Today is a call-to-action episode. Two of the AI tools I actually recommend to small business owners both shipped real upgrades this month. Claude rolled out a small business version with pre-built workflows and connectors into the systems owners already use. Grok shipped custom skills and deployable agents. Both companies stopped acting like a chat box you ask questions and started acting like a place where work actually gets done. The software finally came down to meet you.
The tools are getting upgraded constantly, improvements are shipping almost every single week and now we’re starting to see users requests for connections & interoperability happen within days (not months!). This episode builds toward one assignment; One workflow, One sub-agent, done.
Why I use Claude and Grok in tandem
Most owners ask me which tool to pick. The honest answer is both, but they’re used differently.
Claude is the strategically sound one. If you handed me an MBA student with a master’s in finance and a long memory, that is Claude. Sound advice, careful structure, will not panic when you give it a messy prompt. Grok is the operator who lives on the internet. Built next to X, follows the developers posting every day, knows what shipped this morning. Up-to-the-minute on what is changing in the field.
I will run a contract through both. They surface different problems. I will write a social media plan in Claude and then paste it into Grok, which comes back with five things Claude missed because they trended a month ago, and things have already changed. Different sources, different outputs, same project getting better.
You do not need to start with both. Pick one. Add the other once you have a rhythm.
What actually launched, and who it actually fits
Claude for Small Business has been slow-dripping for a few weeks. Two things matter from the rollout. First, the pre-built workflows. Not toy demos. Real ones, ready to run. Second, the connectors. QuickBooks, DocuSign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva. You can sit in a conversation and tell Claude that the lunch on your card was a meeting with a prospect, and it will go into QuickBooks and recategorize it as meals with clients. You can ask DocuSign to surface every client you are waiting on a signature from, and Claude will draft the follow-up emails into your Gmail drafts box ready for one click.
Grok shipped custom skills, deployable tasks, and custom agents in the same window. The web portal is still there, but the more interesting use is wiring Grok into VS Code with an API key and running it alongside Claude in the same window.
The pre-built workflows are pitched at small business. They also fit the layer of organizations small businesses live next to. Local government. HOAs. Townships. PTAs. Teachers running an after-school program. The parent who used to be a bookkeeper and now keeps books for the local nonprofit. If you are running an organization on the side of your main job, this is built for you too.
AI does not fix messy
Small businesses are beginning to test out their own personal AI agents. What a lot of owners are finding is that it can expose as much as it can assist. Sometimes an AI Agent makes you look deeper at your systems and processes to see if they’re ready for handoff or automation. Just like it used to be with hiring an assistant, or a new employee, it can expose areas you haven’t solidified yet.
Forget the business for a minute. If you are an adult with kids, you should have a will and a trust set up. Where is yours? Is it a paper copy in a drawer? In a safe somewhere? Are there digital scans? Does the file include passwords for your accounts? Could your kids actually find what they need on the worst day of their lives? Most people answer that question and realize their estate is, in their own word, kind of messy.
Now imagine asking AI to organize that for you. If it is a mess, AI cannot help much, because the inputs are not clean enough to hand over. You spend the first hour cleaning up what you should have cleaned up years ago. Our lives exist in these millions of small little organizational items, bills, taxes, receipts, wills & trusts, insurance, bank accounts, credit cards, etc. etc. What if you had a personal assistant helping you keep things organized, and building documentation for your next of kin that is easy to read and understand. A chart of accounts, a graph of investments, contact lists for attorneys, etc. all organized for a purpose.
Scale that to a business. Now it is thousands of documents, thousands of images, company credit cards and bank accounts, employee contracts, healthcare items, retirement, every contract you have ever signed, every payment you have ever made. The mess is the same mess, just bigger. There is a line one of the AI founders wrote this month that I have not stopped thinking about. AI comes along and drains the swamp. It reveals what a horrible mess everything is.
I owned a gym for sixteen years. I thought our Google Drive was well organized at the time. Looking back at it now from inside an AI-first business, it was a disaster. I just did not know. Most owners think their stuff is not that bad until they go to hand it over to AI and realize they have no idea where anything is. That is a hard moment, and it is the most useful moment in this whole transition.
AI amplifies what you already are
This is the part I want every owner to sit with.
AI is a multiplier. It does not fix you. It does not fix the system. If you are a sleazy salesman, AI makes you a faster sleazy salesman. If you are a high-integrity operator who is bad at the technical part, AI takes the technical part off your plate and makes you a much louder version of who you already are.
I do not buy the “AI takes everyone’s job” narrative. I think a thin slice of coding and dashboard work shifts, and the people displaced were probably already on the bubble or they were providing dubious value to begin with. I think the much bigger story is the other direction. Small businesses are made of local people. They sit on township boards. They run the PTA. They give time to their communities while already running too thin. Give an owner back ten hours a week and a few thousand dollars a month, and that time and money go right back into the community they live in. Multiply that across a county and the story is not job loss. The story is local capacity coming back.
The readiness work, in three checks
Before you connect anything, run these three checks on yourself.
One. Do you actually know your own process? Could you write it down, step by step, so a fifth grader could follow it? Most owners cannot. The process lives in their head, it changes by the day, half of it is improvised. You cannot automate a process you cannot describe.
Two. Is your information clean enough to hand over? If you point AI at a folder of files called final, final-two, and final-actually-use-this-one, you will get a faster version of that same mess back. Iterate on the inputs first.
Three. Are you willing to be shown the mess? Hand your written-down process to your spouse. They will start poking holes. You will get frustrated and say it makes sense, it is obvious. That frustration is the data. They just showed you the mess. Iterate again.
Your call to action this week
Here is the actual assignment.
Move one. If you are not using one of these tools, sign up for Claude Pro at twenty dollars a month. The naming is confusing, Pro is their bottom tier, not the top. Get the connector. Open VS Code. Install the Anthropic Claude Code extension. Connect it. If you get stuck anywhere in those five steps, ask Claude itself. It will walk you through it in plain English.
Move two. Pick one workflow and run it inside Claude. A blog post you have to write. A monthly report. An email home to parents if you are a teacher. Anything you do every week that you would rather hand to someone smart. Then teach Claude your voice. Upload ten emails or fifteen social posts you wrote by hand. Tell it to learn how you actually write, not how AI defaults to write. Mine learned that I run on with long paragraphs and do not break every sentence into a new line. As you give it more context, the output gets closer to yours, and you edit less. That is the whole point.
Move three. Build one sub-agent. This is the move that separates people who play with AI from people who use it.
Sub-agents are different from the agent you talk to in the chat. The chat runs on your machine. It uses your CPU. It bogs down your context window. When you open a second terminal to work around it, both windows start grinding. A sub-agent runs on Claude’s own infrastructure, out on the web, not on your laptop. You can spin up thirty of them in the background and your computer keeps moving like nothing is happening.
Here is a worked example outside of business so the shape of it is clear. Say you are a golfer. You want new wedges. Build a research sub-agent. Give it your height, your weight, your TrackMan numbers if you have them, your stock yardage, your miss patterns. Tell it to come back with the three wedges that fit your specs. Then extend the task. Tell the same sub-agent to hunt eBay and the major resale sites for those exact wedges at fifteen to twenty-five percent below market, and return the deals as links. You went to bed. The sub-agent worked. Wake up to the shortlist.
Now take that shape and point it at your business. A research sub-agent that pulls your competitors’ homepages and flags the keywords they hit that you do not. An eBay-style deal hunter that watches the equipment you actually buy. A sub-agent that combs your inbox for client follow-ups that fell through the cracks. The shape is the same. The leverage is enormous.
Teachers, this is your summer
A note for every teacher in my audience, because I have been hearing from you.
Use this summer for your own AI education. Two things happen if you do.
One. You become the AI person at your school. Administrators and other teachers start asking you questions. You go from one of thirty teachers to one of one. That is leverage that pays off in every conversation for the next ten years.
Two. You actually understand what your students are capable of. Right now most of the kids who use AI in their work use it badly. If you can tell a student used AI, the student used it badly. A student using AI well would have trained it on their last five papers, given it the grades and the teacher’s comments, told it to write at their level, told it to use only the punctuation they already use, and asked for a 92 on purpose, not a 100. Cheat with some pride.
That is a separate conversation about integrity and what we owe our kids to teach them. I do not want to skip it. Kids still need to learn to read, write, analyze, research, and reason. 90% of getting value from AI is having logic and reasoning yourself, because you are the check on the AI. We do not get to outsource that. But the teachers who understand what the tool can do in a kid’s hands are the ones who can have an honest conversation about the line.
One workflow, one sub-agent
That is the work this week.
If you do it, email me at jeff@cbusaiagents.com. I will be so excited to hear about it. The people I started with a year ago are now running whole agent systems, building apps, shipping software they never thought they could ship. Once the snowball starts, you realize there are no real limits anymore.
The tools came down to meet you. The next move is yours.
— Jeff
Full transcript
All right, guys, what’s going on today? We’re going to be here talking about some new tools that dropped this past week. We’re going to have a little call to action today. All right, so I know I’ve been talking about a lot and a lot of people have been coming up to me and being like, hey, I’ve been listening and it’s like helping me keep up today.
But today we’re actually going to do something, right? And if you guys have listened to any of my previous podcasts in the past, you know that I’m a big call to action, guys. So we’re going to have something to do this week and I want you guys to try and just get out of your comfort zone a little bit and see if you can achieve a little bit. Okay, so that’s going to be, we’re going to talk about at the end.
But first, let’s just kind of talk a little bit about some stuff that dropped this week, some stuff that’s really exciting, specifically for small business owners, but I do think it’s exciting for just everybody, right? I’ve been finding that a lot of people, you know, whether it’s teachers or employees or people who are in service jobs or run service companies have been coming up to me and being like, hey, you know, I’ve been thinking about you or I’ve been talking about this and I really, you know, we’ve been struggling with getting some of these things across the finish line or to get something to look prettier or stuff’s delayed that shouldn’t be, and I’ve been thinking about you know, hey, how could we maybe use AI, which I think is awesome, right? I think that’s really cool that people are starting to see the functionality, the potential use cases and really seeing the dysfunction that exists in their organization. We’re gonna talk about that a little bit today, but they’re starting to find these inefficiencies and it’s not always like people driven, it’s process driven a lot of times, right?
And I think that that’s awesome because that’s, I think the first part, right, is we have these pain points that exist, we have this stuff that frustrates us, we have these processes or these people or these systems or these things or just we do it that way because it’s always been done that way and we’re annoyed by it and we’re like, but couldn’t there be a better way? And it’s like, yeah, for sure, there could be a better way and that’s what we’re gonna talk a little bit about today. Every tool every week that comes out, hopefully I can keep refreshing you guys on some of the cool stuff that’s coming out, but also this isn’t ever changing world. The stuff I’m touching on is like high level, right?
This is like stuff that is, I think, approachable for a lot of everyday users, but the stuff that’s happening underneath the surface, the extra skills and connectors and some of those things that are coming out are really, really cool. So if you guys start getting deep into the world, you’re gonna find a much more evolving space than what we’re gonna talk about on the high level stuff. All right, so the tools that I use most are Grok and Claude. All right, sorry, let me turn my levels down just a little bit.
So Grok and Claude are, I think, the two best and I like to use them back and forth in tandem, okay? I find that Grok does some things better in Claude does some things better. It’s a very rare case that combined between the two. I can’t get a lot of information, but, you know, for example, this week, I put some contracts through both and both found different things, right?
I put a handful of different social media posts into both of them and they came out with different strategies. They like to build off of each other, actually. So if I take my output, so let’s say I’m building out a social media strategy for one of my companies and I have it layout exactly a timeline how we’re gonna do what, you know, at what point are we gonna start doing Google ads at what point are we gonna start doing Facebook ads, et cetera, and then I take that plan and I copy and paste it over to Grok. Grok then is gonna run through a handful of alternative things and it’s gonna come out and be like, hey, that’s a great plan.
It’s really high level. Here’s some things that I would think about in addition to what Claude put out or here’s some new things that just happened. What I think that Grok is better at because Grok is working close with X and it’s following a lot of the developers that are posting every day on Twitter, they’re posting on articles, they’re posting tweets. I think we still call them tweets, I still do.
And it’s pretty current, right? So it does a better job, I think, of staying up to date with new things that are up and changing. As opposed to Claude seems a little bit more like high level, right, like it’s getting, it’s a little bit more strategically sound, but it may not be like to the minute or the day up to date on what you’re talking about. So I do like to use them in tandem, but they both just got a big upgrade.
And now, actually, in VS Code, you can actually attach Grok with an API key and you can actually use them both directly in VS Code working back and forth. Now, that can be an expensive setup. Again, that’s a pretty high level setup, so that might not be something that’s usable for most people. But as you guys start getting into this more, if you want to have the optionality for both, that does provide you that now just directly in VS Code, which is cool.
All right, so these are kind of the two things that came out this week, all right? So not this week, but Claude’s been rolling out the Claude for Small Business, has been kind of slow dripping a bunch of different things that it’s done. The biggest thing that I found is number one, it has some pre-done workflows that are really, really good for helping specifically small businesses. And I would also say like small business tangential people.
So this might be like local government, HOA, township, some of those things. It might be small business. It might be like a group of teachers or if you guys are on a parent network, like a PTA, something like that, it’s really good for those small to mid-level organizations who require people who maybe aren’t experts at a certain thing, so maybe you’re just a parent who’s also running financials for your HOA because you used to be a bookkeeper and accountant, whatever, right? But then the connectors are the big thing, right?
And this is what I’ve already found some of my clients are finding a lot of success with, is you’re able to connect the big ones that they did are gonna be QuickBooks for sure. That’s probably the biggest one. But DocuSign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, and that’s like all now connectable. And so what’s really cool is you can actually have your agents that are in there and you can have them connect in to your QuickBooks account and you can have it help with your bookkeeping.
You can have it sort and organize and you can do it. And this is what I think is really cool. You can do it in a conversational format. So just like you would with a CPA or with a real bookkeeper, it can just be like, you can be like, hey, you know, it pulls in all of your latest transactions, your credit card statements.
And you can tell it specifically, like, oh, well, that was a lunch I had with a potential client, you know, blah, blah. And it’s gonna automatically go in and change the category and categorize it as meals with clients, right? And it can run all the bookkeeping stuff for you. It can look for gaps or things that you’re missing in terms of expenses so that you could maybe expense some more home office stuff that maybe you didn’t recognize or you could just even ask it, what are my gaps in my own personal finances or my small business finances?
And it can help you with that. So again, some really cool functionality just with that aspect of it. But even DocuSign, like if you’re a realtor and you’re, you know, waiting on documents to be signed and your DocuSign account has that, like, hey, find all the people who I’m waiting on documents to be signed for, draft me an email and put it in my drafts box in my Google account and my Gmail and like, boom, done, right? It’ll go and read the document that needs to be signed, it’ll prepare everything, it’ll do all that for you and draft a followup email with maybe the DocuSign link in there and connect everything for you.
So like, again, some really, really cool functionality helps you go through processes number one faster but also help you make sure that things aren’t slipping through the cracks. So that one’s really cool. And then Grok custom skills and deployable tasks. So Grok is really like moving faster in the API key world.
So now it’s moving out of where I interface most with Grok is just a web portal. And a lot of that now is gonna be for programming things and new updates and then maybe some like financial stuff and legal stuff. But what they’re starting to do now is we’ve got custom skills and we’ve got custom agents now are available on Grok and so as we start thinking about the agents that we build and that’s actually gonna be our call to action today as we’re gonna go in and start working on building our own first sub agent. But as we start going through that process of working with it, having agents across different systems is really usable because they use different sources of information for how they train the AI’s.
And so now that you can do that on Grok, you might have a research agent or like you might do something like let’s say you’re gonna be looking at your website and you wanna have a research agent go and look at all of your competitors websites, right? And see where they’re hitting for keywords or for things that maybe you’re missing. And you can set up agents on Grok to run that in tandem with Claude and they’re gonna come back with different things because they’re using different resources. And they, the AI is how they read your website is gonna be different as well.
So you’ll get different outputs with that which is a really cool kind of thing that you can do now across these different AI’s. And that’s how I think it’s using it, right? It’s, again, think about these like the best personal assistant slash employee you’ve ever had in your life, who’s super intelligent and smart, like what’s better than that? Having two personal assistants who are incredibly smart, who have different skill sets, who are bring different things to the table, right?
And you can think about them as just think about them similarly like you would think about a person, right? It’s like this, you know, Grok is a, you know, older mid forties, you know, male who, you know, comes with this background and is super up to date with all of the newest happenings. And Claude is an incredibly intelligent, well-trained, you know, has a master’s in a PhD in finance and small business and all these things. And they, they can just communicate and talk and work together.
So some cool things out of both of them. But what they’re doing is they’re both trying to walk away from just that like web based chat box, you know, glorified Google interface of how everybody’s working with them. So they are now creating these tools for people to be working within their systems using some of these, you know, programs or third party programs like VS Code. Again, I highly recommend that you guys work within VS Code.
It is a phenomenal ecosystem. It’s very user friendly, has great security measures. And you can interface with either of these. So you can connect either of them or both of them, however you want.
And again, this will get back to kind of our call to action today. But those are some new things that just dropped with within those two tools. So a little stat for you here, stat checks. 72% of business are already testing, working with AI agents. So working on that next step, right?
If we think of the first step of AI is being just going in and interfacing with the chat functions. And that’s where a lot of people started. They met up gone to ChatGPT, asked a question, had some discussions, blah, blah, blah. Your second phase then is going to be to start working within the skills in the agent system and starting to build that.
So again, we’re already starting to look at these numbers ballooning quickly. And I think we’re still very early on this, all right? What we find though is AI does not fix messy, right? And so it says messy businesses, but I’m just saying messy, right?
If you are a messy person, okay? So let’s use a good example here, all right? If you’re an adult and you have kids, right? You should have a will and a trust set up.
Like you should have end of life thing set up for a bunch of reasons. Like if you don’t have that and you haven’t looked into that, go in your AI and ask why and it can tell you. But the big thing is is you don’t want your kids kind of struggling through probate court and dealing with all of these extra legal things when they’re dealing with your death, right? So you should have a will and a trust that lays out exactly what’s gonna happen to you and your stuff when you die, okay?
Let’s just say that. So where is your will and trust, right? Like is it still just paper copies? Did he need a safe?
Do you have any digital copies? Is it well organized? Is it easy to find? Does that include all of your passwords and or you know access to any of your digital accounts and your social media accounts and your bank accounts online and all these other things like there’s a lot of things.
So a lot of people when they think about this like they’re kind of messy, right? Like the paper copy exists. We did that a few years ago. It’s over here.
And so when you start working with an AI let’s say I was gonna task my AI with looking through my estate planning, right? I will, my trust, you know, some of those documents to ensure what happens to me if I go brain dead, you know, in my power of attorney and all those other things, right? Let’s say I’m gonna task my AI as to like give a double check through that and organize it for me so that my kids exactly understand where to find everything and it’s well organized. If I go through that process and I want my AI to do that, I need it to be organized in a way that makes sense to the AI.
And so right away as I start going through that process, if I’m messy with my organization, it is not going to be able to help me very well, right? And this is really true when you start taking that to the scale of something like a business, right? So if we start or a school or, you know, whatever organization you think you’re gonna bring AI into, when you start looking at that scale, then the messiness really exposes because like a will and trust is one specific small set of things, right, a handful of folders or documents. Now we’re talking about thousands of documents, thousands of images, thousands of legal items that we have to keep track of and contracts and payments and all these things.
As you start to go through that, if you’re very messy with your organization, you’re gonna get exposed quickly, all right? And I think this is a rude awakening for a lot of business owners, right? This is a great quote that one of the AI founders made this week and says, AI comes along and drains the swamp. It reveals what a horrible mess everything is.
And I think it’s so true, right? Like when I think back to my time in the Army or I think back to my time in friendship or, you know, just random small organizations, even like, you know, sports teams and some of those things I’ve been a part of over the years. When I think about the disorganization and how much clutter that leaves in my brain, it’s so nice and comforting to know that like now with this business, I’ve started it with AI and AI has helped me all along the way, organized and keep things organized. And so like, if I need to ask it a question or figure out where something is, number one, I can just say something like, hey, pull up my will and trust or, you know, pull up our marketing documents from last month or pull up my financial records or double check my bookkeeping is all up to date.
And it’ll just go and do that, right? And if I say, hey, where’s that folder? I can’t find it. It will literally bring it up for me in a finder box.
So you can like never lose anything, really. Everything is backed up three and four times across my, you know, devices. And so you get to this point where it’s like, I’m so well organized and so consistently quicker because of that organization that it does it like stresses me out to think back to like, oh my gosh, imagine going back into all of Friendship’s Google Drive, you know, in the thousands and thousands of documents and pages throughout all the years. And it’s just, it’s a mess, right?
And I thought it was organized at the time for what I was doing. But now working this way, you realize that it’s just messy. And I think that that is a revelation to a lot of business owners. I think they might think that their stuff’s not that bad.
They might not think they’re disorganized until they start getting into this. And it really is like, oh my gosh, like where is that? I don’t know, I know we have it, right? We did the work on it.
We spent a bunch of time. We hired somebody to do that. And I know it’s around here somewhere, right? And it’s like, and it’s like that times infinity.
All right, so again, it amplifies what you already are, right? If you think about this, like, it’s not, yeah, I can’t fix you, I can’t fix this machine. This is where I think a lot of people with the narrative of, oh yeah, I was going to come in and take jobs, are yeah, I was going to come in and displace people from whatever. I really don’t actually believe that that’s true.
The longer that I do this, I actually don’t find that to be at near as much of a talking point as people are making it out to me. And honestly, like quick side tangent on this. That’s a really weird pervasive narrative that’s getting pushed from somewhere, right? I don’t know where it’s getting pushed from, right?
It’s, I’m not sure if it’s like AI companies, if it’s news, like they just want something, because fear causes clicks. And fear if people losing their jobs is like one of the biggest fears that you can sell. But there’s some pervasive narrative going on that’s getting pushed from somewhere about this. And in reality, I don’t really think that it’s gonna be born to be very true across most industries.
I think certain industries that are very specific to like computer and tech and software design coding some of those things like maybe, yeah. But again, I think the people who are gonna get this place from those jobs are people who are underperforming. And more than likely probably would have been cut anyway, right? It’s just like now we just have more advanced, you know, the best coders or the best people are gonna be the ones who are kind of looking over things.
And then my hope, at least, or what I believe is that the people who are maybe getting laid off because they’re a subpar coder, maybe they can go and use some of these tools and actually bring things to the market that are gonna be more valuable than just, you know, working on, you know, the dashboard at meta to for, you know, to change colors and fonts or something like that, right? So again, as we think about amplifying what you already are, you know, if we think about small businesses, small businesses are people, right? Small businesses are the best things that we want to support because they are made up of the local people who live in your neighborhood, right? And so as much as we can buy from small businesses, as much as we can support small businesses, that’s really all we should be trying to do is consumers.
And a lot of that reason I think is gonna be, you know, they are the people, they are the heartbeat of our communities. And so AI helps amplify that, right? They are gonna help people be able to give more charitable time of charitable giving to our local organizations, you know, the small business owners like the ones I work with, they’re on the local boards of, you know, townships and planning committees and, you know, they’re running in PTAs and they’re doing all these things that are like, that’s big time community service doing that stuff, right? Going in and signing up for civic duty as a small business owner in the community, like, you’re already stressed, you’re already working a lot to then go and give more of your time for your community.
Like, these people really are the lifeblood of what exists around you. And, you know, if we can give them back some time and we can give them back some money, that is time that is gonna be given back to the cities, to the states, to the communities, to the neighborhoods. That is money that is gonna be given back to the time to the neighborhoods, to the local small businesses that they partner with. And things get a lot better from that.
And so I think that that’s kind of where I think, you know, again, it amplifies who you are. Like, if you are a, let’s just take the opposite end of it, right? Like, if you’re a scammer, if you’re a sleazy salesman who’s trying to get over on people, like, yeah, the AI’s gonna amplify that, right? It’s just gonna make everything you do a little sleazier, right?
And if you’re high have super high integrity and you’re really good at what you do, and you struggle maybe just to like, do the technical aspects of it. Like, AI’s just gonna make you better at sharing your message and getting the things out. So, so I think this is just like, again, really, really important for us to think about, conceptually and have a good AI radar of where we sit in the market and just kind of where things are going. So, this is what I wanna think about is, I think AI is fun to play with, right?
And this is where we have to think about, and I really try to get my operators that are working within our systems to have a very specific output that they’re going for and be laser focused on whatever that output is until you finish it and it has a bottom line impact, okay? 95% of projects fail, right? Because they, and when we say fail, it means they spent a bunch of time but it didn’t change anything, right? It didn’t have a bottom line impact. So we started playing around with this tool or this thing but it didn’t change any actions in the organization.
And you have never been more able to do that than with AI. So just keep an eye on that, right? It’s really important for us to do that. But that’s how I like to try to think about this in my head is start by planning more.
What is the intended output that we are trying to achieve and what is that going to mean for our business? How is it going to impact and then work backwards to get there, right? Again, and if you can say it’s gonna save the time of my employees, it’s gonna be a big quality of life improvement for my clients. It’s going to help us get the job done faster and more smoothly with less errors.
Those three things I think are going to be like your primary objectives and that’s where we want to be focused. All right, so as you go through this, this is kind of your ready checks we’re gonna start getting to our call to action for today. So do you know what the process is, right? And this is something again, like I think people very loosely understand what their process is, like if I ask them their sales process, it’s very loose, right?
Well, they kind of they do this or they might come in this way or blah blah blah and it’s, you know, get it buck buttoned up, get it dialed in, get it cleaner, get it written, make sure it’s clear, right, and iterate until it is very specific and very clear to where you can hand it off to like a fifth grader and they could understand exactly how your process works, right? That’s like extremely important, okay? Is the information clean enough to hand over against the same thing iterate until it is and are you willing to be showing the mess, right? So as soon as somebody else like me, right, a consultant or another person or if you really want a nice test, hand it to your spouse, right?
Show them the output and make sure that it’s clean and organized and if it’s not, they’ll be like, I don’t understand, they’ll start poking holes and asking questions and you’ll get super frustrated with them, be like, what do you mean? It makes total sense, it’s obvious, right? And it’s like cool, you were just shown the mess, right? It’s not clean enough yet, keep iterating.
So three moves, all right. This is where we’re gonna go just to touch off these slides because I was thinking about this as I was doing the intro and I want to get us doing some things, okay? So first, all right, I want us to think about number one, if you are not using a tool, right? If you’re not connecting clawed in somewhere, creating projects or working within any of these ecosystems, that’s your first thing is I would say my recommendation be to go and sign up for a clawed account, use the $20 per month, I think they call it Pro, which is confusing, right?
Cause Pro usually would be a higher level but Pro is their bottom level. Sign up for the $20 a month one, get the connector and connect it into VS Code, right? Like that’s our first call to action. And go through again, same thing if you don’t know how to do that, once you sign up for clawed, you can go into the clawed chat bot and ask it, right?
But very simple initial setup, okay? You’ll have to go into VS Code, go into the extensions and connect it with the Anthropic Claude Code and then you’re interfacing from there, okay? If you guys have trouble with that and you’re really struggling with it, again, keep asking the AI’s, you’re welcome to reach out if you really do get stuck, but keep asking the AI’s and it’ll help you walk through all the steps to make sure that you’re connected properly. Once you’re connected, I want you to start thinking about a workflow and start with something simple, right?
A blog post you have to do, an annual report, a, you know, if you’re a teacher, just do a student, you know, end of year, right? It’s end of year. So if you need to write something to a parent or, you know, highlight something about student, start a workflow. The workflow basically you want to think through, again, same thing like all the way from start to finish.
What is the process? Here’s the input, here’s what I need to think about. Here’s what I need to give the agent and then what do I want the output to be? How do I want that output?
Do I always have PDF? As a Word document, what do I want it? As you go through those, once you get your tool, you think about kind of what goes in and then where do I want to check and approve it? And what is wrong with it, right?
So a class example of this is let’s say I want it to write social media posts for me. And traditionally, when AI writes social media posts, it’s got all of these tells, right? It’s got not this, but that M dashes, like the little dash dash, right? And it’s got this like weird talking personality, right?
So then you might need to start looking at, okay, I don’t like that, right? I don’t want that. So I need to go in and either proofread it myself or better yet, find tools that exist to proofread it and make it sound more like you. So how would you do that?
In this case, if you’re a teacher or if you’re gonna be doing student thing, you might upload 10 of your emails to parents that you’ve written in the past by hand, right? If you guys are writing a blog or social media post, you might upload 15 different social media post copies that you’ve written in the past by hand so that it understands specifically and learns how you write, okay, very important to understand how you write, not how it wants to write or these other things. So it’ll learn all these things. Like for me, it was like, oh, you like to use really long run on paragraphs.
You like to use this, whereas AI likes to do like a new paragraph of everything. And so it’ll learn more, right? And then as you teach it, and it’s called give it context, as you give it more context as it learns more about you, the output will become closer and closer and you’ll have to change and edit less because it’ll be more to your liking, your standards and how you write, all right? So that might be like a specific workflow.
Then you just start kind of with very simple, right? Start read only and then widen the leash, right? So once we kind of knock out that first workflow, it’s like we do that, we give it the context, we train it. It’s doing all kinds of things in there.
One, it’s starting to write your Claude.md file, it’s starting to write your brand profile, starting to write and learn, you know, things about you as we go through this iteration and process. So that would be where I would like just really quickly, like just start, right? Start with one of these, either start with one of the workflows that comes preloaded or that the Cloud or Grot can already do or start working on creating your own. But where I really want you to do it, we don’t have a slide for this because what I want you to think about for today is I want us as a team to start working on building a sub agent.
And so this is a bigger ask, right? As you guys are going through this process of starting to download and use the tools and create a workflow, a couple of things you want to be thinking about, like you want it to, you want to tell it right out of the gate, like, hey, I want to start building a system of agents, sub agents and workflows. So that would be the prompt. I want you to learn everything about me and then give a brief, you know, little introduction and ask it what it needs from you to start building out this process.
But then I want you to start thinking about building a sub agent. Sub agents are really cool. So whatever you’re working on right now, right? You can start thinking about a potential sub agent that would do this.
I’ll give you just a handful of like examples of this, okay? Is let’s say you’re a golfer. Golf season’s coming up, right? Let’s say you’re playing in a golf outing on tomorrow.
And you want to research some different club choices, maybe you’re in the market for some new wedges, right? You could create a research agent to go out and research, you know, again, you would give it your height, your weight. If you have any swing analytics from like a TrackMan, you can put all those in that information in there. And you can say like, you know, hey, I’m a six foot three, 220 pound male, generally swing pretty hard.
You know, I tend to miss right on things, you know, whatever, you can put it in all this information. And then you say, I want to create a sub agent that can go out and research all of the wedges on the market and find things in this parameter. Like here’s kind of the yardage I’m looking for. Here’s my stock yardage is whatever.
So you can give it all this context. The sub agent that would go out and research all these things. Now you could go further and you could say, then I want the sub agent, right? So this is going to be the, we’ll call it the golf club research sub agent, okay?
I want it to come through eBay and use sites to find me deals that are out of the normal on those wedges that we decide on, right? So first step is going to be decide on what wedges are going to be best for me, okay? Second step is go out on the internet and find me deals for wedges that are 15 to 25% below standard market price, okay? Provide those to me in a series of links so that I can go through and look at those, right?
Now what’s really cool about this is sub agents a lot of times will go off of your system, go out back onto, we’ll call it like the clawed web based system. So they won’t be running locally anymore. What you do is you give it this set of parameters, okay? And then it’s going to go out to the clawed native system and it’s going to start coming through and going through these websites and doing everything that you tasked with doing.
All it’s going to come back with then is the report on the back end. And so these sub agents then what’s really cool about this is as you get better at this, you can be creating 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 sub agents to be going out and doing all these things but it doesn’t bog and slow your system down so they can be running in the background, like in the literal background. And these sub agents are going out and putting calls out onto the internet and it’s not using your CPU, right? It’s not using your data, it’s not slowing down your internet, it’s not slowing down your computer.
And so because of that, what used to always happen locally, where if we were just running one of our classic agent systems and that’s all happening on your computer, it would just kind of go slow. You go line by line by line, you’d be sitting here watching your terminal or watching your VS Code and it’s just like accept, accept. And you can see it just running these one task set of time and you’d kind of have to wait for it to be done before you could move on to the next thing. And then you would work around that by maybe opening a whole nother window, right, or a whole nother terminal.
So tonight you have two terminals working, right? But what happens then, if you start doing that is your context window start to get bogged up really fast, but because they’re both operating on your own computer on your own internet, they’re bogging each other up. So it’s all starts to slow down and grind down. But when we start building with these sub agents in mind, this is where you can really start cooking with fire, right?
Especially for things they’re going to be like web based research tools. So that’s where I’m going to task you guys today is just start working on your first sub agent, right? And again, I want you getting conversational and working within some of these systems. If you guys are teachers listening to this, right, you’re coming up on summer.
Like let’s use our summer for a little education of our own, right? And just start getting in. Number one, your students are going to pass you up quickly if you aren’t like staying up on this just a little bit, right? And it’s not like you have to be the world’s leading expert, but if two things are true at one, if in your school you can become like the AI person, right?
Somebody who’s on the cutting edge, you’re going to find all of these other teachers administrations and people are going to start to rely on you and lean on you and ask you questions which makes you really invaluable as a teacher, okay? And makes you more valuable to your school generally, opens up opportunities for US things change and adjust into the future, okay? But two, it’s going to help you from a student perspective understand what their capabilities are, right? And I’ve heard all kinds of stories from teachers this year about how students are interfacing using AI.
And like students are still not all the way there yet, right? Like if your teacher can tell that you’re using AI for something, you’re probably not using it very well, right? Like that’s the first thing is if you were using my systems, if you were using what we’re talking about today and you trained it properly to say, I’m an eighth grade student, right? Or I’m a ninth grade student or a fifth grade student.
Here’s my last five papers I’ve written, okay? And here’s my grades and here’s what the teacher knocked off on me for. I need to, I need help with this, right? And I’m gonna have it help me write a paper but with the context of my last papers it won’t write above and beyond your level, right?
It won’t put in punctuations and things that you’re unfamiliar with. It won’t use semicolons, it won’t use italics or things that like you have never used in the past and your errors, like you can even tell it. I don’t want you to be 100 out of 100 paper, right? I don’t want a 92 out of 100 so I need some errors and they’re like make mistakes intentionally, right?
Like if students were operating at a high level and I always go back to like when I was a student, right? Like if you’re gonna cheat, cheat with some pride, right? It’s like, but as a teacher, it’s a tale as old as time, right? Kids are going to try to figure out how to cut corners and yes, as teachers and as parents, a part of our job is to teach our kids integrity and what is the value of learning something for the sake of learning.
And I agree with you that generally like kids need a general education to be able to use AI or do whatever they want to do in their next life, right? Wherever they want to grow up and whatever they want to do. Like you still need to be able to read, learn, analyze data, research, write, and have a good analytical, logical brain, right? Like those are all things to be aspired to and you can’t just like outsource all of that shit to AI because 90% of AI work is actually having good logic and reasoning yourself to ensure that you are the check on AI itself.
So we still need to be able to get those things into the student’s brains. But if you’re in and working this summer on understanding its capabilities and building out agents and sub agents for that, I think you’re gonna find quickly why it is that students need to be using it and interfacing with not avoiding it or walking away from it or whatever. So just I think a cool thing for us to do but this would be like your initial step into getting layers deeper, right? And so we’ve talked a little bit about like what you can use an interface with now.
What I would tell you is if you guys have been following along and listening, like let’s take some action today. Let’s try to download one or two programs. Let’s try to connect our cloud into our programs and let’s try to start building out our own folder set and system, okay? If you guys need help with this or if you guys get stuck or if you guys want someone to help guide you, like you can reach out definitely willing to at least help triage a little bit, right?
A lot of my triages, a lot of times is like, do you ask your agents though? And hopefully we can get all get there. So that’s kind of our call to action for today. So one workflow, one sub agent, that’s our task.
If you guys do it, shoot me an email. I’ll be so proud of you. I’ll be so excited to talk to you about it. And then you’ll also see me get all hopped up on excitement and tell you all the other things that you can do with it and just watching people grow within this and watching what they create is just so, so cool, right?
The clients that I initially started with are building like these huge integrated systems, apps, programs, software. It’s like, once you see it, right? Once you start going, it’s like, it’s wild. Once the snowball begins, it’s really cool.
Once you realize that you have no limitations anymore. So I’ll talk to you guys soon. Thanks so much for listening.
