S2. Ep6 - 5 Ways to Improve Your Business Using AI in 2026

Katie: Welcome to the AI Automations for Business Podcasts. We're your hosts, Katie and Null, and we'll be discussing how you can use AI for your business along with the latest news, updates and automations to help you stay ahead of the curve, allowing you to grow and scale your business more efficiently. Please be sure to subscribe and I hope you enjoy this episode. Hi, hello, I'm Katie. And welcome to this week's podcast episode. As always, I've got Noel here with me. How you doing, Noel?

Noel: Hello, yeah, doing great as always, yeah. Lots to talk about this week.

Katie: Good to hear, good to hear. So before we dive in to this week's topic, just going back to last week's episode with OpenClaw, Maltbook, you know, all these other things, it was called, Any new update since last week? I feel like it's gone a little bit quiet, but maybe...

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: I don't have been online that much. I don't know.

Noel: Yeah, I would say it's calmed down a little bit. Yeah, the hype train has left the station, thankfully, and yeah, it's calm and dang.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: I'm sure there are some other absolutely bonkers websites out there for agents that have been created, but...

Katie: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Noel: All quiet for now.

Katie: Okay.

Noel: But obviously there was other drama as well last week. Oh,

Katie: golly gosh. Tell us the drama. Spill the tea.

Noel: He didn't go without drama, did it? So Anthropic decided to up there advertising and marketing game, didn't they last week? So, yeah, they created some adverts, poking fun at Open AI and their adverts that are going to be coming to chat. which were pretty hilarious, to be fair.

Katie: Yeah. Yeah,

Noel: I did enjoy those.

Katie: Yeah. If you haven't seen those ads, do go and check them out. They are very entertaining. And it was a report that Sam Altman didn't really get it because his defence was something like, that's not how they're going to work.

Noel: Yes. Yes. He initially said that he found them funny.

Katie: Okay.

Noel: He did laugh at them.

Katie: Yeah, because they were funny.

Noel: They were. They were hilarious, yeah. But he did, my other say, it was like, well, it's a bit disingenuous how anthropical showing how these ads are going to be done when we've clearly said that they're not going to impact the user response, which for me is the entire point of satire. It's not, you know, it wouldn't be funny if it was, you know, a true. representations.

Katie: Exactly, exactly.

Noel: Well, one thing that we, I think we both found quite funny is the responses that were simulated from chat TPT. That was the funniest part. And Sam Altman completely missed that in his response.

Katie: So yeah. So for anyone who hasn't seen this ad, it's of a, would you say, university professor and a student?

Noel: Yeah, they've got four.

Katie: Yeah, that is one of them. I've only seen one. So the one that I've seen is a student in a lecture hall. And the university lecture, like, comes to help her because she's got questions. So the student is obviously, like, the user. And the university lecture is the AI. It's chat chit.

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: And so she asks a question. and the lecture basically responds exactly how chat chvety would respond to you. So like, oh, that's a great idea. And stuff like that.

Noel: Absolutely. You've got this bang on. Yeah.

Katie: And then so the student is asking like another question. And the university lecturer, aka the AI chat chachapit, then starts going in. to adverts as it's talking as he's given a response to the student. It's very funny, very entertaining. But yeah, Sam Hortman's come back to that was like, well, it's not going to work like that. And it's like, we know, but it's just funny. It's entertaining.

Noel: Exactly. Yeah. Don't take it too seriously.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: My favourite was how to communicate with your mum better. So it was like a almost like a therapy session so this guy was asking how he could be communicate better with his mum and stuff that and then it kicked into an advert about a mature dating site where he could chat with mature ladies all the time wow

Katie: wow yeah that was very

Noel: that was very cheeky I did enjoy

Katie: that I must go and find the others because yeah like I said I've only seen one and that was the university lecturer and student. And that was so entertaining. So, yeah, I must go and have a look at the others.

Noel: Yeah, they're on Anthropics YouTube channel if you

Katie: want to check them

Noel: out.

Katie: Okay, I will. And if you're listening to this and you've seen the adverts, or you're going to go and watch those adverts, come and let us know which one is your favourite as well.

Noel: Yeah, definitely.

Katie: Yeah, let us know in our LinkedIn group, our free LinkedIn group, we'll put the link in the name of it below. So you can come and join. It's free to join and everyone's welcome. So, yeah, that would be really entertaining.

Noel: Definitely, yeah.

Katie: Okay, so Noel, this week, we are talking all about how to improve your business using AI in 2026.

Noel: Yeah, there's a lot we can do these days, isn't it? Yes.

Katie: So we're going to start. with a basic, but a basic that's going to have a huge impact, I personally believe. And then we're going to go into some more, like, advanced things that people can do, but all things that you can do to help improve your business. Use an AI in 2026 because who doesn't want that?

Noel: I certainly do.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: Definitely.

Katie: Yeah, I think, I think, as well, like, we all want to not only improve our businesses, but also, like, improve ourselves. So, like, we're better business owners for our clients. That's something that's really important to me.

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: And obviously, being, like, a community manager and community strategist, like, that just comes in place so much for me, because it's kind of like, how can I keep making this a better experience? How can I, you know, want the person to stay? How, you know, how can I make them feel safe or make it, you know, make them understand that I'm a safe person to be around and things like that? So all of these things to me are like really important. And yeah, I'm really excited that we're going to be talking about these today.

Noel: Yeah, definitely.

Katie: Okay. So let's start with the first one. Can I say what it is? And then you can, you can tell people, okay, because I'm excited about this one.

Noel: Oh, good.

Katie: Because it's so, such a small tweak.

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: But we'll make a massive difference.

Noel: It's huge.

Katie: Night and day. Yeah. So the first thing you can do to improve your business is. in 2026 using AI is to stop using ChatGBT for your content, for your emails, for writing blogs, social media content, or even if you're not using it to write the whole post, just, you know, the idolization. Yeah,

Noel: that is, yeah. Yeah.

Katie: And it's to start using Claude.

Noel: That's a very controversial first point topic.

Katie: I know. And I should say as well, we haven't been paid.

Noel: No.

Katie: We're not sponsored. We don't have any affiliation with anything that we are going to say on this podcast. We are very clear on all of this. This is our personal opinions. Obviously, Noel and I use AI on a regular basis, not just for our businesses, but the client businesses as well. And obviously we help our clients within our membership as well, the AI Business Club. So we would just have a lot of knowledge and insights. Yeah.

Noel: We've been around a bit.

Katie: Speak for yourself. Gosh. Yeah, so no, tell us why we should stop using Chachipit. and start using Claude for our businesses?

Noel: So I think like the first thing is the type of responses which you're going to get back from Claude versus ChatGPT. I think once you've given it a go, it's completely different. You know, you'll feel that it's a lot more professional. You're not just going to get the same generic sort of stuff out. You know, like everybody that creates post. on chat dbt you can kind of these days spot it you know if they haven't interjected any you know anything original into their prompts

Katie: yeah you can kind of easy spot yeah because we're not just talking about oh you can spot chat chachypt content because of the m dashes and stuff like that we're not worried if you're using AI to write your content that is not what we're talking about

Noel: exactly yeah yeah and i and when it comes to this sort of content as all i mean this something you mentioned to me the other week, wasn't it, where you're not arguing with the AI to get what you want. You're not saying, can you produce me this? And then you look at it and go, well, that's not what I asked for it. It goes, oh, yeah, you're right. Oh, well, maybe I should. It's like, just get it right the first time. And I think when you switch to Claude, you do get that right first time, don't you?

Katie: Yeah. So for me, I think Chachybtee is great, but certainly. things. But writing business content, I don't think it's good at all. No.

Noel: No, definitely not.

Katie: I would use it for other things, definitely, 100%. I'm not saying, like, personally, don't ever use Chachypiti again. I'm not. But I think for me, Claude is so much better for business content.

Noel: So much better, yeah.

Katie: Yeah, because I was like a few weeks. weeks ago, I was just like, what is going on with chat GPT? And I think I've even said it on the podcast. It's like, I was getting really frustrated because I was like, you're not listening to me. It was like I was talking to you at times now.

Noel: Well, you know, yeah.

Katie: When you're like, oh, what, what you're doing? I was like, I've told you. Clearly not listening. Clearly not listening again.

Noel: Not even a super intelligent AI is not listening either. Yeah.

Katie: Yeah, I'll chat you to think clearly about. Yeah. So I find, found switching to Claude, one of the best things that I've done to help my business, because I'm not asking it to write all of my content. Sometimes I'm like, I've got this idea or I've got like these first few sentences, you know, and I need. some ideals to finish this content or this email you know this is what I want to achieve from it and I just find I don't have to keep going no try again or yeah yeah I mean it's just like oh yeah

Noel: yeah where

Katie: you were so much time

Noel: yeah because you were asking for like specific structure wasn't it and within the within the post and it just wasn't following it but yeah Claude just, yeah, he nails it every single time, doesn't he?

Katie: Yeah, because it's well, like Chachibit has a very set format on how it writes your piece of content. And it was just like, I don't, I don't speak like that or I don't write like that. And I was telling it not to do that. And it was doing it. And I was like, type and I was like, I know. and it was just going to that and it was just like la la la la la and you were like you're right you did tell me that okay and then it'd be like okay yes oh i'll i don't know rewrite it or something and then it would do exactly the same mistakes and i was like no

Noel: It's a nightmare, isn't it?

Katie: I don't get that with Claude at all.

Noel: No, no. And there's a couple of other cool features, as well as it's writing ability. There are some other really handy bits in there that they've added in quite recently, which I think for businesses would be really helpful. And I guess the first one is, you know, you can integrate directly into Excel. So if you've got, I don't know, most businesses, if not every business has got a spreadsheet somewhere. So no longer do you need to. to figure out really complicated financial formulas or anything like that. Claude can just go off and build them directly using Excel and export them. So they're all ready to go, which is, that's going to save so many people so much time.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: If you deal with spreadsheets. Yeah.

Katie: Yeah. And as well, like the learning curve from using Chachabit to Claude is zero.

Noel: yeah definitely

Katie: you think oh i've got to learn how to use claude no you've literally just got to open up a different browser or a different app that's it yes

Noel: definitely yeah yeah yeah there's actually no difference in cost either really if you're on a paid subscription you want to switch so the subscription plans are very very similar um yeah if not a little bit cheaper on the higher plans

Katie: yeah but i would say actually the free version of claude is better than the free version of chat chief meeting.

Noel: Oh, Miles Betty, yeah.

Katie: Definitely, yeah. Yeah.

Noel: But I think another real cool feature they bought out recently is Claude Co-work. So if you have a MacBook and it's got the new Mac chips in there so you don't have an Intel processor, you've got a brand new laptop, then you can use co-work so that would control like your browser and it would have access to files that you give access to not like open claw last week where it has everything you know we can say no only work in this folder i don't want you look at anywhere else and you know you can put in some like kind of complex instructions and it will go off and then break all of that down and say right well to do this long task i need to do these 10 tasks in a row and you can just swipe off of that and just let it go off and do its thing.

Katie: Right.

Noel: I think it will

Katie: just go through step

Noel: by step. Yeah.

Katie: I mean,

Noel: it will open your files. It will read them. It will edit them. It can go on like your browser so it could, you know, be searching for competitors or doing any sort of online analysis or, you know, you know, while you're, you know, busy chatting to clients and, you know, making sure they're happy.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: You know, your co-work is off doing something completely different, which, you know, you just don't have time for, which is brilliant.

Katie: Love it. Yeah. Okay. So the next thing that we're going to talk to talk about about improving your business using AI in 2026 is all around reports, quotes, and proposals. Yeah.

Noel: So this is kind of what always usually come across with customers is, you know, great. They've got, you know, a pipeline. They've got leads coming in. but they've got that bottleneck of creating all of these documents. They've usually in a similar format, and, you know, it just takes forever sometimes to get them out.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: Just for a human being to sit there, type it away, go, oh, you know, it could get quite frustrated a bit mundane, you know. And AI doesn't need a cup of tea or a glass of water, you know. It just carries on, you know, it doesn't need a break, it doesn't need lunch. so you know yeah we could use AI to you know speed up that entire process and give your customers a better experience I suppose yeah

Katie: and you've got a really cool example as well from someone that you met at an AI event do you obviously not naming names or businesses um you know let's just mention like the industry and stuff and what what they're actually doing because I feel like it's really, really cool what they're doing.

Noel: Yeah, so they go around looking for, you know, large industrial buildings. So it could be a data center, it could be a factory. And they go off and then pitch them for solar panels. So they go around Google Maps, which I think is crazy, really. They go around Google Maps and they measure the roof sizes of these big buildings and then go, right, that one is. one's too small, that's not worth bothering with. This one's massive. Yes, we'll go with that one. But what they do is basically they've got an automation where they can have a conversation with that particular owner of the building and that then kicks off that the proposal generation. And within that, it's creating some incredible content. So it creates like a 24 page brochure, which they do tweak it a bit at the end where they add in images of the actual building and

Katie: they've got

Noel: some placeholders to get you started but you know there's some like really really complicated formulas this automation and AI are up to so you know they get like the full return of investment they get in the square footage you know how many panels is it going to need how much of this is it going to need and yeah it was just mind boggling the amount of data that was being put out in this report. And they were saying that to create that manually would take hours. You know, like this guy who was talking about is,

Katie: I don't have

Noel: time to sit around and do that. He said, I need to be on the road, on the phone, you know, talking to other businesses and getting them in instead of creating all of the same thing every time. So, yeah, these reports are being created. Yeah, they just run it live. And I think it took about two minutes.

Katie: Why?

Noel: Which is absolutely baffling, isn't it?

Katie: Two minutes instead of like two days.

Noel: Exactly, yeah. And all he's got to do is go in and, you know, just triple check everything, make sure everything's in the right place. And, you know, it's a very quick review, basically. And then just go, yeah, that's fine, send, done.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: And yeah, they were getting in front of customers, you know, just, well, they were winning customers, sorry, just by getting in there first.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: So one client, you know, they were talking. talking about saying they didn't get back to them straight away because they were waiting for somebody else to give them a comparable quote. But they'd waited like two months and a while this just isn't going to happen. So we're just going to have to go with you. Because, you know, you produced it in like two days, you know. It's obviously took a bit of time for him to get through on his to-do list. But, you know, that was still far, far quicker than what anyone else could do it. I can imagine.

Katie: Amazing. So yeah. Yeah.

Noel: Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really helpful. Doing that sort of thing. it gets you in the door really quick, doesn't it? Yeah.

Katie: And then what would that would be? So you would create an agent or?

Noel: No, that was just a plain automation. Yeah, you didn't need an agent for that.

Katie: Plain, good old fashion, AI automation. Yep.

Noel: And if I remember rightly, they didn't have that many modules in there either. They were, they had like their own API set up, somewhere, service set up. They did all the complicated. calculations, but within Make it was like eight modules

Katie: at a Google sheet, Google slides.

Noel: That was it.

Katie: Great.

Noel: It was really straightforward.

Katie: But yeah,

Noel: incredibly powerful.

Katie: Great. Amazing.

Noel: Okay.

Katie: So the next one we are going to talk about is data insights for clients. So you know who to target and maybe like even what to say in your marketing to attract

Noel: more clients exactly yeah yeah there's all kinds of things we can do with that where we can connect in automations just plain linear automations you know or we could even have an agent in there that will go off and do this for you so you know you could sit there and chat to your CRM in plain language i think that's kind of quite powerful in a way because that agent can see things that you don't necessarily see on the big spreadsheet view that you would have in your CRM.

Katie: It can

Noel: spot those patterns and things like that and then, you know, relay that back to you and go, well, you know, maybe you should be going down this path because, you know, if these four customers, they really like this, maybe that's an avenue to explore. So, yeah, it can be incredibly powerful to have that. Obviously, I would say, you do to be a little careful with an agent in your CRM, make sure you're not giving it access to edit or delete stuff that you don't want deleted and things like that. So that's all configurable. So, yeah. Okay. Yeah, you don't want it going rogue.

Katie: No. But I just feel like that's great for looking at those patterns.

Noel: Mm.

Katie: So, you know, if it is someone that you're, someone's business where you are doing outreach, then you're really clear on actually who it is that you are trying to target or if you even want to then use those patterns to, you know, then create marketing, so social media posts, emails, blogs, substack, whatever it is, then it's going to really help you attract your clients quicker and faster because you'll know exactly like what keeps coming up in exactly how you help them as well.

Noel: Absolutely, yeah.

Katie: I love that so much. Yeah, yeah.

Noel: It's kind of like if you want to sit there and do that manually, like you just got to think out how long would it take you to go row by row, especially if you've got a really big business, you know.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: And then not only ingest all of that, but then find those patterns and

Katie: things of the data.

Noel: I mean, there's people that get paid a lot of money to do that.

Katie: But now we can use AI. instead.

Noel: Exactly, yeah. You don't need some crazy contractor to bring in to do all that for you, so.

Katie: No, no.

Noel: No, that's cool. Brilliant.

Katie: Okay, so the next one that we're going to be talking about is using AI to automate your follow-ups, because everyone always says is all about following up with people. But sometimes we forget, we don't have time, you know, things happen,

Noel: you know. Exactly, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you could have back-to-back calls all week, you know.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: So, yeah, you just haven't got into your inbox and found stuff. But, yeah, we can easily use AI, it doesn't have to be an agent, just the standard automation that could, like, go through your inbox and, you know, find those customer emails and basically start looking back and then going right well have they responded yet yes or no i mean it could also be looking in your CRM not just your inbox um so we could say well it's been five days you haven't heard anything uh and then we can use also AI to tailor the response back so it could be talking to them and saying well this is what we quoted you for and you know uh and include information about the business or whatever job you're wanting to do for them. So it comes across as if, you know, the human being sent it. But really, it was your AI's gone off and done that for you. But obviously, you probably won't want it to send straight away. So I always say with our emails, just put it in your drafts. I mean, it's a lot quicker just to read a draft and click send than it is to, well, definitely for me anyway, to sit down and think how to respond to an email and then send it.

Katie: Yeah, for sure.

Noel: Yeah, it's a pain for me, that is.

Katie: I don't think you alone either. I think a lot of people really struggles with, you know, struggle with emails and, you know, sitting down and thinking, okay, right, I need to follow up this one. Even if you do have a template, sometimes it is just really hard to,

Noel: you know,

Katie: just sit down and go, right, I've got to write all of these emails and things like that. So, yeah.

Noel: Yeah, it gets Tyson, doesn't it? it after a while.

Katie: Yeah, it really does.

Noel: Although necessary.

Katie: Yeah, very necessary.

Noel: Yeah. Okay.

Katie: So our very last recommendation for how to improve your business using AI in 2026 is AISCO.

Noel: Mm.

Katie: Yeah. And we have spoken about this on the podcast in Susan 1 where we have lovely Milan to join us. And she told us all about how to, you know, Do your own AI SEO. But, yeah, tell us, tell us more now. Be those who haven't listened to that episode, which, by the way, we will link below. Because if you haven't listened to it, it will blow your mind, like the amount of information that Milano gives away or worry.

Noel: So with AI, as we're going through these days, a lot of people are starting to use this more as a search engine than they would Google, or they're using it like it is Google.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: So every large language model platform right now has the ability to do research or just a generic search. So getting your AI SEO right means that your business will start showing up more and more within those sort of results. So if you've got customers that are going to be using AI platforms to find out answers and things like for specific products and services, then maybe start to look to tailor your AISEO strategy and making sure that you're showing up in those results because it's only going to get bigger and better as we go through. But one thing that we found when we did it on our website was not only did we get more, you know, citations within perplexity, Chachabitin, Claude, we're also getting, you know, more generic traffic from Google as well. So it's not like a trade-off between traditional SEO and AI SEO. They're not, they kind of go hand in hand, I think. You know, if you're boosting one, it kind of helps the other. So, yeah, I mean, our impressions went up like 1,300% in like a couple of days. I was like, wow, okay, this is, you know, pretty impressive, but it's only got better since. So, you know, I'd say it's probably. one the most important things to get right as we go forward with our businesses. You know, you're going to be finding more customers that will find you via these AI tools as they start to use them. Yeah, really important.

Katie: Yeah. I agree. Amazing. So that was all of our recommendations on, you know, what AI or how to use it to improve your business in 2026. We hope you found it helpful. If you would like more things to help you improve your business in 2026 using AI and automations, agents, in chatbots, then we would love for you to come and check out our membership over on the school platform for AI Business Club, where Noel teaches you step-by-step how to do all of this. It's suitable for the very beginners. And also, you know, you're already creating automations, then you are very welcome to join in there. We've got people in there from all sorts of backgrounds and abilities as well. So again, we'll leave the link for you below. Thank you so very much for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode and we will catch you next time for another episode very soon. Take care.