Mastering Mind and Machine: Grow Your Business with Gen AI University

Full video transcript

Hello everybody, my name is Darby Rollins, and welcome to today’s session, where I normally would say “Darby here from The AI Author,” but today marks day one of our official rebrand to Gen AI University. I’ve got some big updates and announcements for what the future of Gen AI University has in store over the course of the rest of 2023 and beyond, as we continue to carve the path forward in AI integration, adaptation, and growth for businesses small and large.

So welcome in, everybody, joining us live today. Just a heads-up, it looks like the chat is not going to be working for us to interact back and forth, but if you do have questions throughout this live session, make sure to drop them in the Q&A and let us know where you’re tuning in from. Great to see everybody here with us live, and I am joined as well on my panel — I’m not sure if you guys can see them live or not — with Kelly Tenney and our head of growth here at Gen AI University, Rachel Coburn.

With that said, I’d like to welcome all you guys here today with us. We’ve got some big updates as to where we’re heading here at Gen AI University, so without further ado I’ll jump right into it, and we’ll have plenty of time to answer your questions throughout the rest of this call. First and foremost, of course, we’ve got the rebrand. We’ve been thinking about this long and hard the past few months, but most importantly we decided to rebrand from The AI Author to Gen AI University for a number of reasons — first and foremost is where we’re heading in our vision as a company and how we’re shaping the future of education and business with AI.

We felt a little bit boxed in by the AI Author branding and where we initially started with book challenges, which is great and helped people write content with AI, but we realized it’s so much more than that, especially with the speed of change accelerating every single week — new AI tools, new information, new advice, new courses, new content, new changes in the world. It’s damn near impossible to keep up with all of it at once. One thing we’ve really come to realize over the past few months is that while the next AI tool is going to come and go, one thing that remains consistent throughout all this is our ability to connect with each other as humans through community, which is really where The AI Author started at the very beginning. But now it’s so much bigger than books — it’s about mindset, adaptation, and how you actually integrate and cut through the noise to figure out what works best for you specifically, so you can elevate your human creativity alongside AI as a co-pilot.

A book as a project is a beast — a lot of content, a lot of energy — and once it’s done, then it goes on to marketing, press, and everything designed to grow your business and platform. While it was great that we started with using AI for books, what we’ve realized is it’s more than just a one-off project — it’s continuous development, upleveling your skills on a consistent basis, with a book as just one tangible piece of content establishing your expertise and authority. But then, what once the book is done? Maybe there are other areas of your business that require other forms of AI to help you scale and streamline different processes — customer service, sales, managing teams of real estate agents and brokers around the state or the world. How do you integrate AI effectively so you’re not bloating yourself or wasting time and resources going in the wrong direction?

All of this means we really need to invest a lot more into continuous training and development — micro courses, micro content, micro coaching geared toward specific tracks of education with clear finish lines, whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or advanced, like a college with different levels of curriculum tailored to every person’s situation. That’s where we’re heading, following a university model for the generative AI space, and that’s one of the reasons we partnered with Kelly Tenney, given her years of experience developing curriculums at the college level — we can model something that’s already working and apply it for our community members, so you know you’re going to a place with real experience and support, not just someone who figured out a 10,000-prompt guidebook on ChatGPT and fire-hoses you with information for a $37 low-ticket marketing funnel cash grab. We’ve all seen that out there, and the noise is only going to get louder. What we’re building is the premier destination to learn, grow, and thrive with a community of like-minded professionals and businesses carving the way forward in generative AI.

We’re going to be sharing more trainings, content, and coaching at beginner-to-advanced levels, helping you integrate cutting-edge tools as they come out and figure out whether a given tool is actually going to work for you. We’re kicking this whole rebrand off next week with an evolved version of our seven-day book challenge, incorporating the latest AI advancements. I’ve been with Jasper since day one, and I’ve watched it evolve to focus more on larger enterprise-level markets, because it’s hard to compete with free, especially with how fast things are moving. Jasper isn’t as supportive for individual creators or smaller teams looking for a tool that evolves with the times, in my opinion. So we’re opening up the hood to other tools — not just Jasper, but Claude from Anthropic, which has been my go-to AI tool over the past few months and is currently free to access in the US and Canada, along with ChatGPT and others.

While Jasper is great for larger marketing teams at massive scale, it’s not the only tool you need in your tool belt. If you get stuck in just one tool and one workflow and try to make it work for everything, you might be inefficient, or that might genuinely be the right tool for your specific business focus — there’s no one cookie-cutter answer. Maybe ChatGPT is good for getting from zero to one, and maybe it’s time to move into automation, plugging directly into the APIs of Claude, Anthropic, OpenAI, or even Jasper to build your own workflow. We now have the building blocks — the Legos, as I see them — to build our own apps, tools, and workflows, and it’s never been easier to turn that workflow into your own business.

So all of that comes back to day one of our seven-day book challenge, which still starts the same way: what’s your why, what’s the outcome you’re looking to accomplish, what project are you focused on, what AI tools do you actually need right now. Maybe it’s chatbot support, maybe it’s custom automations through Make.com, maybe it’s a simple ChatGPT interface to analyze data. Thinking through your workflow and starting with the end in mind remains the same, and staying the human behind the wheel, knowing when to pull which lever, is where the real power comes from. That’s what we’ll cover in our challenge kicking off live on September 7th, exclusively for members of our community. If you’re not a member of Gen AI University programs, I’d invite you to join. If you’re already a member — from Cookbook Plus all the way to Creator Plus — nothing changes with this rebrand; we’re making it as seamless as possible. You’re just going to get more coaching, more recipes, more on-demand trainings, and more micro-level content geared down specific tracks to help you move faster in the right direction.

We’re doing all this to enrich our community experience, bringing the best of the best with weekly group coaching calls, monthly masterminds, and additional monthly AI trainings from other AI educators and mentors in our community who are actually taking action and applying what they’re doing in the real world. All of this is to help you adapt to constant AI change, stay innovative, integrate AI seamlessly, and drive the results you want — ultimately helping you find success faster with AI integration, fusing fluency with these tools alongside your human ingenuity and creativity.

I want to bring up Kelly Tenney, who is no stranger to developing world-class programs for colleges and organizations of all sizes, to demonstrate what this is going to look like for you and what to expect when you invest in yourself as a member of Gen AI University.

Kelly: Hello everybody, it’s so good to be here, and I couldn’t be more excited. When talking with Rachel and Darby about their vision and shift around Gen AI University, I immediately thought we could structure it like a true university or college, and they agreed that’s exactly what they were thinking. From the education perspective, we all know there are tons of trainings out there around AI, people dropping trainings all the time, but the difference between a training and actual curriculum is being able to approach mastering AI in a way that’s more than just getting one thing done — true skill development, true mastery, true understanding, building upon knowledge versus piecemealing a bunch of trainings together. I loved the Lego analogy — we could have a bunch of Legos we build many different things with, or Legos that come together to actually create a house, an airplane, or a car.

Coming at it from the curriculum aspect is going to set Gen AI University apart, and for everyone who’s part of it, you’re going to see the benefits of an organized, strategic, structured curriculum to follow, and your results are going to be accelerated. In a time where I’m seeing companies looking for AI mastery skills, AI usage becoming a new soft skill, you can’t develop that skill set from one-off trainings without a strategy. So, as part of Gen AI University, you’re not just finding the prompt to write the email — you’re going through a cohesive curriculum to actually master email marketing using AI.

I’ll share an example of one of the tracks you’ll see inside Gen AI University — this would be our AI in Business starter track, like a 100-level class for someone coming in who wants to start using AI with best practices, really integrating it into their business, maybe someone who’s been playing around but not using it consistently. We have five courses in this track that we suggest taking in this specific order, taking the guesswork out for you: starting with AI basics training, moving into setting up your brand voice so all your content sounds like you and aligns with your brand, learning how to make generative AI your best brainstorming partner, moving into batch creation for content — specifically social media content and graphics — and wrapping up with auto-scripting to learn how to streamline your workflow so you can create better content faster.

These are things you’re going to find within Gen AI University, and we’re already developing what those different tracks are going to be — around NFTs, email or digital marketing, writing a book — and it’ll be a lot easier to move through and find the curriculum, taking the guesswork out of which training to touch and what you need to know before going into it, because we’re approaching it from an educational perspective, recognizing the need for building skills with structure.

Darby: One thing we’ve seen consistently since Gen AI really started taking off, especially since ChatGPT came into the space, is that the speed of change is picking up every day, every week. A lot of what we’ve spent time on over the past few months is reevaluating how we want to move forward, and going down this traditional university-style learning path, rather than trying to totally recreate a new model, is already proven to be extremely effective. Courses are great, but then a platform changes its UI and the course isn’t entirely obsolete but needs updating — that’s just a fact of life now, and it’s about how we adapt our community and trainings to work seamlessly with that change.

One great question that came up is accreditation, which I know we’ve talked about, Kelly. Right now we don’t have hard dates specifically for that, but you can expect to see more things familiar to what you’d see from a school like Harvard, or maybe even a mascot for the Gen AI University creators one day — let’s have fun with this, because if we’re always so serious, we can forget that this speed of change can get overwhelming, and it ties back to why everything comes back to community and human connection — why people pay thousands of dollars to be part of a university for the relationships and experience as much as the content.

Kelly, can you talk a bit about accreditation and what to expect over the next few months on the coaching front?

Kelly: In terms of accreditation, Darby and I just submitted a version of our AI and Business course for realtors to the State of Florida to get accredited for three CLEs. Now that we’ve gone through that process and know what’s involved — format, information, educational objectives aligned to curriculum — we’re realizing how we can duplicate that process and go full steam ahead with accreditation. I love that we can create that inside Gen AI University and work toward accreditation without everyone having to dig up their transcripts and go back to college. Accreditation on the professional side often goes by region, so first we’re going to look state by state — is California different from Texas — but there are professional organizations that will allow us to be accredited so that you can say you’re an accredited AI expert in business, or whatever track you complete. As tracks develop, we’ll look at getting each one accredited, and I foresee Gen AI University itself eventually being recognized as an accredited educational institution.

Darby: Thank you, Kelly. We’re not going to overload you guys with ideas that don’t have tangible shape behind them — what we’re sharing today has put a dent in our sleep over the past few weeks getting this ready to roll out. We’re kicking things off next week with a live seven-day book challenge, taking the old one apart and rebuilding it with the new tools and resources we have. A lot remains the same — day one starts with your why, laying the foundation, starting with the end in mind, getting clear on who you’re serving.

To answer a question about defining auto-scripting — that’s been one of our cornerstone micro courses, coming out about a year ago, right around our Scale with AI Summit. It’s about breaking down your process and workflow: understanding your prompts, then stringing them together — I call that command stacking — and then moving into automation to create recipes. At the time of this recording we were recently exposed to news that Jasper is pulling back on recipes, which doesn’t change how you approach the methodology — you still need a clear prompt, or your outputs will be off. What used to take 40 minutes in Jasper you can now run in seconds inside Claude with a click of a button, plugging in your avatar, niche, and primary goal, often with a better output. Platforms like Make.com are making this available to anybody for free, no credit card needed, where you can plug in your own OpenAI API for about 20 dollars a month and build out workflows — even something like the “$100 million offer” recipe our community started with, based on Alex Hormozi’s book. Sean Vosler recently launched Movable Type AI, where you put in a big idea and get a 150-page, 30,000-word book draft you can then massage and add your own stories to. We’ve come a long way from the “expand sentence” prompt in Jasper.

If you’d like to be part of a community and get involved, I’d invite you to go to genaiuniversity.com and check us out — you can learn more about what we’ve done, including being recently interviewed by a reporter at the New York Times about AI and books, and featured in a number of publications over the past couple of years. When you’re ready, you can click “start now.” We have a full annual membership now open and available, and you can also start monthly, quarterly, or bi-annually, like signing up for a semester of college. You’re going to get out of it what you put into it — if you sign up and don’t show up, don’t participate, don’t ask questions, the results will reflect that, but if you join and participate, we’re going to continue investing more in the community. If you have a team or organization and want to ask about scholarships or price breaks for team members, we’re open to that, and you can also book a quick demo with myself or a team member.

That’s all I had to share on the vision today. If you’re already part of the community, your membership just got leveled up — you don’t have to do anything different. If you’ve been on the fence, go check us out at genaiuniversity.com, book a call with me or the team with any questions, and select the membership plan that works for you.

For those already in the community from Cookbook Plus to Creator Plus, you’re grandfathered in as-is. If you want additional one-on-one coaching time with myself or Kelly, that’s going to be available going forward, though people already part of the community will get pushed to the front of the line for those opportunities as we add more coaches. Expect more weekly coaching, monthly masterminds, and more micro training inside the vault — the biggest thing you’ll see is some name changes and nomenclature updates for Gen AI University.

Rachel: Hey everybody, I’m head of growth here at Gen AI University — some of you know me, some of you don’t. If you have questions, go to genaiuniversity.com and scroll to the bottom, where we have an FAQ page that we’ll keep adding to. If you have questions about your Creator membership, partnering, or anything else, you can reach out to us at hey@genaiuniversity.com — we originally had hey@theaiauthor.com, but that’s updated now. You can also use the contact page on the site, and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours.

Darby: I’d love to hear from all of you already part of this community what kinds of tracks or courses you’d like to see, as our first priority is making sure you find value in the curriculum. There’s a lot of content produced a couple of years ago that’s still in the community and might not be as relevant today, and that’s okay — a big focus now, after the rebrand and restructuring, is organizing that content and pointing you in the right direction. While we’re still working on a search bot to help find specific things inside transcripts, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team if you’re looking for a particular type of content — we aim to get back to everyone within 24 hours, ideally faster for active members.

Expect some changes, not complete overhauls — a course might move to a different spot in the community, and we’ll update everyone as we make those changes. If you have a large team or organization and want a custom workshop tailored to your industry — we’re talking with some lawyers right now about a law-specific generative AI curriculum, similar to what we’re doing with real estate agents in Florida — or if you know someone who’d be a good fit and want to make an introduction, we have a referral program that rewards you for bringing folks into our network.

On pricing: if you’re already a member of the AI Author community with a paid membership from Creator Plus or Cookbook Plus, from when we launched the community a year and a half ago, you don’t have to do anything — your pricing is locked in and grandfathered. The only thing not included is one-on-one coaching beyond group coaching and on-demand training calls. While the price will be a bit higher for new members coming in now, I can tell you the pricing today is not going to be the same 12 months from now — it’s not going down, and the investment into the programming and community is only going to go up as we grow.

We’ll be announcing this rebrand across our socials — LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube — so keep an eye out, existing members will get an email with all the new social handles. I’m looking forward to hosting a LinkedIn Live in the next couple of weeks to go deeper into this, possibly with a giveaway.

To answer a couple more questions: this doesn’t change the Mastermind calls that are already scheduled through the end of the year, and our Inner Circle Mastermind, which meets weekly and is application-only, stays the same — enrollment for that remains closed. One-on-one calls, say 30 minutes with me or with Kelly, will have booking information posted inside the community.

I see Susie found us a year and a half ago — grateful to be with us on this journey. We’re grateful for everyone who’s been with us since the beginning, through the ups and downs, especially in the Gen AI space, which is no stranger to change. We appreciate everyone giving us your time, energy, and trust that we’re bringing content with your best interest in mind.

We’ve got to sign off here in a second — I’ve got another call after this. If you have other questions, reach out to us at hey@genaiuniversity.com, or find us individually — darby@genaiuniversity.com, rachel@genaiuniversity.com, kelly@genaiuniversity.com. The AI Author is a thing of the past, but the past is what has shaped us to move forward and progress into the future. We’re grateful for all the experiences that got us here, and there’s so much more to come. Everything inside our circle community is going to stay pretty much the same, aside from some naming and nomenclature changes about where to find specific trainings. We’ll be at Gen AI University and all our socials moving forward, posting a lot more online — we’ll see you guys on the other side, hopefully inside Gen AI University. So until next time, keep calm and AI on. Stay safe out there. Bye-bye.