175: {Interview} Unlocking AI for Small Business Success: Practical Strategies with Alane Boyd

In this episode, Alane Boyd shares her expertise on AI and automation, revealing how small businesses can leverage AI agents to save time, increase efficiency, and scale their operations. She discusses practical tools, workflows, and upcoming workshops to help entrepreneurs harness AI effectively.

We talk all things: 

• AI agent automation for small businesses
• Practical AI tools and workflows
• Upcoming AI workshops and training
• How AI saves time and increases efficiency

More on her Claude Co-Work and AI Cohort HERE and use code CP10 for 10% off!

Connect further with Alane on LinkedIn HERE or on her website HERE

Transcript

Caroline Pennington (00:01.32)
Welcome, Elaine.

Alane Boyd (00:02.692)
thank you for having me back. I'm so excited.

Caroline Pennington (00:05.692)
I'm so happy to have you here and I'm just going to tell the listeners we've actually met in person since our first podcast. So that's exciting.

Alane Boyd (00:12.27)
I know you came and met with me in Nashville. It was awesome.

Caroline Pennington (00:15.604)
In real life is the best. So to reintroduce you, you're a keynote speaker, you're an AI agent automation expert, you're an active leader in EO Nashville and a TEDx speaker in Nashville. How did you do it?

Alane Boyd (00:17.806)
you

Alane Boyd (00:32.485)
Just like never giving up and just suffering a lot to get there. But I mean, just keep learning and meeting people is the best part of it. And if nobody knows you, then you're never going to get anywhere. you know, networking. That's why I was so appreciative of you telling me you're going to be in Nashville and got to meet with you. But like, you know, I don't do it alone. I do it because I got people to support me.

and just really just invested into relationships.

Caroline Pennington (01:06.228)
you said that because the exact same thing has been the story for me and it was scary in the beginning and feels weird because networking doesn't come natural to most people and even though I would consider myself an extrovert, it's still, especially when you're starting a business or a podcast, telling people about what you're doing is scary.

Alane Boyd (01:27.534)
It is. And I don't like when I think of networking, I think of sales, but that's not even what I'm doing. I'm just really like just showing up. I just show up and I keep showing up and eventually somebody's going to know who I am. And I'm one of those like introvert extroverts. Like I'm only extroverted for so long before I'm like, I'm too nervous to be here.

Caroline Pennington (01:52.873)
Yeah, I mean, I love your story. mean, you've sold to different companies. You speak on stages. You've led some amazing groups. mean, what are you most proud of professionally and personally?

Alane Boyd (02:06.254)
gosh. So personally, I'm raising a confident, adaptable child. He's 10 and I'm always just like, man, he just like really goes for it and just like the most kind way that he shows up for himself. So I'm always just like this morning, I was like, I'm so proud of you. He just started a brand new school in the middle of the year, didn't know a soul and just keeps kind of figuring out like how to fit in and how to make friends there.

professionally, I don't know, nothing's ever good enough. People always say like, does the bar just keep getting moved? Or what is the saying? Like the goal just keeps moving. I'm like, no, I won the game, but I didn't win by enough. Like that is what is constantly I'm trying to battle through in my life. But, you know, if I'm really being serious, like I'm really proud of my agency that I built up and the fact that I was able to sell it and that

It was multiple people. got offers from multiple companies. You know, was a really sought out business. So I'm really proud of that. And then now just really starting to learn what I enjoy doing and being able to do that and finding the other people that do the things that I hate, but they love.

Caroline Pennington (03:24.628)
because outsourcing sometimes is the hardest part, but so necessary if you're gonna grow. So I wanna talk about AI. You're an AI expert, automation expert. I've got some questions my husband plugged for me to ask you, and then I wanna talk about some of the programs that you've got coming up. So I was just having lunch with my husband actually an hour ago, and he was like, ask her how a small business owner can use or build AI agent and

Alane Boyd (03:31.341)
Yeah.

Alane Boyd (03:38.827)
You

Caroline Pennington (03:54.408)
What specifically can you use it for?

Alane Boyd (03:56.792)
So when we're talking about small companies, know, resources are strapped and that can be time, resources, can be people, it could be money. And so you really got to look at what is a small win that is going to save time, that's going to minimize the agent's build out. So a lot of times we go in with a company and they want to automate a massive workflow. Well, it takes three months to even be able to understand their workflow because nobody really knows what their workflow is.

Nobody knows. So what is something really small? You don't have to automate the whole process, but look at something really small. So an example is we have Decker, the kickoff deck maker. So we name all of our agents. So Decker creates our kickoff decks for new client onboarding. So we do the kickoff call, we go through a deck, and his only job is to take the transcript from the sales call and create our kickoff deck from a template. So we have a Google Slides template.

and have placeholders, the agent goes and fills in those placeholders. What are the top priorities of the client? What are next steps that need to be done? So really just looking at these little bite-sized pieces and being able to automate that. And maybe, Caroline, too, we take a second and talk about what the difference between an AI agent and just using AI chat is, if that's OK? OK. So most people think of

Caroline Pennington (05:16.86)
Yeah, let's back up and start there.

Alane Boyd (05:22.606)
AI is like, I'm going to go to chat to BT or I'm going to go to Claude and I'm going to chat with it. Well, if you think about that relationship between you and the AI chat, it's very manual, right? You are going in and writing the prompt. It gives you an answer. And then it's up to you to go and do something with that. An AI agent has a trigger and it's not you necessarily. So it can be.

that a sales call was just finished and it goes into Pipe Drive and automatically updates the notes, moves it to the next stage in your CRM. So the agent can take a trigger from something and go and take action for you. It's connected to your software platforms and can produce the results. So it's really, it really is your personal assistant or your company's assistant because it can take information and go do the job.

So that's where we're really looking at how does AI scale teams. And we have 41 agents who work for us. And we name them all because they are doing the work of real people that our team members used to do.

Caroline Pennington (06:29.652)
That is seriously so mind-blowing and fascinating because as you're sitting there describing it, I was thinking in my mind, like, a human actually taking the transcript from the meeting, moving it to whoever is the closer of the sale or whatever, fill in the blank that the trigger is. Okay, and for people that don't know, what's a trigger?

Alane Boyd (06:49.696)
A trigger is just what is the action that happens for the rest of the automation to happen. So a trigger could be the sales call just happened and you're using an AI recorder like Fathom or Grain or Fireflies. Well, the agent or the automation can be watching your Fathom account for that to be done. That's the trigger. The trigger is Fathom just recorded a video and there is one available.

And so it kicks off the automation. And what's so great about these triggers is that the human does not have to be a part of it. It can be. So I have Polly. She creates our proposals for us. Polly, her trigger is the proposal status in our CRM Pipe Drive. So when I move it to

to proposal status. Polly goes, I just got triggered. Let me go take care of all the rest. She goes and looks at the transcript from the sales call and goes and fills out our proposal from our template proposals.

Caroline Pennington (07:59.497)
That is freaking brilliant. So at what point does a real human have to come back in?

Alane Boyd (08:05.838)
So I always say an agent honestly should only get you 80 % of the way there because what we're reducing is think about how much is just data movement in your day. Most of our day, all of us are moving data from one place to another and we don't think of it like that because we think of, these are things we have to do and we associate our value to getting those things done. When the value isn't there, our value

is being creative, strategic, have judgment. AI does not have judgment. It doesn't really, cannot make those calls that a human can. And so, you know, even with Polly, who creates my proposals, I still go through and make edits to it, but it saves me on average two to three hours per proposal.

Caroline Pennington (08:55.432)
That's huge.

Alane Boyd (08:56.692)
That is huge. most founders, that's the last thing that is on the list, even though it's what gets us the sale, it is so time consuming that we're a lot of times founders are doing those late in the evening.

Caroline Pennington (09:09.99)
And just like we were talking before we jumped on this pod, my husband's a brilliant lawyer, but he still misses things in his contracts at times. hope none of his clients are listening to this. So AI goes in and helps fix those things. And it's those small details that the human mind.

just graces over or is tired and reviewing this contract like you're talking about.

Alane Boyd (09:29.536)
Yeah, it helps create the consistency that we want. And so there's another piece of AI here that has really become revolutionary with AI. That's not quite an AI agent, but it's not chatting with AI either. It's really the middle part, and that is Claude Cowork. And so people are like, yeah, I use Claude. Unless you're using Claude Cowork, it is not the same.

You know, thinking about it's the desktop app. So you download the app, it's a paid version. It's cheap to start. Don't get stressed. But even with that example of a legal document, they have plugins for that you can use. There's a legal, there's all kinds of plugins. There's a sales plugin, there's a legal plugin. But because we're only as good as we are that day, and these plugins really help shape things.

for us so that we don't forget things. So the legal review one goes, hey, you know, can you review this document? It'll review it and say, hey, you know, these are some things you should consider. Now, it doesn't replace the lawyer. You still need a lawyer, but this gives you either talking points or things that you hadn't thought of, even if you, you know, if you're not a lawyer, obviously. So I had with my CPA, we do R &D credits, research and development credits every year.

because we're a technology company, we're building tech for people, we build tech for ourselves. I have been doing this for 15 years. And, but this year with Claude Cowork, I used the finance review and I'm like, hey, could you take my statements, my credit card statements for this year and make ideas for what I should add to my R &D credit?

spreadsheet for my CPA. And it pulled out things and had ideas that I had never considered. Now I still need my CPA, but this found a whole thousands of dollars for me to discuss and have that conversation. So it's the perfect, I think just way to excel what we're doing with AI, but still do it in a very approachable format. Meaning we don't need to be super technical people and AI agent to build an AI agent. need to be technical, but to use Claude cowork, it can be an any day person.

Caroline Pennington (11:44.853)
That's a brilliant example on something that I wouldn't have thought of either to use this technology to go into our tax itemizations or our invoices or billing or any of our financial stuff and find things that we can use to write off. Okay, so what is the difference between Claude and Claude could work?

Alane Boyd (12:05.336)
So Claude is, there's a few different levels. So Claude, most of us have used just the chat where we go to the browser and we go to Claude and we chat with it. Claude came out a while ago with Claude code. So how does a developer use Claude to help develop, software develop? But they saw this need for like this middle ground. How can...

an everyday person use Claude code, but use it in an approachable way. And they came up with Claude Cowork. So you've got these kind of three segments to Claude and they developed it via a desktop app. So you just go and download it. Now I have found, I'll try go into Claude chat. It's still available in the desktop app. So you can go to chat or toggle to cowork or try toggle to code and I'll go to chat to do something. It's like, Hey, this is actually better to go to cowork for. So

The other thing with cowork is that it integrates with your software platforms. So for instance, I went to cowork and I said, Hey, can you look at my previous two weeks emails and find any sales related emails that I need to follow up on? And so it did. It found three and it goes, Hey, I think these three people you could follow up with here are draft emails. Would you like me to update pipe drive?

because it found that I hadn't added it to PipeDrive yet, which is my CRM. So it went to my CRM, created a contact, an organization, and a deal for each one of those three that I had missed.

Caroline Pennington (13:39.208)
That's insanely amazing. And also finding the holes of where you could make more money, get more clients. Things haven't been done.

Alane Boyd (13:41.964)
And I never left cowork.

Alane Boyd (13:51.213)
And again, we're not having to go, you know, it's not a bunch of data entry for us because that's where our time gets sucked is going to each one of those platforms and trying to find it. I mean, that whole thing took less than five minutes.

Caroline Pennington (14:04.436)
That's insane and also amazing and all the things I think that's just learning about AI and the chat bots and the agents now is just mind blowing and also exciting and everything all of it all the above.

Alane Boyd (14:21.838)
I have one for you, Caroline. You want to hear about Perry? Okay. So Perry, so my business partner and I have a podcast. It's just him and I, it's called Automate Your Agency. And the most important thing when you're building AI agents is to know your process. So it always has to start with humans. Humans have to figure out what is the process. So we had been doing our process for the podcast for a little bit. We kind of got things nailed down and then we built Perry. Perry takes the transcript from Riverside.

Caroline Pennington (14:24.444)
Yeah.

Caroline Pennington (14:48.67)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Alane Boyd (14:52.642)
That's our trigger. It creates 10 ideas for the description, or I'm sorry, the topic name, creates the description of it. It goes, if we reference a previous podcast in it, it goes and grabs the link and puts it in the show notes for us. It creates the, so we use ClickUp as our project management system. It creates the task in our podcast project.

from the template for podcasting, automatically assigns the humans that need to get things done, puts the link for the show notes and topic names, everything in there, creates our Dropbox folder for all of our asset, like images and stuff like that, creates it in the right folder, and creates the email announcement copy for us.

Caroline Pennington (15:44.968)
That's wild.

Alane Boyd (15:47.735)
So that whole thing saved 30 hours a week of work for us because people go, and this is the difference. People go, I'm already using AI for that. But you had to go and do each one of those things. The AI is already built into the process. And I'm telling you, eliminated 30 hours of work.

Caroline Pennington (16:06.248)
I'm just thinking how much time that would save. mean, that's so amazing, so cool, especially how you just broke it down on how you use it for your podcast specifically is amazing. And yes, that makes it the process less intimidating, less resistance of doing a podcast because now you have a workflow of what you can do and how to use the tech to help you out to save your time.

Alane Boyd (16:31.594)
Yeah, and it has SOPs like a standard operating procedure. You give the agent itself instructions. So because you the biggest thing people are like, well, it's I don't want to sound like AI and blah, blah, blah, but it's still saving you 80 % of the work and you can feed it instructions on your tone. You can give it examples of things that you've done. I you needed to do it before so you know the process, but you might like pick your three best newsletters or your three best.

descriptions that you liked and it can reference those when it's building out the stuff for the new episode.

Caroline Pennington (17:07.028)
Okay, so you have two workshops cohorts coming up. Let's talk about those. You got the cloud cowork and you have the AI cohort coming up as well in the month of April. So tell me, tell me about the workshop. Who is it for? How can it help everything?

Alane Boyd (17:18.262)
Yes!

Alane Boyd (17:23.968)
So our Claude Cowork workshop, we're going to teach how to get it set up and also how to build skills. And you're going to learn what those things mean in the workshop, but skills are your SOPs so that Claude Cowork can do stuff over and over and over again for you without having to retell it every single time. So we've got that coming up on April 16th. It is in the afternoon, two hours, and you'll be off to the races.

our AI agent cohort would be the next step. And that starts on April 20th. And you're going to learn how to connect these software platforms. What is an API? What is a web hook? We find most of the people that go through these cohorts are non-technical founders that need to understand how the heck.

Do these things operate? What are these words that I'm hearing? And typically they'll take, you know, if it's solo founder, it'll be them. But if they have a team, we see two to four people from a company coming through these because you need, there's, two parts to this. One is understanding what is needed to build an agent. And then somebody in your company who loves tech, who wants to build these and you need them to be aligned or you're going to be constantly frustrated.

leadership's going to be over here going, well, why the heck isn't this done yet? Why is this taking so long? What's going on? And then the builder is going to be like, well, number one, we have a software that doesn't have an API. Number two, no one in the sales team can articulate the process. So I have no idea what to build. So it's really nice when you have both of these types of people going through together, because then when you leave the cohort, you understand as a company, what is needed to be.

excelling at this really, like really to make things happen.

Caroline Pennington (19:15.582)
So where can we find more information about how to sign up for these programs? All of the above. Like, how can our listeners find you?

Alane Boyd (19:22.37)
They can go to biggestgoal.ai is my website and we've got information on those on our cohorts. We're also Caroline, we've set up a coupon code for all of your listeners so they can use CP 10 for 10 % off of them. And the Claude co-work workshop is just a two hour workshop. The AI agent one, cause it is loaded with information is actually a four week live cohort. It's virtual, but it does. we meet a couple of times a week. So.

biggestgoal.ai, and then me personally, I am very active on LinkedIn. I mean, think that's how we originally might have found each other a couple of years ago. Yeah, so we're both active on LinkedIn. And shoot me a message. I love connecting with people like we talked about at the beginning. It's all about who we know and how we can help each other succeed.

Caroline Pennington (19:59.643)
It is, it is. LinkedIn, for the win.

Caroline Pennington (20:14.196)
Thanks, Elaine.