Curious which AI tools we personally use and recommend most often?

Here are the AI tools we can't live without and that we use to run both of our businesses, Lean Out Method and Strategic Ops Institute. 

We know that there are so many valuable tools on the market with new ones being introduced every day, but like all things, we like to keep things simple and fully optimize a few incredible options instead of distracting ourselves with #allthethings.  These are our go-to's!

CastMagic*

What It Is: CastMagic helps you automate podcast post-production tasks like transcription, summary creation, and social media posts. With capabilities far beyond podcasting, it allows you to convert ANY audio into numerous forms of content that can be easily uploaded to other platforms. It can be used for meetings, coaching sessions, sales calls, etc.

How We Use It: This is our go-to tool for creating our podcast assets including our social media posts, blog posts, workbooks, and more. We also use it to pull out important content from team meetings, group coaching calls, trainings and workshops, etc. and turn it into shareable content. This is our primary tool for all content creation and repurposing, pulling from our original thought leadership content and avoiding all generic AI generated content.

Why We Love It: It saves us so much time and money per month, it's kind of ridiculous; we happily spend the $100 / mo investment.  It dramatically simplifies our content creation and works seamlessly with our lean content marketing and repurposing system by allowing us to save custom prompts that automagically generate exactly the content we need, in OUR VOICE.  It takes a little bit to "train" to capture your unique voice without any of the typical over-hyped and over-exaggerated AI language, but it's well worth the initial time investment and they provide a whole library of prompts to get started with where other people have done the training for you. 

Searchie Wisdom*

What It Is: Searchie Wisdom is a specialized ChatGPT that knows your content inside and out so it can provide interactive chat-based answers to customer questions and direct them to specific videos, audio files, or text where you cover the topic they are asking about.

How We Use It: We use Searchie Wisdom exclusively for our clients inside our Simplify to Scale program, our certification programs, and other digital programs.  It acts as Crista's clone, so people can chat with "AI Crista" in real time to get her answers to their business questions and quickly find the relevant training modules, templates, and toolkits available to them inside their online portal.

Why We Love It: It's quick and easy to administer and set up and easy for our clients to use. It saves us thousands of dollars a month in customer service costs, plus it improves our overall client experience.  It's a win-win, especially for a really low investment of $50 - $120 / mo (depending on which plan you choose).

ChatGPT Plus with Custom GPTs

What It Is: ChatGPT is a conversational AI that can chat with you, answer follow-up questions, and challenge incorrect assumptions. You can use it for just about anything but some of the most common uses are content ideation and creation, research and analytics, translating things into different languages, writing code, creating systems and processes, acting as your assistant, etc.

How We Use It: We develop and leverage custom GPTs to help us come up with content ideas and outlines, refine blog posts and presentations, conduct research, and create systems and processes, just to name a few. Note that we exclusively use ChatGPT Plus (not the free version) and we invest the time to "train" each of our custom GPTs for the purpose we created them. 

Why We Love It and a Word of Caution: There is so much that ChatGPT can do to help simplify and streamline your business operations and amplify your results, and we are continuously coming up with new ways to leverage it to save our clients (and ourselves) time and money! However, it can also provide incorrect data or create generic outputs that can cause more harm than good for your brand. If you use ChatGPT to create any content for you that you publish (i.e. instead of just helping you come up with ideas, you have it write content for you), invest the ~$20 / mo to get the paid version and invest the time to set up a custom GPT.  It will produce significantly better results that amplify your thought leadership instead of detracting from it. 

Claude.ai

What It Is: Claude is an AI assistant that can generate natural, human-like responses to users' prompts and questions. It can respond to text or image-based inputs and works well for analysis and summarizing data.

How We Use It: Although Claude has many uses, we use it to make our copy more concise and compelling, starting with long-form copy or even rough brainstorms.  

Why We Love It: It works great to create really concise content that actually sounds like you without all the over-hyped and over-exaggerated adjectives. Unlike most other tools that only have paid plans or that only work well with a paid plan, there is a lot you can do with the free version of Claude.  Should you decide to invest, it starts at only $20/mo. 

Otter.ai

What It Is: Otter is a meeting note taker and real-time transcription tool. 

How We Use It: We have been using Otter for many years and although Zoom and so many other tools have added this functionality, we still leverage Otter because it gives us the ability to record any conversation, including ad-hoc ones and those outside of Zoom, which we have often.

Why We Love It: It syncs with our calendar and our zoom account to quickly and automatically record and store meetings.  It stores all transcripts and audio recordings in one place making it easy to search and share. Like other tools, it provides a transcript synced to the audio file and summaries of the key takeaways, but unlike other tools, it can be started with the click of a button when you get an unplanned phone call or want to record an in-person conversation, meeting, or event (we use this to record our retreats!).

Curious which other tools we use and recommend?

Here are the other tools we can't live without and that we use to run both of our businesses, Lean Out Method and Strategic Ops Institute.  Most have AI functionality within them that we heavily utilize in addition to the tools listed above.

*Some of these are affiliate links, marked with an asterisk. If you sign up through one of those links you won't pay anything extra (sometimes you’ll even get a discount or bonus!), but I'll get a small commission or credit that helps me to keep delivering the amazing free content and resources provided on this site and our podcast! We only recommend tools that we personally use and trust. Click here to learn more about our affiliate disclaimer.