Elizabeth Gearhart, Ph.D.: Welcome to Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable. I’m Elizabeth Gearhart, podcast consultant, marketing expert, and Ph.D. researcher using AI every day.

Richard Gearhart: And I’m Richard Gearhart, entrepreneur, seasoned business owner, and intellectual property attorney specializing in innovation. Here’s how real companies are using AI right now.

Elizabeth: I want each of our guests, plus Richard and myself, to share one way we’re using AI in our business, then we’ll open it up into a discussion. Dave, I’ll start with you — how are you using AI at The Business Bully?

Dave Anderson – Training an AI on His Own Voice: I’m training AI to understand my voice — all 23 of my books and transcripts of every interview I’ve ever done are uploaded. Partly so the model understands how I think, and partly because it’s saved me tens of thousands of dollars letting AI do a first editing pass on my books before my editor does a final review. I’ve also planned for what happens after I’m gone: six books will release after my death, and beyond that, more books conceived from what I’ve already fed into my AI avatar. That avatar is willed to my daughters, so they can keep producing work in my style for as long as they — and their kids — want to.

Elizabeth: Richard and I talk about this kind of legacy a lot — YouTube videos, podcasts, blog posts. At some point AI could almost recreate a person. It’s a weird, creepy kind of immortality, honestly. I actually read that Matthew McConaughey licensed his voice to AI so it could narrate a Spanish translation of his work in his own voice — I thought that was a cool use case.

Elizabeth: Melissa, what’s one way you’re using AI in your business?

Melissa Franks – Pattern Recognition in Sales Calls: Similar to Dave, we upload all of our sales calls into AI and ask it to do pattern recognition — specifically to find hidden objections that came up in the conversation, so when we follow up we already know what to explore further. It also helps us build proposals of like kind. Uploading the information is the easy part; asking the right questions to get something actually useful back is the hard part. That’s where a seasoned sales professional training the model gets very different results than someone without that background.

Elizabeth: Derick, what about you — what’s one way you’re using AI at FitWithDerick?

Derick Johnson – Turning Experience into Market Research: One of the main ways is market research. I wanted to stand out from other trainers and coaches by focusing on the mind first, then the body — helping people work through trauma. AI has helped me understand what people are actually searching for, far more than Google or word of mouth, and helped me peel back the layers behind someone’s patterns — like tracing a dating cycle back to childhood experience. I took a decade of military and coaching experience, fed it into AI, and it started surfacing the pain points worth focusing on — giving me a real starting point instead of a blank slate.

Richard – Building an AI-Augmented Law Firm: I had a bit of an AI epiphany this week and decided I want our law firm to be AI-augmented — not u201cAI-driven,u201d since that might sound too unsettling to clients expecting confidentiality. One thing I learned: different LLMs have very different security levels. ChatGPT isn’t secure enough for client information, but Microsoft Copilot treats our firm as a private u201ctenant,u201d keeping everything in one secure place. So now ChatGPT handles outward-facing work, and Copilot handles anything internal or client-related.

Elizabeth – Editing for YouTube: One way I just started using AI: we’re turning a strong segment from another show into its own podcast, and I wanted it to do well on YouTube specifically. I gave ChatGPT the transcript and asked how to edit it to maximize watch time. It came back with good notes — cut the ums, tighten this section — but as Dave knows from video editing, if you cut everything AI suggests, you end up with a choppy mess. It really takes a human editor to pick which suggestions actually help.

Group Discussion – Prompting and Craft: The group agrees that specificity is everything with prompts — ChatGPT can’t read your mind, so the more precise the instruction, the better the result. Dave compares it to handing someone Tiger Woods’s golf clubs: the tool doesn’t make you a craftsman. He mentions founding Zenith Media Labs, a team of human editors who use AI suggestions but bring real editing judgment and a consistent visual style — the kind of polish that generic auto-clips tend to miss.

Derick: The more you talk to it, the more it picks up your language. I noticed it was making my coaching calls smoother, since I was already used to explaining things simply to the AI. I also tell it explicitly what not to include — adding a u201cdo not do Xu201d line to a prompt trains it to sound more like you.

Melissa: Building on that — the biggest mistake people make is never showing AI the finished product. If you’re trying to improve a coaching call, upload a call afterward and say u201cthis is what I did with your suggestions.u201d It’ll pick up on your style and get better over time, the same way you’d correct a kid who’s almost loading the dishwasher right.

Group: Starting a brand-new conversation can also help when AI gets stuck giving generic answers — sometimes re-explaining things from scratch produces a sharper result than continuing down a repetitive thread.

Richard – Prompts as Intellectual Property: A really good prompt — the kind people spend real time teaching themselves to write — can be a company’s best intellectual property. Ideally you save strong prompts somewhere the whole team can use them. There’s a case for copyright protection, or treating them as a trade secret; if someone left the company with those prompts, you’d have legal recourse. It takes real time to develop ones that work, so it’s worth protecting.

Elizabeth: One thing that stuck with me: women are some of the best multitaskers and efficiency-makers out there, and we’re using AI just as well as anyone — we’re just not always the ones doing the public presentations about it.

Derick – Turning a Process into a Sellable System: I record my screen in Loom and used to just send that to my team to replicate. Eventually I added a PDF alongside the video with the framework spelled out, since not everyone will watch a full video. That combination became real intellectual property — something we can now package and license to others working through similar transformations.

Richard: That’s a good example of why you don’t always need to register a copyright — it can be hard to enforce. But treating it as a trade secret, and recognizing it as intellectual property in the first place, is the important first step.

Closing – Elizabeth: Thank you all for a great discussion — we’d love to have everyone back in a year to see how differently they’re using AI by then. You’ve been listening to Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable.