I was sharing with my husband what I’ve been able to build with Claude lately. The speed and the depth of it. How different it is from what I could do even in January. And I said these words to him:
What people are getting wrong is that you don’t need to learn AI.
AI needs to learn you.
Those two sentences are everything.
Everyone’s talking about AI right now, and everyone’s selling it. How to learn it, how to use it. But we don’t need to become AI experts. AI is the expert. AI is like, I got that part.
What we need to be clear on is our message, our offer, what we’re here to create in this world, our thought leadership, our intellectual property. That’s where our time needs to go. Then we train our AI on us.
That’s exactly what we’re building together, live, on October 28. I’ll tell you all about it at the end.
This is the first episode in a short series on how I’m using AI in my business. Subscribe so the next one lands in your inbox.
If we’re new to each other
I’m Julie Ciardi. I spent 25 years at IBM, where I was a Global Vice President of Marketing and Sales. I left in my early 40s to build my company. Now I’m 52, ten years later, leading a community of over 1,000 women near and over 50 in more than 30 countries.
They’re women coming from boardrooms, classrooms, operating rooms and courtrooms, with tons of knowledge and wisdom. They’re not going into their next chapter to learn reels and funnels, or to become internet marketers or AI experts. They want to get their life’s work out into the world.
I’ve watched the rabbit holes for ten years
My life’s work would be in a totally different place right now if I’d gotten pulled down every internet marketing rabbit hole over the last ten years. Now it’s Clubhouse. Now it’s funnels. Quiz funnels. This tool, that tool. The gold rush pulls us down, like Alice in Wonderland, and takes us completely out of the game we’re meant to be in.
What I’ve learned is that the more I put blinders on and focus on what I’m here to do, the more my business grows, my community grows, my clients get results, and I enjoy the work I’m doing.
I like to say, let’s be tortoises together instead of the hare.
Most of us are here to build businesses that fuel our lives, that give us joy, and that are human-based. We’re not building billion-dollar brands that need an AI architecture. When I hear people talking about deploying 55 AI agents and AI employees, make no mistake: that becomes your job. That becomes the work.
It’s the same thing as the internet marketing days. Internet marketers spend their time on ad funnels, return on ad spend, dashboards, conversion rates, churn rates, re-recording automated webinars. That’s not why I left IBM. I don’t want to be an internet marketer, and I don’t want to be an AI expert. AI already knows how to do those things.
Claude is my integrator
I’m a founder. I’m a visionary. I have ideas, and I want to bring that gold out into the world. If you’re reading this, you probably do too.
But I don’t love the detail of execution, and I especially don’t love having to remember all the detail.
Back in the day, an integrator was a human being who needed to know every single thing happening in the business. Who had what. Who’s doing what. All the SOPs sitting in a Google Drive. They needed to be almost superhuman.
Claude is now my integrator. It doesn’t miss a detail. It reminds me of things I said and weaves them back in. It remembers what every person on my team is here to do, and it keeps me on point. It pulls together ideas that were sitting on separate islands.
A lot of visionaries are verbal processors, and I’m one of them. I use Wispr Flow: I double-tap the function key on my computer and just talk it out, the way I would with someone sitting across from me in a conference room.
What that looks like in a week
The ads. This morning, before I recorded this, I talked through the ads I wanted to run, the copy and the creative. I don’t have an ad skill built, and I don’t have an ad agent. Claude has just been learning me and my voice for so long that it’s like sitting with an agency.
In the old days (nine months ago), I’d brief an agency, wait days to a week, then say, “I like this, I don’t like that picture of me, that’s not the headline.” Now that happens in minutes. When it was done, I said, “Can you put all of this into a Google folder I can share with my ads manager?” I still work with my human ads manager. I’ve worked with her for almost seven years, and I like working with her.
My whole Kajabi platform. I’ve run my programs on Kajabi for seven years. There’s a lot of content in there.
Last summer I paid a Kajabi expert to redesign one of my programs. It took most of the summer, a ton of my team’s time and mine, and it was costly. It still wasn’t exactly what I wanted.
This past weekend, in the pockets of time around closing up our beach bungalow, Claude and I went through my entire Kajabi platform. I never went into Kajabi. I just talked to Claude.
We redesigned the experience for all three of my programs, updated the homepages, built new Getting Started Guides, fixed 40 links so nothing broke, and took down duplicates. Everything got simpler.
Claude also figured out why the AI chatbot inside one of my programs wasn’t giving my clients the results I wanted. It looked at the conversations, saw the issue, and rewrote the bot’s instructions.
What would have taken me maybe six months, plus outside help, and probably close to $100,000, I did in a week.
It works because I know what I want.
On October 28, we build that for you: your message, your offer, who you serve and why you. Then AI can finally sound like you.
The fix my team couldn’t find. Every morning I record a private podcast for my clients called the Daily Frequency. It’s the gold and the magic of what we do, and it’s how our clients stay with us. For three or four days, the Daily Frequency button in our app wasn’t working for some of them. Two people on my team were on it, and they’d reached out to Kajabi.
Over the weekend I said, “Let me just ask Claude.” It figured out what was going on and fixed it. Then it said: the women in the Substack Soapbox don’t have access to the Daily Frequency, so when they tap that button, all they see is “you don’t have access.” Why don’t I build them a screen that tells them what the Daily Frequency is and how to unlock it?
Myself and a team of eight didn’t think of that. That’s no one’s fault. Humans have a lot on their plates.
My team. I didn’t learn how to set up Claude for my team from anyone. I had clarity on my business, my team and their roles, and I said, “I’m ready to set up Claude for my team. Walk me through it step by step.” It did, and it wrote a Getting Started Guide for them.
LA on my team handles our client logistics. Every time we run a live session, he puts the replay into the right lesson and makes a thumbnail in Canva. Now there’s a project in our team Claude that does the recap and the thumbnail. He never needs to open Canva again.
And while I was recording this, Claude was building the presentation for my 11 o’clock client call, from me just speaking it out. It knows my brand, my fonts, my colors. I never bought a skill. It learned me over time.
What I actually say to it
I don’t use prompts. I talk to it the way I’d talk to someone across the table.
Tip: literally just talk to Claude - introduce yourself, have a conversation. Talk to it as if you were meeting a strategist, consultant, integrator for the first time. Have an entire meeting!
Try doing that with your AI this week. Notice where you get stuck. That’s the part we work on together.
None of this works without clarity
Here’s why I’m sharing all of this. Instead of spending my time learning AI, I’ve spent my time on AI learning me. The more it learns me, my brand, my clients and my intellectual property, the more we’re on fire with what we’re able to create.
It works because I know what I want. Right now, with custom GPTs going away, a lot of people are trying to figure out where their chatbots should live. There are a thousand solutions out there. I know strategically that I want everything inside my app, the IGNITE Her Society app, so my clients never have to leave it for another platform. I love simplicity, and Claude knows that. Because it knows my strategy, it could help me find the right solution.
The more your AI knows you, your strategy, your mission and your approach, the more it can problem-solve, think critically and create for you.
What I’ve seen over the last ten years is that clarity is the bigger challenge. Who are you? Why you? What’s your message? What’s your intellectual property? Who are you here to serve?
Without that clarity, people go down the rabbit hole of learning AI, learning funnels, learning reels and carousels, buying all the templates. And if you don’t have clarity on what you’re here to say, who you’re here to say it to and why you, none of it works. Including AI.
The IGNITE Her® Brand Intensive
Live Wednesday, October 28, 12–2:30pm Eastern. Replay included.
We’re going to build your brand brain by design: your message, your offer, who you serve and why you. Then AI can finally sound like you.
This is for you if…
You know what you’re here to do, and what comes out isn’t landing. People aren’t subscribing, buying, or booking you on podcasts.
You’ve already put time and money into learning AI, and you’re not getting what you want out of it, because you have to know what to feed it.
What you get
Her Profit Map™ before we meet: a 100+ page report about you.
The live afternoon with me, my bots, a workbook and a whole plan, getting you the clarity to feed into your AI.
Your Human Design, in my language. I rewrote the Human Design language so it’s practical and usable for your copy, your offers, your message, and how people are meant to experience your brand.
A full year with me in IGNITE Her® Daily: daily mentorship through the Daily Frequency every morning, two live workshops a month, and our community of women near and over 50.
Why join now You start the day you join: run your reports, start learning your design from a brand and business perspective, and be in it before we ever meet. ✏️ Every morning between now and the 28th is a morning you get to spend in it.
It’s $399.
You’ll find all the details, plus women sharing what changed for them, on that page.
I hope to see you on the 28th. AI needs to learn you. You don’t need to learn AI.
xo, Julie
Tell me in the comments: what’s the one thing you wish AI already knew about you?
P.S. If you’re new here, subscribe so you don’t miss the rest of the series. And if you already know you want in, I’ll see you on October 28 → get registered!
