Your First (12?) AI Employee(s)

Full video transcript

A lot of first-time entrepreneurs don’t even know who they need to get their business growing — what roles they would have. They’re not doing the fundamentals because they just don’t know. This will help you with that. Forget about being an AI or tech novice — even as a novice business owner, it will support you in creating the things you need to get your business off the ground. It can help you create documents to pitch yourself for funding, or even just to sell a product, to put together a sales plan. I used to be the chief sales officer for the National Association of Sales Professionals. Do you know how long it took to put together sales plans for people, for the annual sales plan or the marketing budget?

Hey everybody, Darby here with Jennifi.com. Today I’m joined by Brooke Dukes. She is a communications expert, bestselling author, and transformational business consultant who has been leveraging AI tools not only for her business but for her clients. Brooke and I connected recently on LinkedIn, and she shared a little bit of what she’s building. So Brooke, I’d love to hear a little bit about your background for those who this is their first time meeting you. The stage is yours to share how you’re using AI to scale your business.

Perfect. My background — I have over 24 years of experience in business consulting. My background is psychology, behavioral science, neuro-linguistic programming, and human design, which we marry into our consulting services. This is the fourth business I’ve built and the only one where AI was involved, so it’s been a game changer for us. I’ve been able to see the progression — how quickly I could build this business versus previous businesses without AI. We use what’s called the communication code system, and everything we do is based on mindset and communication, because we believe success, whether personal or professional, comes down to mindset — what’s between your ears — and communication. You cannot be a good leader, a good partner, or a good salesperson without understanding how to communicate.

Having all of our background — I have PhDs on staff who have written white papers for me for previous businesses — and utilizing AI, particularly Sintra in particular, I’ve used many different AI platforms, and Sintra is the one that I believe has really helped us grow our business even faster. I learned about it from a woman who owns a cybersecurity company. When we were sitting down meeting, she asked if I was using ChatGPT. Yeah, everyone is, right? And she was telling me the problems with using ChatGPT and other open systems — all of your information is just out there. I wasn’t willing to give up the benefits I was getting for what could possibly happen with that. So she told me about Sintra AI, and said it’s closed — you can put all your business information, business models, white papers, all the science, all your secret sauce into it, and the brain starts learning about you.

With Sintra, there are 12 helpers essentially for a small business — 12 employees. I feel like right now in our business there are four of us. We have someone on operations, myself, which is a little bit of everything, delivery, the whole bit, and marketing. I could grow tenfold and not have to hire another employee because of Sintra. What took our PhDs weeks, if not months, to create — a really powerful case study — I put in a past case study with all the data, and it popped it out. With some tweaks, I had it done within an hour. It still doesn’t hook up with something like Canva to make things look beautiful — that’s a limitation of it. When I’ve asked it to create documents that look good, they don’t look so great. So I took the information and gave it to my marketing person to make it a beautiful case study, and we had two within a week.

I think this is on the right track with where I see smaller, leaner businesses leveraging these tools and adapting to new technology so much faster than larger enterprises with all the red tape. You said using these 12 different employees gives you the ability to scale without needing to hire — but you’re not using these to replace anyone on staff or the leadership directing them. The information they’re trained on comes from your years of expertise, and you’re making sure they understand your business and that you’re giving them the right guidelines. Of course, there are limitations with anything — a lot of our community uses Gamma, similar to creating presentations within Canva, and I see that as a limitation for a lot of AI tools right now.

Why 12? Why is that the number you’re working with? Are there specific roles they’ve got? What I’ll say on the scaling piece — it also lets me, as a consulting firm, bring in 1099s when we need trainers, so I don’t need to keep the kind of overhead that cripples small businesses. It helps you gauge when you actually need a live person. In previous businesses, I’ve hired people and then realized I didn’t need to, or it wasn’t working out, or I hired someone whose skill set wasn’t what I actually needed. Using these helpers helps you hone in on exactly what you need, which makes scaling more efficient. Also, like many entrepreneurs, you can use Sintra across up to five businesses separately, with a brain for each one.

Going back to how I use the 12 helpers — I don’t use all of them. There’s a recruiter I don’t use myself, but a friend of mine was looking for a job, so I used it for him: put in his generic resume with a job description, and it tailors the resume to that job and writes a cover letter. I use the copywriter all the time. I started using this over the holidays, and it took a bit for the brain to learn my cadence and voice. Like any AI platform, the prompt matters. One thing I do, and I think you can do this with any AI including ChatGPT, is ask: here’s my outcome, what do you need from me to get there? That saves time so I’m not constantly going back and forth. We keep a sheet of prompts so anyone on the team can go in and find the prompt they need.

We don’t really use the social media helper to create posts — I’m a writer, and my operations person is a fabulous writer, so we start with our own ideas: what we’re teaching, what we’ve learned from clients, the challenge. It always comes from us. We don’t use it to just create the post and publish it; that doesn’t work for us. The data analyst has been great, though. One con: you have to tell it not to make up random stats it thinks will help your cause — you have to say only give me real, sourced data, or it will give you amazing-sounding stats that might just be made up. AI tools are getting better at citing sources — platforms like Perplexity, or ChatGPT’s research features, are much better at this than they were three or six months ago. You want to work with companies that are staying up to date and improving their tools based on user feedback.

I’d love to see what it looks like inside an account. Each day, especially when starting out, you work in two tabs. There are questions that help the brain learn the information it needs to tailor what it does for you — it asks guided questions. Then, based on the outcomes, vision, and goals you’ve entered, it offers ideas each day. For example, it suggested creating a communication crisis calculator, a quiz. Each helper gives ideas from its area of expertise, and you can say yes or no. I don’t really use the daily summaries — I use my calendar for that instead.

There’s no way to customize the employees’ roles inside the account, to my knowledge. Each employee has “power ups” — different things they can do, like in email marketing. I haven’t used many of them, but some look useful. I’ve seen over the years that tools tend to be either a blank canvas that’s overwhelming because you don’t know what to build, or extremely narrow, doing only one or two things. Sintra sits in between — it’s a specific use case with guardrails that make it effective for getting what’s actually useful right now. Knowing what you don’t need is almost as important as knowing your outcome. You can even ask the AI what it needs from you to get to that result. I love how it visualizes things with characters — it feels like AI for dummies, which is perfect for someone like me, a novice. Someone more advanced might not find it right for them.

It’s not right for a big enterprise — I’d say ten employees or fewer is the sweet spot as it works right now. You only have one login, so everyone works from the same space, which some people may not like, though Sintra has told me multiple user logins are coming. I find it helpful because our team can see what each other has created — it’s more transparent, though that might not be for everyone.

It’s important to highlight, especially throughout a summit series like this, that there are so many AI tools out there, and the people who find success figure out what job needs to get done and use the right tool for that job. There’s more than enough shiny objects to distract entrepreneurial brains. I encourage people to experiment with different tools, but also consider your team’s infrastructure — how your team edits, logs in, and shares information. Not every platform is built for enterprise-level capability, and a lot of smaller businesses don’t need those enterprise-only features. Sintra seems like a good platform to get started with marketing as a small business, with pre-built templates and workflows that get outputs without needing to be a super prompt engineer.

Are there specific use cases with your clients that make sense right out of the gate? Even for someone starting an ecommerce business, there’s an SEO specialist — as you’re writing content, we put blogs through the SEO specialist. Anyone doing content creation, whether emails or otherwise, gets a huge help from this. On the analytics side, the data analyst supports that too. A lot of small businesses don’t analyze their data because they don’t think it’s important, but it’s more important for a small business to do it — you have to know what’s working if you want to grow. Who can afford a dedicated data analyst as a small business? You usually can’t. This lets you see how you’re performing and get ideas on what to track, which is something most small and mid-size businesses don’t know how to do even if they had someone in that role.

Especially for a first-time entrepreneur, this helps because a lot of first-time entrepreneurs don’t even know what roles they need for their business to grow, or that they don’t have a business plan. They’re not doing the fundamentals because they just don’t know. This helps with that — even for a non-tech novice, as a business owner, it supports creating the things you need to get your business off the ground, pitch for funding, sell a product, or put together a marketing budget. These are things that used to take forever, or that I had no clue about when I started my first business at 34 and made all the mistakes, without money to pay for a business coach or analyst to tell me.

Being able to get this information on demand is a great use case for those getting started — it lets you save your money for where it counts, where it’s really going to make an impact. Let AI do the things it’s honestly better at than a human with emotions and their own agendas, especially building out reports — AI does a lot of the analytics and content processing better. Different AI platforms, like Anthropic’s Claude versus ChatGPT, might give different outputs for the same prompt, so trust but verify — always ask for the source. Anytime it gives me a stat, if I forgot to ask it to only use real data, I’ll ask for the source, and it will give me where it found it.

Where do you recommend people turn their freed-up time and energy once AI takes some of the workload off their plate, especially for those just starting out? I feel it’s personal connection — especially since people spent two years in their house, in their basement or wherever, building relationships matters, especially for small businesses and entrepreneurs. You get so deep into the business side that you forget to lift your head up and network, make connections, and use that attraction for what you want to bring in the right people. When you’re selling, delivering, doing the personal-touch pieces, you want your own heart, your own beliefs, and your values in that. Even with social media and blogs, don’t let AI just write it for you — make sure it’s something you’re passionate about, something your people can tell you know. Always ask: how can I add more value? What can I do right now to add more value to my clients? If you keep that top of mind, your business’s success is inevitable. But if all you’re thinking about is how to succeed or increase revenue, you can fail very quickly.

Coming to the end of today’s call, I’d love to hear where people can learn more about what you do and connect with you online, and any last words of wisdom for people just getting into AI. My website is brookedukes.com, and I’m Brooke Dukes on every social media platform — I got lucky on that one. You can connect with me there or by email. My words of wisdom: make sure your authenticity is part of it. You don’t want to turn your business over to AI to run — that was never the reason for having AI. You want AI to take the pieces that don’t need a personal touch, which frees you up to give your authentic truth to the world. Make sure as a business owner you’re still involved — your heart, the reason you went into business, the things you know can help your clients — is still in it. Don’t give everything over to it.

Thank you so much, Brooke. Thanks everyone for tuning in to this episode of the Scale with AI Summit. Like, subscribe, and keep calm AI on. We’ll see you on the other side. Cheers, y’all.