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Getting Your House in Order — How to Prepare Your Business (and Brain) for AI
6 Plays8 months ago
In this episode, Teryl welcomes listeners back and breaks down how forward‑thinking leaders can get their businesses—and their own brains—AI‑ready by focusing on context, clean knowledge, and practical first wins.
Resources Mentioned
BOOK A DISCOVERY CALL: https://co-gpt.ai/
• ChatGPT - https://openai.com/
• Google Gemini - https://ai.google/
• Anthropic Claude - https://www.anthropic.com/
• Microsoft Copilot - https://www.microsoft.com/copilot
• Screen capture tools (for process recording): Loom - https://www.loom.com/ | OBS Studio - https://obsproject.com/
• Voice notes (for process narration): Apple Voice Memos - https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/voice-memos-iph3c9b7742/ios | Google Recorder - https://recorder.google.com/
Timestamps
• 00:00:00 – Welcome back & mission of the show; why “AI‑ready” starts with leadership clarity.
• 00:01:12 – Ditch the “plug‑and‑play” myth; treat AI like a sharp junior strategist that needs onboarding.
• 00:02:28 – Context engineering > prompt engineering: what “context” actually means and why it drives quality.
• 00:04:58 – Find the right first problems: repetitive work, data filtering, internal chatbots, reporting & summaries.
• 00:06:20 – Build an AI reference library: organize proprietary knowledge; mind the context window; aim for clarity, not volume.
• 00:09:45 – Document your processes: record your workflows, extract patterns, and turn them into SOPs AI can follow.
• 00:14:26 – Define sources of truth: point AI to official docs/datasets to boost reliability.
• 00:15:50 – Create an AI brief & reusable templates: objectives, audience, tone, success criteria; use custom GPTs/containers.
• 00:20:03 – Set boundaries & policy: approved tools, data safeguards, publishing checks, and privacy considerations.
• 00:22:05 – Wrap‑up: clarity + organized knowledge + culture beats shiny tools; CTA to connect with Teryl at CoGPT.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'The AI-Driven Executive'
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the AI-Driven Executive, the podcast for forward-thinking leaders like you who want to use AI to scale your impact, amplify your expertise, and transform your unique insight into lasting advantage.
00:00:16
Speaker
I'm Terrell, that's like Cheryl with a T, but you can just call me T. I am the founder of CoGBT, where we help executives turn AI from a buzzword into a strategic asset. Each week we explore how to lead smarter, think faster, and stay confidently human in a world that is moving at machine speed.
Preparing for AI: Readiness Over Hype
00:00:33
Speaker
In this episode, we are going to dive into getting your house in order, how to prepare your business and your brain to be AI ready. So what do you need to think about if you are of the mindset that you recognize this AI wave is coming and you need to get your business or yourself on board, ready, ahead of the curve and start leveraging some of these incredible tools.
Why AI Initiatives Fail
00:00:58
Speaker
Before AI can make you smarter, faster, more efficient, it needs something smart to work with. The truth is that most AI initiatives fail not because the technology isn't powerful, but because the organization isn't ready.
00:01:13
Speaker
They don't know where to start. It's overwhelming. There's so many tools out there and you want to get after the flashy solutions that you see everyone else talking about. But in this episode, we're going to strip away the hype and we're going to talk about what it actually means to get your business AI ready.
00:01:29
Speaker
We're going to cover how to identify the right first problems to solve, how to organize your knowledge and data so that AI can actually use it, and how to lay the groundwork for a reliable, meaningful results.
00:01:40
Speaker
Think of it as getting your digital house in order. So the ai doesn't just sound like a smart thing to do, but it actually becomes useful.
Debunking the AI Magic Wand Myth
00:01:47
Speaker
And this week I want to start off by talking about this myth of plug and play AI use.
00:01:54
Speaker
There are a lot of flashy tools that people are tossing around out there, even ChatGPT itself. There's this impression that you kind of just switch it on and go. But let's start here. AI isn't a magic wand.
00:02:06
Speaker
It's not something you plug in and instantly get results from. You have to prime it. You want to think of it more like a strategist and a junior strategist, so maybe a very keen one, one that's at the top of their class, but is brand new to your business. They're super smart, but they need to be onboarded. They need to be made aware of your business context. And you're going to hear that word a lot. We're going to talk about context and context engineering because that is the next Big thing you've heard about prompt engineering. 2026 is going to be all about context engineering.
00:02:38
Speaker
And so you're going to get sick of me talking about that. But keep in mind context. when When we refer to that, it means the data and the information that you are providing for the AI. so not just asking the AI what it can do for you,
00:02:52
Speaker
but asking yourself what you can do for the
Defining Clear Problems for AI
00:02:55
Speaker
AI. What information can you give it so that it is able to answer the questions that you have, solve the problems you need solved, and work with you like a strategic partner?
00:03:03
Speaker
um What does it need in order to do that really effectively? And that's a factor that a lot of people overlook. They think you can just turn on chat GPT, ask it a question.
00:03:13
Speaker
It's been trained on these vast data sets. It has access to the internet. It knows a lot, but ultimately AI is just at its core, or at least the large language models are just predicting the next most likely word.
00:03:27
Speaker
And it is kind of magic when you think about how that simple of a principle comes together, comes to fruition to create what we now know as AI. But ultimately that's what it is. And so all it can do if you just go to it and ask it a question, it can search its data training set. It can search ah the internet and see what everyone else is talking about and and access the wealth of information that is available out in the the multiverse.
00:03:56
Speaker
Uh, but at the end of the day, all it's doing is drawing on that and inferring the response that you want to hear. Now that doesn't take into consideration your unique positioning, your perspectives, your considerations, your challenges, your guidelines.
00:04:12
Speaker
So providing AI with your context becomes hugely, hugely valuable. And so we're going to spend a lot of time talking about that. If you want AI to perform at its best, you need to start with clarity.
00:04:25
Speaker
So clarity about what problems you're trying to solve, what knowledge your business actually runs on, the processes, the systems, and where your friction points live.
00:04:35
Speaker
So if you are in a place where you are a leader and you want to start to integrate AI into your daily workflow, into your team's daily workflows, and you want to find the places where it will be most useful, you want to start with the first problems that you think it can solve.
00:04:56
Speaker
And here's the mistake I see most executives making. They start by asking, what can AI do? The better question is what do I need a system to do better?
00:05:06
Speaker
Where are we losing time? Where are we missing insights? Where are we doing repetitive tasks? Things like that are simple wins where you can introduce computer, a machine, an algorithm that can do things better than a human being could. Things like filtering through large amounts of data, accessing maybe company policies or guidelines and providing training resources, things that your internal team could use like an internal chat bot that knows all there is to know about your organization.
00:05:39
Speaker
Or for example, maybe your team spends hours each week preparing reports, summarizing meeting notes, analyzing customer feedback. These are all great early wins where AI can step in because it can help you clear the clutter, free up your team to focus on higher value work and actually achieve better results much more efficiently than people can do manually. It's like handing a calculator to somebody who used to have to do long division by hand.
00:06:03
Speaker
It can empower people to do their jobs better, faster, more efficiently, and free up their time and energy to focus on problems that actually still need human attention. We want to think of this gathering those problems, those initial pain points, as sort of clearing the runway before
Organizing Business Data for AI
00:06:20
Speaker
takeoff.
00:06:20
Speaker
So once you've found the right problems to solve, you need to feed AI the right material because here's the secret. AI is only as good as the information that you give it. So you want to start by collecting what an expert human would need to do the job. So if you were going to bring on a marketing strategist, let's say, to develop a new campaign strategy for your company, what would they need in order to give you ah result that is in the ballpark of something that would be useful and effective.
00:06:49
Speaker
They definitely need to understand your business. They need to understand what you do, who you do it for, who's your audience, that ideal client profile or persona or avatar. They want to understand your unique positioning of the value that you're bringing to the market. And they probably want to understand something about the market itself.
00:07:05
Speaker
What are your competitors doing? What are the trends? What are, what are common pain points that your consumers are expressing? All of that information you can feed to an AI system and when the AI has access to that information, that proprietary information that is specifically about you, your business, your services, your audiences, your market, your competitors, all of that, when it has access to that in the background, it can give you infinitely better results than if you just go to ChachyPT and ask it a blanket question about coming up with a new strategy to sell face cream.
00:07:40
Speaker
You know, so these are the kinds of things we want to start to think about and we want to start to collect the data that's necessary for the AI to do its job the best that it possibly can. And this becomes your AI reference library. It doesn't have to be fancy. It just even starting with a well-structured folder system.
00:07:58
Speaker
Collect the documents, decide what is important and put it in one place so you can start to get a handle on it. The goal isn't volume but it is clarity. You want to be specific about what needs to be in there and don't put anything else. You don't want fluff, you don't want it to get lost.
00:08:15
Speaker
There are limits to context windows and we'll talk about that concept as well. But a context window essentially is what the AI can keep in its brain when considering a problem that you've presented it with.
00:08:29
Speaker
And there are limits to how much it can do. Now those limits are far greater than a human brain. So if you've got, let's say your CMO is trying to come up with a new marketing strategy and they want to understand, you know, the market, they want to understand your positioning, your, your audience, your specific products, maybe special promotions you want to include or any kind of language that you want to tie in there.
00:08:53
Speaker
But at some point, their brain will overload if you keep trying to put variables and inputs and options. And there's they say that human beings, our brains can only hold about seven points of data ah or seven factors concretely when trying to tie them together and make decisions.
00:09:12
Speaker
Well, AI is a computer and computers can manage a few more than seven details at a time and can find patterns across those details, can find connections and potential new solutions. It can brainstorm, it can iterate, it can help point out blind spots for you or help you consider things you might have missed otherwise but it needs the right foundation so what you want to do is give it that clean foundation and when you do so it can turn your existing knowledge policies frameworks perspectives into real leverage after you've collected that kind of data the next step in the process is to really start to document and capture your processes you want to start to document how you and your business
00:09:57
Speaker
thinks and moves and operates. AI can follow logic. It's really good at following direction if you give it clear direction, but it can't guess what's in your head. So start writing down your processes.
00:10:09
Speaker
And if that's difficult, because sometimes, especially as leaders, you've probably got to the position that you're in because you have a certain level of intuition where you approach problems in a different way than most people. That's what's helped you succeed.
00:10:23
Speaker
And you don't want to lose that. But you might think that it's something intangible when actually there are patterns, there are things you are doing subconsciously that can be captured and documented and leveraged to some extent.
00:10:37
Speaker
And you might not even be aware of what some of those processes are because it's so natural and intuitive and subconscious. But one way that I like to go about drawing out my own processes is just recording myself doing it.
00:10:51
Speaker
You can use a screen capture, you can put a camera on yourself or just turn on your voice notes on your phone and talk yourself through it as as you're doing it. What are the steps? What do you need to consider? Where do you start when you're approaching a new problem?
00:11:05
Speaker
What kinds of resources do you turn to start to document that an AI is really good at collecting data. And if you do this a few times, it might even recognize patterns that you didn't realize were there.
00:11:17
Speaker
And it can take all of that unstructured data, that stream of consciousness, that observational space of just watching you do what you do. And it can structure it into an SOP, into a standard operating procedure that somebody on your team could leverage, but also that an AI system could potentially leverage.
00:11:38
Speaker
So start trying to document your processes. It doesn't have to be perfect, but this is more about starting to make the invisible visible. And once you've mapped out these sort of repeatable workflows, AI can start to assist you. It can create summaries, automate templates or suggest improvements, point out blind spots. Like I mentioned, there are so many things that you can do with this.
00:12:01
Speaker
When you have an AI that is trained on you, your thinking, your processes, and again, you don't want to outsource your thinking. You don't want to remove yourself from the equation, especially if you're a leader and that is your zone of genius is your way of thinking.
00:12:17
Speaker
But If you have a tool that somewhat understands your processes and what you're doing and how you're coming to conclusions, what success looks like for you and how do you get there?
00:12:30
Speaker
If you have a tool like that in your back pocket, you can use it to push you even further. It can help you see things that you might have otherwise missed. It can help you move faster. It can help you iterate. It can show you 10 options and let you make a final decision, but it can get you so much closer to where you need to be because it knows what you're trying to do. It knows your goals. It knows your process. It knows your context, the background data, everything that you're pulling in.
00:12:57
Speaker
It can also access. We like to think that as human beings, we have sort of this unique corner on innovation and creativity. And to some extent, there are definitely cases where that is true, ah but ultimately our brains are also just algorithms.
00:13:17
Speaker
our intuition is um almost an unconscious way of processing information using our lifetime of experience and pulling in factors from the environment around you from the task at hand from the problem you've been presented with and mulling those around to find patterns to find potential ways through to a solution to that problem our brains are algorithms and ai is an algorithm there are things that humans still do better and there are things that machines do better especially when it comes to scale.
00:13:54
Speaker
So if you can capture your processes and thinking on ah on a small scale on a single project or a project to project basis AI can extrapolate that and it can eventually learn to apply that at scale to bigger and bigger problems and help you extend your knowledge and ways of doing things to your team, to other people who can help grow your business.
00:14:17
Speaker
You can't delegate judgment, but you can codify process. And that is the first step in sort of scaling yourself through ai So once you've started to get a handle on documenting and capturing your processes, the next step is to try and define your sources of truth.
Establishing Clear Data Sources
00:14:36
Speaker
So one of the biggest reasons that AI outputs feel unreliable is because people feed it inconsistent data. they let it often go find its own data. You ask it a question and if you're not directing it where to look, it's going to go find its data from wherever the heck it wants.
00:14:50
Speaker
And as a leader, you need to be able to define what's official. What are the documents, the data sets and the systems that represent truth inside your business? So make it clear when AI analyzes a forecast or or crafts messaging, it should pull from these sources and not just random inputs.
00:15:08
Speaker
You can be the orchestrator of the context, of the context window, of what it is looking at and considering, what it knows, what proprietary information it has access to, and what is truth.
00:15:22
Speaker
Don't just rely on subreddits that it can pull. I mean, there's a place, there's a time and place for subreddits for sure, especially when collecting ah the voice of the customer data, when you want to hear genuine feedback on what people are saying out in the digiverse of the internet. But when AI knows where the truth lives, the answers get so much smarter, more intuitive, and on point.
00:15:46
Speaker
And it's a very simple step that too many people just simply
Developing Effective AI Prompts
00:15:50
Speaker
overlook. All right, then the next step is to create an AI brief, and this can be the executive secret weapon.
00:15:57
Speaker
So we want to think of a good AI prompt as sort of a briefing document for a consultant. So you'd never just go say, come fix our marketing, right? ah You define the problem, you define the context. Some of those pieces we talked about earlier, offers, audience, business, profile, UVP.
00:16:15
Speaker
um You define the goal. What does success look like? And so the same applies here. Every time you brief AI, you want it to be considering what is the objective? Who's the audience? What's the tone or perspective it should use?
00:16:27
Speaker
What does a successful output look like? And the good news is you don't have to put this in the prompt every time you can create custom GPTs, which is essentially just a fancy term for a container that holds onto the business context that the AI needs to consider every time we're approaching a problem.
00:16:47
Speaker
And if you want reliable results, you want to start prompting it using these banked pieces of context. um Thinking like a strategist, not just a search bar. If you want to search and know what's happening, what people are saying about it on the internet or what solutions other people have out there, you can go to Google.
00:17:05
Speaker
But the powerful thing about AI tools is that it can parse through vast amounts of data and the better that data is organized, the better results you're going to get. But you can store that data in these containers and it can access it. And every time it goes to answer a question, it's going to draw from that bank. It will get to a point where you can go to the AI and say, write me a post for mother's day.
00:17:28
Speaker
And instead of just saying happy mother's day, hope you're enjoying it. Um, and something fluffy about how much you love your mother. And it will know that what you actually mean is that your target audience is women from 25 35 with mothers who are 50 to 60 who really like cycling and you want to sell them a new pair of cycling shorts that are specifically for maturing women and it will just craft the messaging with everything that it knows about that audience about the messaging that resonates about the pain points they have in finding
00:18:01
Speaker
athletic wear that fits their body type and it will craft posts or variations of posts that you could then iterate on. You could pass to your team, but it will give that to you out of the box because it has that context saved.
00:18:15
Speaker
And this can become an incredibly powerful tool. You can have brand guidelines in there about specific language uses and length of sentences and tone of voice and everything else that you need. And you could pass that tool to any new hire who is brand new to the business and they will be able to produce content for you on a much more efficient basis. It will be a lot higher quality when it gets to the editor for review, they're going to have less things to correct. There's going less coaching that's needed.
00:18:45
Speaker
it will just elevate ah the level that your team can operate at. And over time you can build out this asset bank, you can also build out prompt libraries or briefing templates that are reusable frameworks for analysis, writing, planning, or decision support.
00:19:01
Speaker
And those templates will become some of your organization's most valuable intellectual property. And on the note of intellectual property, even just having your employees using ah tool like ChatGPT where that tool is learning them as they are prompting it.
00:19:20
Speaker
If you're working inside ChatGPT projects and it can retain memory across chats within a project, then it is getting smarter and smarter as you go, as you work with it. It can retain memories just inside the the interface of ChatGPT, and that can become a hugely valuable tool because it understands the journey you've been through in developing different campaigns and strategies and tweaking
00:19:50
Speaker
how you think about approaching your your customer challenges, and anything else, any other problems that your team's working on can be retained to some level and it gets better and smarter every time.
Defining AI Policies and Data Protection
00:20:03
Speaker
Now that being said, before you roll anything out, you wanna take a beat to think about boundaries. So you wanna think about which tools are approved, You want to think about what data is off limits and who has access to what, how they can use it, who is allowed to use AI generated material publicly.
00:20:19
Speaker
What are the checks and balances that any material needs to go through before it's published? And this isn't about slowing things down. It's about protecting your brand, your data, and your people. Even a one page internal policy goes a long way in creating clarity and confidence.
00:20:35
Speaker
This is one of the biggest mistakes that I see leaders making when they get very excited about implementing AI, they start sending out a bunch of new tools and getting people jazzed about using it, but there's very little guidance on who can use it or how, what's okay, what's not okay, what data is protected or sensitive, what systems it can be entered into. That's always something you want to take into consideration when you're using any AI tool.
00:20:59
Speaker
Yes, there are checks that we can put in place to say, please don't share my data with the model. We don't want to use it for training purposes to improve the models. Uh, but Ultimately at the end of the day, the nature of using these tools is that you put in data. It needs to be sent to their servers, processed and spit back out with ah the result you're looking for.
00:21:18
Speaker
And so by nature of the tool, you are sharing that data. And it's something you always want to be cognizant of. Don't be putting your social security number in there. Don't be putting anything in there that would be risking your business and your privacy. And if you really do need proprietary systems, there are solutions out there for that.
00:21:37
Speaker
But just bear in mind, if you're using tools like Microsoft and ChattyBT, be sure to stay up to date on their current best practices and policies around cybersecurity and data privacy.
Success Factors Beyond Tech Adoption
00:21:49
Speaker
So just to wrap up, getting your business ready for AI isn't necessarily really about tech adoption. I mean, I haven't talked about any specific tools really beyond ChatGPT, but a lot of those principles could apply to Gemini or Claude or whatever your preferred platform is.
00:22:05
Speaker
Microsoft Copilot is often a go-to for businesses, um but it's not really about the tech. It's about the clarity, the organization of the data, how do we collect data, how do we leverage it, and leadership.
00:22:17
Speaker
How do you get people jazzed? How do you improve the culture around AI and make sure that people feel confident and supported? AI can only multiply what you give it. So before you start experimenting with prompts and automations, make sure that what you're feeding it reflects your best thinking, your best processes, and your best data.
00:22:38
Speaker
Because when you get your house in order, AI doesn't just make your business faster, it makes it smarter. It makes you more effective and it makes your team more empowered.
00:22:49
Speaker
So thanks for tuning into this episode of the AI Driven Executive. If this episode helped you start thinking about how to get your organization AI ready, I'd love to hear what you're exploring next. If there's anything that you would like to hear on this podcast that would be helpful for you, please let me know.
00:23:04
Speaker
And if you'd like hands-on support in getting your systems, data, and strategy aligned for AI success. That's exactly what I do at CodeGPT. And you can find a booking link in the episode description where you can book in a call with me and I can start to get to know your business and give you some tips and tricks, hopefully off the bat and see what we might be able to accomplish together.
00:23:26
Speaker
So I'm Terrell. Thanks for tuning in and I hope you'll join me on the next one.