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Welcome to BE THE EXPERT! In today’s issue:

• Two types of online business creators in 2025
• Seven things you need to AI-enable ASAP
• Rapid improvements in OpenAI models incoming

How to not get run over and left behind by AI

There are 7 critical areas of your online business that you need to AI-enable immediately to protect against a wave of your competitors already doing so.

Last week I talked about how AI is going to destroy online course and information product businesses in 2025.

If you have an online business or are planning one, steps need to be taken RIGHT NOW to ensure you aren’t run over by AI or competitors using AI.

There will be two categories of online business creators in 2025:

• AI-only
• AI + human

AI-only Creators

In the AI-only category, there are people building tools and services that create courses and programs automatically.

There are AI tools that generate text, audio, video almost in many cases indistinguishable from human-originated content.

There are entirely fake AI characters that are “influencers” with large followings.

There are people and tools creating huge amounts of content automatically.

That is today.

In 2025 imagine all of those integrated and working together.

AI by itself is going to destroy 50% or more of the current online course, membership, and coaching businesses in 2025.

How?

By providing equal or better solutions.

But ​last week​ I demonstrated (hopefully) with the movie reference that we can still compete with such AI and automation by leaning into SKILL, EXPERIENCE, TRUST, and CONNECTION.

Let’s say you DO learn how to leverage skill, experience, trust, and connection to differentiate from all the AI that will be out there.

How do we still not get drowned out by their higher volume and increasing quality of information?

We need to ALSO implement AI to amplify and magnify our message.

In every terminator movie (at least the good ones), to beat AI, the humans had to team up with AI.

AI + Human Creators

In addition to AI-only competition, we face even more powerful competition which is creators who have skill, experience, trust, and connection that are ALSO leveraging AI to the maximum extent possible.

Those are the folks pulling ahead as we speak.

That is the place we need to be so we aren’t left behind.

This is where we team up with AI to accelerate and amplify our efforts.

The leaders in all niches right now are starting to do this and all of us need to so we don’t fall so far behind that we can never catch up.

Here’s how.

Seven areas to AI-enable ASAP

As you know from many previous issues, I talk about systemization and automation all the time and AI is the next evolution of that.

In my model, there are nine essential systems all online businesses need for success:

• Project Management
• Process Management
• Sales Funnels
• Products
• Content
• Traffic
• Marketing
• Sales
• Support

For today, we’re going to skip the first two; I’ll cover AI-enabling those in a future issue.

Let’s focus on the customer-facing systems.

Our goal is to team up with AI so that we can dramatically accelerate our efforts.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s set our goal to 10x each of these areas.

Sales Funnels

Testing and continuous improvement are the keys to better sales funnels and results.

The leaders in most niches are constantly running split tests and trying different hooks, offers, funnel types, etc.

Many of us solopreneurs are lucky if we even get version 1 of our funnels done and launched!

But when we are AI-enabled, this becomes possible. We can use AI to generate dozens of different variations of hooks, offers, copy.

Funnel-building tools are starting to pick up this capability as well (our ACCELERATE platform just added this too)

Products

Our products, whether courses, coaching, or other forms, will need significant overhauls to remain competitive in 2025.

Pure information will be commoditized even more.

We must increase our skills and experience and infuse them into our products and content to build trust and connection.

We need to use AI to develop our skills and accelerate our experience.

In my business, by accelerating all the other areas with AI, we’ll be able to help more people, gain more experience, test more, etc.

By building that all back into our programs, they will be MORE relevant than generic AI-generated answers.

Content

This is a big one. AI-generated content is good and improving quickly.

With tools today you can generate hundreds or thousands of pieces of content in a few hours.

Our goal though is NOT to match or exceed that.

Our goal is to increase our volume pretty dramatically so that we ARE visible but to also ensure our content focuses on skill, experience, trust, and connection.

I wrote about this in ​BTE10 – Why I’m Creating Original Content In An AI World​.

We still need to create our own original content (leaning on our skills and experience) and then use AI to multiply and amplify that content.

That is what I call a “content engine,” where we take that raw content and use tools and AI to turn it into dozens of assets and hundreds of posts.

You have to publish at a pretty high volume to even be seen, then your content needs to be high quality and have the attributes mentioned to compete against AI-generated content.

Traffic

We need traffic seeing our content and sales funnels so this is another essential system.

This is typically paid advertising.

Like funnels, the key to success here is testing and continuous improvement.

Ad campaigns typically consist of the ad network like Facebook, the targeting, the creative, and the copy.

Most of us run a few ads, and we publish and pray they work.

The successful test hundreds or thousands of combinations every month.

We can leverage AI in those areas to create and test at a higher volume.

Marketing

There is a massive amount of AI coming into marketing as we speak.

Whether it social media, email, or other forms of marketing the space is overflowing with tools and AI now.

The key is to become a rapid adopter of these as soon as they near the mainstream.

I follow sites that track new AI tools and literally hundreds come out every day.

You do NOT want to get bogged down in that.

But as soon a some leaders appear, it is usually time to adopt them since your competitors will rapidly.

In our ACCELERATE suite of tools, we do that for our clients in terms of adding new features and plugins so they don’t need to go buy dozens of other tools.

Either way, these tools enable a higher volume of marketing and increasing personalization.

Sales

There is also a massive amount of AI coming into sales as we speak. From chatbots to AI sales agents and more, it is rapidly evolving.

In our ACCELERATE suite, new AI capabilities are added every week.

The two key dimensions where AI is helping are speed and personalization.

Some businesses aim for less than one minute response time to a lead with a personalized follow-up, whether AI or human salesperson.

Imagine less than a minute after someone opts into your lead magnet, your AI salesperson contacts them via chat and asks them a few questions about why they opted in, and starts a sales conversation.

Imagine it (gently but persistently) following up with them over a week or more to help them along the buyer’s journey.

Support

Support and fulfillment of your products and programs is a GREAT place to leverage AI.

If you capture every question people ask you and your answer, it is very easy today to create an AI knowledge base and chat bot trained on your specific knowledge and embed that in your programs so people can ask “you” their questions 24×7.

What is coming soon is the ability for Ai to monitor and track the progress of your students/customers and proactively help them leverage everything you have to offer and help them achieve results faster.

But I was already overwhelmed!?

I get it, me too!

With all of the above, I’m not talking about more effort but SHIFTING your efforts so that AI becomes your force multiplier.

Note that all of the examples above are about putting your time and effort into establishing AI in those areas so that more gets done automatically.

So rather than “create the funnel,” it is “establish the AI that creates MANY funnels.”

With content, it’s not “create 100 posts”; it is “establish the content engine so that you create one piece and AI turns it into 100 posts.

Same effort, much greater output.

This is URGENT!

I’m hitting this topic hard over the next few weeks because I have seen the consequences of not moving fast enough.

I worked at Microsoft for a long time.

During the 90’s and 00’s Microsoft missed or started too late in several key waves of technology (the Internet, mobile phones, virtualization).

When you miss or start too late, it’s almost impossible to catch up. Competitors claim the market share and they learn and improve faster.

With cloud computing, Microsoft almost missed it too when Amazon started to take off but we made huge investments and became the #2 provider (now a $25B dollar a quarter business!)

But even then, starting ~12mo later than Amazon, Microsoft has not been able to overtake them even after 15 years.

AI is a different story. Learning all the lessons from above, Microsoft was a very early investor in OpenAI and several others and is spending MASSIVE amounts to build AI capacity.

They are the leader in this space by moving early and at scale.

But I still don’t know HOW to do all this!

That’s why I’m here 🙂

My entire career has been about helping organizations, large and small, leverage these technology waves.

I highly encourage you to get on the waitlist for my upcoming workshop, where I’ll show you how to AI-proof and AI-enable your online business and brand in 2025.

I will show you exactly how to infuse more skill, experience, trust, and connection across your business.

Then I will show how to use AI across all the essential systems of online business to automate and amplify your efforts.

I don’t want anyone in my community to be run over or left behind by AI.

Instead, I want us to leverage AI to expand our businesses and impact.

Be sure to join the waitlist to register when the doors open and qualify for some special bonuses!

Take Action

Be sure to join my “How to build an AI-proof business and brand in 2025” workshop, where we’ll dive deep into each of these areas and help you build a plan for 2025!

Satruday Spotlight 💡

Content Spotlight:​

In this video, I show the importance of creating and capturing your own unique knowledge 🧠 to stand out in a world where AI-generated content is becoming increasingly prevalent.

Tool Spotlight:​

​Cassidy AI​ – AI that has real-time context on your business

Cassidy connects with 100+ knowledge tools (Notion, Slack, OneDrive, etc.) to give AI context on your business, customers, competitors, brand voice, and more.

Cassidy helps us turn our Notion knowledge base into a chatbot and support system as described above where team members and/or clients can ask questions and get answers from “me” 24×7…

News Spotlight:​

​Sam Atlman Reveals Remarkable Changes Coming To O1​ – The AIGRID

Sam suggests aligning with the rapid improvements expected in models like GPT-5 and beyond, creating solutions that add value beyond OpenAI’s core developments.

Similar to the core message in this issue which is to adopt and leverage AI as much as possible.