AI tools can be a game-changer for entrepreneurs, offering the ability to streamline operations, automate routine tasks, and assist decision making with greater efficiency. AI can also augment creative processes, helping entrepreneurs generate new ideas.
Social Media Breakfast of Houston co-founder Jennifer Texada recently sat down with Kelsey Ruger, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Hello Alice, a free online platform that helps businesses launch and grow, to get his insights about how entrepreneurs and solopreneurs can tap into the power of AI.
Develop a Strategy for Using New Tools
Kelsey notes that productivity challenges usually center around resource poverty, namely “not having enough [of] something.” That could be funding, the right employees to get the specific work done, or some other missing element. Identifying such operational or project weaknesses can help business professionals consider how to bridge the gap.
That’s why he believes “you need a strategy for consuming new tools,” AI among them. “There's lots of AI based tools that will help make you more productive, either by speeding up your work or allowing you to do more work in the same time period.”
He invites people to consider AI within the realm of automation, augmentation, and autonomy. He describes automation as the things that can be delegated to a machine or other type of technology in order to complete work faster or to avoid human-made errors, while he considers augmentation as something whereby technology can “make you better or make you more productive.” Meanwhile, he points out that autonomy “isn't really about AI. It’s [about] those things that we as humans are just better at still,” such as “emotional intelligence or creative intelligence.”
Understand How Generative AI Works
Kelsey argues that unless we have a general understanding of how generative AI works, we won’t be able to take full advantage of its capabilities. “Until you truly understand what the generative AI model is doing, it's really hard to write great prompts to get the best output from it,” he says.
He describes it the following way: At its most basic, “most machine models that you're going to work with are what I call ‘one shot.’ So you give it data, you ask it one question, you're going to get a response back.”
“The reason we talk about ‘chat’ is it has memory and it can respond based on things that you said. So when you're giving the ChatGPT interface a prompt, it's taking what you said, but italso has recollection of what you said in the past,” he explains. “Then there's the generative part, that's the generation of text or images or other things that you want to see.
Finally, “the ‘P’ [in GPT] is pre-trained. So in a traditional machine model, you're giving it the data, you're cleaning, it you're teaching it what it wants to do, and in this case, it's been trained with lots and lots of data, and it has been taught to recognize patterns and that's really what you're getting back.”
Use AI as a Tool, Not a Substitute for Your Own Creative Thoughts or Expertise
To ensure someone’s ideas and unique voice shine through, Kelsey explains the approach that works best for him when using AI. “I almost never start from scratch with AI,” he says. “For me, it's taking what I've already thought through and helping me expand it.” In other words, don’t have AI do the thinking for you, but instead use it as a tool to help strengthen the work that’s already been done.
He shares an example: “One of the things that I'll do is I'll give it a full outline and it'll evaluate my outline. And in that case what I wanted to do is say, ‘have I thought through this idea in a way that's going to make sense to people?’ and it will call out problems, and it's not writing it for me, it's sort of saying, ‘I'm your editor, make these changes.’
To ensure creativity remains at its peak, he says, “I never tell people let the AI write everything for you, because you're not going to get something, one, that sounds like you, two, it could come up with something odd.”
Be Clear About Why You Are Using AI Tools
There are thousands of AI tools available and a myriad of uses for them. To avoid running from one shiny tool to another, Kelsey suggests knowing what you spend your time on during the average work day.
“Make sure you know what you're doing in a day. That’s the first thing. If you can catalog what you're spending your time on, it's easier for you to pick out the things that you want to automate or that you think you can use the AI for. So the first tool is get your productivity sort of mapped out,” he says.
“The second thing I would say is, figure out which tools that you're already using [that] have an AI component to them. So if you are a Google workspace customer they already have integrated Gemini into some of their tools already, so you can write emails and it will check your email for you.”
He suggests understanding tools’ different capabilities so that people can choose the ones that are best for them. “I actually have paid accounts for ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, and I use them all for different reasons at different points.”
Kelsey’s Formula for Creating Strong Prompts
To create the strongest and most useful prompts for work, Kelsey uses an approach he calls ACTOR, which stands for Add Context, Task, Outcome, and Role.
Context is the cornerstone of a good prompt. It's about providing the necessary background information that will guide the AI in generating relevant outputs. “The context is making sure you provide the data that supports the prompt. So for example, if I'm going to say write a prom or write a description for a role, I'm going to give it the role title and some specifics about the role that I want it to consider.” This helps the AI narrow down its focus, allowing it to deliver a more accurate and useful result.
Task is the next critical element. Define what the AI should do and how to do it. Whether it’s about using a particular tone, adhering to a specific format, or mimicking a certain brand voice, the task guides the AI in performing the desired action. This can include specifying the voice and style it should use, ensuring consistency across all outputs. This step helps maintain a unified brand voice, especially when multiple team members are involved in content creation.
Outcome is about clearly stating what someone wants to achieve with the prompt. This could be a specific piece of content, like an event description or an internal brief. The more examples provided, the better the AI can understand and replicate the patterns aimed for. This in turn can save hours of work. The efficiency stems from teaching the AI specific templates and guiding it with well-defined parameters.
Finally, Role offers the AI a reference point to understand expectations better. It’s about enabling it to self-check and produce variations. “If I ask it to give me a role, I ask it to give me an alternative to how you might have written that,” he says. “That’s to force it to sort of self-check itself before it gives me a final answer.”
Produce Social Media Output in Various Formats
Kelsey argues that output is critical for success in the social media realm. “If you're trying to get reach, you're not going to be able to post once a week and get any result,” he says. “You gotta be able to do videos and so there's also tools now that will take long form videos and chop them up into reels or shorts that you can then upload.”
For images and video, he likes using Midjourney and is looking into FLUX suite of AI models. For text to speech generation and AI voice generator, he likes ElevenLabs.
“Tools like that, I think, are going to be very useful going forward, especially if you are producing content and you want to produce content for all the different ways people learn,” he says. “Some people are visual, some people are auditory, and so if you can produce a blog post that also has video and audio with it, you actually can touch more people that way.”
For those looking to delve deeper into Kelsey’s strategies for integrating AI into their business operations and workflow, be sure to watch the full livestream.