Season 1 Finale: Switching to Claude, What I Actually Did on My First Login

I’m taking you inside what happened when I finally reactivated Claude Pro and started setting up my AI workspace in real life. I’m breaking down the bigger shift underneath this move, why Claude has been making headlines lately, what the launch of Claude for Small Businesses signals, and why I think the more useful question is no longer which platform is better, but what role each one plays in the way we actually think, create, and run a business.

This episode is also about the habits underneath AI adoption. I talk about why file naming protocols, folder structure, desktop organization, and clearer workflow language matter more than ever once AI starts living closer to your workspace. I also share why more people may need to rethink calling themselves non-technical as job titles, resumes, and the language of work continue to change.

This one is for founders, creatives, marketers, and AI-curious professionals who are starting to realize that the next level is not just better prompts, but better structure, better systems, and a setup that supports the way they actually work.

Helpful resources mentioned:

AMP / The AI Exchange job posting analysis:
https://news.theaiexchange.com/p/special-edition-we-analyzed-24-000-job-postings

Anthropic + PayPal AI Fluency for Small Businesses:
https://anthropic.skilljar.com/ai-fluency-for-small-businesses

NY Tech Week Events:

Mixer RSVP:
 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1988914139732

Women’s Vibe Code Workshop RSVP:
 https://partiful.com/e/3utTkNZhe2NKwkVBuUdU

Ready to cut through the AI overwhelm?

Explore all my resources in one place → https://stan.store/BRXSTUDIO
Free AI Guide • 45-Minute AI Jumpstart • My Favorite Custom GPTs 

If you’re a brand, event, or platform interested in sponsoring season two or collaborating around conference coverage, moderation, or thoughtful storytelling at the intersection of business, technology, and culture, I’d love to connect.

Support your body against EMFs with Leela Quantum Tech - 5% off with affiliate code: BROOKE

More About Brooke:

Website: brookex.com

LinkedIn: Brooke Gramer

More About the Podcast:

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Website: howiaipodcast.com

"How I AI" is a concept and podcast series created and produced by Brooke Gramer of EmpowerFlow Strategies LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript

Brooke 0:00

​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, 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. Hello, and welcome back to How I AI. A couple weeks ago, I recorded part one of this experiment where I talked about moving over to Claude and setting up my new AI workspace, and I promised I'd come back with a part two if enough of you showed interest once I finally got in there and figured out what this looked like in real life. So here we are. And I'll say this upfront, what came through for me this week turned out to be bigger than just switching platforms. Because once your AI workflow starts moving from something you visit periodically throughout your day to something that actually lives closer to your work. Then the way you've organized your whole digital life starts to matter in a completely different way. I'm talking about your files, your naming conventions, your folder organization, the way you describe your repeated workflows, even what's sitting on your desktop. All of it starts to matter more. So today I'm gonna walk you through what I actually got done on my first real login reactivating Claude Pro for the first time in three years. What felt intuitive, what felt confusing, what I'm genuinely excited about, and what I intentionally did not try to do yet. But before I get into my own setup, I want to share a few news updates around Claude because a lot has happened since the last two weeks when we spoke. Anthropic is drawing a clearer line between normal subscription use and heavy use. And this actually mirrors what I've been seeing across the board. In simpler terms, if you're sitting at your computer prompting, thinking, using Claude Code like a normal person, you're probably fine. But if you're using Claude Code more like an infrastructure, meaning scripts, agents, wrappers, automations, always-on workflows running in the background, Anthropic is to share that that kind of usage should really live inside a metered API structure rather than feeling unlimited inside a flat subscription. So I imagine they'll be changing up their pricing structure soon for the more advanced users. And like I mentioned, I've been seeing this happen across the board, which really just iterates how important it is to be an early adapter in these spaces because you get further faster. The other interesting announcement that came through this week from Claude was the launch of Claude for Small Businesses. ChatGPT has already had a lot of these features built into their enterprise level. But while Anthropic is very clearly trying to target more of those founders and small teams and business owners inside their ecosystem, this new suite that they launched includes integrations like QuickBooks, DocuSign, PayPal. And Anthropic even called out that small businesses make up such a huge portion of the US economy right now. I think it was around forty-four percent. But for a lot of these small businesses, AI adoption tends to stop at the chat window because a lot of these systems haven't been built for how small businesses actually operate. We're moving out of the phase where we're so concerned about how our prompts are formatted, where you just ask AI questions like you're using a vending machine. We're moving into a phase where these small businesses genuinely want to be embedded within the actual operating stack. We're talking your contracts, your accounting, your calendars, your workflows, all of your knowledge base and communications. Along with this small business launch, Anthropic partnered with PayPal for a free AI fluency course for small businesses. Access to these tools isn't enough anymore. We need education, implementation, and trust. Especially when you're trying to gain a competitive edge with the market. I'll be sure to link that free AI fluency course in the show notes below. So when people ask me whether or not switching over to Claude is worth it or whether OpenAI will be, quote-unquote,"winning again in the next few months." Which one's better? I think the more useful question is what role each platform actually is trying to play in how we work. Because I realized I don't need another productivity system. What I actually need is a better way to hold all of my ideas, projects, a unified place for my decisions, my voice notes, my podcast episodes, transcripts, product offers I'm working on, and all the mental tabs that are constantly running in my brain. I started thinking of Claude as this nervous system compatible operating system for being a founder in this AI era, and that framing really stuck with me all week. That truly was the bigger need underneath my whole platform migration. And speaking of what I've been working through this week, I had some genuinely interesting breakthroughs using a few of my favorite custom GPTs. Especially one called Dream Journal and another one my colleague made called Wish Wizard. I had these voice note conversations, and these GPTs really helped me process things in a way that felt very reflective and clarifying rather than just being productive. If you want a list of my favorite custom GPTs that I use, I put those in my Stan store, so you can grab those for free linked in my show notes below. You might be wondering why I'm still talking about ChatGPT. Let me explain. I don't think I'm replacing ChatGPT with Claude, at least not right now. For the next three months, I'm keeping both and using them for different parts of how I think and work. ChatGPT still feels like the place I go to for synthesis, for pattern recognition, processing things emotionally and intellectually, for exploratory thinking, and my conceptual development. It's where I'm still drawn to go when I'm trying to understand what I actually am thinking about when coming up with new ideas for product launches. Claude, on the other hand, is starting to feel like something else entirely. It's becoming my new operating system. It's the place for my project architecture, my knowledge organization, workflow support, execution containment, structured memory. It's less about exploring and more about building. So instead of asking which platform is better, I'm asking a much better question: What role does each one play in the way I actually think, create, and run my business? Once I stop trying to master Claude overnight, I could actually start building with it without burning out. So let me tell you what I actually did during my first login. I downloaded the desktop app because this is where you can actually access those features like plugins. I poked around, saw that Claude Code was prompting me to install Git, and I made a very deliberate choice. I'm not getting to Claude Code today. That's not the layer I need to be in yet. I really wanted to focus on setup, not becoming a power user before I even knew what I needed. And I think that's worth saying out loud because a lot of people get excited about the most advanced features first, and we get caught up with all of these Instagram reels or YouTube tutorials of what we should be doing and how to max out Claude Code, And then they burn themselves out trying to go from zero to expert before they've built any real foundation. That was not going to be me this week. Instead, I focused on what actually supports me right now. I set up my settings, my personal preferences, set up the basics around sharing my business goals and how I want to be addressed. And then I started setting up my projects and began uploading the context that I want Claude to understand. My brand kits, all of my decks, my podcast transcripts, my Zoom call transcripts, workshops I've created, any educational materials I've personally downloaded from workshops I've attended. I have a whole folder just on education. Raise your hand if you're guilty for signing up for everybody's free webinar. If you're like me, you probably have a folder on your desktop of all of the workbooks and educational materials you wanna get to. So along with this and all of the broader business context of things I'm working on, whether personally or professionally have been uploaded and added and sorted within my projects. I basically started giving Claude the raw material of my world. At this point of the process, I was reminded how important it is to have a file naming protocol. I have run countless numbers of ChatGPT tutorials for small businesses, and this is one thing I'm always hounding my clients about. Because if you start to ask yourself,"If I hired an intern tomorrow and gave them access to my desktop, would they be able to find everything?" And I think this matters so much when you're starting to give things like Claude access to your computer and specific folders. Maybe you're connecting Google Drive, or maybe you're actually connecting your desktop. And file organization is the standard we need to be working towards, not just for another person on our team, but for the systems we're increasingly asked to help us think, retrieve text, summarize, and act on our behalf. Messy file systems slow down both people and AI. Vague filenames create friction at every level, and one of the biggest things I focused on when training people for ChatGPT is that Folders need to be subdivided clearly by year, project, client, or function. Basically, your workplace should be legible to someone who did not create it. This isn't just admin work, it's future-proofing your AI. The cleaner your digital environment, the more useful AI actually becomes. You may have seen all those hacks."I had Claude organize my desktop in twenty seconds." Well, newsflash, if you don't have your files named properly, It's not going to know what to organize or where to put what. So after I organized my projects, I started to explore the skills section, which are again, basically reusable instructions and workflows that tell Claude how to help you in a specific way without having to re-explain everything from scratch every single time. This was actually the part that was hard for me to navigate. It sits within a customized section of Claude, but it's very easy to miss and very easy to click out of and hard to click back into. Within the little plus sign I looked through, there are some pre-made skills. One of them is called Creator, one is for brand, another one is called co-authoring, and that one really caught my attention because it's essentially a built-in professional writing partner workflow. It's designed for proposals, SOPs, strategy decks, decision documents, long form content, and turning all your messy ideas into organized deliverables, within this skill section is where I started to feel the difference between Claude as a chatbot and Claude as a contained work environment. Also within the customizable section, you'll find the connectors. Right off the bat, I connected Canva, Vid IQ for YouTube, Gmail, Notion, Zoom, Zapier, and Gamma. These are things I use weekly and even daily. I did not connect every single connector i'm trying to move with intention here rather than recreating another messy house I have to manage. From there, I started exploring plugins within Cowork, which felt like a bigger concept. As a refresher, if a skill is one specific workflow, a plugin feels more like an entire role or function packaged together with, subagents built inside it. I installed a few that were pre-made by either Anthropic or Anthropic partners that felt most relevant to my business right now. Those included brand voice, marketing, small business, productivity, and product management. But again, for today, I'm a day one login. I didn't try to customize everything all at once. My next step with Claude is just to get familiar with what's already there within these plugins, the slash commands, the built-in workflows, and figure out how they actually fit into how I think and move my projects forward. That's really what this episode is about, not just a Claude setup tutorial or demo. It's what happens when you stop treating AI like a random chat window and start designing it as a genuine support system for how your brain, business, and bandwidth actually work. This is a really good segue for one more thing this week really brought into focus for me, is how fast the language of work is changing. This morning, I was reading a recent newsletter from AMP, formerly the AI Exchange, and one of the biggest takeaways was that a lot of people are already doing forms of AI enablement, AI strategy, AI workflow design, or cross-functional AI implementation, but they're still describing their work roles, or listing their LinkedIn titles and resumes using old language that really is underselling what they're actually doing. Because if you're someone who regularly listens to this podcast and you're the person introducing AI tools to your team, helping people you work with adapt, or building low-code or no-code systems, you've gotten to the habit of connecting workflows, can translate this between departments that you work with, you may already be doing work that deserves updated resume language. This point came across my feed twice this week. The argument was that nobody should be really calling themselves non-technical anymore, because what does that even mean now? Even I am at fault for constantly doing this, and if you know how to work with an API, build your own AI workflows, connect tools, write instructions, guide adoption, shape systems, you are technical. Maybe not in the old school engineering sense, but in the actual reality of where work is going. So if your current title doesn't reflect that at work, maybe it's time to have a chat with your manager. Or maybe it's time you revisit your LinkedIn language or update your resume. Titles like AI enablement lead, AI strategy manager, AI program manager are starting to pop up quick. I'm not talking about inflating the work that you do. But becoming more strategic. Because the language and terminology you use to describe your work needs to catch up with the work we are all actually now doing today. This point feels especially relevant right now for me because season one of the show taught me over and over that the strongest people in this space aren't always the loudest or the most technically credentialed on paper. They're often the ones that are quietly experimenting. They're starting to build and explore and test without needing permission, and they're making sense of all of this change in real time. Those are the type of people that I hope keep coming back to this podcast. All right, everyone, a quick couple announcements before I wrap up today's episode. I'll be at New York Tech Week the first week of June. I'm hosting my own women's vibe coding event. We're also having a networking mixer. I'll be attending events all throughout the week and recording podcasts with people I've been connecting through this whole ecosystem. If you're tuning in from New York, and I know a lot of you are from the stats of this show, I would genuinely love to meet If you're a woman, come to my vibe coding workshop on June third. If not, come to the mixer we're hosting right after. I'll link both of those RSVPs in the show notes below. And while I'm wrapping up season one with today's episode, I also want to say a genuine thank you to everyone who has filled out the season two survey so far. It's been really useful to hear what's resonating and what you want more of as the show evolves. That feedback has been actively shaping what comes next. I'm not gonna say too much too yet, but here's the short version. The brand of this podcast is getting a lot clearer. More conversations with founders, creatives, and modern professionals building businesses in the AI era. More thoughtful conversations that actually cut through the hype. More creative entrepreneurs figuring this out in smart and practical ways. And so in the next couple weeks, the season two trailer will drop, so stay close. And if you're a brand looking to collaborate, if you're interested in sponsoring, please reach out. A few of the ways I partner include conference coverage, moderating in-person panels, curating programming, and thoughtful storytelling at the intersection of business, technology, and culture. So if you're interested in that type of collaboration, I'd love to connect. And as always, I'm continuing to build out my digital store, BRXStudio, inside my Stan store. Within there, you'll find my free AI Get Started guide, my favorite custom GPTs that I mentioned earlier in this episode, ability to book an AI Jumpstart session with me, which gives you access to my Rolodex of trusted developers and engineers for more technical and custom builds. If season one has sparked something in you and you want to take your next step with AI in a way that actually feels clear and supported, that's the place to go. All right, that's it for today. This is the final episode of season one, which honestly feels a little wild to say out loud. And it feels very fitting that I'm ending this season in such a moment of transition, because that's really what this whole season has been about. Not perfection or mastery or having it all figured out, just paying attention to the shift while it's happening and learning how to move with it instead of behind it. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. And thank you for building alongside me. I'll see you next time. Take care. If you're tuning into this podcast, you're most likely an AI advocate, and you may have also wondered how to support your body against the invisible stress of EMFs. Think wifi, cell towers, or hours in front of your laptop. Leela Quantum products are lab tested in triple blind studies and are proven to help harmonize and neutralize EMF signals. Their products are the few things I felt a real energetic shift from. I personally wear their quantum energy necklace daily. And if you're someone who cares about optimizing your energy and nervous system like I do, explore their offers with my exclusive discount link below. Have you just started exploring AI and feel a bit overwhelmed? Don't worry, I've got you. Jump on a quick start 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.