Episode #87: How I Use AI in My Business to Save Energy and Sell More Sustainably

Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:00]:
As someone with limited energy and a brain that can so easily get stuck in overthinking and self-doubt, AI has genuinely changed the way I run my business. In this episode, I’m sharing 5 ways that I use AI to build more support behind the scenes so that selling and showing up feels lighter and more sustainable. Welcome to the Soulful Sales Show, where we talk about believing in the value of your offers, getting them in front of your right people, and selling more of what you do in your unique way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Soulful Sales Show and our special series of AI episodes in April. So what I’m going to share today is something a bit different. So in 2025, in September 2025, I ran my Aligned AI Summit. It was my biggest Summit yet. It was such an amazing experience talking to a bunch of experts about AI, speaking to all of the attendees about how they’re using it, and having a really nuanced discussion about, you know, some of the pros and cons of using AI.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:09]:
And for my presentation in the Summit, I shared 5 ways that I specifically use AI to save my energy and my capacity. To help me run my business. And as you’ll hear in this presentation, it’s not about getting AI to do everything for me or to take over from me. It’s about using AI as a supportive team member so that I can focus on what I do best. So what you’re about to hear in this episode is the recording of that presentation. So it might be slightly different to what you’re used to in normal podcast episodes from me, but I hope you enjoy it as a high-level overview. and a kind of idea generator for the ways that you can use AI to support your capacity and ultimately help you show up and sell more in your business as well. And I do want to invite you, if what you are listening to resonates, to check out my AI support team offer, which is upgraded now for using, creating your support team in Claude.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:02:08]:
It’s about personalizing AI around your unique business, your unique goals, not using someone else’s system, but training it. In the most simple way possible on your unique business so that it can help you take off some of the load. So you can find out more about that at ruthpoundwhite.com/ai-team, or I also have the Soulful Sales Society membership where I help you to make more sales that depend less on your energy to show up. So it’s about building sales that are less fragile and dependent on you having to put a ton of energy in and be visible. To creating systems and structures behind the scenes that help you sell even when you’re not actively selling. And it’s not all about AI. AI is actually an optional part of the membership, but it is also a big supportive part of membership where you’ll get access to my specific chatbots that are trained on my systems when it comes to selling, launching, writing emails, planning tripwires, upsells, all of that infrastructure that you need to make your sales less effort-dependent. You also get personalized support from me in the form of coaching, Q&As, community in the group.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:17]:
We have a monthly Get It Done Week to help you layer on one of those new sales structures behind the scenes every single month. So it’s really about implementing, taking action, using AI to support you to do that. And you can find out more about the Soulful Sales Society at ruthpoundwhite.com/ss. So here’s what we’re going to cover in this presentation. I’m going to share 5 ways that I personally use AI to support my unique needs as an introverted and low-capacity human. I’m going to include loads of real examples of how I apply these principles and the difference that they make to my life and sales, and the important AI philosophy underlying it all. So before we dive into these 5 ways I’m going to share with you today, let me just give you some important context. So firstly, running a business on your own, even if you do have a team, is hard.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:04:06]:
We have to wear so many hats. Not only do we have to do the work that we actually do and the work that we are best at, but we also have to market that work, to sell that work, and don’t get me started on the admin and the taxes as well. Add in personal challenges into the mix, whether that’s health stuff, neurodivergence, caring responsibilities, stress, or any kind of life stuff that you have going on, it is all a lot to hold. So I am a huge believer in letting AI hold some of that for us. The truth is that AI has been a godsend to me as someone with lower capacity to run my business than I have ever had before. Now, of course, there are important conversations to be had about the impact of AI, the future of AI, the ethics around how it’s trained and how it’s going to be used. But as with money, I believe that AI is a tool. It can be used for bad things and in bad ways, but it also can be used for things that are truly supportive and helpful.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:08]:
And we get to shape it when we use it in alignment with our own personal values. And I think that the best way to look at how we want to use AI is as a support system. How can it amplify what makes me unique? How can it take some of the more mundane or repeatable tasks off my plate and leave more space for the creativity and for the human side of business? So what I’m about to share in this presentation are the broad ways in which I do that, the ways that I use AI to increase my capacity and to boost my business. With lots of examples in each category. There are a lot of ideas in this presentation, I’m not gonna lie, and it is not about implementing all of them. Maybe it’s not even about implementing any of them, because this is about the way that I use AI to support my brain, and your brain is of course unique and different. So the ideas that I’m going to share with you are just suggestions. This is not an exhaustive list.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:06:04]:
Feel free to get creative and come up with your own ideas as well. And above all else, I want you to trust your own expertise. Never just make changes just because AI suggested them. Use your own judgment at all times. That is what makes your business unique. That is what makes you, you. That is what makes your right people want to work with you. And just a side note, you’re also going to notice that I talk about ChatGPT specifically throughout.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:06:30]:
That’s just because it happens to be the tool that I use. If you have a different preferred AI tool, that is totally fine as well. And most of this stuff can be applied to different AI tools. Okay, so all that out the way, let’s move on to the 5 ways that I use AI to support my brain energy and capacity in my business. So number 1, I’m going to start with the most obvious way. That is to get over the blank page syndrome. So you know that feeling when you know you need to get started on something, but you just have so many ideas or so many possible ways that you could be doing it. That you end up doing nothing, right? It is a real thing for so many of us, especially neurodivergent humans.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:14]:
It can also be a symptom of self-doubt. It’s basically a protective behaviour that stops you from even getting started in case you get it wrong when you do start. But the thing is, as business owners, we don’t know the right way to do everything, and we do have to try different things. So AI has been game-changing for me. When it comes to just getting started and building that momentum. So I personally have a custom GPT, an assistant in ChatGPT that is trained on my writing, especially past emails, but also transcripts from Q&As, calls in my membership, some course content, all of that stuff. This assistant is my most used AI tool. It’s one of my most used tools in business, full stop.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:56]:
I love it because, not just because it makes it easier to create new content, but it’s also trained. So it means that it genuinely feels and sounds like me. Usually how it works is I come to it with an idea, I ask it to flesh the idea out, do a few rounds of back and forth, which I think is really, really important. I never use the first output that it gives me. I often also ask it to add in some personal stories or ask me some questions to get to the bottom of those personal stories, and then it’s ready to go. Sometimes I get a bit more stuck and I don’t even want to write anything to my assistant. In that case, I find it really, really helpful to speak things out out loud in voice mode in ChatGPT, or maybe even upload brain dump voice memos that I’ve recorded while out on a walk to get me started. I also often get ChatGPT to ask me questions to get me going, so I will instruct it to ask me a question and pause after each question and keep asking new questions until it has enough information for us to work on whatever it is that I’m working on.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:58]:
It’s not just about creating marketing content though. I also use this to help me work through my offer ideas and even even my admin emails, not sales emails, but the emails that I have to respond to, to clients and collaboration requests and all of that. Now I’m going to add here that I’m a huge fan of keeping the personal human touch in emails and social media comments. I see more and more people using completely copy and pasted ChatGPT responses in social media and in personal emails, and I will admit that something does feel a bit less human. About interacting in that way. So I do try to keep it personal and ultimately written by me. But having said that, I do use AI to help with tricky replies because I actually get the blank page syndrome a lot when it comes to responding to my emails. So it really, really has helped me a lot with that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:09:51]:
And finally, I also recently started using an AI app called Speechify to read text out loud to me. I didn’t think I needed it. ‘You know, it’s really, really simple. Can’t I just read it the normal way?’ But actually, having it read out loud back to me is something that works very, very well for my brain. It’s been a really helpful way for me to proofread things or for me to just listen to things instead of reading them. It’s something I resisted doing for a long time because, like I said, I thought I should be able to just do it the normal way. So I wanted to share it here as an example in case it could help you and your brain as well. So I’m sure that you’re already using AI in some of these ways, but here’s a prompt for you to see where you could go deeper.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:10:35]:
Where does the blank page syndrome hit hardest in your work? Is it emails, social media, planning your offers? How could you use AI to help you just get started? By the way, feel free to talk it out loud with your AI tool of choice, and I’m sure you will come up with some really great ideas to use AI in your own business. Okay, so next point. As business owners, it is exhausting having to make all of the decisions by ourselves, and AI has been so, so helpful for me with reducing that decision fatigue and helping me take faster action, which in turn helps me to test different ideas and get the real data back to see what is working. So again, I have a custom GPT assistant trained on my business. It knows the offers I have, the strategies I use to market my business, and crucially, it knows all of my business goals as well. Because let’s be real, it can be super fun setting all those goals in January, but how easy is it just to forget about them within a few weeks or months? So here’s how I programmed in my assistant with my goals without loads of extra work. So every year, as a bonus for my members, I record my annual review. I share what worked, things I tried, offers I launched, what went well, what I do differently.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:51]:
Plus I also share my goals for the next 12 months. So I’m doing this process for myself anyway. I just happen to record it for my members as a bonus. And then using the transcript of what I’ve recorded, I upload this and then ChatGPT remembers what I said even when I don’t months later. So when I start a conversation with ChatGPT, with my custom GPT, about potential new idea or feeling stuck between two different directions, it can remind me of the bigger picture direction that I wanted to take my business in, and it can help me choose the path that most supports the bigger picture goals. Because as business owners, it’s very easy to get stuck in the short-term decisions and forget the longer, bigger picture stuff. And obviously, goals can change sometimes, and the training I use for my custom GPT might need to be updated a little throughout the year. But generally, the mental load saved by being able to strategize with ChatGPT as my AI partner is massive.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:48]:
And I also deliberately ask it to push back on my ideas, to show me my blind spots, to play devil’s advocate and show me what I’m saying no to when I say yes to something else. That’s a really, really helpful way to use it as well. And in fact, I actually have an entire team of AI support staff helping me with different areas of my business. So I have my email assistant, like I talked about in the last point, my strategy assistant I’m talking about now. I have a membership assistant that helps with the content for that. And much more. Now, I do still have human team members as well. I also have a real-life coach as well.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:23]:
Talking to AI is not the same for me as talking to a human and feeling that human-to-human connection, but it is an incredible addition to how I work, and I don’t know what I did without it, to be honest. Importantly though, ChatGPT does not make my decisions. AI does not make my decisions, and no business coach makes my decisions either. I am still the creative brain behind the business. I still lead the way, always. And sometimes ChatGPT will assume that I have way more capacity than I actually have. It will suggest so many things for me to do, and I honestly say no to most of them. I just get to choose what I know will move the needle the most, or I, I predict will move the needle the most.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:14:05]:
So here’s a prompt for you to help reduce your decision fatigue using AI: Where in your business are you getting stuck in decision fatigue? Which AI support team members do you want to build to help you take action more quickly? Okay, so next up, imperfect sales momentum. If there’s one thing I have learned from running an online business since 2008, it’s that making quicker decisions and testing offers is going to build momentum so much faster than overthinking and trying to get everything just right before putting your offers out there. It is hard though. Of course we want to get it just right. We don’t want our hard work to be wasted. We want to say and do the right things that are going to get people to buy. But unfortunately, we can’t know with certainty what the right things are until we test them, which is why I use AI to help me build imperfect sales momentum by giving me ideas and then helping me act on them more quickly. So I use AI to support my sales in some of the ways I’ve already mentioned, like creating copy and talking through the bigger picture strategy, my offer ideas and all of that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:15:10]:
Other ways I use it include quickly generating ad variations. For different offers like my summits. So basically, I use custom GPTs. I have a custom GPT trained to help me come up with different marketing angles. Then I test them with Facebook ads to find out which angle resonates the most. It’s really, really simple but actually very, very powerful. I also love using AI to update past promo copy instead of reinventing the wheel every time. This is especially helpful if I have debriefed a past launch and I know I want to tweak some things a little bit and I just get to ask AI how I can weave that stuff in.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:15:47]:
Or maybe I’m doing a big project like a summit and the topic has changed, but the format of the summit remains the same. So I can use AI to update it with the new topic. I also regularly repeat a process that I call laid-back launching, which I teach in my Soulful Sales Society membership, which is based on scheduling all the content you need for your launch ahead of time and then honestly, truly relaxing when the launch is happening. and AI makes that laid-back launch process so much easier. I also pull themes from my membership Q&As that become journal prompts that I share with clients, marketing angles that I use in my copy, or sales content that I use to sell my offers. Now, of course, all of this saves me a bunch of time, but it’s really an extension of what I said in the first two points: getting over that analysis paralysis and taking action, getting my stuff out there, getting the data back, Building momentum and figuring out what works for my sales. So your prompt for this point is, how could AI help you take quicker action, test ideas, and build momentum instead of stalling on selling? Number 4, unlocking hidden insights. I am really good at coming up with new ideas.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:16:56]:
I’m really good at getting distracted and trying new things. What I am less good at is actually looking at the data behind the things I’m already doing, or after the end of a launch, seeing clearly what I could tweak and improve. AI has helped me massively in this area. So for example, for a really long time, I had a bunch of client intake forms that had a question on them about why people joined my membership and what they wanted out of the membership content. But I wasn’t using this information in any way. Eventually, I ended up using AI to summarize those intake forms, remove the personal data from them, and just summarize those key questions. I then was able to categorize the types of people that join my memberships and why they join. I then used these categories as the basis for a roadmap that helps to guide members inside of the membership.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:17:48]:
I added a custom GPT quiz to help members figure out which category they were in, and then an AI chatbot inside the member area that talked members through where to find what they need in the membership, because the membership has a lot of content and I knew that I wanted to improve retention by helping people actually use it. I also use these kind of insights like the member intake forms to improve the messaging on my sales page. I get to speak to objections that I hadn’t thought of or goals that people have for joining that I hadn’t thought of. I also recently used AI to input a whole bunch of tasks that I do in my membership monthly. I kind of brain dumped everything I do and then AI helped me to break it into repeatable weekly or monthly systems. To save my energy and stop me doing all tiny bits of work all spread out and get it all out of my head and have it as a repeatable process. It also helps with one-off bigger projects like a launch or a summit. I use AI to see gaps in where I could save time with outsourcing or, you know, giving over tasks to AI and where I can create systems that I can rinse and repeat next time.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:18:59]:
Now, for some people, maybe this is how your brain works already, but for me, This is not how my brain works generally. I am very much motivated by a last-minute deadline. I am very much the kind of person who doesn’t write down the process and just gets on with it, which as you can imagine has become harder and harder over time as my business has grown and especially as my capacity has reduced. So using AI to identify where I can systematise, repeat, and save time has been amazing. I even use AI to help me spot trends. And liabilities in my finances, which again I am very likely to get behind on and just not look at otherwise. So recently ChatGPT showed me where my expenses had crept up in a certain area of my business, also gave me ideas for what to focus on launching based on past sales data. Really, really eye-opening and way less stressful than trawling through the numbers all alone.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:19:54]:
So your prompt for this point: What’s one area of your business where you tend to avoid looking at the data or the details? Have a conversation with AI about what you can learn from that data and how you can use it to benefit your business. And finally, let’s talk about supporting self-doubt spirals. So I have shared lots of ways that self-doubt can show up throughout the ideas I’ve shared already: procrastination, overwhelm, wanting everything to be just right, trying to do all the things at once. They are all manifestations of self-doubt. The great news is that AI can be an incredible coach to avoid this self-doubt spiraling. Now, there are so many ways you can use this. One is just to use it as a sounding board. Record some voice notes to it, ask it to respond like a kind friend or a curious coach, or simply just ask it to listen.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:20:42]:
Sometimes you don’t need any advice, you just need to verbally process. If you want, you could also ask for reframes, for coaching questions, or journal prompts to help you work through what coming up for you. And speaking of journal prompts, if you are not a fan of journaling, try using journal prompts but recording it as voice notes instead, or chatting it through with ChatGPT instead. And over time, when you have used an AI tool like ChatGPT for a longer period of time, it will be able to recall past things that you’ve talked about. It will be able to remind you of goals that you set or past wins when you need a boost. I also regularly ask ChatGPT to share with me subconscious thought patterns that I’m getting stuck in, or ways I’m getting in the way of achieving the goals I set for myself. And it is honestly kind of scary how accurate the reflections can be, but really, really helpful. Now, you don’t have to use it in all of these ways.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:21:39]:
The point is that you use it in any way that helps you get unstuck, stops you spiraling, and helps you either let it go or get moving again and building that momentum again. Obviously, this is not the same as real-life therapy or coaching, and we still have to be careful talking to ChatGPT because we it is a bit of a people pleaser and it can make stuff up, but it is a helpful addition to your support toolbox. So your prompt for this step: think about the moments self-doubt tends to show up the most in your business. How could you use AI to interrupt unhelpful thought patterns and get you back to a place of calm momentum? And don’t forget about those two places that I can support you with this stuff. There is the AI support team, which helps you to train AI, whether that’s that’s ChatGPT or Claude. You can choose your preferred system, train it on your business, train it on your goals, and outsource some of that decision-making and some of the stuff that feels heavy to help you focus on the work that you do best. That is the AI support team, which you can read more about at ruthpoundwhite.com/ai-team. I also support you with a whole bunch of AI tools and systems and strategies to help you sell with less energy.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:22:51]:
That’s inside the Soulful Sales Society membership at ruthpoundwhite.com/soulful-sales-society. Ss. And just a reminder, I want you to always remember that AI is there to support you. It is not there to replace you. You know your business best. Trust your unique magic because your unique magic is what makes you stand out to your right people. And there’s been a lot of ideas here. It’s not about implementing them all at once.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:23:15]:
Ask yourself, what one AI shortcut will help me to build the most momentum the quickest? And start with that one. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Soulful Sales. If you have a moment to rate and review, know that it really does make a difference. And if you would like to carry on the conversation, then you can connect with me in the free community at ruthpoundwhite.com/community, or my personal favorite, join me inside the Soulful Sales Society membership at ruthpoundwhite.com/membership. And keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.