#2: Discover the Gen AI U Mindset & AI Tools to TURN Your Ideas into Reality!

Full video transcript

Hey everyone, Darby here, founder of Gen AI University, and in this video I’m going to be sharing with you a few tools that I use almost every day now to take the ideas that are in my head and either research them, refine them, or get them out and present them — whether it’s a presentation, a website, or deeper research on a topic. Specifically, a few key AI tools that I found incredibly helpful and useful in my own day-to-day, and I know a number of other members inside of our community and subscribers on YouTube are more than likely already familiar with some of these tools I’m going to be mentioning throughout this video. But I think it’s important, before we dive into any specific tools or demonstrations, to understand why we’re doing this in the first place — to preface the entire video with the why, starting with what we value, who we are, and what the mission is here at Gen AI University.

My mission is to help you through this content, and I hope that by applying the philosophies I’ll be sharing with you before we get into the tools and demonstrations, it all ties together. It may resonate with you, it may not, but if it does, I would love to see you subscribe to our channel and share it with anybody who you think would resonate as well with the content we’re creating here, to stay updated with more videos, more drops, and more live events we’ll be hosting.

This video is sponsored by our partner Gamma, which is going to be one of the tools I demonstrate later, and is also one of our Platinum sponsors at the Scale With AI Summit, our upcoming event starting in March of 2025, with a second Summit already scheduled for dates to be announced in September of 2025. This is our flagship Summit, our virtual event that brings together leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs making waves in the AI space — tools we’re building, clients we’re serving, and how we’re building solutions to help people solve their problems and move the needle forward in their business. Gamma is a sponsor I’m proud to say I use almost every day, and it helps me get my ideas into something tangible — a presentation, a website, and many other ways you can utilize this platform. Gamma has provided us with a special code to get you one month free on their Pro subscription tier — check out gamma.app and use the code AISUMMIT.

Let’s dive into what we’re building here at Gen AI University. It all stems from the vision that we want to take more dreams and turn them into greater impacts in the real world. These big ideas we’ve got in our heads are often kept there by resistance, by roadblocks, by things limiting us from getting that idea out — whether it’s a book, a course, a podcast, or something else. That dream-to-reality gap is where myself, my partners, my clients, and our community stand at the forefront of AI innovation and human integration. The speed of change continues to pick up its pace, and AI is not going anywhere. There’s a lot of positive that can be done using this technology in the right way, and also a lot of negative — deep fakes and deceptive practices, which is something I want to avoid bringing into this conversation. There’s a lot of hype in the space too, and I’ve been in it since very early 2021, when what we work with was then called Conversion AI, then Jarvis, then Jasper, leading to the founding of Gen AI University. I’ve hyped up tools that didn’t live up to it, and I’ve hyped up tools that absolutely did.

Being discerning and understanding of all the information in the space is more important now than ever, to focus on what’s going to move the needle in your business and what’s within your control. That comes down to five core values I’ll share with you, then talk about each one. These are the values driving me and our clients and community, and the people I choose to work with align with these values — if they turn you off, it’s probably for the better, but if you do align with them, I want you to have a better idea of where I’m coming from.

The first of the five: bold creativity. Second: empathetic integrity. Third: adaptive autonomy. Fourth: innovative problem solving. Fifth: a growth-oriented mindset. I got to these five core values after spending a lot of time working through the EOS Vision framework — the Entrepreneur Operating System — which you can find in the book Traction by Gino Wickman. This is one of the first things you need to get on paper when building your own game plan, and I’ve modified it slightly over the past year while integrating EOS as our operating system for how we operate Gen AI University and how I operate my life.

The first value, bold creativity: if you’re an entrepreneur, an innovator, a creator with ideas in your head, it’s our responsibility to get out and be bold with those ideas and actions, integrating boldness with our own creativity. Being bold in the act of your own creativeness aligns how I create content, assess content, and identify people to interview or bring into our community or mastermind. It’s designed to push boundaries by blending what’s going on in AI and the innovations we see with human ingenuity. If we combine creativity, boldness, and multiple people together with AI and technology, there’s a lot of great positive impact that can come from that — you’ll see it through the partnerships we develop, sponsors on our podcast and Summits, frameworks like our Buyer Brief book, and products I create like Side Hustle, the party game for entrepreneurs.

The second value, empathetic integrity: leading with purpose to ensure all solutions we’re creating are designed to uplift people and align with long-term impact. I want to work with people who have great integrity and are empathetic in that integrity, understanding at their core the perspective of the people they’re working with. That combination is a powerful lens for building sustainable systems, ethical AI integration, and partnerships rooted in shared values.

The third value, adaptive autonomy: I do best working autonomously, knowing what needs to be done with the freedom to get the job done without micromanagement. The partners and teammates I work with need to be autonomous, able to drive themselves, while I can empower others to thrive independently, all while navigating rapidly changing landscapes, especially in AI. It’s important to be autonomous and get stuff done on your own, but also to adapt to the speed of change — that’s why there’s constant iteration on the tools, processes, and content we create, like our work with Market Sauce and our recipes and prompt stacks over the years.

The fourth value, innovative problem solving: turning challenges into opportunities with actionable steps. A book that had a profound effect on me is “The Obstacle Is the Way” by Ryan Holiday — the takeaway being that the obstacle in front of you isn’t a roadblock but the way forward. We want to turn the challenges that arise day-to-day into opportunities and take action on them, using AI to research a problem extremely fast even when we have no real concept of what the problem is or who’s having it, then approach solving it from an empathetic, innovative perspective.

The fifth value, a growth-oriented mindset: embracing continuous learning, adaptability, and progress, always moving forward and getting better every day. We’re building an ecosystem — a community, a mastermind, an integration network — on top of our channels like YouTube, email, and our podcast, to amplify what’s working and who in our community is doing great things, because the rising tide lifts all ships.

Those are the core values we embody through our content, partnerships, and programs, which felt necessary to share especially as we officially launch our Gen AI University podcast, so you can get a better idea of what’s going on in my mind and the minds of those I’m working with in our community.

Now I want to share a few of the tools I mentioned — Gamma being one — that you can use right now to help with solving problems, being creative, working autonomously, and always learning and adapting. I’m going to demonstrate tools I use every day in a way that’s quick and straight to the point, showing how fast you can get an idea out there, even one you didn’t know existed before starting the research. The tools: one, Gamma, which I’ve already mentioned; two, Perplexity — an incredibly powerful AI search engine that’s changing the game in how we search for solutions to our problems. If you haven’t been using Perplexity already, I’d highly recommend checking it out.

Let’s dive in. We’re going to start with Perplexity, and the demonstration today is taking an idea for a product I have. The demonstration walks through how to use Perplexity to research problems a specific segment of a market is having related to an existing product or service, and then take that research and formulate it into a pitch deck that would effectively educate and sell the idea to that specific segment. The product I’m using is Side Hustle, the party game for entrepreneurs — you can play it online for free at playsidehustle.com. I’m one of the co-founders of the game and one of the original creators, and it can be applied in a fun, creative environment for pitching ideas — in a classroom, a startup incubator, an icebreaker event, a party game at game night, or a centerpiece for networking events at small business events.

I’m going to be using the Pro version of Perplexity, but you can get started with more than enough resources on the free version. First, I’m going to ask Perplexity: research the game playsidehustle.com and identify some of the key target markets they serve with the game. It researches and returns entrepreneurs and business-minded individuals — aspiring entrepreneurs, small business owners, startup founders, business students — and then segments further into young adults and professionals, social gamers, and the educational market, tech-savvy users. Following our Market Sauce methodology, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but for this demonstration I’m going to pick one to go after: the educational market. It suggests appeal in business schools, entrepreneurship programs, professional development workshops, team building exercises, and corporate events — I’d add that educators in high schools and colleges would also fit, whether teaching entrepreneurship or using the game to build soft skills like communication and presenting.

I go a little further: “Let’s focus on the educational market and entrepreneur programs in high school and college classrooms,” and Perplexity researches and finds sources, which I love, because I can validate and get more insight into where the information comes from. It comes back with game-based learning for entrepreneurial education, citing other programs, curriculum integration focused on real-world application, and the development of an entrepreneurial mindset in the classroom. I tell it I like that framing and ask it to come up with a framework for how we would present and pitch this idea to decision makers at education institutions to use the game in their programs. In just a few minutes, we’ve hyper-segmented and created a pitch framework versus a more broad general approach — in this case: problem statement, innovative solution, tangible benefit, case study or evidence, how to implement, presentation tips.

Then I say: write that outline for me based on the market research you found for this segment of the market, identify the problem, then present Side Hustle as the solution. It comes back identifying the problem — lack of real-world application, underdeveloped entrepreneurial mindset, insufficient resources — and the solution: providing hands-on experiences and identifying opportunities for application. I add a call to action pointing people to play free online at playsidehustle.com. Now I’ve got a problem, a solution, and a call to action — the outline I need.

From here, that’s where Gamma comes in. I take the content I created inside Perplexity and switch to a new tab in Gamma, where I’m already in a folder with projects I’ve made for the Side Hustle game, and click “create new.” Gamma gives you a few options to get started: pasting in text, generating with a prompt, or importing files from a URL. Since I already have an outline, I select “paste in text” and copy over the problem and call-to-action content from Perplexity. Then I choose “presentation” (versus web page or document) and continue.

The next step is generation, where you choose whether to condense, preserve, or generate — condense boils the content down, preserve keeps it roughly the same, and generate writes new copy for the audience you identify. I describe the audience as educators and entrepreneurship program developers with a persuasive, problem-focused tone, set it to generate with a medium amount of text since I already provided the context, and set it to a 10-card slide deck. From there you can choose from prebuilt templates inside Gamma with different styles and light/dark themes — I’ve already modified one of these to match the Side Hustle branding, so I select customize with that theme and click generate.

Gamma generates the full presentation in real time based on the content I gave it, producing a first draft I can edit quickly — adding links, refining copy, updating things. Scrolling to the top, we’ve got “Side Hustle: Redefining Entrepreneurship Education,” a blurb about the game, and a section addressing gaps in entrepreneurial skills — limited exposure, lack of presentation skills, real-world application through simulation. I check that the AI isn’t hallucinating and that everything reflects what’s true about the game — this is the human-in-the-loop review step. A lot of the images were AI-generated, and I can swap or remove them or prompt for different ones. There are more resources on using Gamma, including our Gamma Lab workshop from the 2024 Scale With AI Summit, available on our Scale With AI Summit playlist on YouTube.

The inputs I provided directly inform the outputs, so it’s my responsibility to review the presentation and make sure it looks solid and the information is correct before I’d pitch it to somebody. But to get a customized presentation built out as a starting point, we’re already about 80% of the way there just from using Perplexity for initial research and Gamma to create the first draft. From there, clicking present puts you off to the races, able to present your idea in a clean, simple, smooth flow containing all the information sourced and curated as context for Gamma.

The main thing to be aware of when using any generative AI tool to get ideas out and present them is that the context you bring in is of the utmost importance to the outputs it produces. It’s your responsibility as the human in the loop to quality-control the output — the same responsibility that applies whether or not you’re using AI. This process took a few minutes instead of a few hours, and that time savings has had a huge impact on how I go about researching processes, refining ideas, understanding target markets, and creating personalized presentations for a specific segment of the market, in a fraction of the time these projects would have taken before, when they’d often be cost-prohibitive.

I hope you find this combination of Perplexity and Gamma useful — you can also mix in tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to continue refining and getting more granular with the outlines and content you’d be creating alongside Perplexity. But it’s about seeing the power of research and taking it from an idea into something you can present that gets the problem, the solution, and the call to action across in a way everyone can understand — simple and effective. I hope you find it useful in your AI journey. If you did find it useful or helpful, please let us know with a like, a share, and a comment, and let us know what you found most useful, most insightful, or what you’d want to see and learn about next in the world of generative AI as it relates to your innovation, your creativity, and the growth of yourself and your business. I’m Darby Rollins, founder of Gen AI University. Keep calm and AI on — I’ll see you in the next video.