217 | The Stuff My Students Are Building With AI That's Lowkey Blowing My Mind

Speaker A: Hey. Hey, it's your coach, Candice. Okay. I have to tell you about something that's been happening inside my programs lately because it is genuinely making my week every single week. The women and folks that I get to coach have started building lots of incredible things with AI specifically with Claude. And I don't mean that they're just asking it to write Q cute captions or even making it smarter for their marketing. They are building actual tools that go off and do the work for them while they live their lives or focus on other things. They're building incredible dashboards and opportunities that help them to see certain blind spots in their business. And I, uh, really thought it would be so fun to share this with you in case you've been dabbling in AI or even using it more. Seriously. Seriously. And just kind of wondering, what are other people out there building? So today I just want to geek out with you. I thought we could use a light, fun episode that inspires you to start thinking about how you can use some of the tools that you either hear people talking about or that you might be under utilizing. And I'm going to walk you through a handful of some of the coolest things that people in my world are building right now. Sort of a show and tell. None of this requires you to be techie, which is the greatest part. And a good chunk of it is isn't even sort of wedding specific. Any business could start building some of these things. So wherever you're listening from, stick with me today because today's episode is for the wedding pro. Or really any business owner who keeps hearing you should be doing insert the blank with AI but has no real idea what that could look like. Like so let me show you. Let's get into it. Welcome back to the Power and Purpose podcast. If you're new here, I'm Candace. I'm your coach. I built and sold a six figure wedding planning business and now I get to spend my days helping incredible business owners like you build something that actually feels good to run and also make more money doing it. If you're new around here, do me a favor. Hit subscribe. Subscribe. Coming out with me and everyone else who listens to this podcast every single week. We're a great group of folks if I do say so myself. And if you've been here a while. Hi. Thank you. I'm so glad you're back. Thanks for being here with me for another week. I have a quick favor before we dig in. If you've got somebody in your orbit, in your Life. A business bestie who is either freaked out by all this AI stuff or who is just has a not fully wrapped their arms around it. You know exactly who I'm picturing in your mind. You're like, yep, I know who to send this to. Send them this episode. This is going to help them get inspired and allow them to see fun ways they can use AI to support them in their business without leasing out their thoughts, their skills and. And uh, allowing them to be more human in their business. Okay, so a tiny bit of context about today's episode. Everything I'm going to share with you is real stuff that's bubbling up inside my programs, whether it's Wedding Pro Insiders or the Planners playbook. And there are a couple of fun ideas that I am throwing in from my own business just to show you the range of what you can do and build inside Claude, specifically Claude Code and Claude Code Cowork. And I'm not on the sidelines. I have built many of these things in my own business. I have supported many of my students to build these things as well. I latched on to AI pretty early and I have been helping wedding pros do things with AI in their business, consistently inside Planners Playbook, which is for planners, but also inside my mastermind, Wedding Pro Insider. So here's the only thing I need you to believe in today before we start. Not one of the people that has supported this podcast with their ideas today is a coder, is a tech whiz, is somebody who is a digital savant. None of them are techie. They just got really curious about how they could solve a problem in their business using Claude. And they used Claude to figure out how to do this. Or certainly inside of our programs, we assisted them and supported them in getting this done. Okay, so I just want to say you don't need to be techie to do this. I think a lot. Almost all wedding pros I meet love to tell me that they're not techie and that they are not sure about the technical stuff. And here's a little coaching side note, that is not a good excuse anymore in the digital world of business and the way business is changing, you actually need to learn how to do some of these things and you would be better off if you did. So stop with that mindset that you're not a tech person, that you don't understand. Anybody can sit down and understand this. You just need the right coach or teacher to guide you. And outside of that, you also just need to get started. You just need to open up an app. Ah. And start using it and asking it, uh, questions of how you can better use it. That's the first. First step. Okay. All right, so let's get into some fun things that my students are building with AI. The first is something really cool that a lot of my students are doing. They're using Claude Cowork to skin their inbox and to support their sales process and to support more consistent sales activity. And this one gets me all in my feels because this is one of my operating standards for 2026. For you, my sweet podcast listener, and for the women inside my mastermind, where a lot of what we're doing, the work we're doing this year, is focused on those operating standards. I did a whole podcast episode on, uh, this. Go back and listen if you're curious or you have not listened to it. But, uh, on that note, one of my operating standards is you need to have a daily sales activity. You need to be daily in your inbox looking for opportunities, whether it's networking, a lead that landed in your inbox, a lead that went cold that you could follow up on. There are so many sales opportunities hiding in plain sight. And so on that note, some of the women that I coach took that quite literally and built out a scheduled task that helps them mine for sales opportunities in their inbox. How does it work? Well, they connected Claude coworkers to their inbox and their calendar, and they have taught it about their pricing, some of the standards they've set for what makes a good lead or a good inquiry. They have taught it about the services that they provide, and they have asked it to go into their inbox and seek out sales opportunities or to respond to leads and. And opportunities that are coming into their inbox for them. So what happens is Claude is trained on all of these awesome things in their business, and either daily or weekly, it's scanning their inbox, really, depending on volume. Some folks that I coach have a really large volume of leads coming in. Other people may have just one or two popping in a week. By the way, the amount, the volume does not equal success, by the way, but just wanted to share that. And so they have this scheduled to happen on certain days of the week, and it will go into their inbox, and it knows what to look for. It knows if a planner is referring a client to prioritize those leads. It knows how to respond to planners or how to formulate a draft response that then the business owner can go in and customize. It knows what to look for when a really hot lead comes through the inbox. It knows what to look for when following up with a lead. It is incredible what this can do. And if you're feeling inundated by opportunities in your inbox, or if you feel like you're not, not able to follow up with opportunities as much as you wish you could, this sales skill is really going to help you. I also find that, like, when Claude is giving you response opportunities and like researching all this for you, it takes the excuses away. It takes the excuses away. If you're just like dragging your feet on something or you're like, I know I should reach out to people, I know I should respond to this inquiry, I know I should respond to this person in my inbox, but I just don't have the energy or I don't, I just don't feel like it. This really breaks down some of those walls that we build up when we're burnt out, we're tired, we're uninspired, or we're just like, oh, I can't answer one more email. So if that is how you've been feeling lately, having this kickstart things for you and get responses or conversations 80% initiated is going to be so such an incredible skill for you to build. And this is going to get you excited about sales. Another fun, um, little side note here is, is that as they're building these skills and creating and deploying these things and allowing AI to fill in some of the blanks for them, they're getting re energized about the work. We're just talking about this in my own business Mastermind, where we're talking about Claude and skills and somebody brought up the question of, in my business Mastermind, like, is any of this doing anything? Like, we're building this stuff, but are we seeing an ROI? And several people shared the ROIs that they're seeing from a daily seal skill. And, uh, I chimed in and I was like, this is also getting me excited about certain things again that I wasn't excited about. And it's the same for several of my students. It's just getting you back in the game. It's a new way to look at things and sometimes all we need is a shiny new fun thing to get us just back doing the work. So that's the first is a daily weekly sales skill that is answering emails, looking for opportunities, and actually moving sales forward. Okay, then next is one of my personal favorites. And it is dashboards that allow people to see their data. I want you to Think about a piece of data that's meaningful to you. Maybe it is how well your SEO is performing. That is a metric that if you're spending a lot of money or a lot of time and attention on, you would really like to know how that data is working. Maybe it is referrals. You want to monitor where your referrals are coming from so you can pay attention to the 20% of people who are sending you 80% of your business. Another is, of course, financials. What are your best sellers? What are your money makers? What are your margins on certain services, certain products, the things that you offer? All this to say I've been watching lots of my students build in Claude what they call artifacts, which is essentially a dashboard that you can create and customize that pulls data from different sources and gives you a visual dashboard of that data. So people are building dashboards right now inside Claude that can pull all of this information onto one screen. And they're building dashboards around SEO. They're building dashboards around money and finances. They're building dashboards around sales. They're building dashboards around data and metrics that are really meaningful to them. And the beautiful part is you can open up your dashboard. Let's say you're opening up your 2026 sales dashboard. You open it up daily with your coffee. It is automatically refreshed because it connects to things like your QuickBooks. It can connect to your CRM, it can connect to your Stripe or whatever checkout system you might be using. It can even be connected to your bank account, your PayPal. And it gives a viewpoint of certain metrics that are meaningful to you. So you can open this up with your cup of coffee, and your whole business is sitting there looking back at you in your brand colors, with specific data points or metrics that are accurate and current that you have deemed to be really important. Bookings, revenue, leads that came in this month, how many of those leads turn into calls? How many of those calls turned into signed contracts? What you're actually netting per wedding, some of your social metrics or numbers? Maybe you've been running a really important campaign. Maybe you've been going all in on Instagram and you want to know how. What are the numbers telling me about what I'm putting out and my growth? The beautiful part is, is that cloud will build these dashboards for you. All you have to do is connect the tools that you're using. It will start building it for you, and it refreshes in real time because it's pulling real Metrics. It is incredible what you can do in Claude with artifacts and how intelligent this is and how helpful this actually is. So if you've been prioritizing sales, marketing or something in your business and you wish that you just didn't have to look at a boring, ugly spreadsheet, you can channel all those data and metrics into a spreadsheet and then have cloud make it pretty for you. I don't know about you, but I love looking at numbers in a visual way. It really helps me to understand those numbers better. And spreadsheets sometimes do not do it for me unless they have a visual component. So for me, this has been a game changer in my business. I've got a bunch of dashboards, but it's been so great watching my students build this for all different data points that are important to them in their business. Most of us are running our business on a gut feeling and whatever's in the bank today. So imagine being able to see the whole thing in one look right in your AI tool. The next thing people are building that I think is is going to blow your mind and give you so many ideas. And I feel like not enough people are thinking about how to use all this information and data. But a lot of my students have AI note takers joining their calls all the time. If you're a wedding planner or you're somebody heavily in logistics, invitation designers, being able to have an AI note taker like Fathom AI, which is what I use and recommend, attend your calls and provide sales summaries to do lists, tasks, even mail notes out after the call to parties involved is such a game changer. But not enough people are recognizing that these calls are a goldmind of information. I mean, think about how many conversations that you've had in a single week that all of those conversations just kind of vanish into the ether. Client calls, vendor meetings, sales meetings, opportunities. You hang up and most of what said is gone in an hour. But if you record the call using an AI tool and then Claude connects directly, directly to that AI tool, you don't have to copy and paste anything. It can connect directly to Fathom. If you can hand the transcript of that, uh, call to Claude a minute later, it's going to give you a breakdown. But it's also so much information that maybe you're not utilizing in smart ways. So my students are taking these call transcripts and they're mining for data. They're perfecting their sales process by looking at sales calls and having Claude give them feedback. They are Using these call transcripts to give them ideas around content they can post and things they can put out there to attract more of the right clients. They are using these calls to help them with rebrands, sales copy, website copy, building out landing pages for their business. If they're trying to target a new demographic, a new location, a new venue, and they want it to rank on Google, they're using these calls to mine for data. They're using these calls to help look for blind spots in their processes, to try to see where clients asking lots of questions or getting really stuck, that perhaps a process in their business isn't making certain things clear and this is an indication that they should fix that area of their business. Imagine you could take the last 100 client calls you've had, whether that has been over the last month or the last decade, and you could look for patterns and trends and information in those calls. What would you want to know? What would you want to be really intelligent about? What would you want to pull together and then ask Claude or your business coach or your team questions about? There are so many opportunities here. The lowest hanging fruit is to look at these calls and to be able to go and update certain things in whatever tool you're using as you work with clients. But the, the larger context of this is this can provide you with so much great information that will help you make smarter, more refined decisions about process selling, pricing, marketing, client experience, standards, boundaries, all the things in your business. Okay, the next one is a little spooky, but honestly, I think you're really going to appreciate what it can do. Okay, so this build takes a couple's inquiry and before you reply, Claude does research on their venue, their date, their vibe, from their socials, their budget tier, and any, anything else you ask Claude to research. And then it hands you a little brief. Think of it like a little card of information that goes beyond just what the client shared with you and basically gives you additional context and information you should consider in your response. It could say something like, this client is a great fit for this level of service. Here's why this is a great match. Here's an angle you can try when reaching, uh, back out to this client or responding. And so you can have Claude research the inquiries that are coming in for you and just providing a little bit more context so that you can respond more thought, thoughtfully and intentionally to your leads. I absolutely love this and I find that a lot of wedding pros are doing this naturally. You get a lead come through, you might Google their name, you might then go check out their social media just to get a feel for who they are. But imagine that Claude can do this for you. Pull their LinkedIn, get a little bit of details so that you kind of know who you're talking to and you don't feel like you are just talking to a stranger or an email, but you're talking to an actual person. It provides a lot more context, allows you to get some intel. And I think from the perspective of the work that we do, it can make our responses more meaningful and more intentional. And it gives us the feeling that we are actually talking to a person and not just a number in our inbox. But on that note, as we're investigating or doing research, people are also building a weekly competitor watch too, so it can check what your competitors might be doing, how their SEO might be doing, how they might be ranking for certain things, and drops a little summary for you each week. I do want to say you should be very careful with something like that. From the perspective of your own mindset, your own mental health, if you find that you compare yourself a lot to your competitors and you really get in your head, I would not suggest doing something like that. But if you can withstand some of the feelings that you might feel watching your competitors do awesome, amazing things, then this could be a really great way to stay plugged in to what other people are doing and how that might affect what you are doing. I think how I would use this in a thoughtful way would be to just understand what my competitors were doing out there in the world and asking myself, how could I show up differently to get noticed and to do something different. I love to zig when somebody zags. I love to be able to do something slightly different or vastly different than what my competitors are doing. So this could be a fun little skill or a fun little scheduled task for you. So lots of ideas. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many cool things that my students are building and so many cool things that we're building. Inside planners playbook with wedding planners and of course, inside my mastermind with all wedding pros. I would love to know out of everything that I just rattled off, which one made you go, okay, I want to go into Claude Cowork and have it build me. That I would love to hear from you. DM me M. If you have a question about how any of this works, you're welcome to reach out to me. If I can point you in the right direction, I certainly will. I do want to invite you if you're prioritizing using AI in your business and you are a wedding planner, you want my help building some of these things? You want to see how people are building some of these things? You want me to give you some of the keys to building these things? For instance, this week, inside Planners Playbook, we built a timeline skill that helps planners start their timeline and then also create multiple timelines from their master. If you want me to help you build some of these things, go and sign up for the wait list for Planners Playbook or reach out to me and let me know you would like to join. I'll send you the link now. Just a reminder, you don't have to build anything that I shared today. You don't have to try anything that I shared today. But I would love for you to test out one of these ideas, especially the one where you thought, that's really interesting. I'm really curious about that. That made me excited. I felt a little flutter in my stomach, like, ooh, that that's inspiring. Or something. That can, of course, save you time. All right, friends, thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I hope you enjoyed. I want to remind you there's so much power in your purpose. And I'll see you next week.