Lately, I’ve noticed something about almost every business owner I talk to. They want to start using AI, or use it more, to make their business run more efficiently, and then they freeze. They don’t know what to do next, or they’re overwhelmed by the countless AI tools and options, with new ones popping up every single day. It’s quite literally information overload.
If you’re in the frustrated and overwhelmed camp, it’s okay (no shame here). I’m going to make this stupid simple for you. By the end of this post, you’ll know exactly how to figure out where AI belongs in your business, and I’ll walk you through the real example of how I used it to take one of my most time-consuming processes and make it incredibly fast.
If you’d rather watch than read, the full video is right here:
Why AI feels so overwhelming right now
First, I want to say that nobody sponsored this post or the video it came from, and I think that’s important to say. A lot of creators will pitch you an AI tool because they’re getting paid by the brand, and that doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for your business. You could also watch a million tutorials on YouTube and do endless research and still end up with a workflow that just doesn’t work for the way you actually run things.
So instead of starting with the tools, I want you to start with your own business. The process I’m about to share is designed to work for your business specifically, which is exactly why it works better than copying someone else’s stack.
Before we get into it, DM me on Instagram at @SamanthaLeeWarren and tell me: which AI tool or trend has you the most confused right now? I’d love to know what’s on your list. 👇
Step 1: Find out where your time actually goes
Before you start using any AI in your business, the first step is to understand what you actually spend the most time on.
In my business, I use a free time tracking tool called Clockify to track all the time I spend on different tasks and with different clients. At the end of the month, I have a very itemized report of how long I spent on each task and each client project. Even if you only do this for one week, you’re going to get a lot of insight into what you’re wasting time on that you didn’t have before.
I’ll use a marketing example, since marketing is my industry. Maybe you’re spending a lot of time creating graphics, or maybe you spend the most time writing and tweaking copy. Those tasks might not all belong with AI, and they’re still worth paying attention to.
FIND YOUR ZONE OF GENIUS
While you’re tracking, take note of what your zone of genius is. If you’re a copywriter, your zone of genius is copywriting, right? So to spend more time on your craft, you may want to outsource your other tasks (admin tasks or project management, for example) to AI so you can focus more on writing copy. The same goes if you’re a graphic designer, a web designer, or whatever it is you do.
The goal of bringing AI into your business is to spend more time on your craft while you hand off the things that sit outside your zone of genius. Your craft stays yours, and AI takes on the tasks that drain you.
Step 2: Take your time report to ChatGPT
This is why having that time report is so incredibly important. Once you have a week or a month of data, you can take the report to ChatGPT (or your AI tool of choice) and it can help you identify the areas where you could be optimizing.
That’s exactly what I did, and it’s what gave me the idea for the video. I took a very time-consuming process in my business and made it incredibly fast with a Claude workflow that I wouldn’t have figured out on my own without the steps in this post.
My real example: automating my Pinterest marketing
After getting my time tracking data, I took it to ChatGPT, because that’s my tool of choice for chatting. Pinterest marketing is something I’ve wanted to do consistently in my business for a while, but I’ve always done it on and off because it’s so time-consuming.
If you’ve ever done Pinterest, you know. There’s creating graphics, writing copy, and scheduling the pins, and the thing about Pinterest that’s different from other platforms is that it’s a volume-focused platform. Posting a high volume of pins is recommended (even if it isn’t required), and some people post 20 or 30 pins in one day. If you’re doing all of those graphics, all of that copy, and all of that scheduling manually, it gets very time-consuming, and honestly it’s not even worth it unless you can automate the process.
So I wanted to explore a way to use AI to make the process faster for me, and I realized there were really three separate processes I wanted to automate:
- 1) Creating the pin graphics
- 2) Writing the pin titles and descriptions
- 3) Scheduling the pins
The first prompt I used
The first thing I said to ChatGPT was: “Find me the best Pinterest pin creator repository on GitHub that I can install on my Claude.”
That is not super expert developer language, but it’s just how I chat with my ChatGPT, and obviously it’s going to get what I mean. You don’t have to say it perfectly to get what you need.
What GitHub and a “repo” actually are
I want to share some context on the terminology so you fully understand what we’re talking about here, because I know these words can make your eyes glaze over.
GitHub is basically a site where people store and share the code projects they’ve built. You can think of it like a digital filing cabinet that everybody can access, and people share project folders there that you can use to teach your Claude (or your AI tool of choice) new skills or how to do different things. When I say “repository” or “repo,” I mean one folder inside that big filing cabinet. The files inside that folder hold the code, the instructions, and the details of what Claude needs to know in order to accomplish the goal.
(I’m mentioning Claude here because that’s what I use for this, but this works for ChatGPT as well, and probably other AI tools too.)
What ChatGPT found
ChatGPT dug through GitHub and found me a skills repo called Social Media Skills. It picked this one as the strongest option because it had 100 GitHub stars, it’s MIT licensed, and it’s explicitly built for Claude Code and Claude’s custom skill system. Even though it’s a more general social media repo, it has a specific Pinterest pin design skill, which is exactly what I was trying to achieve.
So I downloaded it and installed that Pinterest design skill. From there, ChatGPT gave me another skill to install for actual PNG creation.
Turn on memory in your AI tools
Make sure your AI tools of choice have memory turned on so they remember key details about your brand. Even though I didn’t give ChatGPT all the context from before, it already knew exactly what I was trying to achieve with my brand and the overall objective, so it gave me much more tailored advice about which skills to install.
Send it screenshots when you’re unsure
You can send screenshots of your actual screen to ChatGPT while it walks you through a process, which is so helpful if you’re ever unsure about something. I do this whenever I’m getting into something I don’t understand, and it verifies that I’m actually doing the right thing.
In my case, I needed to go to a site called Code to Image, generate an API key, and put that key in a specific place. ChatGPT walked me through how to do it, and we went back and forth about it. I ran into some issues, and at one point I had to do some JSON. I don’t know JSON, by the way… but the good news is that ChatGPT does, so it wrote the code for me and told me exactly where to put it. Meanwhile I’m over here like, “Who’s Jason?” LOL.
Finishing the workflow
Once the design skill was installed, I went back and forth with Claude to get the pin templates I liked. Then I went through the same process to figure out how to actually schedule the pins with Claude, and that required a separate tool called Postiz. I just started using it, and it works amazing. You can use it for other social platforms as well, which is a goldmine for me as a content creator.
Step 3: Let AI teach you the rest
This is the whole point of the process. If you don’t know how to do something, your AI can teach you how to do it. It can tell you the most efficient workflow based on the data you give it. It can choose the repo for you, walk you through installing the skill step by step, show you how to use it, and help you troubleshoot any issues along the way.
This is the best way I’ve found to optimize any process in your business with AI. And if you’d love a step-by-step tutorial on setting up this exact Pinterest workflow with Claude, DM me on Instagram at @SamanthaLeeWarren and I’ll make one. The bigger win, though, is taking this same process and applying it to your own business, using your own time sheets and your own data.
Prompts to get you started
Here’s how to put this into practice this week. These are starting points, so swap in the details of your own business.
AFTER A WEEK OF TIME TRACKING: “Here’s my time report from the last week: [paste your tasks and hours]. Which of these tasks are taking the most time, and which ones could AI help me speed up or take off my plate?”
TO FIND YOUR ZONE OF GENIUS: “Here’s what I do in my business and what I enjoy most: [describe it]. Based on my time report, which tasks are part of my zone of genius, and which ones are low-impact tasks I should automate first?”
TO BUILD THE WORKFLOW: “I want to automate [the process]. Walk me through the best way to do it step by step, recommend the tools I’d need, and ask me questions if you need more context before you answer.”
A great way to decide where to start is to look at the things you hate doing, or the things outside your zone of genius. Those are the things to automate first. Use this process, get those tasks off your plate, and spend that time on what actually matters.
FAQ
1) How do I start using AI in my business?
Start by tracking your time for at least a week so you can see what you actually spend the most time on. Then take that report to ChatGPT or your AI tool of choice and ask it which tasks it could help you speed up, starting with the ones outside your zone of genius.
2) Which AI tool should I use?
The best tool is the one that fits your business and your workflow, and ChatGPT can help you find it once it has your time data and context. I use ChatGPT for chatting and planning, and Claude for the workflow I built in this post.
3) Do I need to know how to code to use AI tools like Claude skills?
You can do this without any coding knowledge. I don’t know JSON, and ChatGPT wrote the code I needed and told me exactly where to put it. Send it screenshots whenever you’re unsure and it’ll check your work.
4) What is a GitHub repository?
GitHub is like a digital filing cabinet where people share code projects, and a repository (or repo) is one folder inside it. The files in that folder hold the code and instructions your AI tool needs to learn a new skill.
5) What should I automate first?
Start with the tasks you hate doing and the tasks outside your zone of genius, especially the ones eating the most hours in your time report.
Here’s what I want you to take away…
There’s so much you can achieve just by chatting with AI. It can fill in the gaps in your own knowledge, explain things to you in a way you actually understand, and give you advice that’s personalized to your business. You don’t have to know which tool is best before you start, because you can let your own data and your AI figure that out with you. I’m going to keep doing this with other processes in my business, and I love the idea of you becoming the woman whose business runs on simple systems so she has more time for her friends, her family, traveling, and everything she loves outside of work.
Tell me what you’re automating first
I’d love to hear what you’re working on and how you’re speeding things up to create more time for what matters. DM me on Instagram at @SamanthaLeeWarren and tell me: what’s the first process in your business you want AI to take off your plate? I read every single one. 🪄
Pin me to your favorite Pinterest board!
