First steps for implementing AI into your business

Heard everyone talking about AI but still aren't sure what it actually means for your business?

Have you tried a tool or two, felt quietly underwhelmed and wondered if you're missing something obvious?

In this Lunch and Learn, Charlotte Boundy explains how to start using AI and automation in a way that's practical, clear and specific to how your small business works.

You'll see automation working in real time and leave with a clear picture of where to focus first in your own business.

The tools exist – the question is knowing which ones are right for you.

Topics covered in this session

• How to identify the tasks in your business that are ready to automate right now

• Where you could be saving the most time and money with AI

• How to choose the right AI tools for your business without wasting time on the wrong ones

About the speaker

Charlotte has spent 12 years working in business operations, first in London and then building Bright Spark Collective from the ground up during COVID.

In that time, she's worked with close to 100 UK founders across a wide range of industries, helping them build businesses that run more smoothly and demand less of them personally.

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Transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.

Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today.

For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.

I'm pleased to introduce Charlotte Boundy, who is the founder of Bright Spark Collective. In this session, Charlotte will explain how to start using AI and automation in a way that's practical, clear, and specific to how your small business works.

If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email to you with the recording and further resources today.

So over to you, Charlotte.

Charlotte: Thanks so much. Hi, everyone. It's great to have you here.

My name is Charlotte Boundy. Thank you for the introduction. If you'd like to add me on LinkedIn, you can scan the QR code at the bottom right with your phone. I'll put it up again at the end as well.

A little bit about me before we kick off. I have 12 years' experience in operations. I started working as a PA, then an EA, and then became a head of operations in a couple of companies before moving over to running my own company, Bright Spark Collective.

Bright Spark Collective has been going for about five years now, and we have a really strong team of virtual assistants that help founders on a flexible basis from five hours a week.

About two to three years ago, I started to move more into AI because I realised that the team needed to learn it to stay super productive. Once I stepped into that world, I got really excited. I absolutely love science and technology, and I ended up being fully immersed in the AI space.

Now I do lots of operations strategy consulting and AI consulting for small businesses.

I'm super passionate about helping businesses grow. I love working with start-ups and solopreneurs. I live in Southend, and I have two cats who I love very much.

I also opened the Secret AI Club a couple of months back. If you'd like some more information on that, please let us know at the very end.

I'd love to know where you're at right now with AI. So if you could pop something in the chat, put a one if AI is something you know about but haven't really started with yet. Maybe you've used a bit of ChatGPT.

Put a two if you're using a tool or two, but it's not quite there yet or you're not feeling like it's making much of a difference.

And then put a three if you feel like you're doing some AI stuff, but you're really wanting to build on it and formalise it a bit more.

I'm just having a little look at the answers in the chat. Okay, cool. Yep. We've got a four as well. I love the answer from Claudia: "Four, using it, but don't know enough." That's great. You sound like a pro.

Lots of ones and twos here, and a couple of threes. Excellent. Brilliant.

One thing I would say with AI at the moment is that in the last survey report McKinsey did, they estimated that about 30% to 40% or more of current work activities can be automated with technologies already available. That's great, but you might be sitting there thinking, okay, cool, but what does that actually mean for me?

I'd say in this case, knowledge is power. So you've already done the best thing possible, which is come and join me on this Lunch and Learn.

I'd also love to know in the chat what's eating your time right now as a founder. It would be really interesting to hear what you feel is taking up the most time, and I can hopefully address some of that at the end and whether AI or automation can help.

Emails, absolutely. Emails are a massive thing, especially as a founder. You get so many every day, and it's so easy to drop one.

Sending quotes. Yep, absolutely. Emails and sending quotes are definitely things where AI and automation can help.

Emails, daughters, and phone calls. Daughters I probably can't help much with, but emails and follow-up, hopefully yes.

Analysis of data across multiple sources. Yep, there are definitely some AI tools for that, and for clarifying data too.

Looking for leads is a great one, actually. You can definitely use AI combined with automation to have 20 leads in your inbox every day, ready to go. I've done a similar project recently with somebody else.

Social media posts for a fashion brand, managing client records. Yes, absolutely. This is great. Out of all the things in the chat, I'd say 80% to 90% of them can be helped by AI and automation.

The general rule with AI and automation is this: if a task is repetitive, and something you need to do every day or every week, then it's worth considering whether AI or automation can help.

Figuring out which tools to use and when to use them is another step, but the first thing is to figure out what you actually want AI and automation to help with. So I'd definitely say start with anything repetitive.

To figure that out, when I talk to organisations, we map everything out. This is something you can do yourself at home if you want to, or you can come talk to me, or maybe you've got a head of ops in your business you can talk to.

Generally, the first thing we want to do is map everything out because if you add AI and automation to something that's already disorganised, or you don't have a clear standard operating procedure for it, then it's just going to create more chaos.

So I'd put the headings across your business: sales, marketing, operations, HR, and anything else relevant. Then underneath each heading, map out what happens, who is responsible, what the steps are, and how long each thing takes.

For example, in marketing you might say: three LinkedIn posts are created and scheduled every week. Great. Who is responsible for that? What are the exact steps they go through?

In sales, you might say: we try to get 20 leads every week. Great. How does that actually happen? Map that process out in detail.

That's the first step. Because when you're instructing an AI or an automation, you really need to break down step by step what needs to happen.

Following on from that, I'd love for you all to get your phones out. This is a little example of an automation and how it can work.

If you can get your phone out and scan the QR code, if you have an iPhone it will probably already say "hi," and you can hit enter and send. If you have a Samsung or something similar, you might need to type the words "hi!" and send it.

Once you do that, you should start chatting to a short AI automation I've made in ManyChat for you. Some of you might already have seen this type of thing in action, but I think it's one of the most powerful tools we've used with businesses for increasing interaction with their audience, followers, community, or sales pipeline.

Sometimes it's much more effective than email because people's WhatsApps are right there. You can also tailor the responses, which is really cool.

You can plug the WhatsApp automation into a large language model such as Claude or ChatGPT, and you can load your knowledge into that so when the customer or potential lead is having a conversation, it pulls the data from there.

Hopefully some of you have managed to give this automation a go. Please give me a quick yes in the chat if you've managed to get that running on your phone.

Perfect. Okay. Great. People have got it running. Excellent.

I know some of you might be sitting there thinking, okay, cool, that's great, but how does that help my business? So I'm going to give you one use case of something we did recently with this exact setup.

We worked with a dentist, and after we built this automation for her, she had a £240,000 increase in revenue in quarter one and a 30% increase in appointment bookings.

This automation took us about a week to build and go live. It actually took a couple of hours to build, but there was some iteration and back and forth to make it ready to ship.

What did that look like? She came to us because she had a problem. She was offering free Invisalign appointments. There was a Facebook advert, and when people clicked it, they filled out their details.

What was happening after that was that a few hours later, her reception team would ring the lead to book in the free consultation. Unfortunately, because of this gap, they were losing a lot of those leads.

By the time the reception team called them, people had forgotten they'd filled it in, thought it was a spam call, or were busy doing something else. So this gap was costing them loads of revenue.

What we did instead was link the advert up to a ManyChat sequence, not the one you're seeing today, but one programmed with all of the dentist's knowledge around Invisalign.

That meant that as soon as someone filled out the form, they immediately got a WhatsApp message. That message was there to get them booked into their appointment.

If the person had questions or delayed booking in, the ManyChat would prompt them again and ask whether they had concerns about price, pain, length of treatment, or appearance.

Its job was to answer those questions and encourage them back towards booking, which really increased the amount of bookings and therefore the revenue.

The three- to four-hour gap didn't matter anymore because they'd already booked via WhatsApp. We still kept the phone call because humans are still really important. I definitely don't think AI should replace humans fully.

In the end, that phone call became a courtesy call so the person still felt they were getting a good service and had spoken to a human before their appointment.

There are lots of different cases where you can use automation. This ManyChat example is just one.

That example is mainly relevant if you're focused on sales or lead generation, but automations can be used in lots of other ways too.

Some of you who put three or four in the chat might already know this, so bear with me. For those of you who put one or two, I'm just going to explain a bit more about automation.

Automation is great because you can automate hundreds of different things. You can build on lots of different platforms.

ManyChat is what I used to create that WhatsApp flow. Lindy.ai is my favourite automation platform because I find it the easiest to build on. Then there's Zapier, which I'm sure lots of you have heard of.

There's also Microsoft Power Automate if you're a Microsoft user. And there's n8n, which is usable, but I think it's harder than the others to use. There's also Make, which I didn't put on here, and some of you might have tried that as well.

An automation is great because it can do almost anything. Going back to some of the examples in the chat earlier, some of you said emails were taking a lot of time.

The great thing is that you can program an automation with a large language model like Claude or ChatGPT to sift through your emails in the morning, highlight what's important, archive newsletters, and even draft responses using your knowledge.

Similarly, if you need to create a daily report on something, you can set the automation to trigger that report and have it ready in your inbox at the start of the day.

I'm just opening the chat again because I think there were a few more examples.

Research and sales outreach is definitely something we did with an automation recently. Someone had a whole list from Sales Navigator of potential clients.

We got the automation to research each client further, work out whether they really fit the ideal customer profile, and decide the best way to reach out. It would either draft the email or send instructions that this particular lead needed a phone call or a postal letter.

That worked really well. They had a whole bunch of new meetings booked in, which was awesome to see.

Creating images for product listings, yes, that can definitely be done with AI. I won't go too far into that one now.

Another client was forever missing meetings because they had ADHD, so we set it up so they'd get a text message every time they were due in a meeting in 10 minutes, five minutes, and one minute.

You can set up reminders with Google Calendar anyway, but we wanted to make sure it actually texted them so that wherever they were, they'd see it.

There's a whole host of automations you can create, and it's very exciting. I really encourage you to explore them.

I'm going to move on from automation now because although I'd love to teach everyone how to make one, that's definitely more of a half-day session.

I'm going to move on to Claude. Some of you might have used Claude before, or you've used ChatGPT.

Interestingly, I asked Claude what it thought it looked like, and this was the description it came up with, which I then put into Gemini to create a picture for us. I think it probably looks like that.

A lot of you have probably heard that Claude is overtaking ChatGPT a little in popularity, and I'm about to show you some of the things it can do.

This isn't a live demo because I always worry about the live demo gods not smiling on me, so I'm using a video instead.

In this example, I asked it to come up with 10 tips for founders to help them delegate. Fine, that sounds pretty basic.

But then I asked it to create me a one-pager using the same design as one I had attached. So what I actually did was upload one of our previously designed one-pagers that we use to send out to people, and I asked it to put those 10 tips into that same design and template.

This is something that would normally take somebody a while in Canva, but Claude can do it in minutes, which I think is really impressive.

You can also put your website in and say, actually, Claude, can you take the branding from my website? It will scan your site, pull the branding off, and create the document for you.

You can do this with PowerPoints as well. If you have a slide deck you like to use, it can put all the new content in, which is fantastic. There we go. There is the fully branded PDF right there.

If it's not perfect, you can chat to Claude and ask it to change the layout or put different things in. I think it's brilliant for creating documents or decks in your branding. I'll let you know afterwards how to grab all of these prompts.

The second thing I love about Claude is this: you can now use it like a junior assistant. This is called Claude Cowork, which is something you download.

With Claude Cowork, you can ask it to go off and do tasks for you, just like a junior assistant would.

You can ask Claude to open the browser. In this example, I used a PA-style task. I said I needed a hotel in London on the 24th of May for one night.

If you Google a hotel or ask a regular LLM to find one, it'll usually bring back listing prices. But when you actually go to the hotel's site and put the dates in, the price is often different.

That's why this is a good example. It doesn't just search Google and give you generic results. It actually opens the browser, works through the results, clicks through to the hotel websites, and checks properly.

In this case, I wanted something very specific. It had to be within zone one or two, it had to be five-star, and it had to have a pool.

That's quite a lot of criteria, and it would normally involve quite a lot of manual research. But Claude can open the browser and get to work doing that.

I used this the other day to create a report on how my LinkedIn was doing. I didn't just want stats on post performance. I wanted to know how my actions were affecting that performance.

So I asked it to open my browser, look at my LinkedIn, and create me a report. It came back with about a 10-page report, and I was able to see what I'd done on certain days and how that had affected my reach.

The last thing I'll show you with Claude is this. You can click the plus button and add connectors.

That means you can connect Claude into lots of different software tools. You can connect it into Zoom, your CRM, or in my case, Granola, which is my note-taking tool.

The only thing I would say here is to be mindful of data. When you are connecting things through Claude, you may be passing data through a third party, so just double-check whether that's okay for the kind of data involved.

I usually mainly use it for connecting Granola so I can query and work from my call notes.

So if I had a call with Emma on my team about our go-to-market strategy, for example, I can get Claude to pull those notes in, work with them, and help me with whatever I need next.

It'll give me the link to the full notes, and I can then ask it questions. You can also ask it for feedback. Maybe it was a sales call and you want to know how well you did against a certain sales framework. It can analyse all of that for you. I really love the note-taker connector.

You can also connect Canva. Once Claude has created an asset for you, like the branded document at the start, you can ask Claude to open it in Canva, and then you can go and edit it.

This is the result of a client we worked with recently. We asked Claude to do a full analysis of their LinkedIn, and we also used the Shield app to figure out that at the time they were getting, on average, 20,000 impressions per post.

After doing the full analysis of their LinkedIn and working with a small marketing company to figure out the next steps, and monitoring it closely with daily reports using a combination of automation and Claude, within three months that client was averaging about 343,000 impressions per post.

That was a really impressive increase and a great business case for using AI strategically.

Something else I asked Claude to do was connect to my Gmail and calendar. Again, just be careful and make sure the data is appropriate for that use.

Once connected, I asked it to check my diary for free slots next week and draft an email offering those slots to get a meeting booked in with John Doe.

It looked at my diary, found the slots, and emailed John with the options. Then John came back, chose a slot, and it booked it in.

I love this because it's so quick and saves me searching through my diary for ages. You can set up an automation for this too, but I won't go into that right now.

I also asked it if it could get my niece and nephew ready for school and make me a coffee. That didn't go so well. So we're still a little way off AI being able to do that.

I did promise I'd explain a bit about which tools to use in your business.

I'd love to sit here and tell you there's one main tool you need, but it really depends on your business, the industry you're in, the kind of things you do every day, and how big your team is.

But I'm happy to share my favourite tools, which are Claude, Lindy for building automations, and HeyGen for generating very authentic-looking videos, marketing content, and voice-related assets.

HeyGen has a really cool feature where you can take a picture of a product, and it will make you a full product video for social media, which is very impressive.

Those are my favourite tools. But in terms of what you specifically need for your business, it really does depend on your business. It's always worth having a chat with Claude and asking what it thinks.

Otherwise, feel free to get in touch with me, and we can figure that out together.

Thank you so much for coming to the Lunch and Learn today. I hope it's been insightful and useful. I'd love to teach you so much more, but there's only so much I can squeeze into 30 minutes.

So that's it for now. Thank you so much for spending the time with me. I'm going to hand back over for questions.

Beth: Thanks so much, Charlotte. That was really interesting. There are so many practical takeaways from that. I had no idea that you could open up your browser in Claude and ask it to do the search that way. So yes, really clever.

We've only got a few minutes, so we don't have time for many questions. Melissa has asked in the chat whether you could recommend any software for creating photoshoot-looking photos for products. I suppose that would be HeyGen?

Charlotte: So HeyGen is good for videos. If you want to create photoshoots, so far I've found Gemini to be the best image creator for me at this point.

There is also an AI called Holo, which I haven't used yet, but I've heard good things about. So there are a couple there to test out.

For me, Gemini has been brilliant, and it's definitely worth trying the HeyGen ad generator video. It's incredible. It made an amazing video about water for me. I was just testing it out, and I thought, now I want this tap water.

Beth: That's brilliant. I love it. We'll do one more then, if that's okay with you, Charlotte. For someone who's tried AI tools and felt underwhelmed, what are they most likely doing wrong in your opinion?

Charlotte: I think the biggest thing to learn about AI tools is that it's all about what you put in.

I'm sure we've all seen the very obvious AI posts or AI comments on LinkedIn. It really is the case that what you put in is what you get out.

Sometimes AI is seen as a miracle answer to everything. Really, you want to see it more as a sparring partner that you chat with. It's all about your ideas, your voice, your authenticity, and your knowledge going in, so that what comes out is actually meaningful and usable.

Beth: That's brilliant. Thank you, Charlotte. We've had lots of nice comments in the chat thanking you for the session today.

Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

Charlotte: Thanks so much, everyone. Cheers. Bye.

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