Learn how to turn generative AI into your ultimate thinking partner, chief of staff, and second brain—saving time, money, and mental bandwidth.

Blog Post

In this episode of Two Marketing Moms, Kelly Callahan Poe sits down with Marnie Wills, founder of Business with AI Strategist, to explore how professionals can use AI as a creative partner—not a replacement. Marnie’s mission is to make AI adoption fun, practical, and deeply human.

Key Takeaways

1. Treat AI as your “second brain.”
AI isn’t just for data or automation—it can act as your Chief of Staff. Marnie connects her favorite tool, Claude AI, to her calendar, inbox, and even her kids’ school emails. It helps her plan the week, manage family logistics, and even track when they last had sausage and mash!

2. Keep a human in the loop.
AI can make work faster, but it’s our human judgment and creativity that keep it ethical and authentic. Marnie encourages leaders to add their expertise and voice to every AI output—so the next generation’s AI learns from real human insight, not recycled machine content.

3. AI can make work (and life) more fun.
Marnie challenges listeners to develop an “AI-first mindset.” Before tackling a task, ask: Could AI help me do this better or more creatively? She uses AI to brainstorm, build websites, create proposals, and even help her kids make interactive school projects.

4. Free up time for what matters.
By offloading admin and repetitive work, AI gives us back mental bandwidth to focus on creativity, relationships, and meaningful human connection.

5. The future is wearable.
Marnie predicts that the smartphone’s days are numbered. The next wave? AI wearables and agents that integrate seamlessly into our daily lives—helping us manage tasks, conversations, and ideas in real time.

Final Thought

AI isn’t replacing us—it’s reshaping how we work and connect. When used intentionally, it helps us think deeper, act faster, and spend

Episode Recap

Kelly Callahan-Poe

If you want to learn how to turn AI into your ultimate thinking partner and second brain, this episodes for you. Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms podcast. I’m Kelly Callahan-Poe and today’s episode is called Work Smarter with AI with Marnie Wills. Marnie’s on a mission to make AI adoption fun, practical, and human, helping people use intuitive workflows to boost creativity, efficiency, and balance. Welcome, Marnie.

Marnie Wills

Kelly thanks so much for having me.

Kelly

Thanks for squeezing in the time. I appreciate it. I did a little research, and I found out from the most recent Pew Research Center poll that 62 % of US adults are already interacting with AI several times a week. So basically, most everyone has had some experience with AI. Since most of us are familiar with the basics of AI tools and chat GPT, what are some practical examples of AI workflows that we may not be aware of?

Marnie

Practical examples that we may not be aware of is the fact that you can customize your AI to potentially be your chief of staff and connect to all of your emails, your calendars, all of your meeting notes. It can be that second brain and that second person to help you, when I say person, like a second person would, to be able to help you every day.

And for me, my Chief of Staff AI that I’ve got set up, I actually use Claude AI, which is my favorite AI. And Claude connects to all of my emails, including all of the emails I get from the school, my children’s school, which I sometimes feel can take up a lot of admin time. So, my Chief of Staff Claude AI goes in and helps me at the start of every week–think about any due dates that are due from not only from work, but for life as well. And also helps us plan our food and our eating plan because we update what we eat throughout the week. And my children are fussy and, but also quite picky from the terms of, we had sausage and mash the other week. And I’m like, I’m sure we had it three weeks ago. And I go straight to Claude, when did we last have sausage and mash?

So that’s just an example of maybe a way, a workflow or a way to use AI that maybe we haven’t all thought about.

Kelly

How does it work, you have given Claude access to your email in terms of do you have it auto respond or because that makes that’s a little scary to me tell me how that works?

Marnie

Yeah, I don’t have auto respond. And I know there’s a lot of AI tools out there that you can have respond for you. I’m still a massive believer that we are in early days of AI and we still need the human in the loop. Plus, I don’t know whether we discussed this before, but I also believe that it’s our job as leaders in business, as moms, as know, business people, I think it’s our job to keep training AI for the next generation.

My children are four and eight. And I know that by the time they get to higher education, they’re to have an AI tutor and they’re to have many agents that work with them. But at the moment, generative AI has been trained on all of the human data up until now. And if we don’t use it ethically and we, we ask an AI to produce something for us and we don’t check over it. We don’t add our human domain expertise, which is our knowledge, our experience and our perspective on it. Then the AI is training on the AI.

And I don’t know about you, but I know it’s the smartest thing, but I would rather it keep training on our human, you know, expertise or just the way we like to talk as humans, right? And I think if we don’t, if we don’t start to think about that ethically, the way we use it by always having a human in the loop, especially when communicating with other humans, then I think we’re not using, we’re not being ethical users.

Kelly

That’s one of the biggest criticisms of AI. I there are many in that it can’t create original ideas or generate personal experiences or any of the emotional nuances that kind of define human connection. One of the things that you said when we chatted earlier is that AI creates a space for more human connection rather than less. Can you tell me what this means?

Marnie

Well, I’m speaking for myself, but I spend a lot of my time doing basic admin tasks that I could potentially be collaborating with an AI to do so that I can do it quicker, faster and potentially more creative, right? Which means that when I have outsourced or leveraged AI to help with those admin tasks, I’m going to have more free time, hopefully, for that interaction. But not only the time, but I’ve also got less mental load. have released, you know, I feel like I’m in control. And sometimes when you feel like you’ve got clarity and you’re in control of situations, you can relax more and you can have, you know, a better conversation or you can be more present, in your day to day life, because you’re not consumed about all the things you’ve got to do or what’s coming up or thinking, trying to solve a problem. and I think if we can strategically use AI from that perspective, we not only will have more time, but the quality of time that we have to have human to human connection will be much better quality. And I think we’re just gonna be more present. And I really am hoping, and I don’t know if we discussed this already, but I really am hoping that the smartphone only has five more years left in it. I would quite like to ditch my phone and be using something else.

Kelly

What do you imagine that you would use instead of the smartphone?

Marnie

Yeah, I think we’re going to have wearables that we talk to. So, we’re to have agents connected to us, whether that’s on a, you know, in a glasses on a watch, you know, already there’s quite a lot of, kind of devices out there that you could just stick on and listens to you all day. And then it helps be, you know, the, the extra you that was in the room. So, you can ask, I was in the room with Kelly. We had a nice conversation, about, AI and life, you know, helped me write a post about what we discussed or help me talk about a way we can collaborate or add value or something like that. It’s having an AI with you all the time. There’ll be pros and cons for that, don’t get me wrong. I think because I believe we’re moving to a world of AI agents where agents will be given tasks trained on human data and they’ll be able to do those tasks for us as well as by having digital agents and we’ll also have humanoids in our house doing a lot of our tasks for us, driverless cars. I think that because we’re heading in that direction, I do think that we will be able to hopefully have a weight off our shoulders. For me, get rid of that phone and maybe have a wearable device on which I could talk to people and agents.

Kelly

Well, I’m grateful that I’m not a teenager moving into those years because a lot of your privacy is taken away, I would assume.

Marnie

Yeah, yeah, definitely. But then we saw that as well with social media, I mean, social media has completely changed our human operating system. It’s changed our human communication system. It’s changed the way we view ourselves, the way we view others. You know, it’s definitely got its pros and its cons. And for me, there’s way more cons than pros. But, you know, we might be saying the same with about AI in 10 years’ time as well, right?

Kelly

That’s absolutely true. You specialize in the customization of AI tools, and you mentioned when we last chatted that this can make work feel more enjoyable. Can you elaborate on that? Is that what you meant in terms of because it’ll give you more time?

Marnie

Yeah, so I like to talk about having an AI first mindset. So, whenever I need to do any task, and this is in life and business, I think to myself, have I got a customized AI that can collaborate with me to do this task more efficient, maybe more creative, and maybe, and I like to say like, make it fun. Like, because sometimes when the work that we need to do, it feels like a drag. Like for example, yesterday I had to create a new AI transformation program for a business, for an industry I hadn’t worked with before. And normally I think I would have been like, but for me, I’m like, great. I’ve got this template, and I have an AI already trained in my transformation and I get to do loads of deep research into this industry. Like I’m going to learn something new. This is really exciting. Then I’m going to go onto Lovable, which is a vibe coding platform. And I’m just going to start talking to the agent on Lovable and telling the, telling the agent what I think I want.

And here’s all the information I’ve got and helped me create a pitch deck basically, but I wanted it to be via an interactive website. And that was fun for me because it’s something new, but I don’t feel like I feel superhuman because I’m not doing it on my own, right? And I’m actually doing it with a customized AI. And what I mean by that is this AI is trained; it’s got extra knowledge base. I call it a second brain. if you think about

If you think about it as a person, say you have a new employee you’re working with and their role is customer service, what information do you need to give them about a business and their role to make sure that they can fulfill that role? That is the second brain. So that’s the knowledge base. And then the extra step in customization is adding instructions. So, you’d say to the new customer service employee, you’re an expert customer service employee. You always respond like this. You are able to do X, Y, Z, you know, like it’s almost their job description almost, you know, so here’s the knowledge base, here’s their job description, and that becomes your customer service. If you think about customizing your AI exactly like that, because these large language models, say ChatGPT, the basic chat is awesome, and the memory is really good. So, it’s great, but you’ve got to take it to that next level and add a knowledge base, so a second brain, and add some custom instructions.

And then try and have, I don’t want to go overboard and say as many as possible. I try to, in terms of business, block it into like buckets. So, I might have like a personal bucket around like my thought leadership, my chief of staff, you know, my personal family, family time, you know, and then I might have a lead generation sales and marketing bucket. So, I might have a couple of AI assistants in there that do lead gen or help with my marketing content.

And then I might have the customer journey bucket of delivery to clients and creating new proposals and templates. So, I’ll have trained, like customized and trained AI within each of those buckets. So, you don’t want too many, but you want enough of which you can, every time you think, oh, I’ve got to do a task, think, what trained customized AI can I use to collaborate with me to make this more efficient, more creative and more fun?

Kelly

So, you have different AIs for different purposes. Are they all within Claude or different platforms?

Marnie

Yeah, so my go-to is Claude, but I also use Perplexity. Perplexity is very similar to Google in terms of search. It’s absolutely amazing. But its inbuilt AI model is called Sona, which is fantastic. But when you’re on the paid version of Perplexity, are they amazing? Yeah. But on the paid version, you can actually change the model.

So, you can use any ChatGPT. Well, I think there’s only ChatGPT 5 now anyway. Claude, Gemini, I think you can even use DeepSeek in there, which is the Chinese model. So, you can change the model, and you can also create spaces, which if you’re a ChatGPT user, you would know as projects. So, when I say you customize it through a project, you can do the same on Perplexity via spaces. So, I’ll have quite a few different spaces set up.

My biggest one is kind of market analysis and industry research, because I have to know a lot about AI in different industries. So, I have different spaces for that. And then when I am able to save the information into the spaces and in terms of customizing, I’ll be able to change the model. So, if I want to write an email sequence, you know, focusing on a particular industry and trying to add value from that perspective, I’m going to change the model to Claude, because we know Claude’s great at writing. If I need to be like maybe create some educational content, I’m probably going to go to Gemini. Like you can change the model of which you use in perplexity. So, perplexity is probably my other go-to in terms of where I’ve got my customized AI. then, know, chat GBT, everybody uses ChatGPT, has had some new features out this week, which is, which is really exciting. And, you know, you would be silly not to be using ChatGPT. But I have to admit, I don’t love the vibes in ChatGPT. I like to be creative with ChatGPT and it’s very easy to create GPTs to be sharing with people. that’s definitely a great opportunity and the deep research is really good in there, but it’s probably my third go-to.

Kelly

I guess I hadn’t thought of different GPTs for different types of topics or areas, education versus writing and that sort of thing. So that’s interesting that you have been able to have the time to discover that between the various ones.

Marnie

Yeah, again, I think it just comes down to like that AI first mindset that I mentioned, you know, I’m like, okay, you know, I really want to be able to collaborate with an AI here. Do I have a… Can I build one? So, yeah.

Kelly

One of the ones that you mentioned was something called Lovable. Can you tell me about that?

Marnie

Yeah, so have you heard of the phrase vibe coding?

Kelly

No.

Marnie

OK, so Vibe coding is the ability for a human to talk in natural language, so to vibe with an agent, an AI agent, and then the AI agent will go and write the code, so build the website or build an app. And here’s a really interesting stat for you. Apparently, only 1% of the population can code. But in June 2025, 10% of the websites that went live in the world were vibe coded, which means the human spoke to an agent and the agent then coded the website for them and then they press publish. So, a really easy platform to use is called Lovable.dev. It’s super, super easy to use and it’s really fun. you know, I showed somebody the other day, was a, they were a HR consultant, and they created a PDF for clients, like as a lead magnet around different communication styles for different generations. So, baby boomers, millennials to Gen Z. it was really interesting. Like it was a really good PDF, but if you don’t love opening PDFs and if you don’t love reading it, basically if you’re a Gen Z, you’re just going to look at that and go, you know. So, I was like, well, this is good for them.

Baby boomers who might, you know, just be able to open the PDF and I’m stereotyping here. So, you know, I’m trying, I’m not trying to be rude. I’m just trying to paint the picture. So, the baby boomers might be like, oh, do I have to download this? You know, and then the millennials are like, Oh, sweet, cool. I’m looking at a PDF and then the Gen Z is like, this is boring. I can’t be bothered looking at it. Right. So, we have to try and create it in a different format. So, I just uploaded it to lovable, put some information about the business in there you know, with the logos, so attached the logo and the website and put the details in there. And then just said, look, I want to make this really interactive. I want it to be able to appeal to all generations. I want it to be a go-to web page for this business to set them above the rest. And off it went, created me a HR kind of website that was interactive for the different ways that each of the generation liked to communicate. And there was like a little quiz you could do as well. And then you just press publish and she just shared it with her clients. So, it was fun.

Kelly

Wow, I thought I was up to date on all this stuff, and I clearly have a lot to learn and explore. So, I will definitely do that. Are there any final secrets of AI and customizations that you want to give us in terms of tips and tricks?

Marnie

Yeah, I mean, I’d love to share, some of the things I’ve created for my eight-year-old daughter, because I think sometimes, you know, just sharing how you’re using it in day-to-day life, I think is quite fun. So, my eight-year-old, she created on Google slides, like a PowerPoint around about the Aztecs, it was part of her project, and she had to like find information and know, get Google images and all of that stuff. So, they were teaching them Google Slides at school, which is great. And then she came home and she showed me, I thought, that’s amazing. I said, do you want to make a website from that? She’s like, yeah. I’m like, okay. So, we went to Gamma, G-A-double-M-A dot app free. And all you do is you upload the Google Slides, and it creates a website. You can create a website, you can create like slides, you can create social media.

You can create whatever you just choose. And then she got to choose the colors. And then it did make up some things. So, it obviously took the content from the Google Slides, but it also then added extra information. So, then I taught her how to use Perplexity to check the information to make sure it was relevant. And then we started prompting the AI about the images because they come up with some dodgy, well, I wouldn’t say dodgy. I’d just say probably not eight-year-old appropriate images for Aztecs. was a bit scary faces, that type of thing. But again, that comes back to probably giving the instructions of, I need this to be pitched at an eight-year-old. And then, yeah, it took us about 30 minutes. It was so much fun. She absolutely loved it. And then all of a sudden, she was able to customize the website. So, she called it her name and Aztec project, which was so cool. And she’s like, is it a website? Can I send it to people? was like, yeah.

So, she had loads of fun with that. And then she loves maths, like a rhythmic maths, and it’s like a bit of a challenge. So, we created just by Google Apps. It was really easy. It’s free. I think it’s aiStudio.google.com. But you log in, because she’s got Google account already. She goes straight to the apps, and she just explained what she wanted. She wanted a 60 second timer for her age-appropriate maths questions.

We wanted to gamify it, like make it fun so she can write down her scores. So yeah, she played around with that like every other day and she, yeah, she loves it. So, there’s just some things that we’re able to create. She’s created some songs; she’s written some songs with ChatGPT and then put it into an app called Sunoand it’s played the music for her. you know, like she doesn’t need to be techie, she just needs to be open to be creative with new things. So, we have quite a lot of fun doing that around the many sports as you know, because I was running a little late to this podcast because I was picking her up from a sport. yeah, I think that’s always nice to share just so that, you know, it crushes any myths that, you know, you’re, you can’t, you’re too techie for AI or you don’t know how to use it because I promise you, if you, even if you just go to a AI and say, you know, I love languages, what can I create? You know, it’s going to help you, and it will even give you a step-by-step guide if you like. So. Yeah, it’s a great time to be alive with this amazing technology. But again, I’m a bit biased because I like to make AI fun and practical.

Kelly

Well, I love all of the advice and tips that you’ve given us today. They’re not just for professionals, but also for parents and for education as well. So, thank you so much for joining us. I’m going to put your contact information at twomarketingmoms.com and please check out our website and don’t forget to subscribe and share. Thank you for joining today.

Marnie Wills Contact Information

https://businesswithaistrategist.com

https://www.facebook.com/people/Business-with-AI-Strategist/61570182487853

https://www.instagram.com/businesswithai_strategist