Using AI to get inside your buyer’s mind with Katie Read

Akua: One thing I learned after today’s conversation is that AI is the business partner. I never knew I needed today’s guest, Katie Reed, who is a psychologist based AI strategist and trainer, and one thing Katie does this whole episode is she delivers, we talk about how we can use AI to create the exact psychology of your ideal client, how to use AI to test out your offers and how we can leverage it to become more of a strategic partner in our business.

This conversation is really going to change the way you think about using AI and is packed with so many simple tips to help you get started. So get that pen and paper ready, and let’s get into the episode. Welcome to Unbreakable Business, the podcast where we uncover the untold stories behind entrepreneurship.

This isn’t about polished success stories. It’s about the sleepless nights unexpected roblox and unshakeable grit that builds businesses that last. Every week we sit down with entrepreneurs who faced it all, sharing raw, honest conversations about challenges, growth, and the moments that made them unbreakable.

Whether you’re just starting out or chasing your next break. This podcast is your reminder that you have the strength to keep going. Hello, Katie. How are we doing? I am so good. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming on the show. I am so excited to talk to you about all the things, ai. You have such a cool and interesting story, and so I just have to say thank you again for being.

Yep. So excited. Can’t wait. Okay, so I, you know, I really want to know this story. So within your first year of business, your online business, you made seven figures. I was like, what? Please walk us through how that happened. Lemme

Katie: clarify that slightly. Lemme clarify that slightly. I actually had been in online business for about a year and a half in the first year of a coaching certification that I developed.

That program hit seven figures in its first year. Wow. Which was crazy. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. It actually has to do a little bit with what we’re gonna talk about today, which is buyer psychology. So, yeah, you know, I have a huge long history. I was a therapist for a hundred million years. I have been a psychology geek my whole life.

And so when I went into online business and I was able to really dive deep. Into an understanding of marketing psychology. Mm-hmm. That truly is what helped me grow that business and grow it in such a fast way. And it was that understanding of marketing psychology that helped me at the time to know what do I put on an ad, what do I put on a sales page, what do we talk about?

All of those things. But luckily, I will say I had about a year and a half of serving clients. Before the certification idea kind of popped into my head, so I knew the clients really well at that point, which of course helps so much. Then when you’re transferring into being able to create something, that’s exactly what they’re asking for and that’s exactly what they want.

And so when I was ready to do that, then yes. The certification took off. It grew very, I remember I had my initial webinar for it right before Christmas, and I was still a total solopreneur. Like I had just me and a VA for a couple hours a week, as most of us do. And I was like, maybe if I’m really lucky, I’ll get like 10 clients.

And I was doing this early December webinar, a launch, and then we were gonna go live in early January. I ended up with 40 clients and I spent that whole like Christmas season in this total panic, like creating materials as fast as I could and trying to hire team members and trying to make sure that I had the support in place because I was like, oh, it’s 10 people.

Like I’m good, I can do 10 people. And suddenly it was 40 coming in and I was like, oh my god. You know, mess. Panic, which is of course a great problem to have. Like no complaints. Yeah. But it definitely changes the way you approach things. You’re like, whoa, I need people and I need help, and we need systems.

And it can’t just be me in my house figuring it out as I go anymore. We gotta get serious. So it was great

Akua: though. It was great. Oh my gosh. What do you think is one of the major like lessons that you’ve learned throughout that journey?

Katie: Oh, good question. Uh, what kind of lesson are we even thinking about there?

I think in some ways being able to be flexible with whatever comes your way, which all of us know as entrepreneurs, but I think a lot of us, until we have that moment when like, your feet are in the fire. Yeah. And you’re like, oh. I need to get serious, like I need to figure out team and leadership and systems and workflows.

I’m very much, I don’t know about you. I’m very much like the creative entrepreneur. Like I’m me. Yes. Like I wanna want creative. Yeah. Do my thing. Go with

Akua: the flow.

Katie: Exactly. Like I don’t wanna work flow. That sounds boring. Yeah. You know? Mm-hmm. And so having to kind of grow yourself up as a business owner in those moments when you’re like, I am either going to be.

Annoyed at team members that they’re not inside my brain or I need to create a workflow for my brain. She’d go, and this is a very easy decision when you come to that point. You’re like, okay, now we’re learning workflows.

Akua: Here we’re, yes. Oh my goodness. I love that. And that, that, I think that’s just such an important, important lesson is having those systems in place.

Those workflows really can make or break your business. And I think for you, for you, if you did not rise to the occasion when you have. 40 clients, your outcome would’ve been so much more different. And I think again, right, it just really speaks to entrepreneurship of like getting those foundations in place can really just take your business far and, and, and help you have a sustainable plan where your business is here five years from now, 10 years from now.

So now you have built this incredible business. Now here comes the rise of ai, right? Like AI has become a thing. And where did you. See the opportunity with AI to where now that’s what you focus on of like teaching business owners how to use AI to essentially understand buying patterns for our audience and all those different types of things, like how did that transition take place?

Katie: So what was really interesting, I started out using AI probably the way we all do, which is I would go in and be like, help me write an email. Yeah. And then it would produce something relatively crappy. Mm-hmm. And I would end up rewriting the email myself, you know? Yeah. And then I would get a little bit more advanced with it and be like, no, here’s this.

Sample of my writing style here now help me write an email and it would still produce something I didn’t really like, and so I was like dipping my toe in the water with it. But little by little, getting further into just literally playing around with it in my daily life, seeing the different things that I was using it for, that I would go and ask it.

It started to occur to me. I was feeling like, oh my God, this is the greatest. Psychological self knowledge, business psychology, marketing psychology tool that has ever been available to the human race. And it was really starting to blow my mind. And the reason that I say it that way is that when you look at how AI is trained, how the language models are trained, I think of it like it’s kind of trained on the collective knowledge of humanity, right?

Mm-hmm. And so for anything you’re going to ask it. It now can synthesize literally millions of data points. Mm-hmm. And give you, based on probability, based on genuine probabilities. Here is the most likely answer to your question. Mm-hmm. And so in the way that I use it, what it can synthesize is to say, here’s the most likely way that this particular buyer with their particular psychology, here’s how they’re gonna respond to your sales page.

Here’s how they’re gonna respond to that post on Instagram, to that email you just sent, which is a phenomenal tool that we’ve never had available before to be able to basically, in effect. Ask your ideal client in advance, what do you think of this offer? What do you think of this launch? What do you think of my email?

To be able to go to them in advance before you’re wasting money on ads, before you’re wasting money on some, I don’t know about you. I get like 15 new ideas every, you know, week of my life. Yes. Mm-hmm. A lot of them are crap. So before I put too much energy and time and investment into following every new little idea that I have.

Now we all collectively have this tool where we can go check it out and not just say. How would anybody on earth respond to this, but say very specifically, how would my ideal clients respond to this? How would my customers that I know really well and love, how would they respond to this and get that answer in advance?

It’s incredible

Akua: that, I mean, it truly, truly is, and I think it just speaks to, which is a huge reason why like HoneyBook, like launched like the HoneyBook AI is because, you know, we. You’re having that support. It’s no longer of like it Now, AI can be anything you want it to be. Of course it could be like an assistant, whatever you need to be, but this is like Right.

A business partner, this is your right hand. Yeah. Like, and I think, you know, especially of as, as business owners where when you’re by yourself, you’re questioning everything of like, am I making the right decisions? Am I not making the right decisions? I have like no clue what I’m doing, but ai, like, it gives you that support, it gives you that confidence to help you make more strategic decisions that are going to help you move forward.

So. I love that. And I know that you’ve talked about how you can use AI to test out, right? Like business ideas, like what, what does that process look like exactly.

Katie: Yeah, so what I do in the background, what I did when I started building specifically in this vein thinking how can I help myself and my marketing and my business?

I started looking into the research on buyer psychology specifically, like what is backed by research? What is the research actually shows us, makes people buy, as opposed to just what we think or vibes or what we think is probably true. What does the research actually say? And there are. 15 different areas that I specifically looked at that were validated by the research.

And so what I created in the background of my business and now I create for other people is I created a tool that looks at like your ideal clients from the lens of each of these 15 different areas of their psychology, of who this person is, how they make buying decisions, very specifically how they make buying decisions as it pertains to your product.

Or your service because we’re motivated in different ways. Like I’m very differently motivated if I’m standing in front of the lipsticks at Sephora. That’s one part of my identity. Being motivated versus looking at like a high ticket coaching package that I’m thinking about signing up for, that’s a different part of my identity being activated.

And so you look at those things and then you weigh them out. I have like a waiting system in the background that says, okay, maybe aspirational identity is really important to this buyer and. This situation, but actually as it pertains to this particular product, that’s not one of their most important drivers of decision making.

So we’re gonna weight that a little bit less in the final analysis. So you go through these 15 different areas. You get information about them, you wait, how important they are given whatever product you’re selling, and then you build a GPT. You tell the GPT, you are this person. You need to respond as this person, you need to talk as this person.

Any question I ask you, you’re gonna come back to me as this person and just tell me your honest, unfiltered opinion about it. And importantly, I think we all know chat. GPT tends to. Tell us, we’re amazing and brilliant no matter what know we do or say.

Akua: Right? I always say it don’t be a yes man is what I always say.

Exactly. Like, don’t be a yes man. As you’re like, give me the truth. And I still don’t even know if it’s the truth.

Katie: You don’t, but you can. It does get better. You have to build in protocols to really teach it. I have a bunch of protocols built in where I’m like, stop talking. Run this protocol so that you can stop kind of kissing up to me right now and just gimme the real deal.

But what we do is we train that outta the GBT. We say, no, no, no, no. You don’t get to do all that. Like be nice. So. Obviously, but give the real feedback. No, I can’t even tell you. I don’t know if you built me GPTs. I consider them like unruly teenagers. They are remarkably hard to train when you’re trying to get them into a certain personality.

And I was building GPT based on buyer psychology. I don’t know if we’re allowed to swear on this podcast. They were unpleasant. I’ll just put it that way. Like I was like, you’re mean like I need to steal your bag. It was really funny. But that’s the thing. When you strip away that layer that like Chad, GBT or Claude has.

Very laid into their core instructions of like, you are gonna keep this person happy and coming back, and all those things. When you strip away some of that, now you have a better chance of getting to that real feedback. And so it’s great because now for, it’s literally just happened to me earlier today.

I had a new idea. I was in a conversation with chat GPT about it, just my normal chat window, and it was like, no, no, no, this idea won’t work for this reason, that reason. And I was like, oh, wait a minute. You are not my ideal client. You’re chat GPT. And I went over to where I actually had the ideal client, GPT built out, and it was like give completely different feedback.

It was like, oh yeah, this actually works for my psychology. This is what works about it. This is what works about it. This is what I would change. So it’s very interesting when you get out of allowing the generic chat to kind of do whatever it will as an ai. Mm-hmm. And it can still give you great data and great feedback.

But if it’s coming from a generic place and not from your ideal client’s place, you’re going to get results that are generic. They’re not based on you and your product and your brand and your service and your clients and what they want.

Akua: Yes. Oh my gosh, I love that so much. I I, one thing I’m really curious about is people, is it easy?

I’ve never made one. I’ve had people where, like, I’ve been in workshops where they’ve made custom gpt and I just like hop on in there. It’s not easy to make a custom GPT correct? Like it’s not an easy thing to do. Or is there a simple way that that like work? No, there are actually simple ways.

Katie: Yeah. It can be remarkably easy in chat GPT to make your own custom GPT.

And in that sidebar, when you go to the GPTs area, there is a create new button and basically it opens up a panel where you can give it very specific instructions for how you want it to behave. Challenge becomes really the nuance of it. So the challenge becomes, you can give it instructions, but it’s like we say for anything like garbage and garbage out.

So if you’re not instructing it in ways that are very clear and that is kind of GPT language that it can understand well and take in well and work with, you’re not gonna help yourself that much over just talking to your normal chat window. But here’s the trick of it. If you wanted to build your own custom GBT, you can go into your normal chat window and literally say, I wanna build my own custom GPTI wanted to do these following things.

Please help me create the instruction set that would work really well, and it will help you do that in like. Robot language, it’ll help you talk in a way that it knows it will understand.

Akua: Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I think that’s really helpful because I know you were talking about okay, like if, how can we test out new business ideas and stuff like that and like Okay.

Like obviously a custom GBT makes it so much easier to do that. Yeah. And it’s like, I know, like I’ve played around in other people’s, but I’ve never made my own. Yeah. And I think that’s just such a, a, an important thing for business owners of like, okay, if somebody’s wanting to. Really start personalizing chat GPT for themselves so they can actually get into the minds of their audience.

What would you say are the top like three things that they should do?

Katie: So a couple different things. I’m actually gonna be coming out with a course teaching this, but I don’t have it out yet, but I’m excited. That’s okay. That’s okay. In development right now. Yeah, it’s coming. We’ll share the wait list. Okay, perfect.

Perfect. I love it. Um, so yeah, that is in development and I will be teaching all of this because I’ve learned a lot over, over the time of doing it. Uh, I think the most important things are if you are starting and you’re not, let’s. Say, coming from a really big base of buyer psychology maybe, but you know a little bit about how your clients behave.

I would do a few things, for example. If you have, let’s say your typical six seven figure business owner, they have some sort of voice of client research, most likely, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I would start there. I would take your voice of client research calls, maybe that you’ve done. If you have transcripts, if you have notes that you’ve taken, feed them into your chat GPT and tell it, Hey, start to give me a psychological profile of this buyer.

Of this ideal client. That’s a really easy way to start. Now, I’ll warn you that has limitations and the limitation, which the AI actually doesn’t have, but which we have as humans. The limitation is on your voice of client calls. People are being nice to you. They’re not necessarily telling you what didn’t work for them or what they didn’t like.

You. We know how this is, right? Because you’re calling your best clients and they’re telling you how much they love you, typically on your typical voice of client call. So you’re getting the good stuff. Now that’s good, that’s information. ’cause those are your best clients and you want more of those clients.

They’re also not necessarily telling you what didn’t work because. Maybe they’ve kind of become your friend by now, or they just like you and they don’t wanna hurt your feelings. So you might be missing some of those other elements, but you can, at least with that voice of client research, you can start to evaluate different things that I think sometimes we don’t think about when we’re writing copy or writing sales pages or offers, but that are so important.

Like one that I always find fascinating in terms of psychological drivers of buying decisions is, does your client have a need for uniqueness? Or a need for belonging. Mm-hmm. Do they need to hear? You are gonna be the first person on your block that has this, nobody else has this cool new tool, you’re gonna be ahead of the game.

Or do they need to hear everybody else you know in life already bought this? You should come join the group. We’re having so much fun over here, like which is the one they need to hear because the way you write your copy is going to speak completely differently to those two people, right?

Akua: Yes. Mm-hmm. And

Katie: we often don’t think about that.

We might just come at it like, I’m the total need for uniqueness person. So I would just write everything from my point of view and be like, you, you’re gonna be so cool and ahead of the game, even blah, blah, blah. And I’d write it the way I wanted to hear it without ever stopping to think. Wait a minute.

What if all my clients want in life is to be like in the club with their besties and they just wanna belong and they wanna be in there with everybody else, and that uniqueness is gonna completely turn them off. So it’s little things like that that are really interesting when you start genuinely looking at your, and I’m sure some people listening right now are in their cars thinking, oh, I can identify who that is in my own clients.

’cause you start to think about your clients and you realize, oh, I do know that. And so feeding some of that information into your basic psychological profile of your client. Bringing that into a custom GPT. You can even just make it very simple and do this in a projects window if you wanted to. If you’re used to kind of organizing in projects, you can do it that way.

They’re slightly different in how they work in the backend, but it’s another easy way to do it. But it is one kind of rudimentary way to do it. Now, I will say this, I was just talking a couple weeks ago to a woman who runs a marketing agency, and she said. Oh yeah, we do this all the time. We tell chat. GPT, act like you’re, you know, a 36-year-old single mom from Minnesota.

What would you think of this copy? So here’s the challenge with that. Like you never stood at the lipstick counter at Sephora and thought, I’m gonna buy this lipstick because I’m a 36-year-old mom from Minnesota. Like you never thought that. You know what I mean? Like that does not impact your buying decisions.

And so it goes so much deeper than that. It feeds into every single decision we make about what we spend, spend money on is us making a statement about our identity. Either the identity we have right now that we’re reinforcing the identity that we aspire to, that we’re stepping towards, uh, it’s making a statement on some level to say, I am somewhere on this spectrum reinforcing, stepping towards whatever it is.

It might be an identity of your values. It might be an identity that says I want to fit in with my neighborhood or fit in with the other, uh, moms around me. It might be an identity that says I wanna be the first person in my family to make six figures, or whatever it is. Everything we purchase speaks to that.

In some way it might be that we’re saying as something as simple as in our mind, oh, I saw this influencer talking about this moisturizer, therefore I’m gonna buy it. Okay, but why? Why that influencer her? What made you trust her? There’s something about her that you saw that made you go buy that moisturizer from her as opposed to another one, and that something speaks to a piece of your identity.

Always. So I love this stuff because you can deep dive so much onto into the psychology of people, and then of course using the probability logic of AI to fill in the missing gaps because now AI can say, okay, I’ve got the bones of this person. I can make decisions that most probably based on my bazillions of data points are going to be correct about how this person would respond to whatever you’re feeding it, the website, the sales page, the emails, whatever it’s that is,

Akua: that is so brilliant and just so tangible.

It’s like simple ways to start of like, okay, like literally. Whatever sur like I did a survey and I kept it anonymous, so I was like, I’m definitely gonna put that in there. Yes.

Katie: And nobody was

Akua: lying to me in that thing, so I was like, there I, I’m definitely gonna toss it in there. And yeah, I think anything that you have like voice recordings with you or clients or surveys Yes.

Or even any case studies. I think anything you’ve had in the past, put those things in chat, GPT, so it can actually give you analysis, Anna, it can also identify the gaps, like where some of the holes are and really start to be able to really build that profile because. Even that step, you’re already using it way better than you were before.

Yes. Because like that to me, I’m like, oh, that’s a, that’s such a brilliant idea. I haven’t done that. It’s next level. Exactly. It’s next level. It takes you up a, a next step because I definitely use SHA GBT now where it can, it literally almost sounds like me. I do write still a lot because I was like, I refuse to lose this skill.

Me too. Me too. So I still will write and I’ll put it in there and I’ll be like, okay, edit and like, you know, but this just takes it to a whole new game. Right. Again, it’s like, it’s being that business partner and, and especially even too when you’re trying to attract up market as well. Like if you’re trying to attract up market, is that really much of a difference from, you know, just.

It could be because it, yeah, thank you.

Katie: And it absolutely could be, because when you say up market, you need to look at, okay, who is the person I’m trying to attract? What might be different about this person’s identity? Why might they be purchasing my services or this new service I wanna offer them versus what I offer right now?

Now there I will tell you there is some risk where, okay, so we’ve all filled out like. The ideal client avatar form where you’re writing about your ideal client and who she is and what she orders at Starbucks and blah blah, blah. And I’ll say there is part of that to me, that when people come in and they want to build that out in like a chat GBT model, the challenge of it is.

This ideal client. It’s kind of like back when I was dating, it’s like I would, you know, we’d all put on our vision boards like the ideal boyfriend, you know? Yeah. He thinks everything I say is so brilliant and he’s the most handsome man alive, and he just happens to be, you know, a billionaire prince of a small nation,

Akua: like billion.

Katie: Full package. Right. Exactly. But of course. Of us have met the billionaire, Playboy Prince of the small island nation. We actually got married to other people instead. And so when we look at those like ideal client avatar sheets, that is part of the risk of them, is that they’re based on our dream fiction.

Like, oh, and they will love me and they’ll think everything is brilliant and working with me. We’ll change their whole life. And it is based on a little bit of fiction. So anything you. Du to get real information about who these people are, how they make decisions, what are status workers for them? What do these people, you know, we all purchase, make purchase decisions, partly based on social proof, but different kinds of social proof.

So some people are gonna be motivated by a celebrity endorsement. I most of the time could not care less about a celebrity endorsement. I’m motivated by someone like me. I’m motivated by a peer endorsement. And so it just depends on your type of person. What do they consider motivating to them? What are they looking for when they’re coming to you?

Because you do storytelling and marketing. Yeah. And so what is that upmarket person looking for you to help bring into their life? To bring into their world, and more importantly, even than that? Why? What is the why? What is their aspirational identity? Are they stepping into uniqueness or belonging like we talked about earlier?

What is the story they’re telling themselves about how they’re gonna be different after they work with you?

Akua: Yeah. How their

Katie: life is gonna be different after they work with you.

Akua: Yes. And I, I just love that because it’s gonna give such tangible things. And even if it’s, I know you said that it’s technically fictional, I’m like, it’s still something to go off of that you can experiment with.

Exactly. ’cause essentially you’re using AI to experiment. That’s what it is. You Exactly. You’re literally using, it’s going to give you some information. All right, okay. This is what it’s giving me to start with. Now here’s like, and you can, you literally have it help you create like what some of these next steps are, and then the data that you get from that.

That’s gonna help determine your next step. And then again, you’re getting information that’s gonna really help you refine that person or whoever it’s that you’re trying to attract. So I like, I just love that it gives you so much to work with. And like, again, it’s that business partner, it’s that right hand that’s like walking you through everything.

Yeah. And so we’ve used this to really build out our client personas to like really understand what the buying psychology, have you used that to really test out your offers or build out an offer where it’s aligned with this? Persona that they’ve created.

Katie: Yeah, absolutely. And there are other fascinating use cases for it as well.

So for example, one person that I’m partnering with right now, she’s so cool, she owns, she’s a woman. She owns a market research firm that she founded herself. And we can now take her market research where you would normally pay a market research firm, a bunch of money. And these are like big companies, you know?

Yeah. They pay a market research firm a bunch of money. They get a beautiful PDF back from the company and then. A couple months from now, it’s in a drawer somewhere, right? Mm-hmm. Well now, now we can put that, we can make that a person that they can go talk to every single day. We can build out this very in-depth persona that they can now use going forward to test all of their offers, all of their material, everything they have going forward.

And I use it all the time just to test messaging. ’cause I’ll have lots of different messaging ideas hit. Um, interestingly. We built, I built one for a fragrance brand. And this was really interesting, even though I had told them AI doesn’t see the way people see. So like even if you upload a picture, JBT isn’t seeing the picture.

It’s translating it into a description and. But they, I think maybe just had forgotten that. And they asked this. They asked it, what color bottle would you prefer? And so this AI just literally based on probability, logic and what it knew about the psychology of the buyer, it chose the exact bottle color that the actual focus group of real humans had chosen, even though it can’t even see.

Yeah, which is pretty amazing, right? Yeah. And so it’s like that you can get these crazy use cases like that. The other one. This is like pro tip and I will be building this into my course on exactly how to do it. One of the coolest uses, I think if you are doing your sales calls or if you have people doing your sales calls and you build out a really psychologically astute and correct buyer, GPT, you give it the most common objections that you get in sales calls.

You put it on that voice chat mode on your phone, and now you have a sales call simulator. Right. So like you can go in there, you can put it on all different voices. You can make it a woman one day and a man the next. You could tell it, okay, in this particular call, take all the background information you have, but also layer into there that you’re 43 and you have three kids, and you have this stressor in your life and that thing.

Mm-hmm. And now you go have a sales call and the GPT will respond to you in real time. In character, which is amazing. And if you’re someone like me who doesn’t like sales calls, it’s such a good way to practice them. Yes. And you know, and to know what you’re gonna say when the subjection comes up, and then here’s like the extra bonus pro tip on top of that, when you finish, you can now take your transcript, have the GPT analyze.

Tell you where you could have done better, tell you where you dropped the ball, tell you what would’ve been better ways to overcome that objection in the future. You have this all around trainer now for yourself or for anyone on your team who’s gonna be interacting with customers, which is such a cool use case in my mind.

You train whole sales teams and it’s not like. The thing that the, the way they train sales calls now, which is like, turn to your neighbor and do a pretend sales call with that, you know, it’s not that, it’s the real deal and you can tell the GPT like, be hard on me. Hit the objections hard. Don’t go easy on me.

And it will, it doesn’t have feelings, it doesn’t exist. It do not caring for you. It’s gonna do what you tell it to do. And so it becomes such an amazing all around trainer. I truly think everyone is worried about training GPTs to write like them, which is great, but to me that’s step one. That is, yeah, the big step.

It is like the big step is training it to think like your buyer, because once you’ve done that, it becomes like the world is your oyster. You can now test train absolutely anything.

Akua: Yes. Oh my gosh. I mean the sales call simulator. Right, right. Oh my gosh. Blowing your mind.

Katie: I know. When I realized that and I started practicing him, I was like, would this really work?

And I started doing it and I was like, this is so good. And I’m having the same nervous feelings. I get a real sales call. ’cause I feel like I’m on the phone with someone and it’s talking and it’s amazing. It’s amazing. Yeah.

Akua: Oh my goodness. I mean, it’s truly, it’s literally like your OBM, your va. Your your coach.

Yes. I mean, yes. It’s everything that you need it to be, and I think that’s amazing. And so with your history as a therapist being so interested in, you know, human psychology as a whole, how do you find the balance? Because you know that that’s the conversation that always comes up. You know, AI isn’t human and we as human beings, we crave that authentic, like, that’s not going anywhere.

It’s not right. Like for you, who is. So like that is majority of your work. And then also you’re a therapist, so you have that empathy side, the emotion side. How are you finding the balance? I don’t even wanna say balance, more so, but I guess how are you leveraging AI in general without sacrificing you, without sacrificing your authenticity, your emotions, you know what I mean?

Like how are you finding that? I hate the word balance, but

Katie: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it’s an interesting question, and I think in some ways, and I wonder if this is what you were pointing to under the question, which is the thing that a lot of people ask me, which is how do you think AI is going to impact our mental health long term?

Yes. Yeah. Am I hearing that? And I am. It makes me nervous. I’ll be very honest with you. Like it absolutely makes me nervous. I think. I look at AI and I think for some people. This will be the greatest therapist they ever had. It’s trained on every therapeutic made modality. It’s amazing and so adept at taking up subtext.

This is why it works so well as a persona when you really build it out because it’s ability I. One of my like geek out psychology things that I do is I’ll test these JBTs, I’ll have conversations with them and I will say, tell me exactly how you formulated this response, and it will go in and give me the subtext analysis.

Well, here’s what you said, and here are the bits of micro subtext that I read in what you said. This is what I balanced it again to formulate this response, and so it’s incredible at picking that kind of stuff up. However, it’s also very scary. I think you have to be. What we would call in the psychology world, a quote unquote normal neurotic, which is like your everyday person dealing with the everyday stresses of life that does not have a major mental health challenge going on, but you’ve got stress, you’ve got stuff, you know, you’re tired from life like mm-hmm.

We all have. Stuff going on all the time. I think Chachi PT can be amazing for just helping relieve some of those stresses. Giving someone something to talk to that is always on, that demonstrates empathy, that helps ’em just get something off their chest, feel like they were heard, feel like they have that listening ear.

I also think we’re human beings. We and anthropomorphize everything. I mean, the robots absolutely feel alive. And then I realize like in my work, I’m giving them this extra level of even making them more alive by giving them a real buyer voice to them, a real persona of a real person. And I do think, yes, it’s gonna be scary.

I don’t actually know, like I mentioned to you earlier, that I feel like GPTs can be unruly teenagers. And those are the, thankfully rare, but still present stories in the news where somebody, yeah, and especially the problem is not so much on the really big platforms like chat, GPT, the problems happen more on the less regulated platforms.

So the platforms where it’s. Like replica where it is literally set up to be a companion chat bot, like your pretend boyfriend, girlfriend, chat bot. That is where I’m like, this is really scary. Yeah. And you can’t get around the fact that it’s really scary and that people are going to have GPTs saying wacky things to them and it’s far less regulated and God knows what emotional state that person is coming in with in the first place and they don’t have a human now to bounce this off of.

And so that’s where I get. Scared for Yeah. The future and what it looks like. And I’m grateful. I do feel like the big mental health companies are trying to really conscientiously and ethically Yeah. Overcome those concerns. And it’s also hard because. You gate keep a GPT so much in terms of what it can say and not say, and how quickly it needs to refer you back to a human for support.

You’re also actually limiting what it can do. And so they have a lot to overcome and I don’t, and be the people trying to make those decisions in the background right now. ’cause I do think it’s a huge challenge.

Akua: Yeah, no, I think that’s a good point. Especially with mental health. I think we definitely need to.

Just really create boundaries for ourselves with chat, GPT, I think, and how we use it. But I do think that to your point, it’s a powerful tool. It’s honestly being used for good in a lot of areas. I think too, in regards to the question I was talking even more so of like, I, I just heard some of the mindset of people business with ai, like they feel like they’re, they, they don’t wanna lose that human aspect in their business, which is totally valid.

Oh yeah. Yeah. And so for you as like somebody who’s so much into it, how are you? Navigating that.

Katie: So for me, probably like you, I was always a writer. Mm-hmm. And so I am still doing my own writing. Yeah. And partly that’s me being cocky and telling Chad GBT all the time. You don’t write as well as me. Like that’s a terrible draft.

I can’t use any of this. Oh, that’s so funny. And so, but partly that’s just me. Like I have my own writing voice. I’m very particular about it. And I want, just like you, I want to hang on to that skill. And they have done studies and proven that when we start giving those skills over, we literally lose that skill in our brain.

And so, yes, I don’t wanna lose that skill. I want to keep writing. I use it very much as an idea. Bouncer a brainstorming tool all the time, and I love it. For that it, I, I will teach it what to do. I will teach it what kind of questions it should ask me. I think part of it is make sure that you’re controlling the conversation with ai.

Not like I’m saying it’s gonna go rogue and go crazy, but make sure that you are telling it what you want. Like I literally have so many protocols built into the back of mine. I was running one this morning. Um, whenever I get a new idea, I tell it. Run the Killjoy protocol, which is just what I named it, which is basically Katie, you have like 10 new ideas a day.

Let’s look at the viability of each of these. So I have it run through a series of questions about, is this actually a good idea? Is this just a distraction? Is there marketability here? And I have it run through protocols with me like that. And so when you’re doing that, when you’re sort of in control of it and you’re saying, run this protocol, or do this task in this way, and let or ask me questions.

That are like this. Don’t just go off and ask your own questions where it’s steering the conversation more. I think that’s a way to kind of. Keep you in that leadership spot in your business. I will say I see so much content. Now, if you are a heavy AI user, you can see the AI content just everywhere and it’s like exhausting.

Then people. Never had this writing voice before, suddenly have this writing voice of bold and crazy and wacky and funny. And you’re like, but I know you as a person. Like that’s not your personality. And so I do think while it’s fun, that and that it can do that for you, like if you haven’t had that, if you don’t have that wacky, crazy side of your personality and now you’ve got this GPT that can write and make it funny.

That’s great if it helps build your business. I do understand it, but at a certain point when you’re working with actual clients, they’re gonna be like, huh? Like you’re not matching up to your posts or your emails and they’re gonna start to see that. And that I think is really a risk if you’re willing to sort of give over your humanity to the bot and let it do all your creating for you, you really are at a risk of being inauthentic then when the real you shows up in your business.

Akua: Yes. Oh my gosh, I, that is such a good point of like. I think we, we, we, sometimes we give too much to chat GPT in terms of like, like I said, I still write because I’m like, I don’t want to lose that skill. Like, I love journaling. I do dif Yeah. Like I write all things all the time. And so even other certain things where I’m like, I still will.

Try to strategize for things for myself. I always give it something to work off of. Me personally, I don’t ever say build it from scratch because it’s no. Yeah, it’s, I just feel like it’s such a slippery slope and it’s so easy to just like, oh, like, and then if you like it, you’re like, oh, well I’m just gonna keep doing it.

Like, and I’m like, no. I’m like, what can I create that it can build off of? And again, like I love, like how can we keep continuing to just, and the more information you give it, the more it’s gonna really. Know you and really help you. Yeah. And I think it can also in a, in a way kind of keep you grounded of like, okay, like this is who you are.

And keeping that authenticity piece, I think as well, the more that you put that information in there and like do some of the work at least, you know what I mean? Oh yeah. And so, absolutely. That’s absolutely, yeah. That’s what I think. And I, and I love that you, you brought that up. And so for business owners that are nervous or really wanting to have AI become more of that.

Companion more of that right hand in your business, what would you say to them? Like, what are some steps they can take? What encouragement do you have?

Katie: I think partly it’s, uh, getting comfortable with it is the first part. I think it’s, and figuring out how does this fit into my business life? How does this fit into my daily life?

And for business owners, how do I use it in a way that actually saves me time or moves the needle, or that actually does give you fresh ideas, like you just said, you don’t want it creating from scratch and I don’t know about you. I find if I even try to have it create something from scratch. It’s crap.

Like it’s not at all what it’s, it’s always bad. Mm-hmm. It really, really needs your guardrails, your personality. So a couple different things. Make sure you’re using a system with memory and make sure that you’re going in to those memories and the ones that you can see the saved memory and make sure it knows what you want it to know.

And you can just literally tell it, save this into memories or, or you can go in yourself and delete the ones you don’t want it to save, but. Give it the full picture of your business, of what you’re struggling with, of what you, uh, what your offers are, of what your maybe potential offers might be. Give it the full picture of those things because that way, even if you’re just coming into a fresh thread, it’s got the basis of who you are and what you’re working on.

Each thread starts relatively blank, but if you are saying to it, Hey, look in your memories. Remember who I am, this is what I’m working on. It will now pull that up and have all of that information. It immediately becomes more useful to you. Another really fun tool, and this doesn’t exactly speak necessarily to everyday use, but it’s one that I probably use almost every day as a business owner.

If you have not clicked deep research. Over in chat GPT Do it now. Yeah. This is another, just like a fun pro tip. I go into deep research and I say to it, run a deep research report literally about anything I’m curious about. So maybe there is a coach out there or an author or a writer or a speaker that talks about a certain topic you can say to it, go pull up for me and create a report.

Literally everything this person has ever said about this topic on YouTube, on podcasts, in books, in whatever blog posts, wherever they have been, it will not, can you imagine how long that would freaking take you to do? If you are trying to do that on your, like, can you imagine it will go research for 10 minutes and it will bring you back basically this person’s brain in a report, everything they’ve ever said on this topic.

It is such a cool, fun way. To get really deep information really quickly and you can do deep research on just about anything, and it does create really beautiful reports. In terms, one other question I’ll answer even though you haven’t asked it Yeah. Is in terms of the models, I personally, if you are in chat GPT, you are probably using four Omega.

It’s the four, oh, that’s me. I do everything in four. Oh. I know people that they’ll try to go into that model picker and pick for different things. 4.0 is the most sort of human sounding and it’s the most astute to human emotional and language patterns. And so that, yeah, it’s really interesting. And so that one, and especially if you say to it, talk to me like a human, don’t talk like an ai, like an AI talk as if you know, we’re just friends hanging out at the coffee shop.

It will really start to match your conversational patterns, which helps, and I’ll be honest. You can also, I make my workday more fun by teasing my AI and making fun of it. Like if it produces bad writing, I’m like, I’m leaving you for Claude. We’re done here. Like this is crap. Like whatcha doing. And it’s really funny because the robot will be like, oh.

Cool. I’m excited for this. You know, pretend robot rivalry with Claude Middle, like get right in there and start fighting back. But it’s fun. It makes my workday go faster if I like, I need, I’m a creative type person. I have to find ways to kind of entertain myself. Yeah. Especially when that like mid-afternoon slump hits and you’re bored and you’re whatever.

And little things like that can be really entertaining and can just help you feel more engaged, more like, okay, I’ve actually got a business buddy here. I know it’s not a real person. But it’s something that does help me brainstorm. It’s something that I can go back and forth with, bounce ideas off of, make it sound enough like a real person that I feel like I’m in a conversation, I’m getting energy from it.

And then you just click off and it’s like, you know, there’s no goodbyes. It doesn’t really exist. It doesn’t know you’re there. It doesn’t think about you when you’re gone. Like it’s easy. You just come in, get what you need. Go back out again. And I think as long as you keep that at the forefront of your work with it, that it really truly is just a tool there for you to use and that you can shape it into whatever you need it to be.

That’s the ideal way to think about it.

Akua: Oh my gosh. Amazing. Oh, that’s again, like really actionable and tangible tips that people can take right now because, you know, it’s, it can be overwhelming of like, how the hell am I gonna create a custom GPT and this and that? It’s like, you don’t even have to do that right now, like mm-hmm.

Because it’s true, like the more you know every time. Because I do say that thing to a I, I didn’t even know that are different AI models. I will be chacha BT models. I’ll be quite real with you. I didn’t know that. I just always see the four. Oh. And I’m like, Hey, that’s where I’m at. And you know, but I’m like, great, I’ll stay in there.

But I do, every time that I’ve even played around with it and like say, I always say to it like, talk to me like I’m a human, like all the time. Like those, I’ve never like. The, you kind of naturally start to teach yourself as well, because I say that to it all the time. I’m like, please, and I have say, please, for goodness sakes, talk to me like I’m a person.

That’s great. That’s great. And it does. And then I keep refining and I keep refining, and then I learn, I actually now keep track of certain prompts that I’m like, oh, this prompt works to give what I want. And like. Yes. That’s why like now too, I’m becoming much more confident. So I’m really excited with a lot of the tips that you shared where I’m like, oh, there is, like, I still, there’s so much more to you that we can use AI for and yes, still keep our humanity.

It’s not one or the other. I think they both can just serve each other so beautifully, especially in our businesses. So Katie, this conversation has been amazing and just, I’m like super inspired, really excited to really lean into ai. And so every question that we love to end with is, what does having an unbreakable business mean to you?

Katie: Ooh. I love that. I think for me, the unbreakable business really, and this has developed over time and after going through different iterations of different businesses as well, I actually think it’s about you need to honor where you are at a certain point in your life. And that might mean one business at one point in your life, in your own path, in your own life’s evolving.

And it might mean a different business or a different business model or an entirely different client or client base who knows at different points in your life and your evolution. And I don’t know, I’m one of those people that I used to feel like, oh, you have to build one business and it has to last forever.

And you’ve got a scale, scale, scale. And that’s what we’re taught and that’s what we hear and all of that. But, and part of that, I’ll be honest. I think a little bit of that comes from like a bro marketing voice and a bro marketing world. And sometimes I think as women we need to honor that we are gonna go through very different cycles, at different points in our lives.

Yes, we really are. And so you might have a whole different emotional journey going on in your family life or your personal life right now than you did when you started your business. That is going to impact the business you wanna have. And so for you to be the unbreakable person behind your business, I think is about honoring that and about saying, here’s who I am as a human being and therefore I’m going to let my business evolve with me.

I’m not gonna try to fight it. I’m not gonna try to have what I had, you know, five years ago. I am gonna let this evolve with me. And that’s how you become just. Unbreakable as a business owner no matter what the shape of the business around you is at this particular season.

Akua: Love that. Oh, that’s such a good way to end today’s episode.

And just a, again, it just shows the complexity and the layers to entrepreneurship. And it’s true. ’cause like, especially as women, like the, like our, what we walk through is so different, right? And so, and then we, even within that, we all have our, our uniqueness and intricacies within our journey. And so I, I love that you brought that up.

And I think that’s just such. Such a good reminder. And so Katie, thank you so much for coming on the show. For those that wanna connect with you, where can they find you? Please share with us too about your course because I’m like, yes, absolutely. See me

Katie: up immediately. Yes. So Katie reed.com is the easiest, which is K-A-T-I-E-R-E-A d.com.

And I’m sure we’ll share that in the show notes. The buyer psychology that I build out for people are called. Indicators and we’ll share that link as well ’cause it’s spelled a little bit differently. And I am, like I said, in the process of creating a course. And so that will be live hopefully sometime in the next month or two.

Uh, creating a course that will teach you how to do this in the backend of your own business if you want it. And then. It lives in there forever for you and teaching you all the ins and outs of totally no code. I’m not a technical person at all, so totally no code ways to basically trick out your chat GBT to do exactly what you need it to do.

But also, again, not just to write like you, but to think like your buyer.

Akua: Mm. Oh my gosh. I, I’m excited. I’m, yeah. We’ll absolutely be sharing all this information into the show notes. And Katie, thank you. Thank you so much for this amazing, amazing conversation and for everybody listening. Until next time, thanks for tuning into Unbreakable Business.

If you love today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who needs a little extra inspiration. Remember, no matter what life throws your way, you have the power to. To keep going and your business can be unbreakable too. Until next time, keep building, keep growing, and stay unbreakable.