Work Smarter with Generative AI

Episode Transcript

Kelly Callahan-Poe: If you want to learn how to turn AI into your ultimate thinking partner and second brain, this episode is 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: The most recent Pew Research Center poll shows that 62% of US adults are already interacting with AI several times a week. Since most of us are familiar with the basics of AI tools and ChatGPT, what are some practical examples of AI workflows that we may not be aware of?

Marnie: 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 every day.

My Chief of Staff AI—I actually use Claude AI, which is my favorite—connects to all of my emails, including all the emails from my children's school, which can take up a lot of admin time. My Chief of Staff helps me at the start of every week think about any due dates from not only work but for life as well. It also helps us plan our food and eating plan. My children are picky, and the other week we had sausage and mash. I thought, "I'm sure we had it three weeks ago." I go straight to Claude: "When did we last have sausage and mash?"

Kelly: How does it work if you give Claude access to your email? Do you have it auto respond? That's a little scary.

Marnie: I don't have auto respond. I'm still a massive believer that we're in early days of AI and we still need the human in the loop. Plus, I believe it's our job as leaders in business, as moms, as business people, to keep training AI for the next generation.

My children are four and eight. By the time they get to higher education, they're going to have an AI tutor. But generative AI has been trained on all of the human data up until now. If we don't use it ethically, if we ask an AI to produce something and we don't check over it, don't add our human domain expertise—our knowledge, experience, and perspective—then the AI is training on AI. I would rather it keep training on our human expertise or just the way we like to talk as humans.

Kelly: One of the biggest criticisms of AI is that it can't create original ideas or generate personal experiences or any of the emotional nuances that define human connection. But you said that AI creates a space for more human connection rather than less. What does that mean?

Marnie: I spend a lot of my time doing basic admin tasks that I could be collaborating with an AI to do quicker, faster, and potentially more creative. When I've outsourced or leveraged AI to help with those admin tasks, I'm going to have more free time for interaction. But not only time—I've also got less mental load. I feel in control. When you have clarity and control, you can relax more and have better conversations, be more present.

If we can strategically use AI, we not only will have more time, but the quality of time for human-to-human connection will be much better. I really am hoping that the smartphone only has five more years left in it. I would like to ditch my phone and use something else.

Kelly: What do you imagine using instead of the smartphone?

Marnie: I think we're going to have wearables that we talk to. Agents connected to us, whether in glasses, on a watch, or devices that listen to you all day. So you could ask, "I was in the room with Kelly. We had a nice conversation about AI and life—help me write a post about what we discussed." It's having an AI with you all the time.

Because we're moving to a world of AI agents where agents will be given tasks trained on human data, we'll also have humanoids in our house doing a lot of tasks for us, driverless cars. I think we will be able to have a weight off our shoulders.

Kelly: You specialize in the customization of AI tools. You mentioned this can make work feel more enjoyable. Can you elaborate?

Marnie: I like to talk about having an AI First Mindset. Whenever I need to do any task—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, more creative, and make it fun?"

Yesterday I had to create a new AI transformation program for an industry I hadn't worked with before. Normally I might have been intimidated. But I'm like, "Great! I've got this template, I have an AI already trained in my transformation, and I get to do loads of deep research into this industry. I'm going to learn something new!"

Then I went onto Lovable, which is a vibe coding platform. I just started talking to the agent and telling it what I want. And that was fun because it's something new, but I don't feel like I'm doing it on my own. I'm doing it with a customized AI.

Kelly: What do you mean by customized AI?

Marnie: Think about it as a person. Say you have a new employee whose role is customer service. What information do you need to give them about the business and their role? That is the second brain—the knowledge base. Then you add instructions—almost their job description: "You're an expert customer service employee. You always respond like this. You are able to do X, Y, Z."

I try to block my customized AIs into buckets. I might have a personal bucket around thought leadership, my chief of staff, family time. Then a lead generation, sales and marketing bucket. Then a customer journey bucket of delivery to clients and creating proposals. Every time I think "I've got to do a task," I 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: My go-to is Claude, but I also use Perplexity. Perplexity is very similar to Google in terms of search—absolutely amazing. On the paid version, you can change the model—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, even DeepSeek. You can also create spaces, which if you're a ChatGPT user, you would know as projects.

If I want to write an email sequence, I'm going to change the model to Claude because we know Claude's great at writing. If I need to create educational content, I'll probably go to Gemini. ChatGPT has had some new features out this week, and you'd be silly not to be using it. 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 share with people.

Kelly: One you mentioned was something called Lovable. Can you tell me about that?

Marnie: Have you heard of the phrase vibe coding? It's the ability for a human to talk in natural language—to vibe with an AI agent—and then the agent will write the code, build the website or app.

Here's an interesting stat: Only 1% of the population can code. But in June 2025, 10% of the websites that went live in the world were vibe coded—meaning the human spoke to an agent and the agent coded the website for them and they pressed publish.

A really easy platform is Lovable.dev. It's super easy and fun. I showed someone the other day—an HR consultant who created a PDF as a lead magnet around communication styles for different generations. I said, "Well, this is good for baby boomers who might open the PDF, but Gen Z is like 'this is boring, I can't be bothered.'"

So I uploaded it to Lovable, put information about the business, attached the logo and website, and said "I want to make this really interactive, appeal to all generations, be a go-to web page." Off it went and created an HR website that was interactive with a little quiz. You just press publish and share it with clients. It was fun.

Kelly: Are there any final secrets of AI and customizations—tips and tricks?

Marnie: I'd love to share some things I've created for my eight-year-old daughter. She created a PowerPoint about the Aztecs on Google Slides. When she showed me, I said, "Do you want to make a website from that?" So we went to Gamma.app—free—uploaded the Google Slides and it creates a website. She got to choose the colors. It did add extra information, so I taught her how to use Perplexity to check the information. We prompted the AI about the images because some were scary faces, not eight-year-old appropriate. It took about 30 minutes. She loved it!

She also loves math, so we created an app using Google AI Studio. She just explained what she wanted—a 60-second timer for age-appropriate maths questions, gamified so she can write down her scores. She's created songs with ChatGPT and put them into Suno to play the music.

She doesn't need to be techie—she just needs to be open to be creative with new things. Even if you just go to an AI and say "I love languages, what can I create?" it will help you and give you a step-by-step guide. It's a great time to be alive with this amazing technology.

Kelly: I love all of the advice and tips you've given us today. They're not just for professionals, but also for parents and education. Thank you for joining us. Find your contact information at twomarketingmoms.com and please don't forget to subscribe and share.