Erica: Welcome to Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, the podcast where we stop playing small, start calling things out, and actually do something about it. I'm your host, Erica Anderson Rooney, executive coach, speaker, and a little bit of a movement maker. And I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. Because let's be honest, we've been told to lean in but not too far, to speak up but not too loudly. To be ambitious but somehow still likable. And y'all, we're done doing that.

This is the space where we break it all down. The sticky floors, the ceilings, and the gaps that are shaping who gets ahead, especially in this next era of AI and leadership. Some of it's mindset, some of it's burnout, and some of it is the system working exactly as it was designed. Either way, we're not staying stuck in it. Each episode is your nudge to move. One decision, one shift, one bold step forward. No overhauls, y'all. No waiting until you feel ready. Just real momentum. So if you're ready to think bigger, move smarter, and build power on your own terms, you're in the right place. Let's smash the ceilings and close the gaps.

Y'all, we are in an era where AI is either going to work for you or it is going to totally pass you by. And today's guest has figured out something that most people, and y'all, I'm talking about even the most technical experts, have completely missed. She is a data driven marketer. She's the owner of a seven figure agency, so you know that she knows what she's doing. She's a keynote speaker and the founder of, y'all, countless businesses at this point, that she has built alongside an AI business partner. Y'all, she does not have a tech background. She's got no coding degree, no development team, but this is what is so incredible and still blows my mind. So I cannot wait to dive in. But y'all, she launched a software company in 48 hours. And now she teaches women entrepreneurs exactly how to do what she did. And y'all, she doesn't do it by copying prompts, but by building a real partnership with AI that takes work off of their plate, knows and understands their business, and helps them build things that they never thought were possible. Y'all, I know this from experience because I'm actually enrolled in all the things that she does. So speaking from experience, girls. All right. She is the founder of KAC Marketing and Collab AI, and she is one of the most practical and exciting voices in the AI space today. Kay Allen-Carr, welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors podcast. How are you doing?

Kay: I am doing so good. That was the best intro I've ever had. Thank you very much.

Erica: Well, as I told you before, and for everyone listening, I'm a little fangirling right now because I have been following Kay since I started my business, like four or five years ago. And that was when I was still a chief people officer, still had no idea what Google Analytics was, didn't even know that was a thing. And I took her course, and that was where she started. But now, Kay, you are doing so much with your new business, Collab AI, and I'm in it. So I would love to kick it off. I want you to tell us a little bit about Collab AI, but then I want you to take us back and tell us what was the journey that brought us here.

Kay: Yeah. So I think maybe I'll start at the journey piece, because like you mentioned, I own a marketing agency, and I noticed that a lot of people started using AI for marketing. So there was that competitive piece of, okay, how are we as an agency going to evolve now that we know small businesses especially, and at the agency we primarily worked with companies in the two to five million range, which is ripe for AI to come in and help with a lot of things because they're looking for efficiencies. And so I said, okay, we don't want to compete against AI. People are going to leverage this technology, and they should, because it is so life changing, as I've seen in my own business. So I said, how do we take it to the next level? How do we go to the next place? And part of that was helping our clients start implementing AI into their workflows and just seeing how incredible that was. So we weren't replacing ourselves exactly with that work, but we were helping them see that they could take AI automation that they've had in place for like a decade and really upgrade that with AI.

As an example, we have a client that came to us saying, hey, we want to potentially hire a PR agency. Do you know anyone that you could recommend us to, because we don't offer PR? And I said, okay, well, PR agencies are pretty expensive. I know you just put a ton of money into designing and producing your most recent line, since you're a fashion brand. What if we look at an AI solution for this? And so I built a tool. This is one of the first software apps I built with AI. And I built it in like four hours. It's a speaking pitch tool, so a PR pitch tool. And I basically just sat down and said to my AI, hey, we have a client. I didn't prompt engineer. I didn't research anything. I just said to my AI, which is Claude right now, I said, we have a client who wants to get more visibility in the press. I want to build a tool that will help them do that. Is that possible? And if so, what does it look like? So I didn't have to come to my AI with something already totally specced out with a huge prompt that I meticulously sat there and created. I just threw out the idea to my AI, and it came back and said, oh, here's exactly how I would spec this out if I were you. What do you think? And I said, I'd love this feature. I don't think this feature is necessary. And literally within like a four hour span, we not only had, in five minutes we had a working prototype, because in Claude you can have something called an artifact, which is like a live app that really only you can use on your computer. So we tested it out with this artifact in my Claude instance. It worked great. So then I said, well, how do we make this available to the client? And my AI walked me through it completely. It said, open a hosting account here. Once you have the login information, just send it to me and I'll handle the rest. And an hour later I had a working app, which now anyone can see if they go to my website, and they can use it for free. I built it for our clients, but now I just make it available for everyone because I thought, why not? It shows the power of just one small thing that you can do with AI so quickly, that previously would have either cost a small business a lot of money in hiring a PR agency or subscribing to PR software and not really knowing what to do with the contact information they receive. So with this tool I created with my AI, not only does it find you possible press contacts to connect with, but it also researches that contact and drafts up the pitch for you. So all you have to do is copy and paste that into your email and send it off, or obviously refine it if you want to. But that's cost zero dollars to do in a couple hours.

Erica: Oh my gosh, okay, this is incredible, because your story of dipping your toe into AI and just experimenting with it and playing with it, that is the exact unlock that I hope everyone here who is listening is dialing into, because Kay's exact unlock can be your exact unlock. You just have to know, what is the problem that I'm trying to solve? What do I not know? And that is what I think so many people don't understand about AI today, because we have been flooded with all of these different prompting frameworks and big words like agent mode and hallucination and do I even have the right LLM, and what is an LLM, and it's overwhelming, especially for non-technical people, which is also why I love having you here. I'm also a non-technical person, and this is something you say all the time, it's really about moving from prompting to partnering, and this is the perfect example. You weren't prompting it with a special framework or formula. You were just having a conversation, as if someone was sitting next to you guiding you through the process.

Kay: Yes. And you can do that with anything. So of the tools that I've started creating for my business and for my clients, it really just starts with a conversation. Someone says to me, hey, it'd be cool if we could do this, or do you know of software that does this? And I can point them to references. Somebody asked me for an SEO keyword research tool because they want to get into SEO and AEO, so optimization for AI, and I said, yes, you can use SEMrush, you can use SE Ranking, it's going to cost you between fifty to a hundred and fifty dollars a month depending on the package you choose, but you don't have to, you could build your own tool. And they were like, oh, that sounds difficult. I'm like, let me show you how easy it is. And again, in like two hours, I completely replicated the key features of those popular SEO tools. I've been using it in my own business, my clients have been using it in their businesses to improve their SEO. It's been about a month now, and the cost to me, because I give everyone access to it for free, has been like two dollars.

Erica: Yes, because they send you things like, oh, here's an API key, you need it, and it's going to cost you money. And I was actually doing something yesterday, Kay, with Claude, and I needed my API key and then I was like, oh, I got to give it funds, and I was like, I don't know if I really want to do this. And I swear, my Claude, it knows me. It was like, look girl, if you put twenty dollars in, and this many times you ran it, and this many people clicked it, that will last you for six months. And I was like, no, it really isn't that bad.

Kay: No, it's really not.

Erica: Oh my gosh, okay. You haven't always been in AI. Obviously you came up through marketing. As long as I've known you, you've run your own business. So is that your life? Have you always been a business owner, or did you go corporate at any time?

Kay: No. Yeah, so I started corporate. I started my career working at Comcast, and then I didn't love corporate, and I know a lot of your listeners are corporate, but it felt like, and this may not be surprising, it felt like everything was too slow for me in corporate. I hated sitting in meetings to talk about things for six months before we begin implementing them, and then consultants come in, and everyone comes in, and it takes like five years to get something done. So I left Comcast. I went to work for an Inc. 500 startup, and then I did a couple years there as a PR manager, and then I went into the agency world. So I started as a marketing manager at an ad agency in Miami, worked my way up to head of department, worked my way up to partner, and then I was like, well, now what else am I going to do? I'm the youngest partner in the business, there's really nowhere else for me to go. So that's when I decided to start my own business.

Erica: And that sounds like it happened really quickly.

Kay: That was over fifteen years. I know, I know. And that's the thing, right, we speed it up in real time.

Erica: But what I'm hearing is you were doing the corporate grind, you climbed the ladder, and then that's where you hit your first glass ceiling, which is what this is all about. And so you transition into marketing, you're running that agency, and now you're doing your AI agency. What I also want to think about and talk about here are the sticky floors. And for me, those are the limiting beliefs, the toxic behaviors that keep us stuck. And I think there are so many sticky floors when it comes to AI. Big ones being, I'm not technical enough, I have no idea how to use it, it's going to take me too long to figure it out before I can actually start doing something with it. Did you ever experience any sticky floors with AI before you dove all in, or were you just like, hell no, this is so exciting, I'm doing it?

Kay: Oh no, I definitely have had sticky floors. So I initially only used it for copywriting, and I thought this copy is actually not good. I think it's very easy, when you use AI a lot, to notice certain sentence structures and paragraphs, and I felt like I could tell it was written by AI, and I didn't like that. I care less about that now, because now I understand, if it sounds like it was written by AI, it's because AI is going to have nearly perfect grammar, and this is actually how we probably should be writing. So I'm less embarrassed about it now. But I would say, yeah, for a long time, all I used it for was copy. And then I said, okay, well what are other ways I can use this? And I didn't touch Claude Code until February of this year, or any sort of coding with AI, because I thought the same thing. Oh, that's for the developers, and Chat GPT or Claude Chat, that's for me, that's all I'm ever going to do with it. And then the first time I created that first app, I was like, oh, now I'm creating apps for everything. And I've replaced almost all of the software subscriptions in my business with our own tools, to cut our cost down significantly. And that's been very exciting.

Erica: Well, heck yes, I would say so too. Okay, you've talked a little bit about how you used to use AI and how you're using it now. I want to actually hear, high level, a day in the life of Kay when she was doing the marketing world pre-AI, and then a day in the life of Kay now that she has all of these AI employees and AI powers at her fingertips.

Kay: Yeah, that's, wow, my life is so different. So when I started pre-AI, I was working in my own business, I was working from like five a.m. until eight p.m. growing the business. And also, I imagine a lot of high achieving listeners will agree with this, I was a perfectionist, a control freak. And so even though I had started growing my team, I would get their work and be like, this isn't exactly how I would do it, so I'm going to sit here and completely redo it. And I just spent so much time on that. And I eventually realized, okay, as a business owner, I need to hire senior level employees so that I'm having to redo things less, because they bring the same amount of experience to me. But that also got very expensive. My marketing director is six figures. I started hiring people that I had to pay a lot of money to. And so that helped to reduce my day. Instead of getting up at five a.m. and working till eight p.m., I would get up at eight a.m. and work a normal day. But I still felt stressed out, because I was like, I'm paying people a lot of money, I feel less engaged in the business, because now I do have these employees who can take so much work off my plate, but now I don't know what's happening day to day. And so at the end of last year, I started really getting into AI and understanding how we could use AI in our own client and marketing workflows, so that I would feel more in the loop, and if I wanted to, I could reduce our team headcount. I don't necessarily believe we should always just jump to reducing headcount, because those employees are often multi-skilled and can do other things, now that AI can take over the repetitive stuff. That person's time is freed up to do things that only human relationship building can do. So I've adjusted roles in my business now, but my day to day is, I feel almost embarrassed to share this, but I probably work like ten hours a week now, and I used to work literally five a.m. until eight p.m. But I just have AI doing all of our reporting. I used to be the reporting and analysis person, so I'd spend a good portion of my week running through data, running numbers, figuring out what the next move was from a data driven perspective. And now I wake up on Monday mornings and my AI is just like, here's your download from the previous week, here's your report, here are recommendations based on your methodology on what we think you would recommend next. And I'm just like, okay, cool. All I really have to do now is show up to client calls. And I feel in the loop, because my AI is scanning through all the messages in our project management portal and our client communication portal, and just gives me a daily summary that it drops into Slack for me, and I feel in the loop. I'm productive, my team is productive.

Erica: Okay, everybody listening right now is going, ten hours a week, what in the heck? But let me remind y'all here, we're talking about seven figures. This woman isn't just working with one client and that's all she's doing. She is doing a massive amount of work and working ten hours a week. And I will say, this is not the first time I've heard someone say that to me. So I know it's done, because it's a repeatable process. So first of all, what the heck are you doing with thirty extra hours a week, girl?

Kay: Well, I bought a horse, and now I spend all my time at the barn.

Erica: Okay y'all, you can buy a horse. Is she doing all right? That's all I have to say. And she is spending time with her horse, and isn't that what we are all after?

Kay: Yes.

Erica: So brainstorm this with me here, Kay, because the audience on this podcast, while we do have some business owners, we have a lot of people in corporate who have a ton of meetings, fifty seven thousand emails a day, they're not going to be able to dial it down to ten hours. But what would be some of the incredible activities that they could think about implementing to cut down on some of the repetitive BS work that takes up so much time?

Kay: So I think it varies by role. There are general things that you can do, like have AI triage your email inbox, your Slack channel, your ClickUp or whatever your project management portal is, and give you a summary, so you don't have to go in and check all those things, and draft emails. It can draft email replies for you, and you go in and just say yes, or I want to edit this, and then send. That can be helpful. But I think the real heavy lifting is done in role specific things. So for example, as a marketer, I know automating reporting, automating optimization of ads and emails, all of that can be done with AI, and doesn't really require a human, aside from a final review. Obviously we want to do a final review to make sure there's nothing in there that could potentially be read as offensive, because sometimes AI can't pick up on those nuances, so we need someone to review those things. But really anything that's repetitive, and especially with data, like reporting, is great for AI to take off your plate. Same thing with sales. I was talking to someone who does enterprise sales, and she was asking how can I use AI, and she told me, every day I have to document every call I have, all the cold calls I made, all the follow-ups I did, all the messages I sent. And I said, okay, well you just need to connect AI to your email, your calendar, whatever systems you're using, and it can automate that reporting for you, so that when it's five p.m. and you're done with calls and you don't want to sit and compile a report for the next thirty minutes, it's already done for you, and it's been created throughout the day. Same thing with accounting. I was talking to an accountant who runs a very small team at a small business, and she's like, I'm doing bookkeeping, I'm doing this and that. I'm like, okay, your AI can actually do categorization for you, a lot of these bookkeeping tasks, so you can be more focused on the big picture financial strategy for your business, and of course take a look, make sure things are categorized correctly, but you don't have to be the one in there manually spending your time doing that repetitive task. So I would say to the listeners, any repetitive task that you do, I would just go to Claude or Chat GPT and say, hey, I do this task, describe it as if you're describing it to a friend, and say, is there any part of this that I can automate, or all of it, and just let the AI tell you. I would guess in nine out of ten cases, maybe even ten out of ten cases, there is going to be a way to automate that with AI.

Erica: I will tell you too, I mean, I was in corporate for a very long time, I was a chief people officer. So when you're thinking about it from an HR specific role, so many hours spent on training decks, and learning and development, and onboarding flows, and just redesigning all of those things, and now it can be done in minutes. And so I do think a really great way, if you're in corporate and you're like, this is all cool but I don't know how to use it in my world, start mapping out all of those things that you do on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, and just document it for starters. I think too, and this is where a lot of people get tripped up, is people are really realizing how dirty their data is and how disjointed their companies are running. We've got stuff in email over here, we've got an old system over there, we have no filing nomenclature system, and that alone kind of stops them before they can even start. How do you advise them to move forward with that? Do you say put a line in the sand, and like moving forward we're doing all this, and we're either not going to worry about that, or we'll only worry about what we need to worry about? How do we move past this dirty data problem and actually utilize AI?

Kay: So yes, I think there's a couple different ways I would approach it, depending on what the data is. If we're talking about a Google Drive that's really messy, or a Dropbox, or Microsoft, whatever, I would say tell your AI to clean it up for you. When I was that way, my project manager would constantly be driven nuts, because I would create a document, create a presentation, didn't put it in folders, didn't organize it, and she wouldn't be able to find anything. And I'm like, I'm sorry, I was working from five a.m. until eight p.m., I was just like, I got to keep moving. And I got organized, like, it's just there now. You're able to schedule your AI to do tasks, so at the end of the day I'm like, hey, go into my Google Drive and tidy up anything I didn't tidy up. You can do that on a daily basis, but you can also tell it, go in and tidy up everything that's in there. I had my AI do that. It created the folders, it moved things based on the content inside each folder, it created a folder for each client and moved their documents into the correct folders. So I would say, if it's a data problem like that, just connect your AI to your Google Drive, or whatever it is, and tell it, go nuts, organize it. If it's dirty data when it comes to actual data, so CSV files that are maybe outdated, I would say, okay, you probably want to start fresh, pull some fresh data and start from there. Tell your AI, hey, this has gotten out of date, this is how we need to create a process for moving forward, and that's something your AI can own. And I think that's probably one of the most important things I would want to tell anyone, is that you do not have to be the leader on everything, you don't have to be involved in everything, you don't have to tell your AI specifically what to do with every task. You can just give it the end goal and say, I want you to own this, and the AI can do that. They can set up their own scheduling, their own reminders. You can basically just ask AI for anything you want. It's like a little genie, ask it for anything you want, work related or even life related, and watch what it can do. It's virtually limitless.

Erica: Yeah, it really is. And y'all, if you are like me, with a little sprinkle of that ADHD in there, where you just got ping pong brain, so many bright ideas, I'm going to say two things. Number one is AI can really hurt you here if you don't tell it that this is you, because it will say, do you want to make a one pager, do you want to now make it a slide deck, do you want to turn it into a LinkedIn post, and I'm always like, oh yes, yes, sounds great, keep going, and then you're like, wait, what was I even trying to do, I needed to respond to an email. So try to hone it in there, but you can tell it, this is where I struggle, so make sure I stay on course. And y'all, I'm going to give a shameless plug here for Kay's courses and stuff, one of the biggest unlocks for me was when Kay taught me to create a chief of staff in my Claude. What I have it doing for me now, Kay, is triaging the email. It gives me my priority, must respond to this email today, ones I can respond to any time during the week, and ones I can just delete. It pulls out my must-dos, like Erica, these are the priorities on your calendar because you have this coming up next week. I've been able to have a section in there that is all on my business cadences, right, that's been a challenging part for me, because when you're a solopreneur you handle everything, so how often am I reviewing my mileage, when am I doing my finances, all of those things, and it reminds me, and it's literally like having a team of assistants behind you to build this for you. And if you are not running a business, that's totally fine, if you're a badass CEO, have it run all of the department reviews for you and keep up with their KPIs and performance reviews. There is so much you can do with it. And I would say if you're not sure where to start, starting with what Kay is teaching, creating a chief of staff, is such a good place to experiment because you can't mess it up.

Kay: Yeah, and I teach that to small business owners and CEOs all the time. It's like, create a business partner, create a chief of staff, someone like that for employees. I'm getting ready to publish this new methodology I have for when we're working with corporate clients who want employee training, and it's really like, build an AI colleague. So instead of chief of staff, it's someone that you work with, so you still give it an identity, and most importantly you give it a role, with defined things it's responsible for on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, because the feedback that I hear when I speak with employees oftentimes is, it's a waste of my time to use AI, my employer requires us now to use AI at least a certain amount of hours per week, or for a certain amount of tasks, and I'm doing it, I don't love what comes out of it, it's so generic, and so I'm checking off the box of using AI and then I'm having to work even later to just do the work on my own. And so really, the same methodology applies to employees as well, not just business owners, where okay, create yourself a colleague, a partner, give it defined tasks that are on your list that you don't like doing, give it the things you don't like doing and make it responsible for that. So just say, hey, your role is, if you're a marketing director, your role is you're a marketing manager, you're responsible for daily review of our ad campaigns, daily review of email KPIs, and then you bring me the data and let's talk through it, and then you implement the optimization or changes in whatever role. And if you give it a name, because research shows that when we name our AIs, we're more likely to talk to them frequently, because we kind of do just think of them as a person on our team. And beyond that, give them a name, give them a role, give them specific tasks to do, and give them institutional knowledge. Give them access to your Notion database where you have all of your normal workflows documented, or your Google Drive, or wherever it is that you have SOPs, information about your company, information about your clients, that it can tap into while it's doing a task. So it can say, okay, I need to create, Kay asked me to do a market research report, and I need to pull competitive research, well let me go into the institutional knowledge bank right in Notion, or wherever, and find who her key competitors are, and make sure I'm pulling the data from the competitors that she actually cares about, versus just going out there choosing random companies. If you give it that institutional knowledge, not just one time, not in a conversation, but in a content database it can access on its own whenever it needs to, you are going to get such specific, incredible results, where you're like, wow, this was actually really helpful, instead of, this was very generic, I need to redo it.

Erica: Do you think it would be helpful if they almost created job descriptions? Like an AI employee?

Kay: Yeah, I think it can't hurt. I mean, I don't think it needs to be, you sit down and write out an actual document and give it to the AI, but I think actually a really interesting thing would be giving your job description to your AI and saying, this is what I'm responsible for, where can you do some of the heavy lifting, or what can you take off my plate? Because I think we often underestimate what AI can do for us. And so that's why with the app, I didn't come in and say, this is an app I want to create for pitching people, or for SEO, and this is exactly what it needs to look like, I just said, this is my end goal, to have an app that can help with keyword research, and let the AI take its vast knowledge of everything and come back and present me with the plan, so I didn't have to do that executive work. And that's the mindset switch, you're not giving it all of this information that we've historically been told we need to do, you're really just giving them the idea, and delegating, and walking away.

Erica: Yes, and that's how you only have to work ten hours a week.

Kay: Because I just say, these are the end goals, how are we going to get there, and I let, just like any employee that I would hire and trust, tell me, okay, you tell me, you're the AI, you're infinitely more intelligent than I am, because I only know what I've learned over my thirty nine years in life. An AI has all the information in the universe, so why should I think that I know better? The AI can tap into its knowledge, see all the fifty ways people have already tried to do this, see which is the best way, and then present that to me, and I can say yes or no. So I think it's the same way if you're an employee looking to use AI more, just give it your job description, your daily to-dos, and say, this is what I have to do all the time, my goal is to have less things on my plate so I feel less stressed out and more productive, how can you help me with my tasks? And from there, build its own job description.

Erica: Oh my gosh, y'all, that's incredible. I feel like if you take nothing else away from today, if you are a traditional corporate employee, find your job description, word vomit out all the things you do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, and just say, hey girl, I always call my AI a girl because you know, we run the world, hey girl, what can you take off my plate, how can we build this? And I think the other big takeaway, and I would love to hear your opinion, Kay, is start with small easy wins. The very first time I ever built a Chat GPT agent, fun fact, I'm also a personal trainer, in my first career I was a marketer, I was a personal trainer in my first career. But I still have this one client that I see, and just to get familiar with the system and the responses, I was like, you know what, I'm going to create an Erica personal training bot that would hit all of my client's goals and targets, and I just talked to my AI, I said, this is who she is, her age, her goals, this is the workout she typically likes to do, and oh by the way, she likes exercises she's seen and knows, but she doesn't want the same ones every week, so do something with that. I don't use that one a ton now, because it was one of my first ones, but it gave me just enough confidence to say, how can I try something bigger. So what are your thoughts, do we start small and personal and low risk, or do we just go balls to the wall, I'm going Claude, Cowork, Notion, I'm going to figure it all out, what do you think?

Kay: I think it depends on what your personality type is. I would say, on the other side of it now, if you go balls to the wall, you will learn so much faster, because it's not difficult. I was talking to a Collab AI member the other day, and she's like, I haven't done anything with APIs yet because I'm nervous, I'm scared. And I was like, girl, I was the same way, and for six months I didn't touch Claude Code or connectors, anything. And then the first time I just said, hey, I'm just gonna use it, that's when my brain exploded, and in one day I made an app, and by the end of the month I had like five apps that I had made, because I was like, wow, that was so easy, it really didn't require any technical knowledge from me. So I'm not saying everyone needs to build an app, obviously, but I think throw out whatever your biggest stressor is right now, in your job, in life, whatever it is, throw that out to Claude, and just like you mentioned, brain dump, put it in voice mode, and just say, hey Claude, this is the thing that's bothering me, this is how I've been trying to address it, it hasn't worked because XYZ, how would you approach this, or how can we approach this where you can help me, and see what the plan is. And you can even say, try to not make it too technical, or if that's an area that gives you anxiety, just tell it, I need a non-technical solution for this. Because oftentimes I notice my AI will say, here's the more complicated way we can approach this, or here's the simple way we can just get started, and depending on what day it is, I might go one way or the other. So whatever it is that's on your mind, that you wish you didn't have to do anymore, this is bugging me, this annoys me, bring it to your AI, and just like a conversation, like you're talking to your best friend or a colleague, and see what the AI says. I bet they're going to have a solution for you, and I bet it's not going to be difficult to implement.

Erica: No. And I will give you this one little tidbit that I do, that has helped me, and then I kind of want to move into some quick rapid fire questions, I'm usually not a rapid fire question girly, but I feel like you're going to have some good answers. But when I'm doing the technical builds, and some of these automations, and remember I ain't technical, I'm a chief people officer by trade, okay, we don't code, we don't do any of that, if I get stuck, I will take a screenshot and give it to my Claude, or my Chat, or whatever LLM I'm using, and I will say, this is where I'm stuck, what do I click? And it will literally say, oh girl, you're on the wrong screen, let's back it up, or it will say, oh no, that looks perfect, click continue. And I don't know about you, if you're listening, but sometimes those are the small things that will keep me stuck, and keep me from moving on, it's like I don't know what to click, it's too much, I'm out. So send it the screenshots. But Kay, are you ready for a few quick fun rapid fire questions?

Kay: I am. But just to touch on that, so if you have Claude, like the Chrome extension, or if you use Chat GPT and use the Atlas browser, it can see your screen. So a lot of times you can skip the screenshot step, just open up Claude in Chrome, it pops up in the side of your browser, or if you're using Atlas, it can see your screen and guide you right there, which, like you mentioned, is such a big timesaver. I was helping a client set up their Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce is such a beast, it would have taken me probably like four to six weeks in the past, and I got it done in like four days.

Erica: Hey.

Kay: Well, actually, I set up Claude to do most of the work, it's like, JK, I really wasn't doing it, I was just every now and then approving it.

Erica: I love it. Okay Kay, some rapid fire. Out of all the LLMs, I think I know your answer here because I hear it the most frequently from you, but Google Gemini, Copilot, Chat GPT, Claude, which is your favorite?

Kay: Claude is my favorite. So I switched to Claude in February of this year, after using Chat GPT since 2003, early 2004. And I switched because the apps that Claude connects to were read write, and on Chat GPT at the time, they were just read only. So what that means in a practical sense is, Chat GPT could read my email, but it couldn't draft replies for me, or send replies for me. Same thing with project management apps, and I'm like, well, why do I want it just to read things and then tell me what to do, I want it to be able to do the thing too that it's telling me to do. So I switched to Claude for that reason. Chat GPT today, especially if you use the Codex product, can do things for you, and just natively now, they introduced it, so it can read write to Notion. A lot of apps though, still on Chat GPT, you still have to go through Codex to get it to read write, and so I think that's a gigantic limitation for the average person who doesn't feel comfortable coding, to have to go into Codex to ask for that, even though you can ask for it in plain conversation.

Erica: So this is rapid fire, I shouldn't be giving you a whole dissertation on it, but you know what, there were some really good key points in there, so we're going to take it. But what's the biggest mistake that you think women are making when they first start using AI?

Kay: Thinking that we have to be super detailed in our ask, instead of just saying, like a friend, hey, this is what I want to do, can we do it, what's the plan?

Erica: What's the plan, are you riding or not, I like it. Okay, complete this sentence for me. AI didn't replace me, it.

Kay: There's so many words coming to my mind right now that I think would be great. I think AI didn't replace me, it made me more efficient, more productive. It stretched my time. It made me money.

Erica: Hey, that's, let's end on that one, it made me dollars.

Kay: Yes.

Erica: I like it. And then this is my last question, it's my best question, but I want to go back in time to maybe the Kay who's sitting there, you've got your KAC Marketing that you spent so much time and energy building and growing and marketing for, and then you're like, oh my gosh, I think I'm going to have to do this Collab AI thing. It's that itch, that nudge, and you're having all those anxieties and thoughts of, do I do it, do I not? What piece of advice would you give her today?

Kay: I'm glad that you followed your intuition. Yeah, I would say, I'm glad you followed your intuition to do it, and it wasn't just intuition, it was logically looking at the landscape and picturing, what does the marketing landscape look like in five years, and how can I use AI, instead of being one of those people who just says, don't use AI, or my team, my business would never use AI, because I do think it's like the internet, where lots of people said, we don't need a website, we're not going to use the internet, and look where we are now. AI is here to stay, it's had a huge impact on the business, on the world, how we all work, how we all think, how we're productive. Don't ignore it, figure out how you can work with it instead of against it. And I'm glad that I followed my intuition to do that.

Erica: Yes, me too, girl, me too. I find the Collab AI stuff way more interesting than the Google marketing analytics stuff, I know we need it all, but as a business owner, I was like, oh, I got to do this. So Kay, thank you so much for joining us on the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors podcast. Y'all listening, I will say this, check out Collab AI. The way Kay talked on this podcast, the way she speaks, the way she explains AI here, that's exactly how she does it on her platform. She is one of the people I look to, to learn from. Even if you're very well versed in AI, it's always good to hear other people's perspectives, because even just hearing some of the very basics she said, like if you have Chat GPT Atlas or Claude installed in your browser, why aren't you using that? And I'm like, damn girl, why am I sending all these screenshots? Okay, so all that to be said, check out Collab AI, we're going to drop the links for all of Kay's social where you can find her, how you can start working with her. But Kay, thank you so much.

Kay: Thank you.

Erica: If this episode resonated with you, don't let it stop here. Send it to a woman you care about, a colleague, a friend, someone who's been on your mind while you were listening. These conversations are meant to be shared, and you never know what one small shift can unlock for someone else. And if you haven't already, make sure you're following the podcast, leave a rating, and write a quick review. It helps more women find this space, and it keeps these conversations going. If you're ready to go deeper, come a little closer, send me a DM, I'll invite you to sit in on a live HER Collective session as my personal guest. No pressure, no strings attached. But you get to experience it, feel the room, and see what happens when women start moving together. Until next time, y'all, keep going, keep choosing differently, and let's smash the ceilings and close the gaps.