518. AI: Helpful or Harmful to Your Business?

AI can crank out a week’s worth of content in seconds. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. In today’s episode, I want to give you a moment to pause to reflect on the cost of convenience because if you’re not careful, the same tool that helps you grow your brand might quietly start eroding the very thing that built it: trust.

So today, let’s talk about how to use AI without losing your voice and how to keep your coaching content feeling real, resonant, and truly you. Most importantly, how to make sure you build more trust with your audience. This is episode 518 of Better Than Happy, AI: Helpful or Harmful to Your Business? Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

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Hey there, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. So happy that you’re here. I want to share some of my thoughts on AI today. Now, what makes me a qualified expert to speak on this subject? Nothing. I’m really not, okay? So you can feel free to disregard everything I have to say here, but I just want to share some insights from 11 years of growing a coaching business and from my understanding of human beings and human behavior. So I guess you could say I have experience in online business, and I have experience in understanding people. When I say I’m not qualified in any other way, I mean, I am not a tech expert. I am, just by full disclosure, what I think they call is a late adopter when it comes to new technology.

Like, I remember when my husband and I were dating 20-ish years ago, this was when we were moving from VHS tapes over to DVDs on discs to watch movies, and I had a whole collection of VHS tapes. And I had bought this little mini television that had a built-in VCR, which for those of you that don’t know, that’s where we used to put the VHS tape in the VCR, and then it would play the movie on your TV. And mine was a TV VCR combo, and it was small enough to be in my little bedroom in my apartment.

So anyway, when my husband and I get married, and he’s like, “Can we get rid of this VCR TV combo and all these VHS tapes?” And I was like, “No. Those are my movies that I like to watch.” And he’s like, “But you know we have DVDs now.” You know there’s much better TVs. I’m like, “What? This one’s fine. I don’t know why we need to get rid of it.” That’s what we call a late adopter, right? The old way works fine. Why would I need to go to the new way until it becomes hard to update, and maybe you can’t get the stuff you want and need anymore, and then I sort of reluctantly give in, and I don’t own any of those VHS tapes today. But at any rate, just want to fully disclose that, okay?

But like I said, there’s a few things I just want to mention, especially for those of you that are building coaching businesses or some other kind of online business or service-based business where your brand depends a lot on trust with your clients. And I’m not telling you not to use AI. In fact, when I decided to record this episode, I logged right into my ChatGPT, and I said, “Hey, ChatGPT, I want to make an episode about this thing. Give me some title ideas. Give me some intro ideas, and let’s flush out what some of the content should be.” So the irony is I’m using AI to talk to you about being cautious using AI because, again, I’m not here to tell you not to use it. Definitely, I want you to be using it. It’s useful for so many reasons that I think are obvious, right?

But I want you to use it thoughtfully and with intention. And I want you to consider in the end what you’re actually trying to accomplish and make sure that you don’t sabotage the end goal, okay? I don’t know what’s going to happen with AI. I don’t know, maybe at some point it will take an unexpected turn in some way, and maybe, I don’t know, six months from now, this episode will be totally unnecessary and outdated. Who knows? But I do think it’s important for those of you building businesses that you think about a few key things as you dive into the world of AI.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So obviously, so many benefits. Let’s just touch on a few. My favorite thing about, I’ll just say ChatGPT—that’s what I’m most familiar with, but I know there are a couple of platforms out there that people are using. My favorite thing is how it takes what Google used to do, basically a search engine, and just does all of the legwork of sifting through the results to find the best result and then find the information within the result. 

Like, you know when you do a Google search and you get a little summary, and then you click on it, and then you go to this article or whatever it is and try to find where is that part even? Like, this just cuts through all the minutia, right? It searches the whole internet or whatever it does, I don’t know, to find the best answer to your question, and then it organizes it and condenses it. And it’s just so amazing.

I love how you can have a conversation with it. It can help you to get past blocks in your own creativity. It can help you think differently about a situation and just honestly saves us at this point a lot of time, right, and boosts our productivity. So I love it for all of those things. And I am using it, like I said, to help me with my podcasts, but I’m using it in other places in my business, and I plan to continue to do that.

Here’s where I want us to think and be cautious, okay? As coaches, our businesses rely on trust, right? My clients trust me. Whether they’re my paying clients coming in and trusting me with their really sensitive, vulnerable stories and emotions and situations, very personal information, right? They’re trusting me to hold space for them and to be confidential when appropriate and to be delicate with them if you will, right? They’re trusting me. 

But even those of you listening to this podcast who maybe don’t consider yourself clients, but you are a podcast listener, or maybe even people who just follow me on social media, right? They trust me to a certain extent. You guys trust that I’m here to take care of you. You trust that this is me talking to you, which it is, by the way. You trust that you’re going to know what you can expect when you come to this podcast.

And I take that trust very seriously. I know it matters. I know if I lose your trust, that is detrimental to both of us in so many ways, okay? So the biggest problem I see with AI today is that those of us who are in the consumer space don’t really trust it yet, right? We’re not sure. I think the jury might still be out for most of us. Of course, we all have different ideas and experiences, but I’m just talking in general, we are a little bit skeptical of it for all kinds of reasons.

One thing I notice is that the website where I go to get stock photos—so for those of you who are like, “What does that mean?” A stock photo is a photo that I pay a fee to be able to use on a website or some kind of marketing material or here in the podcast, right? Because you can’t just take anybody’s image off the internet and use it. It either has to be my own image, meaning I took it with my camera, or a photo that I have paid for or I have in some way the rights to use it on my website, right? So we call these stock photos because they’re just photos that you can pay some kind of a fee to be able to utilize.

Okay, almost every photo on this stock website now is AI. They will mark them AI so that we know, and I have a hard time finding one that is not AI, especially finding one that fits kind of what I’m looking for. They’re almost always AI. I don’t really like that because I want a real person. A lot of times I’m putting people on the stock photos of my website because I’m talking about human behavior here, right? And I might find a woman that has kind of the expression I’m looking for or whatever that I think might speak to it, and then it says AI, and I’m like, but she’s not real. She’s not really feeling that emotion because she’s not real. I would much rather have a real woman. 

Why is that? Why do we feel that way, you guys? I don’t know. And maybe some of you don’t feel that way, and you’re like, “I’m fine with an AI photo.” But there’s just something to me that makes me like, “Oh, I just really wish I could find the right photo of a real woman.” So now I’m sifting through, trying to find the real person. And I haven’t always been able to do it. 

Some of the photos I’ve used are AI photos. And can people tell? Not really. But I do wonder about what message this is sending to our psyche because I notice that the stock photos, the people don’t all look perfect because they’re trying to make the photos look realistic, right? So they’ll put imperfections and things, but have you noticed that the imperfections even are kind of perfectly imperfect?

Okay, so I don’t know what that’s about, but I’m just curious, right? When you see a photo of someone and you learn that it’s AI, does it change your perception? And I don’t even think it matters the reason why. I just think it’s something to consider that maybe your consumers are going to feel a similar way.

So that’s just one example, but let me tell you about where I am a little bit more concerned. So in the past 11 years since I’ve been building an online business, we’ve seen video become more and more effective in terms of how to reach people, teach valuable information, help people with their transformations, and build trust.

So I should say audio does that, right? Like listening to this podcast will probably build trust with my listeners faster than me writing a blog because there’s something about the audio interaction, hearing my actual voice and hearing inflections in my voice that it feels a little bit more personal, so it tends to connect with somebody a little bit faster than if they’re just reading a blog or a book or something in that regard, right? 

And then video just takes it to the next level, takes the “know, like, and trust” factor, we would call it, and the ability to teach from where it is in audio to the next level with video because now we have audio and visual. So the more senses we can engage, we can touch on different learning styles, but also, again, we feel more connected to a human being as we have more ability to see, hear, et cetera, as we’re learning from them. And so we’ve seen video rise up in terms of the effectiveness it has as we create content.

Okay? So even on social media, we’ve seen the evolution of this, right? Really in the last few years, where videos, short-form videos even, little 60-second, 90-second videos, tend to connect better with an audience than just a post with static words. And this is again because of the connection factor, the engagement factor. It’s more engaging to us when we can see it or hear it, et cetera. And this is a win for the consumer or client, but it’s also a win for us as business owners because we get to make that connection and build that know, like, and trust factor faster.

Okay, so that said, I’ve noticed in the last six months or so that sometimes when I go to YouTube to watch/listen to some videos—because I will often press play and then throw it in my pocket so I’m listening—but when I go to YouTube, a lot of times there’ll be something in my algorithm that might be like, I don’t know, a message from Tony Robbins or Oprah or something like that. And the title sounds interesting, and so I’ll press play, and I can tell that the voice is just a little bit off, right? Just slightly different. And so immediately I’m like, “Oh, this is this is not Tony Robbins or Oprah. This is AI.”

Now, here’s the thing. I don’t mind. I’m not like, “Oh, I only will listen to Tony, actual Tony Robbins.” I don’t mind Tony Robbins having AI record his voice myself. Now, some people might mind that. I don’t really mind it. What I don’t like is I suddenly don’t know who actually created this video and this really is his words, his message, what he would want to say at this time, or if somebody else created it and is using his name and has emulated his voice through AI, and this may not be his opinion at all or his thoughts at all. And that makes me very skeptical. Very skeptical.

And that is the danger I see on AI, okay? If your audience is going to either, first of all, not feel that connection with you because it’s not actually you – and listen, I know the technology is just going to keep getting better and better, and I’m sure it will be very hard to detect at some point whether it’s you or not. And I don’t know. I don’t doubt that we’ll get there, but I don’t think we’re there yet. I think we can tell there’s something missing.

What is it? I don’t know. It’s your soul. It’s your spirit. There’s something missing still when we hear your voice through AI. So will that bother people that it’s just not you? Maybe. But will people become skeptical of who actually made this? I think yes.

My sister was telling me recently that she heard, I think it was Mark Cuban – gosh, I can’t remember, but somebody, I think it was one of the judges from Shark Tank, talking about this and saying that his prediction is that what will happen is the ability to build “know, like, and trust” through video that we have today and probably even through audio, right, like this podcast, will erode, and people will start wanting more live, face-to-face interaction. Almost like we’re taking a step back, right? Where we used to be able to record things and then make it accessible at anybody’s time, it may cause a sort of pendulum swing back to people wanting to connect and hear and learn from you live in real-time so that they can really trust that it’s really you or what have you.

I don’t know. I just thought that was interesting. What is going to happen next in the world of content creation or the world of teaching courses online or the world of coaching even? Would you want to get coached by AI, by something that wasn’t a human being? Would it be the same? I don’t know. Will we get to a point where AI can do a better job? I don’t know the answer to that.

I just think as you dive into the world of AI—and I, again, I’m a huge fan of you doing that—I want you to ask yourself, “Is this worth the possible lack of trust I’m going to create with my clients?” So my recommendation is that you err on the side of generating trust. So that might mean disclosing to your clients that this is AI. And again, you get to decide. I don’t know what the appropriate time or amount to do that is. 

I know that some of the companies that I’ve recently interacted with online that have like a Q&A function will, you know, start answering questions, and then after a while, I realize this is not a person, this is a this is AI, this is a computer. And it frustrates me at a certain point because I realize there’s only so much help that it can provide me.

And then I kind of need a real person to think through this differently. And again, the technology will continue to evolve, and maybe it’ll get to a point where it’s better than a real person, but it’s not to me right now. And once I realize, “Oh, this is a chat, you know, service, a computer,” I feel a little bit like, “Ugh, like I fell for it for a minute” because they said, “Hi, this is Judy. I’m going to be taking care of you. Is there anything I can help you with?” And like, I was interacting with it as though it was a person and then realized it wasn’t, and I feel a little bit of my trust has gone down. Not that I think that’s wrong to use a computer, I just wish I would have known. You know what I mean? So I don’t know. It’s just something you might consider. If you’re going to use AI, does it make sense to disclose it to a certain extent?

I think AI is great for you to partner with. I think you should be co-creating with AI. Use it to brainstorm or even to create structure or spark ideas. But eventually, you want to turn it into your own voice with your own values and your own experiences and your own wisdom. One of the things I’m going to be doing is I just finished teaching phase one of coach training. I’ve created a coach training that’s three phases, and phase one is where we really go deep into the tools and the content. Phase two, they’re going to be coaching clients and using it, and phase three, they’re going to create a program and get their business going.

But anyway, I just finished teaching phase one, okay? And so I’m going to take all of the transcripts from the classes I’ve been teaching on Zoom, feed them to AI, ask AI to help me turn those into like a booklet of sorts that will have all of that information organized and written out. And I will then go through it and see what it comes up with and modify it and edit or go back to AI and ask it to fix this, change that, do this part again, right? So I will use AI to help me to do that, but it’s still all in my voice, and it’s taking my voice and just organizing it into, you know, something more legible that people would want to actually read.

So that’s what I mean. Co-create with AI. Don’t delegate everything to AI. I mean, this is even true when you’re hiring a team. I think of AI like another employee, okay? I don’t want to abdicate things to my employees. I want to delegate things to my employees. There’s a difference, and I’ve learned this the hard way, my friends, by trying to just abdicate, meaning, “I don’t want to think about that, so you just do it. You figure it out.” Some of that is part of delegation, but it’s very different to delegate versus abdicate.

Delegating means you have a clear objective and timelines. And certain things get run through your own filter, especially as that employee is new and is learning how you think and what values you have in your business and how you want things run. And then at some point, the employee can do it more on their own, but delegating to AI versus abdicating to AI is going to keep your voice, your authenticity in there, and build, again, more of that trust with your clients or customers.

Okay? So anyway, that’s my thoughts on AI. I would love to hear your thoughts on AI. I would love to hear how you’re using AI to help you in your business, to better serve your clients, to help you focus on the parts that you need to, the human parts, and to let go of all the minutia that you shouldn’t be doing, that you don’t need to be doing. 

All of these are huge benefits, I think, of AI. And so we want to dive in, and we want to learn it. I just want you to think critically as you do it. And I don’t want you to assume that just because somebody who you think might be a little smarter than you or might have more experience than you is using it in a certain way, that’s necessarily how you should use it. Stop and think about it and ask yourself some critical questions.

But again, trust with your client is more valuable than anything else. And once you’ve broken it, it’s very hard to come back and rebuild. Most people just won’t stick around long enough to give you the chance to do it. So don’t make that mistake. Thanks for joining me today, everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your week, and I’ll see you next week. Take care.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.