AI Use Cases For Soloists with Heidi Araya

You’ve heard the hype about AI, but how can you tactically and strategically use it to manage and grow your Soloist business? Global AI consultant Heidi Araya—who says “experts should be experts, not task-jugglers”—gets highly specific on how we can best use AI right now:

Why your most productive use of AI starts with where friction currently lies in your business.

Saving time: buying or building AI assistants for the time-intensive tasks typical with knowledge work.

Creating a “librarian” to answer questions from your existing content—internally, externally (with or without monetizing).

Protecting your proprietary content from being used to train large learning models (LLMs).

Strategic use cases that may surprise you (and replace the thousands of dollars you might otherwise spend to uncover this data).

LINKS

Heidi Araya Website | LinkedIn

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Heidi Araya is a global consultant, keynote speaker, and patented inventor who has dedicated her decades-long career to driving multimillion-dollar business improvements using a people-first approach.

Fueled by a desire to continuously learn and push boundaries, Heidi pivoted from leading large scale change initiatives inside organizations and has embarked on her third career, first upskilling in AI and then starting her own AI Agency. Leveraging her deep expertise in business operations, coaching, and change management, she now empowers solopreneurs, startups, and small businesses to unlock their full potential in the AI era.

Heidi’s passion lies in bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI technology and practical applications for small businesses. She doesn’t just talk AI, she implements it. Her people-centric approach focuses on AI enablement, AI automation, and productivity coaching, allowing smaller businesses to compete with larger corporations.

When she’s not empowering businesses with AI, she enjoys raising butterflies, tackling home improvement projects, and staying active.

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – 00:18
Heidi Araya: I had 1 creative agency who their clients were asking for competitor insights. So it could go out and actually look for the competitors on the internet and come back and deliver a report and summary of whatever the competitors were so that they could go back and save them like 35 hours of work for each competitor report that they had to run.

00:24 – 01:10
Rochelle Moulton : Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton, and today I’m joined by soloist and AI consultant, Heidi Araya. Heidi is a global consultant, keynote speaker, and patented inventor who’s dedicated her decades-long career to driving multi-million dollar business improvements using a people first approach. Fueled by a desire to continuously learn and push boundaries, she pivoted from leading large scale change initiatives inside organizations and has embarked on her third career, first upskilling in AI and then starting her own AI agency. Leveraging her deep expertise

01:10 – 01:38
Rochelle Moulton : in business operations, coaching and change management, she now helps solopreneurs, startups and small businesses unlock their full potential in the AI era. And when she’s not empowering businesses with AI, she enjoys raising butterflies, tackling home improvement projects, and staying active. Heidi, Welcome. Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here today. I love the combination of AI with raising butterflies. Somehow that just feels so perfect to

01:39 – 01:46
Heidi Araya: me. That’s great. I just released 2 of them today this morning. They emerged. I was so happy to see them take flight. Oh,

01:46 – 02:20
Rochelle Moulton : I like that. I think we’re going to work this metaphor into there somehow. So 1 of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is that there is so much hype on AI right now. And I feel like you are the AI soloist whisperer with your smart, practical advice. It’s like you jump over the hype to see what we can make work right now. So let’s dive in. So first, before we talk about AI, let’s talk about you And how you decided to focus your business on AI like if I remember rightly you started

02:20 – 02:22
Rochelle Moulton : out with a BA in Russian Yes,

02:22 – 02:58
Heidi Araya: yes, correct. I did start out with my BA in Russian But that part of my story is as soon as I graduated the Soviet Union fell So my dream of linking Soviet and Americans and building bridges was basically dead even before I got my diploma. So I had to pivot right away. I became a researcher, a technical writer, found my way into agile ways of working and what’s called lean. So I was doing these large-scale transformations inside organizations and I always found these processes were broken and people were miserable at work because they couldn’t actually get

02:58 – 03:30
Heidi Araya: work done. So it became my mission to alleviate misery in the workplace. And I don’t think that’s really changed. I think when I noticed the decline of my previous career in leading agile transformations inside large organizations, it just seemed like people, they need the help, but the companies didn’t want to invest there. So luckily, I saw that AI was coming on the scene for years. And so I launched the opportunity to say, this is an opportunity that I can leverage, learn from, and then help other people. And at the time, when I first started thinking about

03:30 – 03:49
Heidi Araya: it, I thought, well, I’m going to lead, again, some initiative inside an organization. But by the time I ended my data science program at MIT, I had decided that, no, I have to go with boots on the ground talking to people. This is something that I want to impact small businesses and solopreneurs because I’ve just seen people struggle too much. So I was done with large organizations.

03:50 – 04:27
Rochelle Moulton : Well, I can totally relate to that. I just love this movement from Russian to MIT to AI. And so thank you for sharing that. I really wanted listeners to see that pivoting can happen fast when you’ve made up your mind to provide value in new ways. All right, let’s 0 in on soloists and especially soloist consultants. So we are typically doing some combination of tasks from admin for the business to serving clients, maybe we’re writing reports or we’re conducting assessments to marketing. At least I do, I feel like I spend a ton of time doing that.

04:27 – 04:46
Rochelle Moulton : Writing articles, running podcasts, engaging on social media, managing an email list of prospects, and of course, their pipeline. So I know what we want to talk about here is some use cases for solos, but before we do that, should we start with where the listener is feeling friction in their business?

04:47 – 05:14
Heidi Araya: Yeah. Well, actually, the solopreneur consultants that I speak with and coaches that I speak with, you’ve hit it. They don’t have enough time to work on their business, they’re working in their business, they are struggling because they’re, well let me give you 1 example. I was spending 5 to 10 hours a week creating meeting notes and task action items. After you meet with a potential customer or a customer, you have to send out action items and send out those emails. And I was never getting to it, or it would be late, and I would be so

05:14 – 05:42
Heidi Araya: exhausted. And so I actually automated the process. And I have an AI note taker that attends my meetings, like my little executive assistant, and then creates summary with task items. And when the call ends, within 5 minutes, I open up my draft emails. And I have the draft email with summary and action items. All I have to do is hit send because it’s pre-populated with the people who were in the meeting. So I guess I just look for ways for people to reduce the things that they’re doing. That’s what I would call drudgery. So we can

05:42 – 06:07
Heidi Araya: free up time. Now I don’t spend that time with that. And I already, the automations and the AI that I use inside, for myself, I guess I feel empathy, right? Because I am a solopreneur and I’m struggling with those exact same things. So I know each solopreneur has maybe slightly different struggles, but I think we also have a lot of similarities, like the marketing content creation proposal creation, responding to emails as some of the things that we have to time slice across our day.

06:07 – 06:33
Rochelle Moulton : Well, it also makes AI so much more accessible that we’re not having to sit back and go, oh, how can I use AI instead of saying, okay, where’s the friction? Where are the bottlenecks in my business now? And especially, what do I not like doing that maybe there is another way to do? Yes. So let’s talk about those use cases. I know you’ve been developing and working with clients on quite a number of these. So where should we

06:33 – 07:10
Heidi Araya: start? Yeah, so I guess the first 1 that’s very popular across my clients today is a custom AI assistant, I’ll say. You can imagine it like chat GPT, but it’s trained on you and it knows everything about you. So we train this robust backend on, you might have like 1 client, 17 years of blog posts, books, podcasts, talks, whatever it is, your website. So we train it on all the content that you think is relevant, and then that’s accessible then. You can imagine that second brain knows everything about you that you have ever shared with the

07:10 – 07:40
Heidi Araya: world that you just chose to share with that. So then we actually build a brand for the person and find the brand voice. And so that’s there as their own little personal assistant. So I use mine multiple times a day to everything from, you know, help me write this email to, I need to write a proposal, rephrasing things. And even for social media, that’s 1 of the struggles we have as solopreneurs is we want to write more resonant content in social media that’s not just coming from chat GPT. So now when that second brain knows all

07:40 – 07:46
Heidi Araya: about us, we come up with much more resonant content in minutes instead of hours.

07:46 – 08:00
Rochelle Moulton : So I just want to dive into that just a little bit more. I want to make sure that people understand this. I want to make sure I understand this. So you train it. So you’re putting in audio from podcasts, you’re putting in blog posts. Can you do books

08:00 – 08:07
Heidi Araya: as well? Yep, you can do books. And I have 1 client who has put all of his 28 books up in his second brain.

08:07 – 08:16
Rochelle Moulton : I love that. And so you could use this internally, right, to help you. I love that a byproduct of this is getting clear on your brand voice.

08:16 – 08:39
Heidi Araya: Yes, it is amazing. So that was 1 of the realizations. I wasn’t sure. I tested it. I just wasn’t sure how it would turn out. I was like, let me just ask, what’s the brand voice? But it turned out amazing. So actually, we have a system where we work with clients to figure out certain things. Let’s say they don’t have a lot of content yet, but they want to get there and they want to start building their brands. So we have them fill out a little paper and we meet with them and we do a recording.

08:39 – 09:01
Heidi Araya: And that’s part of the first thing that we would get up in their content. It turns out that the audio recording is so much richer than the blog post that you write, and you just communicate in a completely different way. So the content that comes out after you’ve done something like a recording is just so rich, and I guess that’s what they find value in as well, right? This rich content that gives them really great stuff that they can use right away.

09:01 – 09:07
Rochelle Moulton : I’m sitting there thinking of 7 years of weekly podcast audio. Right.

09:07 – 09:38
Heidi Araya: Yes. And now, so that’s an internal use. I know that you have a client who used it externally. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So I have several clients who they’re actually using it externally as well. So 1 of them is, well, I have a few authors there. But 1 of them happens to have really high usage. It might get like 100 chats per week on the chat bot. And I guess the value there is so this person’s content is in English, but people across the world want to understand this management philosophy

09:38 – 10:05
Heidi Araya: that he has. So people talk to the chat bot in up to 100 languages across the world 24-7. And so now he’s seen as a thought leader in his space because he was the first 1 to have that there and people are getting value and I see some of the chat logs are, you know, thank you so much or this is the best response I’ve gotten on that. So people ask it anything from help me write a job description to how do I run this activity, to all kinds of things. So I view it as really

10:05 – 10:33
Heidi Araya: crucial for an author who wants to maybe expand their reach globally. And 1 of the other things is people don’t have time to read whole books now. So they can now ask a very specific question. How do I do this particular thing, right? And get that answer right away in real time. So it’s bite sized learning. Now in in that case, did this person monetize it or are they doing this? So actually he has to. 1 is open on his website and he did monetize the 1 with the 28 books.

10:34 – 10:39
Rochelle Moulton : Okay, well that makes sense because if you’re giving away your book content, eventually nobody buys the books anymore.

10:40 – 11:05
Heidi Araya: Right. His website traffic is up 25 to 35%. He’s getting more people purchasing the books and I mean now you know his you can just see the engagement everywhere that you know his posts are He also does actually share the funny things or the valuable things that people get out of there So from time to time he’ll be sharing a little snippet of the chat bot gave this answer or someone asked this question. So it’s also fun. Well, plus that sounds like

11:05 – 11:25
Rochelle Moulton : a social media post that just wrote itself. Yes, true enough. Yeah. So what do you say when authors are worried about putting their proprietary information into a chat bot that somehow this is going to wind up in the master scheme and be used inappropriately. How do you deal with that concern?

11:25 – 11:59
Heidi Araya: Yeah, so the unlike when you upload it to a public platform like chat GPT none of the data or none of the LLMs are training on your data. So it’s secure from that perspective. It’s not going to be trained. We’re just accessing, you know, what’s called the API. So it doesn’t have access to your content. But otherwise I also have a very secure platform. That’s ISO 27001 GDPR and SOC 2 compliant. So it’s from that perspective they’re very secure platforms now that customers don’t have to worry about that. Maybe even someone hacking into the platform right.

11:59 – 12:18
Heidi Araya: So they’re very secure platforms And there’s another way where you can sort of upload it and then delete the actual source material so it stays trained, but no 1 can actually go and download the material afterwards. So there’s various ways that you can secure it if people are concerned. And this person was actually concerned. This is his livelihood. So he wanted to make sure it was very secure.

12:18 – 12:50
Rochelle Moulton : Interesting. Interesting. So is this what would you call this the librarian? And you know, I’ve had this conversation with a couple people on the podcast where we said, gee, what we really want is a librarian, Because we have all this content. I mean, I do have 17 years of blog posts and 7 years of weekly podcasts. And it would be awesome to have, I’ll say, somebody, in this case, something, go and be able to pull answers to certain kinds of questions from content. Is this the application that you would use to do that,

12:50 – 13:21
Heidi Araya: or is there another 1? So you could. I have a very robust platform that offers citations. And so, for example, if you asked a specific question and it referenced a podcast, like I have another customer who’s an attorney and when it references some of the material from the podcast. For example, it’s going to pull that in a citation and then put it there in the chat so you can see exactly where it came from. So unlike chat GPT where you just don’t know where the answer came from, this actually tells you where in your content it

13:21 – 13:35
Heidi Araya: got that answer. So you also feel safer that it’s not hallucinating, which is another thing we can talk about if you want to, and that you know exactly where that content is. So I’ve had customers say, “‘Oh, I forgot about that blog post. Yeah, that was a good 1.

13:35 – 14:01
Rochelle Moulton : Yeah, I could see that. Okay. I mean, this is really interesting because there’s a lot of people that really have concerns about this. And I think sometimes the concerns are really warranted. And I could see why you’d want to think twice. And in other situations, there are opportunities to manage the risk. So what else are you seeing, especially soloists and consultants, use AI for?

14:01 – 14:32
Heidi Araya: Well, a lot of them actually are looking to grow their brand on LinkedIn. And so when you want to grow your brand on LinkedIn, it starts with content. So other than a custom chat bot for content, there are a lot of people who are looking to say easily transcribe videos or edit their video. So for customers as well, I help them sometimes edit their videos or help them with the content. So something like Descript is for people who might have a short video that they just wanna edit. And what Descript does is allows you to edit

14:32 – 15:06
Heidi Araya: it like it’s a Word document. And you can also add captions easily. So I see things like third-party tools other than just ChatDBT and Cloud, which are very robust offerings on their own, but also specialized tools for whatever specific problem that you have. And I think you may remember that I was requesting transcripts from your podcast because I love them and the way that I consume material is more reading. And so another product that I use is called transcript.lol, which just easily generates transcripts from a video on YouTube, or you can upload it very easily. So

15:06 – 15:34
Heidi Araya: I think depending on the use cases for solopreneurs, when they want to grow their brand, they might do things like get transcripts so they can repurpose as social media posts, use Descript for managing meetings, of course. I have my personal note taker Fireflies. There are other ones called Sybil and Otter, of course. Before putting a bunch of tools out there, I always try to ask, what’s the top time suck that you have? Like, going back to the problem you’re trying to solve, because otherwise I’m just putting a bunch of tools out there. But those are some

15:34 – 16:06
Heidi Araya: of the other things I’m seeing. How do I manage my day or I’m getting a lot of receipts? So I guess depending on the problem that they’re trying to solve, I would recommend some solutions. But also, well, I’ll give you 1 example. I can use my custom chat bot or even chat GBT or Claude or something like that to improve an email. But that works for a few of them. So if you have to send out 1, 000 emails, like I have 1 client who needs to send out donor emails regularly, who’s a nonprofit, then you

16:06 – 16:30
Heidi Araya: would need something more robust, like an automation, to generate personalized draft emails for donors, asking them for pledges. And it could do that at scale. So I also think there’s an opportunity there to really leverage not only AI assistance and the way that we think about them today, but actual automations where we’re taking pieces of different, say, processes and making them come together in

16:30 – 17:01
Rochelle Moulton : a way that, like my automation with meeting minutes to draft email and I just hit send really can reduce hours down to minutes. Yeah, you know, it’s interesting because I immediately took your advice and I bought transcript LOL, which I think is for what I buy is like $10 a month, something really trivial. And what finally made me do the transcripts was I wanted to do them for a while because I know people appreciate them. But what I didn’t want to do is I didn’t want to review them. I did not want to have to read

17:01 – 17:32
Rochelle Moulton : it and correct it. I mean, I just, I don’t have time for that. And so I experimented with this and it worked perfectly. I mean, there’s probably a few typos in there, like they can never get my name right. Right. So I changed that right at the beginning. But other than that, it worked really well. And then what I used it for because I could argue it actually Increases the amount of time I spend on podcast production because I can’t do the transcript until I have the final audio file So it adds another step, right? But

17:32 – 18:05
Rochelle Moulton : what I wanted to do was I wanted to find a way other than the email I sent to my list to share some of the things from that podcast. And the transcript made it so much easier to do, especially if there was a fair amount of time between the time that I wanted to do something and then I’d recorded it. Because I don’t remember the nuance. 3 or 4 months later, hugely, hugely helpful. I mean, Frankly, I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have tried to summarize something I had done 3 or 4 months ago had

18:05 – 18:06
Rochelle Moulton : I not had the tool.

18:07 – 18:14
Heidi Araya: That’s a great use case. And also it can revitalize interest in previous podcast episodes as well. Well that’s exactly what happened.

18:14 – 18:39
Rochelle Moulton : I mean, I tried it on LinkedIn and I said something like, here’s an experiment. Instead of giving you the link to the audio, I’m going to tell you a little bit more about what was in this episode. And I want to introduce you to the person who was the guest and tell you a little bit about them and then tell you a little bit more about what they said. And in this case, I set it up as a carousel. And it was interesting because it brought out some people that I know listen to the podcast, but

18:39 – 18:52
Rochelle Moulton : they struggle with wanting to take notes when it’s, like this episode, where It’s really tactical. There’s a lot of ideas here. And if you just have the transcript, it’s so much easier for them. And that’s the goal as a

18:52 – 19:13
Heidi Araya: podcast host. That’s amazing. But you can see how AI then could be an enabler to do different things that you wouldn’t have done otherwise. And so I guess going back to some of the struggles that solo printers have and want to do is put something out there and see how people like it be an experiment, other social media content, that just having the transcript could enable for you.

19:13 – 19:18
Rochelle Moulton : Yes, yes, Absolutely. So what other kinds of use cases have you seen?

19:18 – 19:49
Heidi Araya: Well here’s an interesting 1. A lot of solopreneurs that I speak with actually are struggling to get new clients. And so they tend to do a lot of research on LinkedIn and or elsewhere, if their client base is elsewhere, and they’re doing all that research manually. So there are actually ways that AI can go out and do a lot of research on people, who their ideal client is, and then basically summarize it for them. It’s called enriching with information that it finds on the people and then sort of delivering that to people and so they can

19:49 – 19:57
Heidi Araya: actually spend their time connecting with potential clients instead of just struggling trying to find and do all that research so there are a million use cases there.

19:57 – 20:11
Rochelle Moulton : Well that’s really interesting because like I’m just gonna use LinkedIn because I know a lot of people use it. So LinkedIn has their sales navigator product, which works fine if your audience is something you can slice and dice.

20:12 – 20:41
Heidi Araya: But what I think I’m hearing between the lines is that this AI use case might allow you to slice and dice in a different way. Yeah, so this is what’s called AI agents. So unlike AI assistants, which you would interact with like Claude or your custom AI assistant, an AI agent goes out and you give it a task and it sort of autonomously kind of, you know, scary in a bit of ways for some people, but it goes out and you give it the task to do this research. So it might actually go out and I

20:41 – 21:09
Heidi Araya: had 1 creative agency who their clients were asking for competitor insights. So it could go out and actually look for the competitors on the internet and come back and deliver a report and summary of whatever the competitors were so that they could go back and save them like 35 hours at work for each competitor report that they had to run. So instead of you directing all the action, the AI agents are given specific tasks and can autonomously do that and then come back and tell you what they’ve found.

21:09 – 21:46
Rochelle Moulton : Is that at all related to, I’ve seen some consultants use perplexity and find to help with research. And this is when they’re writing articles where they have some research. And so they’ll do the initial research themselves, and then they’ll write the piece themselves, because they want to have their voice. But then they use AI to see if there’s research that they missed. And the thought behind that is that it keeps your voice intact, but it also makes sure that you’re casting a wide enough net before publishing. What you just described sounded like taking this idea up

21:46 – 21:47
Rochelle Moulton : a notch.

21:47 – 22:14
Heidi Araya: Yeah, so perplexity is actually really good for research because it has the citations there, although you do have to be careful it doesn’t hallucinate them. So always check the sources. But it does take it 1 step farther because you would just sit back and you would just say, well, I’m going to program my AI agent to go out there and do customer research on this particular thing. And it would just deliver it to you. So you could then review it. You could certainly, well, you would have to certainly review and check all the sources and resources

22:14 – 22:23
Heidi Araya: that it came up with. And you could still do your own research using perplexity. But yeah, it would just save you a lot of time. So it is absolutely taking it up a notch or 2.

22:23 – 22:31
Rochelle Moulton : Okay. So what other kinds of friction have you helped solve for soloist clients?

22:32 – 23:02
Heidi Araya: Yeah, this is also an interesting use case, but I find that people find it very hard to, even myself when I’m trying to figure out who is my ideal client profile, like how am I gonna match my messaging to my ideal client profile? So another amazing use case is, and you can even do this in Claude or ChatGPT, any solution that you have, is to work to help you create an ideal client profile and then act as that. So if you are targeting real estate agents, then You could tell it to act as a real estate

23:02 – 23:27
Heidi Araya: agent and other characteristics that you might have, like maybe commercial properties. You basically frame this and it could give you early feedback on your ideas. You can even upload a presentation or whatever idea you had and then ask it, acting as a real estate agent selling commercial property in XYZ area. What do you think about this and what feedback would you have for me? So, that’s another amazing use case that a lot of people aren’t leveraging. Yeah.

23:29 – 23:35
Rochelle Moulton : I’m assuming You’re thinking, well, gee, that’s a whole lot easier than doing a listening tour, isn’t it? Yeah, it

23:35 – 24:04
Heidi Araya: doesn’t replace it, of course, but it can give you some, you know, get you like, again, it’s like a notch closer. I actually have, so another fascinating use case that people are using it for is something that we haven’t touched on yet, and that’s voice AI. So she’s in maintenance right now, but I have my own AI assistant that when I don’t pick up my phone, she will answer the call. Her name is Ingrid. And she’ll take a message for me. And A lot of solopreneurs now are realizing that when they’re serving their customers and they’re

24:04 – 24:31
Heidi Araya: missing phone calls, that people won’t call back. They’re gonna go to someone else and they don’t know when they’re gonna get that return call. So having someone respond and answer the call and assure them that they’ll be called back right away is 1 great use case. And it’s great, I guess, for a lot of solopreneurs. Even part-time people maybe who are working on their solo printer business part-time and they haven’t quit their day job and this is a great use case there because you get a customer call and someone’s going to answer the call and you

24:31 – 24:36
Heidi Araya: are at your other job. So yeah, have you heard about AI voice or considered it in that way before?

24:37 – 25:00
Rochelle Moulton : No, it’s funny because I so am not. I mean, I never answer my phone if I don’t recognize who the call is coming from. Right. And most people schedule calls. So it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to think about it. But I get it, there are businesses, especially where you’re implementing for people, you need to answer the phone. So yeah, I think that’s amazing.

25:01 – 25:31
Heidi Araya: I have another client who does a train the trainer course and he spends a lot of time answering text messages on how do I lead this activity, how do I do that. So he runs them through his five-day course, I think it’s 5 days long, they exit the course and then they’re immediately going to implement whatever it is in their own organizations. Then they’re not sure, so they’re brand new. So, he’s like, I’m Heidi from 6 a.m. To 9 p.m. I’m just answering text messages of how do I do this? How do I? And it’s not

25:31 – 26:01
Heidi Araya: only the text messages, it’s phone calls. And so when we connected, I said, well, that’s a perfect use case. You know, you can train a chatbot, so someone on the material and how you lead them the course. And so they can just take a break, maybe even in a 5 minute break in between activities, they can chat with the chat bot. And also the voice AI assistant because he wanted to have a call coach. So you know, people get phone calls, they could just step out of the activity and make a phone call and say, how

26:01 – 26:15
Heidi Araya: do I do this activity? And then it would tell them how to do that activity so There’s amazing ways that you can use voice AI today. That is brilliant I could just picture that guy feeling like pulled in 27 different directions all day long

26:15 – 26:27
Rochelle Moulton : and to be able to really focus and offload something that is so repetitive, really. Each 1 feels unique to the person, but the answers are repetitive, I’m sure.

26:27 – 26:39
Heidi Araya: Yes, true enough. I guess that’s a great use case with AI. You’ve got some body of knowledge and you get repetitive questions. So whether it’s you can even use it as customer support, right? Yeah, like this guy’s kind of doing.

26:39 – 27:06
Rochelle Moulton : Well, yeah. And 1 of your clients is in my circle. And I didn’t know that she was a client. And I got onto her website to look at something for her and I saw the little bot at the bottom. I’m like, aha, sure enough, I could tell you built it. And I love the way that she used it. It fit with her brand. It made sense. And I may just be projecting here, But I think that there are a lot of soloists who are not in the tech space who are saying, yeah, yeah, AI, AI, just

27:06 – 27:40
Rochelle Moulton : leave me alone. But the fact is that there are so many new use cases popping up that I would argue it makes sense every quarter or so to stop and say, hey, is there a new solution? Because AI is changing so fast. Is there a new solution to this problem that I’m having or this task I want to offload or this friction that’s in my business? Is there something else that can help me here? Yes, absolutely. So I have clients who used to spend time in meetings. And when

27:40 – 28:05
Heidi Araya: you’re a solopreneur and you’re spending time in meetings answering repetitive questions because that’s a prime use case, right? I don’t know, They could have just went on my website and asked that question. And now if they were even to leverage that chat bot to then tell people before you schedule a meeting with me, make sure you chat with my chat bot and ask them some key questions, immediate time saver. You’ll get that time back and the person is gonna save some time and perhaps even money themselves.

28:05 – 28:10
Rochelle Moulton : Yes, yes. So are there other use cases we should talk about do you think?

28:10 – 28:42
Heidi Araya: So I think the main thing is for people, I think you hit it like what is the major thing that you’re struggling with? Do a regular review, go out into the community and ask maybe how other people have solved it, speak with a specialist. I can’t think of any other things that we can talk about right now because I think each solopreneur might have different problems that they want to solve. But there are ones that are the key ones that we’ve covered, right? We’re creating the same kinds of proposal, they’re the same kinds of emails, they’re

28:42 – 29:02
Heidi Araya: the same thing. So AI is really good at reducing the drudgery for things that you do repeatedly. So if there is something like that in your business and most of us have those things, then that is a key use case for AI. So I would just tell people, look there first and then get help with it and start asking questions of how I can leverage AI. Yeah, I mean,

29:02 – 29:27
Rochelle Moulton : I think the way that you opened with how you saved yourself so much time by having an AI assistant on your calls, that’s something a lot of soloists, particularly B2B doing big transformational style projects could really relate to. Yeah. So that might not be a bad place to start if that’s a source of friction or annoyance or just a big time suck. Yeah. 1 of

29:27 – 29:48
Heidi Araya: the other things that I had as I was going through, it didn’t come to me immediately. I was like, oh, my receipts, I have a lot of receipts where I have a lot of subscriptions for the things that I use. I try a lot of new software, and they’re all piling up. And I had this folder in my email, and I was like, I’ll sort through this. And finally, I just gave up. And I said, you know what? There’s something called Spark Receipt. You just forward it directly, or you upload the image, and it’s just going

29:48 – 30:13
Heidi Araya: to be in there. So whenever you need it, I’ve got the text backup right here. So it’s like, it took me that point where maybe just step a little back and go, yeah, there are really inexpensive solutions that people can leverage. That was a task that didn’t take me time as I was putting it off, but it was something that I should have been doing. And so that’s another key for, I guess, solopreneurs. If you’re not doing something you think you should be doing and you’re putting it off because it’s too much effort, maybe that’s an

30:13 – 30:14
Heidi Araya: area that AI could help.

30:14 – 30:30
Rochelle Moulton : I could relate to that. So Heidi, there’s a question I like to ask every guest, which is if you could go back to who you were when you first started your business, what’s the 1 thing you’d advise her to do?

30:30 – 30:58
Heidi Araya: My first advice is something that I know that you advise people to do and that is don’t try to do it all on your own. You can be a solopreneur, but know where you lack expertise and look to fill that gap. So for me, I knew that I didn’t have lots of experience with sales and marketing. And yet, of course, I knew it was a whole career for somebody, but I didn’t realize how big the gap was. So luckily I figured it out pretty soon rather than later, but this person really opened up my eyes as

30:58 – 31:09
Heidi Araya: far as the things that I should be doing and could be doing instead. And so that was 1 thing that I would definitely advise for people getting started on their business. It’s funny, it’s 1 of

31:09 – 31:24
Rochelle Moulton : the hardest things for people to do is to get help in the beginning. Other than, yeah, I need an accountant or I need a lawyer to set up the business. But yeah, it can be a little scary when you start spending money on people to help you. But it’s a good investment.

31:25 – 31:38
Heidi Araya: It sure is. I’m actually sleeping better. I think I told you this. I’m sleeping better since I hired that person. It’s definitely the best investment that I’ve made in my nascent business. Even if I think that I don’t want to spend the money there, I don’t regret it at all.

31:38 – 31:52
Rochelle Moulton : Yeah. A lot of the biggest expenses in business turn out to be that way, right? Because we have this big fear beforehand. And then when it works out, we’re like, oh, yeah. That’s part of the jump to the next level that we all make at different points.

31:52 – 31:53
Heidi Araya: I think so, yeah.

31:53 – 32:03
Rochelle Moulton : So Heidi, we’ll be putting all sorts of links to you and your content in the show notes, but where’s the best place for people to learn more about you? So they can go to my website at Brightlogicgroup.com.

32:05 – 32:09
Heidi Araya: And of course, you can always find me on LinkedIn at Heidi Araya. Of course,

32:09 – 32:30
Rochelle Moulton : I see you there all the time. So Heidi, thank you. I mean, you’ve been more than generous with all of these different ideas that we can use to get back our time or to leverage up or even to Find ways to bring more value out of things that we’ve already created. So thank you

32:31 – 32:50
Heidi Araya: You’re so welcome. And I just want to share 1 thing I forgot to share. I was speaking with someone the other day and she said, when I explained to her what I did, she said to me, aha, I finally get it. You humanize AI. Why oh you humanize? And I thought, yeah, maybe that is what I do.

32:50 – 33:09
Rochelle Moulton : Well, it’s why I wanted you on the show, because it’s not a theoretical, let’s discuss all the things that can do, but let’s see how we can use this right now in our business. And I can guarantee if we were having the same conversation a year from now, we’d have some more stuff to talk about. Absolutely. Yes.

33:09 – 33:13
Heidi Araya: Thank you so much for inviting me and hopefully, yeah, folks need help. They’ll reach out.

33:13 – 33:31
Rochelle Moulton : Absolutely. Thank you. So as we wrap up this episode, if you haven’t joined my email list yet, now is the time. Your soloist business and your future self will thank you. The link is in the show notes. That’s it for this episode. Please join us next time for The Soloist Life. Bye-bye. Us to life. Bye bye!