How I AI
How I AI showcases the people shaping the future with artificial intelligence. Host Brooke Gramer spotlights founders, innovators, and creatives who share not just the tools they use, but the transformations they’ve experienced. Human-centered storytelling meets visionary insights on business, culture, and the future of innovation.
How I AI
How an IT Leader Turned 40 Years of Systems Thinking Into AI Archetypes and Better Workflows
In this episode of How I AI, I sit down with Colette Mason, a collaborative AI consultant with over 40 years of real-world systems experience across investment banking, the UK government, and large-scale public infrastructure. Today, she helps business owners build AI teammates that actually support their brains instead of overwhelm them.
Colette brings a grounded, human-first lens to AI. We talk about her seven AI user archetypes, how your personality might be sabotaging your own AI results, and why training your assistant beats writing long prompts every time. She also shares the tools, frameworks, and mindset shifts she uses to help founders save thousands, streamline their workflows, and make better decisions with AI as a co-pilot.
Topics We Cover:
- The 7 AI User Types That Sabotage Their Own Success (Which One Are You?)
Juggler, Warrior, Visionary, Tweaker, Hermit, Escapist, Architect - Why training your assistant beats starting from scratch with every prompt
- How AI can help you finish tasks instead of multiplying half-done projects
- Why over-automation burns founders out and when to DIY vs. hire help
- Real case studies: saving 130k for a government team, replacing a 99-pound monthly tool in a day, and supporting a trauma specialist’s full PR breakthrough
- Colette’s honest take on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and when to use what
- A behind-the-scenes look at Sheldon, her AI assistant, and how she builds personalized agents for clients
- The PR tools she actually uses: NewsPage Media and Lightbulb PR
Resources Mentioned:
- The 7 AI User Types Quiz
- NewsPage Media
- Lightbulb PR
- OpenAI Prompt Optimizer
- Sheldon (Colette’s AI assistant)
Connect with Colette:
Website: cleverclogsai.com
Substack: cleverclogsai.substack.com
LinkedIn: Colette Mason
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"How I AI" is a concept and podcast series created and produced by Brooke Gramer of EmpowerFlow Strategies LLC. All rights reserved.
Some things I do with people is I always like to train things rather than rely on prompts because otherwise, it's gonna guess and it's gonna guess wrong. So things you could do would be to upload your priorities for this week, this quarter and tell it you've got the tendency where you tend to wander off and it will hopefully say to you, well, we were supposed to be working on the website wording today, not logos, come back to what you're supposed to be doing. So if you keep reminding you and it to stay on track, then I think you get better results.
Brooke:Welcome to How I AI the podcast featuring real people, real stories, and real AI in action. I'm Brooke Gramer, your host and guide on this journey into the real world impact of artificial intelligence. For over 15 years, I've worked in creative marketing events and business strategy, wearing all the hats. I know the struggle of trying to scale and manage all things without burning out, but here's the game changer, AI. This isn't just a podcast. How I AI is a community, a space where curious minds like you come together, share ideas, and I'll also bring you exclusive discounts, and insider resources, because AI isn't just a trend, it's a shift, and the sooner we embrace it, the more freedom, creativity, and opportunities will unlock. Have you just started exploring AI and feel a bit overwhelmed? Don't worry, I've got you. Jump on a quick start audit call with me so you can walk away with a clear and personalized plan to move forward with more confidence and ease. Join my community of AI adopters like yourself. Plus, grab my free resources, including the AI Get Started Guide. Or try my How I AI companion GPT. It pulls insights from my guest interviews along with global reports, so you can stay ahead of the curve. Follow the link in the description below to get started.
Brooke (2):My guest today, Colette has over 40 years building systems, from investment banks to the UK government. Now she's using the same precision to help business owners build collaborative AI teammates. In this episode, we talk about her seven AI archetypes, how to stop juggling half finished ideas, and what it means to make technology work with us, not against us. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by creating the right prompts or burnt out by automation, this conversation will remind you that AI can be helpful and even a little bit healing. Alright, let's dive in.
Brooke:Today I have a very special guest joining us from Great Britain, Colette Mason, a collaborative AI consultant with over 40 years in IT and three years of hands-on AI implementation. Colette, welcome. I'm so happy to have you.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Thank you very much. Yes, thank you.
Brooke:For us to just start this conversation, i'd love to hear a little bit about yourself. If you could share with listeners how you ended up where you are today.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yes. I probably don't look old enough to have 40 years uh, computing experience, so I suppose I ought to start there. I didn't start in the pram. It was a little bit older than that. My dad was an engineer and he bought me things like meccano when I was small and when home computers first came out he sort of got one and told me this could be pretty good fun. So for my birthday, my first computer turned up and I was, yeah, I was 12 years old and you had to plug it into the TV'cause there were no monitors back then. And, and I just loved it. I, I was an only child and I was used to making my own entertainment and so it was great to have this machine'cause it could do so many things. And um, I started from, you know, I started from there and then a couple of years later, dad saved up for the next computer, which was um, in color. I still plugged into the tv, but it was in color. And from there I got my first computing job because I'd had a couple of years experience by then and I'd been helping a local business like a little wholesaler, and I started to help them with their customer lists and stock. And then I kind of moved on, moved on from there in uh, in IT.
Brooke:Very cool. I love speaking to people that have those natural curious minds in their origin stories. It usually starts something like, oh, I, I was sitting around playing with my Legos and Sudoku and wanting to build since day one. So thank you for sharing that. So bring us to where you are today and the type of clients you support and the collaborative efforts that you are doing with AI.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yes. So just before I sort of got into the eighth, the I stuff, I was doing lots of stuff for investment banking.
Brooke:Mm-hmm.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:I did the, I looked after London Underground's email system or 10,000 email addresses and I did lots of big corporate projects. And as part of that, somebody actually thought, wouldn't it be really good if we asked the users how this thing worked? And I started to transition into usability. And that's where now when I'm in ai, I'm much more into, well, how does it feel to use this? Does it do what we want it to do? How do we feel about it as a society in a slightly wider sense than you might just do. Trying to automate yourself. So that's where the, the collaborative part bit came from. And also I think there's a bit of a technical limitation. It's, it's not as good as ev the marketing brochures would have us believe. And it still makes lots of mistakes and things. So I think it's pretty critical that you have a, a person in there when you're making judgments. Logic not so much, but when it's actual judgements, when there's gray areas, then I think you definitely still need a person.
Brooke:Yes. You and I in our intro call, talked a lot about just the system and processes and AI and automation and how it's all different.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yeah.
Brooke:If you could maybe touch on that inner nuance and why it's so important to understand where we are now and the current limitations and how we need to still be supporting it.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:I think the biggest advancements we've seen this year are in the STEM types of ai, where it's maths and physics and there's a right and wrong answer and things with humor and empathy and real good bedside manner. Those things are really hard to find out what works and what works for somebody might not work for somebody else. And so it's hard for the machine to learn to do it. And they're quite thorny issues as well where you might offend somebody or lose a customer if you get it wrong. It's not just run the equation again. And I think that slows, slows us down a little bit. Or people just get a bit glib and they get tired of checking when it keeps doing it wrong and they'll wave it through. I'm not sure that's the best, the best idea to do it that way. So I don't, for the more human things, it's just not really good enough to be left Unpoliced.
Brooke:Yes, you've done such a great job and a grounded way of bringing, merging AI with frameworks that you've put together.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yes.
Brooke:and one of my favorite things that you've done is you've created these. AI archetypes, which I wanna dig
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yes.
Brooke:Do
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:yeah.
Brooke:in teaching? What inspired you to wanna create AI archetypes?
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:I'm a master NLP practitioner and I'm a hypnotherapist'cause I'm quite a bad certificate junkie. And so, and I was interested in how mines worked and a lot, I'm a quite an optimistic person and lots of people would come to me for advice and I thought, well, maybe I ought to learn a bit more about minds and that combined with sitting next to people for a very long time when I was doing IT support, I had a really good understanding of what, what makes people get things a little bit wrong without really noticing. And I thought of these seven types of, of things that I'd seen either myself doing, if I'm honest, or I'd seen other people struggling with them. So, for instance, one of the examples I've called this person a juggler and they've got lots of tasks that are about 90% finished. And it's nearly done and the AI will say, oh, wouldn't it be really good if we just amended the slides that go with this, you know, with, you know, with your voiceover or whatever. And, oh, and then you start wandering off and fixing the slides and the voiceover's not quite finished. And then, oh, we better tell people this is on. And then you're doing an email job. And so for the jugglers, although it's being helpful and making sure they don't drop the ball, it's actually putting more pressure on them, starting off more jobs that aren't quite finished, and it's so easy. It's comes up with these tiny little good ideas that you think, oh, don't take me five minutes to do that, and by the end of the day, nothing's complete. So that was one of my first ones that I identified that I'd certainly felt with it, when it's always trying to be helpful at the end of a chat. Lots of bad things can happen at that point.
Brooke:I relate so much to that because I get pulled in so many different directions. Right now, I'm, I'm a bit of a solopreneur, as they call it,
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yeah.
Brooke:and I'm using AI as my co-pilot every day, but it is always pulling me and suggesting all these different directions to go. So how do you overcome that?
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Some things I do with people is I always like to train things rather than rely on prompts because otherwise, you know, it's, it's gonna guess and it's gonna guess wrong. So things you could do would be to upload your priorities for this week, this quarter. And so, and you can sort of say and, and tell it you've got the tendency where you tend to wander off and so. You know when you're wandering off and it will hopefully say to you, well, we were supposed to be working on the website wording today, not logos, come back to what you're supposed to be doing. So if you keep reminding you and it to stay on track, then I think you get better results. And, and once you've found out what these problems are, you're less likely to make the mistake, you know? Although it's like a bit of a forehead slapper and it's obvious, you think, ah, yeah, I do do that. And I just need to be aware. I don't move on to something else until the thing that's on my post-it note is, is finished.
Brooke:Beautiful. I'm gonna make that note and maybe update my instructions for my GPTs.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:When I talk to people about what do you want this thing to do, I think it's important to say what you're good at and what you're bad at so that it can give you the right amount of support. So the, the opposite of a juggler is somebody who will, is a relentless machine, and they will compete. Every task there, but they'll do, and then they'll complete that task and then the next task and then, and then it's three o'clock in the morning and the AI's going, oh, and now we can move on to this.'cause it doesn't get exhausted like you do unless you hit your subscription buffer. There's no end to the amount of things it'll say. And now we'll do this, and now we'll do this. And so, but at least the Warriors complete things, but they have the same poor quality of life because it gives them so many potential things to do.
Brooke:Is that one of the other seven archetypes? Would you
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:That's one of my other, the others, okay. Yes. Um, The next one I've got is the visionary. Um, And I see this a lot when I go to the entrepreneurial conferences, a speaker will say something, the person who I'm sat next to will suddenly think I'm gonna pivot my whole business. Because if that sentence that that person on stage just said, and the AI can say to you. Oh have you, have you looked at it this way and, and you think, oh, I haven't, or, or, why didn't you make a course out of this book? You could sell the course and monetize your knowledge better, and you think, oh, I could do a course. I've never done one before, but let's go. And the book doesn't get finished because there's this huge big project, not a tiny little, send that email reminder type project, and it's so all consuming and you don't want it to fall out of the back of your head. That you know, you need to say to your assistant, can we just jot down the framework of how this works? I'll park it somewhere in a Google doc, and then I'll, then I'll go back to what I was supposed to be doing. And then you've got the luxury of storing that light bulb that could be really effective, but you are not got that sinking feeling of, oh, I should really be doing the shiny thing. It makes you stay on what you're doing. The next people are the tweakers and they, they're perfectionists. They like external validation. They'll be the sort of person who would print out a project and then say to their colleague, oh, could you just go through this? I'll put the kettle on. Tell me what you think to my PDF. And they, they speak to the ai, go, let's make this slightly better. Let's make this slightly better. And it will always find an improvement, won't it? So you need to, in that situation, it's handy to say, um. this is 98% good enough, and it exists and it's ready to go, and it can be perfect in your mind, but nobody will find out about it. So you can encourage it to let you send things out, even if it's not pixel perfect or whatever your, you know, your foible is for detail. So I like to build avatars in my assistance so that you can say, you know, would, would a beginner find this the right level of detail? Or, you know, is it interesting enough? Is the pacing okay? And that can help with those tweaker traits. It's just like pulling the fruit machine going, oh, I need to get three of the same. And you keep pulling it, pulling it, pulling it till all your time's gone rather than your money. So that's my next one. Uh, The next people are hermits and they are the sort of people who are building, you know, they, they're wondering what strategy to take. So it's not necessarily a deliverable, like a new webpage, it's more, you know, should I get into public speaking or should I start a podcast and you haven't really got a sounding board to say, what, what would be good for me? And if the hermits get a bit lost, and then they'll start Googling for, well, which is best, and then half a day disappears. And I think it's helpful for them to say, I'm, you know, I need some help with like launching a podcast and bring in somebody like Mr. Beast to talk to you and give you some ideas on how to capture attention with a with a podcast. Um, There's just a couple more. There's the Escapists. The escapists want to automate everything. They hate computers. They hate um, they want free time. They want pina coladas on the beach. But unfortunately the escapists probably aren't the people who can automate things'cause it needs quite a lot of technical skill. You've, you've got to model what you do. You've got to build what you do in reality and then you've gotta check, it doesn't fall over. And if it does fall over, you might have to fix it really quickly. So there's a lot of technical moving parts there. And I think automation's been available for 30 years. Everyone's sort of, you know, Zapier for tens of years. So these tools have been there, but people didn't use them'cause it was difficult. And if you think, well, AI's gonna help me automate everything by Tuesday, if you've not done it before, then you haven't got those muscles yet and you. It probably won't. So those are the escapists and the final one are the architects. And they're always building systems and tweaking them. So I'll use the example, you know, they're building a swan sanctuary for white swans, and then they suddenly see a black swan, I think, oh, that swan could get really hot in the sun. I better build an extra swan shelter for the black swans. And then there'll be another requirement, and another requirement, and another requirement. And it never gets finished'cause they're building for all these tiny little scenarios that might not happen. And I think it's important for, again, for the ai, like the perfectionist to step in and go, well we're looking after, you know, a thousand swans. If one of them gets a bit hot then they'll have to lump it. And it's the same with your software projects. Um, But it, you know, it is difficult to do'cause you want to build a robust thing. And I think having the permission to sometimes not be absolutely perfect is quite a nice sort of added bonus of having an assistant.
Brooke:Wow. I feel like I just sat through a bit of a AI business therapy session. That was wonderful. I could see myself in some of those, if not all of them. And it's such an interesting time because a lot of people are stepping into that space of being entrepreneurs for the first time, building apps for the first time. And I could see how each and every one of us could get caught up in one of those spaces.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yeah.
Brooke:so much for, for diving into that. And going back to automation, you said automation takes not only technical skills to automate it. But then we need to like build it. We need to, write out this step by step. And then there's the managing process. And I'm at that point my AI implementation where I'm weighing these pros and cons of DIYing it or paying a professional. Then it comes to those like monthly reoccurring fees to have it sustainable. So curious if you can touch a little bit more on how you've been able to support founders and the type of collaborative efforts that you're bringing forth.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Okay. Um, Let's think. So one example would be somebody who was doing a lot of trauma work and very difficult subject on social medias, nobody's going, that happened to me. And so you haven't got that you know engagement to push you along when you, when you're creating content every day to get known and get people in your funnel and your free lead magnet. And so the first thing I did for her was I helped her build a content plan and then to make the content to go in it, which sounds kind of, well yeah. But that freed her up enough to start a PR campaign and she ended up on national television for 10 minutes so it wasn't just the content creation, it was the extra brain power to do something else, which was really helpful. So that would be, that would be one example. Another example on the creative side of things is somebody's doing public art sculptures and they need to get materials and a place for this art to be, they need to speak to officials and material suppliers, the local community, lots of different people to speak to. And they've used the AI to speed up doing that process, so then they're not so drained when they actually meet people in person. That's another, another example. In my own life, I've used it, I've saved the government, you know, 130,000 pounds in a week by going what features are we using at the moment into auditing how a business works? And sort of told the ministers, no, you can't have your hobby website with four pages on it for 50,000 pounds a year. It's not a good use of money. And so I've helped to look, look for savings for people because they can't always afford a VA they can't always afford. But some of the tools I see where there's, there's a tool that where you can have a, a survey with somebody and it'll give you a report at the end of it saying, well, you are this type of person and it was 99 pounds a month for this thing. And I thought, well, all it's doing is a quiz and, and put in the scores at the end. And I didn't really think it was a good value for money, so I used my assistant to build that, which has saved me 1200 pounds a month. So I do a little audit to work out which of those profiles you are, and that would, you know, that would've been 99 pounds a month. And I built it with Sheldon with quite a lot of coffee, swearing a biscuits in a day. So that was a good, that was a day rate of 1200 pounds, I guess. So that's, you know, I think replacing a lot of the tools is, is quite a good, a good thing to do. Mm-hmm.
Brooke:sharing those case studies. I, I love hearing stories of how it's actually being implemented so that people can become expanded in their own business. How I AI is brought to you in partnership with the Collective AI, A space designed to accelerate your learning and AI adoption. I joined the collective and it's completely catapulted my learning, expanded my network, and showed me what's possible with ai. Whether you're just starting out seeking community or want done for you solutions, The Collective gives you the resources to grow your business with AI. Let's bring it back down to personal more with you of how you first started implementing ai. I know you've been in this space for quite some time where maybe you can kind of just bring us to the present day and
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yeah.
Brooke:is your, what does your day to day look like with AI as your co-pilot?
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Okay, so the thing that got me into it was during COVID, I started writing fiction books as something you could do at home. I ended up doing quite well at that. I sold a million pounds worth of books, which was quite good, considering I didn't like the subject matter at all. But I'd done lots of computer documentation for big companies, and so I was used to wrangling with boring documents, and so I had to start using the AI to write books three years ago. They're only just about starting to do it reasonably well now if you know what you're doing. In terms of uh, what I do with it now. I use it a lot for confidence, decision making certainty. Been using it for, I've been featured in the press twice this week, so I've been using it to find news articles. It was about when we'll be able to use AI as a financial advisor rather than just looking at you know, investment documents and working out, if it's spending money on rainforest deforestation, things you don't agree with, that's fairly easy. But actually work, working with a portfolio is about five years away. So I got featured in two newspapers about that last week. So it's helping me research things, fact check things in multiple places. I used different AIs to fact check each other and go, oh, this is created in that tool. I bet you could do better. And it really, like, it really responds to that. Um, so there's been a lot of positioning things. I've, I've done the 18 assistants and got the, dragged the testimonials outta people, even though, you know what it's like. People love what you've made, but getting the testimonials out and they go to ground and without the testimonials, it's really hard to prove you, you know?'cause so many people are jumping on AI when they haven't got a clue so gathering the testimonials, nagging people for testimonials, got automated. And then consulting with people to put in assistants. So I have to interview them, work out their requirements, build the assistant to match their strengths and weaknesses and their business goals, their backstory and values is quite important, I think a lot a lot of people in my circle use story telemarketing, so you've got to teach it the stories for that to work properly. So I ask them about, the Hill they call it the hill, they you wanna die on here in the uk, so what's the hill you wanna die on? That goes in the system so it can speak up for you a lot better. So it's, you know, working with people in that sense.
Brooke:How many clients do you have at one time?
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Not too many hopefully. I think uh, my years of support taught me that that's not the best place for me to be. But I'd say about five, at 10 on, I think I, I built eight assistants in one go. So eight at once was, was, um it was good to prove I could do it, but I I wouldn't be running them every quarter, let's say.
Brooke:So now you have an AI assistant or a agentic marketplace where you have these stereotypical agents that do certain things that you sell people on. Is that how it works? Mm-hmm.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:put that in, um, in a spreadsheet and then that can become training, a distill version of training, and then I can also add in some more things to help them. So that's how I, that's how I do those uh, in terms of building. Yeah.
Brooke:So I was just curious on how people purchase your services or products.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Alright.
Brooke:Self living or is it more like high touch? Is it something that they just can go in and buy an assistant or an agent and, use it day to day?
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:So,
Brooke:work?
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:so I did it um, one to one and word of mouth. Really. I'm in the lucky position that I don't need a huge, you know, empire. I can do this as a lifestyle business. So you know, maybe 30 people a year would be plenty. I'm not looking to do 800, you know, people a year. It wouldn't be for me. So it's all referrals really. And I think because I have to work with them so closely to get the best result, I have to have quite a good measure of who they are. But I am gonna do some automated versions um, where they can just fit in there the online interview, and then that can become a fairly basic assistant. I'm thinking more for, you know, companies with, I don't really want to do it with the people who are quite tech savvy already because they've usually built something with duct tape and, and cardboard and it's like they don't wanna move away from it. Whereas it's much easier to work with somebody who's not really used AI at all. Now they've not had that sounding board experience. So I think small business owners rather than the ones who are constantly online, are the people to, to go to next. So I've been going to expos in, in London to try and network with more, more people and, and the press coverage again helps them find me. So, and then um, I've done the usual things that you do with like, the book and the course to sort of replace yourself in that way and I can gift that, you know, to charities or I could do good with it. And that, and then it can just be a regular commercial thing that I offer. Yeah.
Brooke:Wonderful. I always like to hear how different people are embracing this consulting with AI and tech space that's so booming and growing right now. Tell me a bit about pitching yourself. How, how did you find success with that? I know that's been a big question that listeners have had recently is PR and, and pitching themselves and getting placed in in media. I'm curious how you were able to get those two newspaper spots response.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:there is. So I joined a group called uh, NewsPage Media, and they're based in the UK an ex tabloid journalist and another journalist with probably 30 years experience. And they. You know, PR can be really expensive, you know, sort of 10,000 pounds a month for some of the best companies and for, for a lot of us, that's just not feasible. You don't even know if you, if I bought a 10,000 pound server, at least I've got something to show for it. Whereas media, it may or may not come off. So I, I did it that way. There's a quite good, there's a good group called Light Bulb, which is um, six pounds a month in the uk. They have an American version and you can, and it's full of journalists and real people. So not representatives of people and assistants. It's proper experts and the journalists. And I've had a friend who's had 40 pieces of coverage in there. She's a physiotherapist ex army major. Uh, So that was so light bulb would be a place if you wanted to do it that way. And then I think you've gotta be fairly opinionated. You gotta have sound bites'cause you're only gonna get a small piece of small feature. So it's, it's that sort of pithy journalist type way of speaking is something you have to have to work on. I think having a press pack is useful, so every time you do get some coverage, whether it's appearing on a podcast like this or a guest blog you're a guest expert in a group, start building all those up to show that you've got credibility and authority. Pair that up with the testimonials as well. And then concrete proof so I can say how much I've speeded people up by or what, how many problems I've solved for them. Try and try and make it numerical so it looks good on an infographic. And I think a lot of people get sucked into exposure dollars with people who want, you know, just not, they want mates rates'cause they're a friend and things. So I think you have to be quite a bit tougher than you you might want to be when you first start out. Hmm.
Brooke:You touched on building infographics and and press kits, and you shared a little bit earlier about just comparing different LLMs to each other and
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Hmm.
Brooke:them against one another to get the best results. Could you share more? I assume maybe perplexity might be one of the tools that you use. What's your quote unquote tech stack look like?
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:So I use Claude the most for writing. But but I get very frustrated with its hard limits on the chat. I've just about to hit my limit for the week, which is a new thing they seem to have put in, unless I've been a really heavy user this week. They seem very limiting. I guess. They, they want to be more profitable. They've got a very small market share, so they have to watch the pennies a bit more, I guess. Um, So I do like Claude for its writing style, but it gets it, yeah, the limits. But ChatGPT can go on forever, but it wanders off because it can go on for so long. It'll, it's like when you're a boy Scout over here and you're taught to navigate to a place, you navigate a little bit to the left, and then if you go off off target, then, you know, which side the lighthouse you're aiming for is. Whereas AI can just wander off and you can, you just dunno where you're gonna end up. And I think ChatGPT does that a lot. So, and I find Gemini doesn't really listen to what you're saying at all. It's it. It's a bit of a, of a high maintenance diva. I think I find Gemini quite difficult, but it's very good for fact checking. But I find, so when I'm doing the press releases, I've found Gemini's the best for, you know, did the IEE really say this about electricity usage or whatever I was looking up. So I found Gemini good for that. I've not bothered so much with perplexity, Comet or, I just, I think you can lose a bit of time working out how other platforms can work really well for you. And sometimes it's easier to hammer away on a slightly slower one that you know really well than look for a silver bullet and a better one somewhere else. But I've got fairly standard tasks to do, so I'm quite lucky in that respect. There's a, you know, it's usually just text, text, no video or audio things to do so I can, you know, I don't really have to find anything too exotic.
Brooke:Thank you for sharing. I think it's just interesting to see what different
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Hmm.
Brooke:towards. I agree. I think it's important to keep it simple. I've also seen have seen that trend where it does seem like they are starting to watch their pennies a little bit more across the
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yeah.
Brooke:The beginning of this year, it was a little different. The answers were different and, it seems like it pauses a lot more and it reaches capacity to really produce good answers. I've seen a shift in that in the last handful of months.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yeah, I think certainly when, when ChatGPT five was launched, it was meant to have a router that put people to, that used.'cause I, I would imagine people were always using the Rolls Royce model to do a simple task. And so I could understand why they put it in, but it didn't work for the first 48 hours I think.
Brooke:Yeah.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:And so everyone got really disillusioned because they, they didn't think it was, you know, working very well. And even now it's supposed to work better. I'm not convinced it was as good as, as four was for the tasks I was using it for with a lot, especially with the website copy coming up with blog ideas and modeling avatars. I found it was really good for that. But now not so much. Yeah.
Brooke:I agree so. I think the term you used was certificate junkie,
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yes.
Brooke:certificate junkie. I find that so funny because I also feel every three to five years, I find myself wanting to really reinvent myself and gravitate towards just always upskilling or learning whatever my curiosity is following in that moment.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yeah.
Brooke:What's next for you? Because a lot of people think that this, even consulting um, and AI is a bit of a bubble and, you know, the AI and tech and how we're gonna automate things is gonna be so different in the next couple years. What do you feel like is next for you? You, you've been an author, you have such a, an amazing background. What's exciting you now?
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:I have got some AI qualifications to do'cause I fact they can get some letters after your name for like two of those. I thought that'll be good. So I was going to do those anyway, again, just to separate me from the people who, who are good marketers who don't know that a mouse has got two buttons to it. Like I don't wanna be lumped in with them. So I'm not too sure. I think I quite like following. You know, how, how it's going to work. So I was looking at the electricity usage. So I think a Gen AI is gonna use, for example, 15% of Japan's whole power requirements. So that's what, and then in 2030 it's going to use all of the power that Japan would use for one year to power all the data centers. And that's a huge amount of resources and electricity. And when I see people with poor prompts and creating terrible videos on Sora just putting their face on something because they can. And I did a quote um, a figure yesterday uses 2,776 times more energy to do. A video that's gonna sink down on Facebook.'cause everyone's gonna think I'm not one of those, but I'm in Sora videos again. It just seemed to me a complete waste. And I think, and I'm quite conscious that some people are gonna get left behind and part of me wants to speak up for, let's use this for good and I want to research using it for good things and maybe more of a, a thinker in that, in that sense. And helping people use it for the best for them.
Brooke:I did see that open AI just put out its own free prompt pack and suggested a bunch of prompts,
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yes.
Brooke:specifically with that. So,
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Brooke:into it yet personally. I did interview a gentleman in Germany who founded this company called POMA. And we spoke a lot about just the environmentalism impacts and to your point, yeah using a Rolls Royce to, to ask really simple questions. And I agree. I think a lot of people are very haphazardly and even since that conversation I had with him, I've noticed I really need to jump into ChatGPT? Can I really just Google this now? Especially with AI summary. And how can I tone these responses?'cause for some reason it's gotten to a habit to give me a novel with every response, which is just overwhelming to me.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yeah.
Brooke:but on the opposite end, using a lot of energy.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Brooke:Well, the next question I wanted to ask, which kind of is in tandem with where you're going at next, is just a fun question
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Okay.
Brooke:everybody since we're in this time where we can create anything. If you were to build something tomorrow using ai, if you were to create an app or a completely new project what would you wanna create?
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Something that's been on the back burner a bit is travel road trip travel planners for people in camper vans.'cause I love exploring places. I just did a 2000 mile one a couple of weeks ago. And, and I, I sort of helped plan it out with the tools saying what I was interested in and I like to go off the beaten track a bit. And so I was thinking of one of the things in the UK I like to do most is going to the places that nobody else really goes to.'cause you've done Oxford and Cambridge and Canterbury and York. And then, well, what do you do for the next 50 years of your life, you're gonna have to go to another place. So I, I was thinking of looking at a region and saying, right, give me something you could do on a Friday afternoon all day, on a Saturday and a Sunday morning, and then you travel home and it automatically create two half days and a full day plan for whatever you, wherever you wanted to go.'Cause,'cause I do a lot of traveling. And uh, but have it that I'd probably have that as a printed book, get the AI to help me organize it a bit like having a courier organizes the most efficient route for parcels. It's like, well, what's the most fun route you could organize? So it could, it might be slightly longer road, but it might be more interesting road. So I thought, yeah, I'll have a dabble with that just as a fun project.
Brooke:It's very creative and fun, and I could see a lot of people really gravitating towards that. I remember I was in DC about a year ago, and I decided to really lean into ChatGPT to plan my every step of the way and tell me the best route for walking. I let it know if it was raining, and it was just my co-pilot as I was traveling. I love, I love a vista point and taking the, the longer, beautiful route so I could see people
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Um.
Brooke:Towards that. That's beautiful. I listened to a lot of Gary Vee, who is a bit of a futurist when it comes to just consumer trends and also this age of the solopreneur and everybody leaning into creation.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Mm-hmm.
Brooke:he always just talks about how those are the, you know, the very niche personal things that are gonna explode and leaning into that and developing and creating things like that are going to truly be the way people are making money in the
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yes, I think so. I think COVID taught us how important it is to be with other humans. Um, We're seeing that, you know, AI's replacing people a little bit on social media and we are getting, you know, like we used to have banner blindness when the back in the shouty days of the internet with all these animated banners moving around all the time. I think we can see fake content along way away. And I think Ernst and Young commented on it last week saying, well, people just see there's no like person behind it and they just scroll on. They scroll on past and don't think it's worth it. So I think if you can somehow combine uniqueness and and connecting with you as a person in some way, like authors could put people's names in a book or something like that, it's, you don't have to meet them in person, but you can make a really personal and nice connection. I think being able to make those products that connect with a person will work quite well. And use AI just to scale it, because once somebody does it really well, they'll, they'll do it faster than you. So you've gotta get in first and you have to do that use AI to get in first these days. So.
Brooke:Absolutely. Well, Colette, we went so many different directions in this conversation today. I would love to round it out with you to share what's one key takeaway you would like listeners to have from this episode.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Oh, crikey. Um, I, I, Well, I'd probably say take the time to train your assistant rather than giving it really long prompts. Having to start cold every time you start something, really think about who you are, what you do, what you stand for, what you sell, what pages are on your website, what your social media links are. Try and give it as much information as possible so that it doesn't make as many mistakes. You get less frustrated, you get things done more quickly, and it uses less resource.
Brooke:I love that key takeaway. What's the best way for people to connect with you? How should they reach out?
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:So I've got the website, cleverclogsai.com. I'm going to start using LinkedIn a lot more, so you can find me on LinkedIn. And I've got a substack as well where I've been putting some ideas about, you know, universal wage and, you know, how, how society's gonna transform. So that's on a, a Clever Clogs AI substack as well. So if you just want to get some information, you can go there.
Brooke:Love that. I'll tag your substack in the description and, and show notes. It's something that's been on my mind to get into and I've seen a lot of people gravitate towards there lately.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yeah, I think it's got, it's already got an audience and I think people, people who put the information on there, it's a bit like medium, I think they, they think about what they're publishing, so it's got, it's got a good reputation when you get there, I think. So I thought, yeah, I'll make a home there.
Brooke:Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this talk and I can't wait to share all about the archetypes with everyone. It's so fascinating.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Yes. Yeah, you can do the little test on the website and it'll tell you what your archetype is. So you can find out, it's just the four questions to answer, so it's, it's really quick. Yeah.
Brooke:I'll do that next.
Colette Mason | Clever Clogs AI:Okay. Lovely. Thank you very much.
Brooke:Thank you. Take care. Wow, I hope today's episode opened your mind to what's possible with AI. Do you have a cool use case on how you're using AI and want to share it? DM me. I'd love to hear more and feature you on my next podcast. Until next time, here's to working smarter, not harder. See you on the next episode of How I AI. This episode was made possible in partnership with the Collective AI, a community designed to help entrepreneurs, creators, and professionals seamlessly integrate AI into their workflows. One of the biggest game changers in my own AI journey was joining this space. It's where I learned, connected and truly enhanced my understanding of what's possible with AI. And the best part, they offer multiple membership levels to meet you where you are. Whether you want to DIY, your AI learning or work with a personalized AI consultant for your business, The Collective has you covered. Learn more and sign up using my exclusive link in the show notes.
