learning style, you can adapt very, very quickly indeed. So if you've got training courses or an academy as part of your business model, you need to be jumping into Notebook. LM, next up I want to talk about something called agentic AI and Agentic AI is a little bit different to the chat to and fro that we are used to. An agent can actually do the work for you. So rather than just talking, it gets into doing. And some of the big AI models are leading the way here. And the one that I want to talk about is Anthropic's Claude. And there isn't one magic button that says Do my admin, but it can now have access through something called co-work. It can access some of your tools and the files that live on your computer and carry out tasks with several steps all on their own. So what could it be doing for your salon? Well, how about instead of spending a weekend, we've got a nice shiny tax year. Instead of spending in the weekend drowning in receipts and a big spreadsheet, what if you gave the whole lot to AI? So give it access to your digital bank statement. Give it one goal. Analyze my spending for the last financial year, categorize it into these categories. Show me my top three biggest expenses and prepare a one page report that I can share with the management team. The AI doesn't chat to you about it. It does the analysis, spits out that clean summary, maybe even with a few charts for you to digest. Here's another one. You can give the agent access to your calendar. So when I'm brought into a business, if I've got somebody who's struggling with overwhelm or struggling with productivity, the first thing we do is take the temperature on their calendar so we have a look at their calendar and see where they're spending their time at the moment, whether that's aligned with the goals that they've set for their business, where you can give the agent access to your Google Calendar, ask it to analyse the last three months of your diary, tell you how you've been actually spending your time, how much of that time was spent at work on paying clients, what percentage was spent on admin, how much time was wasted. And it can scan that data and give you a report that might show that you are losing 15% of your week to pointless admin tasks that aren't moving the business forward. Insights that could genuinely change how you run your business. So the difference between chat-based AI and these agentic systems is that the agent can connect to different tools, it can use your files, it can work on its own and make decisions to hit a goal. And this is an enormous shift in AI. It's taking AI from not just being an assistant, but actually being a bit of a colleague that gets the boring, repetitive stuff so that you can focus on your clients. And now how about a bit of a personal use case? So this third AI worker is a bit different. It's not just for your business, it's for you. And it's my way of recognising that lots of people are using AI, not necessarily just on their businesses, they're using it personally as well because running your own business can be incredibly stressful and it can be lonely too. And this is where a piece of software called Pi, AI comes in. So Pi is personal. AI is designed for supportive, empathetic conversation. It's superpower is its memory. And unlike other chat bots that forget who you are when you close the window or when you move onto a different chat, Pi remembers your goals, it remembers your struggles, remembers what you've talked about before. It's designed to be more of a proper companion. So what I really like about this is we're no longer having those personal chats, those almost therapeutic chats, those counselling sessions with chat GPT or whoever else you're using. We can start to silo stuff. So we can keep our business chats on chat, GPT, the personal stuff. We could be moving into pi.ai. So then we're not going to get weird personal bits of information thrown in to business briefings that we're putting together or social media posts or email marketing. We can keep stuff completely separate and a lot more private away from those language models. So we can be brainstorming with Pi, we can be talking to it about the plans that you have for your business, the ambitions that you have. It can kick around ideas with you, but it's not necessarily going to be using that to then inform other conversations around your business. So think of it as a kind of online journal or a personal coach. It's free to use, it's available as an app as well. And you can give it a voice that makes it even friendlier as well. So there we have it. Three ways we can be using AI beyond the chatting backwards and forwards. We've got Notebook LM to become your business Brain, Agentic AI that becomes your admin assistant and Pi that becomes your personal mentor. So we've stopped asking daft questions, now we're building proper systems, treating AI like a team of digital employees that can actually support you in your business goals. If you would like to dive further into the uses of AI, why not head over to Phil jackson.coach, check out my program, AI by Your Side. I would love to be helping you on your AI journey. Super affordable. We talk about marketing stuff, we talk about money stuff, we talk about goal orientated and productivity stuff as well. I give you loads of examples like this on ways that you can be using AI in your own business. I'd also love to hear from you. Reach out and let me know how you are using AI in your business or what you are going to give a go to first. Had some glorious emails this week, which have absolutely made me smile. You know, I love hearing from my salon owner friends. Also, reach out if you would like to be a guest on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. And until next time, take care.