5 Ways You’re Probably Not Using AI (But Should Be!)

AI is no longer the stuff of sci-fi and geeks. It's here for all of us, and it's an amazing resource, too, that could be saving you hours every week in your salon business. If only you knew how. Here today are five ways you're probably not using AI, but I really think you should be. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming in your eyes and ears again with another dose of Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are we? Achingly well, I hope, as we steam towards the end of winter. Finally, we had a few nice sunny days over the weekend here in the UK, and it was just wonderful to be out with your arms out in the sunshine. Albeit just for a few hours in the afternoon. How's March looking for you? I've had some really good reports from my salon coaching clients. Everyone seems to be having a much stronger month than they were in February, and I think it's what we needed, actually, a bit of a shot in the arm to get us to the end of Q1 with a smile on our faces. How are things with you? Reach out and let me know. I'd love to hear from you. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know I love hearing from my salon owner friends anyway. So today, what are we talking about? Well, we're talking about AI, and it seems like everybody's talking about AI at the moment, doesn't it? But trust me, ChatGPT is available and there for everyone to use in much more interesting ways than drafting shitty marketing emails to a very tired list. Do be careful, by the way, when we're taking content from AI, the number of times I've seen people copy and paste into their social media, and of course the instruction from AI is at the beginning of the bit that they copied and pasted. It makes us all look a bit stupid, my darlings. And I do feel that there's a role for AI, and I do think that we are missing a trick here in the salon industry, and largely that's down to our software suppliers. I think it's time that they built a lot more of the AI functionality into what they're doing, and they don't seem to be keeping pace. We seem to be having to do lots of work on this ourselves. But luckily, these AI platforms have made it terribly easy for us, and most of it is just chat-based. And we're very good at chatting in the salon industry, so we should be amazing at using AI for our purposes. But today, I wanted to scratch the surface a little bit and go a little bit deeper than perhaps a lot of people are telling you how to. I want to go beyond just coming up with a bit of marketing. I've also come up with a couple of different platforms that we can use beyond ChatGPT, just to broaden your knowledge and understanding a little bit.

But I'm going to caveat my entire conversation around AI, and I'm going to caveat it by saying that I don't think AI is very good at taking over tasks that you don't understand. I think AI is best when it's helping you and increasing the pace of output for something that you would be able to do yourself if you had the time, the inclination, and the mental capacity to do it. And I'm going to caveat everything that I do with AI in that sort of way. So when I'm coming up with marketing plans, yes, I could come up with a marketing plan, but AI is going to do it a lot quicker for me. When I'm coming up with an email sequence, yes, I can write an email sequence, but if I want the first draft in a hurry, I'm going to turn to AI for it. I could be analysing figures, and we're going to talk a little bit about analysis in just a second, but it just saves me an awful lot of time. And that's what I think AI is amazing for. I don't think it's good for replacing tasks that you don't understand because you need to give AI the instructions in the first place. And if you don't understand what you're asking for, the output, the bit that AI gives you in return, it's going to be fairly ropey quality as well. So I'm going to caveat that. I think we should be looking at everything that we're doing day in and day out and looking for opportunities where AI could be making life quicker, easier, and cheaper for us. And there are some bits of our industry that, to be honest with you, I think are pretty safe for now. There are some bits where I think I'd be a little bit worried if, for example, I was a copywriter writing emails or marketing for salons. I'd be a little bit stressed by now because I think we're about to come into a phase of marketing where those people are no longer going to be required. What's going to be much more important is understanding how to get what we need from ChatGPT and its competitors. But firstly, I want to talk a little bit about some of the other stuff that we could be doing. I'm going to talk about copywriting and I'm going to be encouraging you to use some different apps. I want you to use some different platforms. And one that I find is particularly good at copywriting is one called Claude. And Claude is similar price as ChatGPT if you wanted to pay for it. There's a free version, the same as ChatGPT as well.

But I find for copywriting tasks, Claude is particularly good. And one of the instances that I've been using it is when I'm drafting responses. So quite often I get email requests and sometimes I want to just draft a response which looks very professional, but hasn't taken me very much time at all. And it's one of those silly tasks which could easily turn into a 10, 15 minute task, whereas Claude can do it in just a few seconds for me. So what I would do in that instance is take the email that you want to respond to, copy it, give it to Claude and tell it the kind of response that you want to give, whether that's a positive one, a negative one. I can see this being amazing for rejecting people in the recruitment process, for example. Or sometimes I have requests from journalists who want quotes or articles from me and I just don't have the space or I don't have the marketing need to do those things. I don't want to burn those bridges, though. I want it to be a nice, considered professional response that leaves the door open in the future. But for now, it's a polite decline. And in those terms, I would hand that straight over to Claude and get a response back. Make sure if you're here in the UK that you always tell AI that you want British English spelling. Otherwise, we'll be having Zs where there ought to be Ss, my darling. And that's a dead giveaway that you've got AI working on your behalf and give it the kind of tone that you want. And what I found when I've been exploring AI and I'm a nerd, I'm a geek. I admit it. I love this stuff and I could do this stuff all day, every day. In fact, there are days when I do. But I really enjoy the process. But lots of people don't. But what I found in my exploration of AI is that we need to go back. We need to go back with our final response. So if you get a draft email out of Claude responding to, let's say, a customer complaint that you want to handle really professionally. Take the draft, change it, alter it, send it, but then copy it back into Claude and say, this is what I went with in the end and give it the reasons why you made alterations to the draft that it gave you. Perhaps it was too long, too short. You didn't like the phrasing. There were certain phrases that you found slightly triggering or might inflame a situation. Whatever response you have in return, make sure you give it back. Because what happens over time is AI gets better and better and better at getting it right first time for you. Without that feedback, you're always going to have that very superficial level, that very obviously AI generated response. OK, so keep going back, keep giving it feedback. And the more context you can give AI, the better you're going to get a response out of it in the first place. Now, talking about giving AI an awful lot to work with, here's one that I've been playing with with DeepSeek.

And you may have heard of DeepSeek. DeepSeek popped up as a competitor to ChatGPT very recently, actually. And there was lots and lots of noise about it because it was being hailed as a much more efficient and certainly more environmentally friendly way of generating responses. There's a huge amount of energy which is required to keep all these computers working, answering responses to the like of you and me. And DeepSeek was hailed, it's come from China, which some people have decided makes it a no-go as far as they're concerned. They have concerns over national security and don't want to be sharing data in a big way with China. But assuming that you're OK with that, then DeepSeek is an alternative because they were using lower powered processors in order to answer these responses. So the environmental impact was hailed as being lower than using something like ChatGPT. Anyway, to cut a long story, medium length, it works exactly the same way. As far as we're concerned, I'm sure there are differences, but the differences are very, very subtle. So what I would encourage you to do is to be training more than one of these models on your business. So what I've been doing as I've been using ChatGPT, I've been using DeepSeek alongside it so that it still has the context, still understands my business. And one of the things that I gave DeepSeek to do was to manipulate some very big data from a salon. And I managed to get one of my salon customers to basically give me all of the information they had from their salon software in table form. And it was an enormous piece of work, which I then gave to DeepSeek. And I said, OK, I'm going to ask you some questions about this data now. It took a little while. We had to break some of the data up into smaller chunks to upload it. But eventually it had all the information that it needed. And this is one of those examples of things that we could do another way, but AI is going to do it an awful lot quicker for us. So I could jump into my salon software system and start pulling up marketing reports. And I could say, give me a marketing report with everyone who's had a certain service in the last six months. Or I could say, give me my top 20 spenders who have ever had this type of service. And our marketing reports on our salon software should be able to give us that data relatively easily. The problem is, it's a slow process. You've got to understand how the reports work on your salon software. And it can be a little bit confusing.

And also, of course, it can be quite time consuming. What could make life an awful lot easier is if we could just have a chat with our salon software. And we can't do that with salon software, at least none that I've come across in the short term. But we can with AI. So by giving it all of that information, I can say things like, give me my list of top 20 spenders who have ever had this service. And we're going to send them a marketing email promoting this service at a special discount price. And AI can go away, do the research, do the analysis and come back with a very targeted response. And manipulating those big amounts of data into usable tasks that we can then go away with and actually enhance our businesses, I think is a perfect use example. And I can't wait until the likes of Forrest and Timely and Vegaro are starting to build AI into their software because they're going to have to, let's face it. When they start building it in, we can start asking questions of that type. How about something a bit lighter? How about something that's a little bit more playful? I've been telling you to jump back into blogging because I think there are SEO benefits to be had. And I think SEO is going to become more and more and more important, not less. And we know that Uncle Google really likes it when we update our websites regularly. And a blog is a perfect way to do that and to also show that our website is up to date, but position you as an expert. Now, what I'm not going to say is that I want you to go away and get AI to start generating blogs for you. You could do. What I found is that they can feel a bit AI. And also, let's face it, we want quality content, not just necessarily quantity, but for drafting out a response, drafting out a blog rather, in quite short amounts of time. Yes, of course, you could use AI. But here's a fun one for you instead. I want you to head over to an app called Napkin. So the website is napkin.ai. And I want you to upload a blog that you've written. And what Napkin will do very neatly is allow you to highlight a section or the entire blog and it will put together infographics for you. So let's say that you've got something that's talking. Let's say there's a section in your blog which is talking about stats to do with premature aging of the skin due to SPF damage. What we can do is take that very scientific data, take all those stats and all those bits of information. And napkin.ai will put it into a little infographic for you, which you can then add to your blog. It breaks up the text, makes it more interesting to read. And the wonderful thing at the moment, my darlings, is napkin.ai is free to use. While it's in beta, they're not charging anything at all for the premium version.

You're going to love it. I've got those napkins in all of my blogs on the way forward because they're just so easy to generate, so quick to break up that text and make it much more engaging and much more interesting to look at too. Next, I want to talk about how we can get AI to be a bit more proactive. And I've been using a piece of software called Sintra. And Sintra is basically, if you think about ChatGPT, it can be a bit intimidating when it's got its cursor blinking at you and you need to know exactly what to ask it. What Sintra has done is come up with a set of little helpers and those little helpers each are tasked with a certain part of your business. So, for example, there is Soshi is one of your helpers. And Soshi has all of the tasks at hand to help you with your social media in terms of generating content, scheduling, coming up with captions and so on. We have Dexter, who is a data manipulator, so he's very good at the facts and figures and so on. So there's all these different helpers and it just makes the AI experience a little bit friendlier. But what I really like is Sintra is proactive in its helping of your business. So every day when I log on to Sintra, it has a set of questions about my business. I don't have to go to it with the information. It's proactively asking me useful, pertinent questions about my business. And then in response, it will come up with a set of ideas that AI could help with in terms of coming up with cheat sheets or frequently asked questions or helping with a web page. So it's coming up with suggestions rather than waiting for me to always identify the need. You're going to really like it. I'm going to put the link to Sintra in the in the comment section. But also note that this is an affiliate link. If you sign up with Sintra, then I will get a small kickback, which I promise to only spend on drugs and strippers. What I've really established, though, with Sintra is a longer term relationship with AI. And that longer term is my final point. And I'm going to come back to ChatGPT with this one because I've been using ChatGPT this year to help with my longer term goal setting. Not just coming up with plans for a particular marketing campaign over the next couple of weeks, but actually helping me come up with a plan for the entire year. And again, not just in marketing terms. So ChatGPT and I sat down one day over a cup of coffee and figured out what my financial goals were going to be for the year.

And what I did was identified the strong months and the weak months in my business. The months where it was going to be easier for me to sell, like January, for example, in coaching is always a really good month. And there are some months which are a lot tougher. So, for example, lots of my customers are parents. So in the summer, I struggle to sell coaching programs. I gave ChatGPT all of that information about the strengths and weaknesses in my turnover cycle. I gave it my annual goal and I asked it for help in breaking my goal down into quarterly and then into monthly goals. Now, you might say, well, OK, that's looking into the future, but it's not necessarily a long term relationship with AI. Well, it is if you keep going back. So every week I use ChatGPT to help break down my turnover. So I use something called Profit First in my business, and I strongly recommend you do as well in terms of managing your cash flow. And what Profit First does is it asks you to take any income into the business and break it into different pots or different spaces and allocate different budgets inside your own business. So every week my income comes into my bank account. I go to ChatGPT. I say, this is the income. Help me break it down into the pots. But also make sure you're updating with progress towards the goals that we set at the beginning of the year. So it's monitoring my progress week after week, month after month. It celebrates with me when we've had a good month. It gives me congratulations and pats me on the back. It identifies when we're falling behind and when I need to really hustle and really knuckle down like I had to in March because February was a bit tougher than it should have been. So that longer term relationship with AI is where I think it can really start to enhance and give results in your business. I've even used it, believe it or not, because I'm of a certain age, my darling. I know it's hard to believe looking at your Uncle Phil, but I am not the right side of 50. But I've got an allotment now. And those of you in the States, I don't think you call them allotments anyway. Basically, it's a bit of ground that you can rent from the council for a very small amount to grow food and flowers on. So I have an allotment now because it's a terribly middle-aged thing to do. And I've used ChatGPT to help me come up with my plan for my allotment. So we've come up with a planting schedule. It goes away and does the research, tells me when to sow the seeds, when I'm going to be manuring bits of ground, when I need to be pruning fruit trees and so on. And it's come up with an entire program for my allotment for the season. But rather than leaving it at that, I tell it when I've sown the seeds. I tell it when I'm starting to see the little seedlings popping up.

I tell it what the weather's doing and when the last frost is due in my area. So it's got all of this context to help me continually tweak and change that plan as we go through the year. To bring it back to a business example, that's exactly what I'm doing with the money week after week, month after month. And I strongly encourage you to do the same. So there we have it. My ideas on how you could be using AI a lot more effectively in your business. What have I missed? There is so much out there and I'm determined to be not only the queen of salons, but I'm going to be the queen of AI for salons because I love this stuff and I can get to grips with it. I'm very lucky. My brain works in a certain way, which means I can get to grips with it very easily. But reach out. Let me know what you're doing. My email address scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. I would love to hear how you're using AI to further your business goals. Also reach out if you'd like to be a guest on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. Haven't done an interview for a little while. I'd love to be talking to you about your journey in our amazing industry. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your eyes and ears again with another dose of my wise hour wisdom. And until then, take care.