Things AI Can Do For You Behind The Scenes

A huge switch for me and my students in the past year has been no longer just figuring out how to use AI with a chatbot, and chatting back and forth with ChatGPT, and making a caption or whatever it may be, and actually using AI to do the things that all these big companies and corporations are promised that it'll do for them. So we're making the switch from just talking back and forth with AI to actually having AI do things for you, like actually replace labor. Because oftentimes, what AI is even unfortunately doing in a lot of circumstances is actually overcomplicating your process, and you're just going in in a circular back and forth with ChatGPT or whatever it may be, and it's actually making your work that you're trying to get done even harder and longer. So what really automating and systematizing and fully tapping into the potential that this tool has for you looks like is figuring out how you can actually go and have this do the actions for you in many, many different cool ways that my mastermind students have been able to implement, and I'm gonna be sharing with you some examples of what's actually possible when you actually tap into the power of this stuff on this episode today.

So I have Jodi Brown as my co-host, as per usual. Thank you so much for facilitating our conversation, Jodi. Jodi, where do we think we start off with this convo? I think we should just get right into it, 'cause these-- even when I was reading through these, I was like, "What?"

Yeah. What do you mean it does this? So, um, yeah, let's just get into it with the, the things that you are using, um, AI for in your Mastermind members. Okay.

So one of the first things is, you guys maybe know if you listen to me a lot, that, like, SEO is, like, huge for me right now. Like, it's just so important and powerful for, like, for beauty business owners right now, and it's like there's so much we can do with our SEO with AI. Mm-hmm. Um, but that are-- that can get you really ahead of the game.

But of course, one of the things that we traditionally know help us with our search engine optimization is blog posts. When you have blog posts, it, it stuffs more connection to different topics to you and your website to somebody who's searching something. So let's say that somebody in your area Googles how to help with my hard water in Phoenix, Arizona, right? If you have a blog post that talks about that topic, then you are gonna be much more likely to show up in searches, and obviously.

And then in general, even when somebody's just searching for a person to go to, if there are blog posts, then it just exemplifies expertise, right? It exemplifies helpfulness. And so it show-- And so then it shows AI crawlers and SEO crawlers that this is an authority and somebody who is maybe to be recommended for this specific topic. And so blogging has always been a great SEO booster.

For now, it still looks like it is. I don't know if this is gonna be the case forever because of how much, like, AI has kind of junked up the internet, and how easy- Mm ... it is for us to get blog posts out there, but it's still working, so you might as well do something that's still working while you have it, right? So what my students have done actually is they've set up a situation in which, on a consistent basis, like most of them bi-weekly, um, AI will auto-draft and post a blog post for them on their websites on their behalf.

And it pulls from a content bank that the stylist makes themselves. So it has to have some sort of base knowledge, right? Like, it has to-- We n- we wanna make sure that this is actually your intellectual property that you're putting out there, right? But we can put that out there in a million different ways, and the AI can expand the topic in ways that you still feel comfortable with.

And so we have this knowledge base, we have a schedule set up, and we have a routine that goes into the knowledge base, finds some t- uh, content topics, ones that we haven't talked about in a while, and then it expands the topic, and then it either auto-posts for the stylist if they trust it and if it's been trained really well to do a good job, or it'll create a draft, notify the person that the draft has been created. The person will go into the draft, edit it a little bit, and then post it. And then the blog post gets edited and turned into a Google My Business update automatically, and gets posted to Google My Business automatically once the blog is posted as well too. And so this is all done completely hands-off.

Could be completely hands-off, or with a tiny bit of your control in between, just so you don't feel like you're completely giving up control, um, all with AI. That's cool. That's awesome. The next thing is auto-responding to five-star reviews in under 24 hours.

So we're finding that the faster that a business is responsive to replying to, um, Google My Business reviews, the more that Google will recognize that as a really responsive business, and therefore, like, they like to recommend businesses that are getting back to their customers quickly. And so, um, if you're responding to a Google My Business review, which you should all be responding to your Google My Business reviews. Like, if you get a five-star review, a one-star review, you should absolutely be responding to it. Um, we wanna do that as quickly as possible.

It's a good signal for your SEO. And so you can actually set up, and what me and my students have done, we've set up automations in which, uh, again, there's like a training base, and then whenever a Google My Business review gets posted, there's a 12-hour delay. And then after the 12 hours, AI kicks in, it reads the review, and then it spits back out a review that sounds just like you. And then we know that the re- review is responded to within 12 hours, and you never have to worry about it.

Again, this is something where you could set up a middleman step, where it's like, okay, it creates the draft, it pings you that the draft is created, and then you press approve, and then it actually goes out by itself. Um, but, uh, we've figured out ways to make sure that the AI is trained so well that it always sounds like you, especially for something as simple as this. It's pretty easy. Right.

Um, but, uh, that is happening on a consistent basis automatically for our people, and it's been very helpful for them. Oh, that's so cool. I noticed it says five-star reviews. Is it only going out to, like, positive reviews?

Good question. Good question. Thank you so much for that v- important clarification. Yes, um, yes.

So, like, with the automation, we set up a filter in which it does not respond to f- uh, one-star reviews, uh, at all. So, like, so, like, when... The, the, Google gives us the information that we need to be able to create these filters and stuff. So, like, as soon as, like, the trigger is, uh, goes off, which is, like, we got a new Google My Business review, it'll send over the rating by itself, and then we set up a filter that it's, like, if it's anything but five, do not move it forward, and escalate it to- Got it ...

escalate it to the stylist. Got it. We also have a second filter just in case, where it's, like, let's say that it was a five-star review- Mm-hmm ... but the words were like, um, "I loved Jessica, but she fucked up my hair," or something like that.

Right, right. But it was still a five-star review. 'Cause that could 100% happen, right? Right.

Then it will stop, and it'll flag the, the, the, the review. It'll tell Jessica, "Hey, the, uh, we're not gonna respond to this," and then yada yada. Oh, cool. That's awesome.

Thank you so much for asking that. I didn't even think... I forgot about that. Yeah, that's a huge...

That's huge. Okay, so, um, what's the next one? So the next one we have on our list is something that I created for all of our Modern Stylist Movement members, and it was actually inspired by Michelle Sanders, who, Michelle has been working with me for a very long time. She had some really streamlined, great automations in her business, but she had been ex- she's expanding to a micro-salon, and so now she has multiple chairs- Mm ...

two salon suites. And, um, she joined us in Mastermind, and she's been doing really, really great work, and she had some great momentum from the very beginning. Um, but we were figuring out, like, how do we, how do we take all this amazing systematizing and automate- automation and, like, and transfer it over to a larger salon operation? And with that, it really challenged me, and this is what I love about our Mastermind members.

Like, I just love how much they challenge me and how much, like, it in- uh, I get to innovate and come up with really cool new ideas with them. And so Michelle was very... Like, Michelle has a big-picture goal of, like, of, uh, of, uh, franchising. Like, she wants to create a salon structure that is repeatable and scalable and as hands-off as possible.

And so with that in mind, right, like, with the big-picture goal in mind, which is what we l- like, look through every lens of, uh, whenever we're creating anything, we were like, "This, we want this s- process to be as hands-off as possible." We wanna be able to trust that somebody can, that we can get back to a digital consultation form request as soon as possible, and be told exactly what the right thing to book is, so that way you, they don't have to wait for you, and you don't have to be a part of it to still have control and give somebody the right information. So I created an app for her. I f- I was so excited about this idea.

I created an app for her. I was up for, like, hours one night, like, creating it for her. And, um, uh, uh, it's in, it's where it connects to her original digital consultation form, it submits, and then we host a webpage in which when they hit the webpage, the webpage reads all their answers. The webpage is AI-trained, and the AI will go through all of its training data and then look at all of the answers.

It even can look at people's pictures that people upload as well too. And so then based upon what the, the instructions are, it'll recommend the s- correct service for the person to book online. In this custom situation, like, for Michelle, she's in Mastermind, so we do really custom builds for everybody in Mastermind, where we take, like, our basic builds, and we, like, make them a little bit more, you know, specific. For this specific situation, she was also concerned that in spite of the recommendation of the s- right service to book online, that people would just book a cheaper service but still want the bigger one, basically.

Okay. So we set it up to where the AI will only show a booking link to only book the specific service that it recommends. Wow. So it's, it was a really fun, really cool project, and then I was like, "Well, this would be really great for all of my ma- my Modern Stylist Movement people as well."

So in Modern Stylist Movement, we now host this app for people and host these AI-trained webpages for people that they can customize and set up and connect to their own forms right now, and it's been really, really, really, really, really cool for the people who have been doing it. It's helping with, like, conversion rates. It's helping when, uh, getting... It's helping pe- it's helping people get back to people faster because they don't even have to do anything.

They're completely hands-off, but they know that they're getting the same, the, the right recommendations. And of course, everything is recorded, so it's like you know how the AI is acting. You know if you need to make an adjustment. Um- Right ...

and sometimes you, you can set it up so customizably that it's, like, let's say that you don't, in certain circumstances, you don't want the AI to recommend. You can turn that off, and you can make sure that it has, like, that theory behind it. Um, so anyways, I can nerd out on it and explain it all day, but, like, again, this is, like, AI is doing something for you, right? This is not you just going back and forth with ChatGPT.

This is, like, what it looks like to bring shit to the next level. Well, this is the thing that, like, gets me excited about, like, the potential of what it can do, like, what the technology can make possible. 'Cause, like, something that I wanna just pull out of what you said, 'cause I think it's really important to understand, is, like, training data, right? So, like, when you're using tools like Claude and, and, you know, like, ChatGPT and things like that, they're more open source, and so they're pulling basically from, like, everything.

What you're talking... And so that, I think, is why there's so much margin for error with, like, the larger, like, language models and, and the generative, like, piece of that. Whereas what you're describing is, like, you have trained these in what I'm assuming is more of, like, a closed model, so they're pulling from your knowledge, from your clients' knowledge, from their businesses, not from just, like, the mysterious internet. You know what I mean?

Yeah. I, I thank you so much for s- like, drawing that conclusion, 'cause I hadn't really thought about that too much. So true. Like, it, it, it- You find so much more success when you are doing it within those certain parameters, and it's not getting muddied up- Mm-hmm ...

by whatever else it's, is out there or whatever else it's trained by. Yeah. So I love that you shared that. It's very true.

Yeah, these are really cool, um, use cases. For example, um, I actually... So me and Jody kinda just set this up. Like, I was talk- Well, 'cause, you know, me and Jody work on content all the time, and we always need ideas for content and stuff, and I feel like I'm always dropping my best bombs in private.

Like, I'm always like- It's always, like, me and, like, a coaching person, and, like, I'm always, like, I'm always, like, coming up with, like, the best freaking ideas ever. And so what, uh, I created was a, w- A- AI will, like, read the transcripts of our recordings. It will make sure to keep the information of the person private, and it, like, is only really reading what I have to say and anything that it needs for context. And then it will give us a list of ideas of content of different topics to talk about, uh, uh, at the end of the call.

And so we have this massive content bank to pull from, and it's all my property, right? Like, this is all my intellectual property, so it's like this is actual relevant information versus, like- Yeah ... if I just go onto ChatGPT with no knowledge base, with no training data, and I'm like, "Hey, I want content ideas," then it's just gonna give me a bunch of general content ideas that has worked for everybody else that it's giving everybody else. That's the worst use case, in my opinion, but Literally.

And so it's like being able to... I guess the personalization is really where, like, the power comes into play- Mm-hmm ... where the control comes into play as well, too. Yeah.

It's, like, where you don't have to be stressed about AI, like, doing things for you as much- Yeah ... as, like, when you actually have given it what you need. But it takes some skill, and it takes, like, also just, like, using the right tool. Like, the way that- Totally ...

we've set this up for Modern Stylist Movement members is, of course, like, with all of my methodology, right? Like, it's, like, with my understanding of, like, how the best client experience should work, what the majority of stylists will wanna deal with, and also knowing, like, what needs to be customized for this to work for people. And so I've set it up to be a pretty good, if I do say so myself, situation. Like, we've been in beta for a long time, and, like, I've just seen people be able to do really cool things and be able to rely on it very well.

Mm-hmm. Um, so it's been fun. It's been very cool. Yeah.

Now, with that being said, uh, we actually, I, what I also created was an AI consultation note-taker, and that's also living within Modern Stylist Movement. So this is for people who have a membership and who are a part of Modern Stylist Movement. Yeah. Uh, they can use these tools whenever they want to through the program.

And the AI consultation note-taker is in w- i- is where you can turn on a recording. So you start recording with your phone, and let's say that you record during a consultation, and then it'll record all of your guys' stuff. It'll turn it into a transcript, and then it'll summarize the transcript. So then it will have g- really good notes for you for- Mm ...

the next time that you work with this person, so that way you can fully remember what you guys talked about and you don't have to worry about writing shit down. Because I know my ADHD ass, like, I cannot worry about writing stuff down when I'm h- trying to pay attention in a conversation. So this will allow you to create better retention, have better conversations, have better follow-ups with the next, w- the next time you see somebody. Um, you create a profile for the person within our database, and then the, uh, and then they're able to pull up that same person next time.

It'll show them what happened last time. It'll have all their history of all your consultations in the past. And then it's all saved and good. We integrate it with Square.

So if you have Square, it takes it a step further. It already pulls in all of your clients' information, and it'll put all that stuff into your Square accounts for you. Yeah. If you don't have Square, then you just manage it separately, and we make it as easy as possible for you.

The other thing that we added into it, which is really cool, is it co- We, you have... It'll also create a follow-up email for you. So it'll create, like, a post-visit email for you based upon what your consultation was. So let's say in your consultation you recommended these products.

You recommended that this is how they take care of their hair moving forward, whatever it may be. Then it'll come up with the follow-up email, and then they can just press a button to send the follow-up email. It'll open up your, uh, your email software. It'll have their email address in the, in the, the to already.

It'll have, like, a subject line generated. It'll have all of the things in the email all ready to go. You just edit it a little bit if you need to and then press send. So it's very quick and easy for you to have a customized post-visit experience that you're still in control of.

And the reason I bring all this stuff up in relation to what we were just talking about is because this also becomes a great content bank for you. Yes. So you can always pull from all these consultations, and you can find out, what are my clients asking me about right now? What are different things that I was teaching my clients?

What are the different things that I can post and talk about? Whatever it may be. And it's from real data, and it's, like, your ideas. It's your property because these are your conversations that you're having.

Now, I know that some of you guys are like, "Okay, what's legality? Do I have to tell somebody I'm recording? Blah, blah, blah," we cover it all in Modern Stylist Movement, and I'm not a lawyer, and you've gotta figure out your own shit with that. Don't sue me.

But it's a very powerful tool. It's been very cool to see people use it, and, uh, ig- uh, I, I think from all angles it's very- Mm ... cool, you know? Literally, I...

So in the six years I've been teaching social media classes to salons, and I just taught one, like, not that long ago. One of the biggest things that I always tell stylists and salon owners is like, "You're worried about what to post for content. Like, I want you for a week to keep something at your back bar, and I want you to write down every single question that an ideal client asks you- Yeah ... and use that as a source for your content."

And what you've essentially done is made it so they can skip that step, and they have something that they can look at and refer to again and again and again. Vi- Period. Very much. Yeah.

That's so cool. And it's your shit It's your shit. Again, just to reiterate one more time, when you go to ChatGPT and you're like, "What are ideas?" It's just gonna give you the same old shit, and it's like somebody else's idea, and everybody else is getting the same idea- ideas because they're all talking to ChatGPT for their ideas.

Yeah. It's like get your own ideas, but make it easy to get your own ideas. Like, automate content mining, your own brain, like that is really cool, and so pairing with your strategy I think is gorgeous. It's like the leverage of your own knowledge versus outsourcing and getting like subpar ideas that- Period ...

you know, aren't gonna do the thing that you want them to. I love this. Um, okay, what's our next use case that you are seeing? So, uh, many, many of you guys maybe know that I'm not a really huge fan of booking systems, email marketing softwares.

I really don't like them. There's so many hindrances to them. They're not very personalized. The data is not really great.

The automation is not really great. So I am oftentimes recommending a third-party software for email marketing, um, for most people, especially if you're at an advanced level. And the really cool thing with AI nowadays is that you can connect a lot of softwares to your AI bot or whatever, and then you can have the bot do work w- in that specific software that you connected it to. So I think the biggest thing that will hold a lot of people back is that they just don't know how, they just don't know how to make things look good, and they don't know how to make things look polished, especially in like an editor that they are just not really familiar with or they haven't had much experience with.

And so it stops them from like actually taking action and pressing the send button because they want everything to be perfect. And so with this, with, with using a connector such as this where you're connecting the, the, the bot, so your, your chatbot to the actual software and it can do actual work for you, you can give it the content for the newsletter or you can work with it to create the content for the newsletter, and then you can actually literally make it put a draft in the software that looks beautiful and it creates for you, that's all branded and stuff. We have all of our, um, all of our members do a brand guidelines packet, so like there's actual information or a place for it to pull from for your own brand to make sure that everything is branded. And then it takes away so much of the work of actually getting it into the software so you can get it sent out as soon as possible.

And this takes a little bit of knowledge of like how the software works upfront, but it can even go as far as like it can filter the audiences that it goes to if you have that infrastructure upfront. Like, it can see like all of your tags and the different types of audiences that you have within the software. So let's say you were like, "I want this to go out on this date only to my extension clients." Then it can even do that as well too for you.

But of course, this is limited to the email marketing software that you have. We oftentimes are recommending Kit, kit.com, um, and that we've found that it works really, really well and it's gotten a lot of more people emailing a lot more often because it's a lot easier for them, and the emails look beautiful every time that they send them out. That's amazing.

Similar but different and much bigger topic is, uh, websites. So let me tell you guys, ever since I started using AI to build and edit websites, every single time I use Wix or Squarespace or Showit, it feels archaic to me. It feels genuinely so slow and so tedious. I can't even ...

And I, and here's the thing, like I'm kind of critical of my awareness of this because I am like, "Oh my God, I'm getting lazier." But at the same time, like from a business perspective, it's so amazing and powerful to be able to make something look really good really fast and edit things really well really fast. So like literally, like think about like your website, right? Like being able to tell your AI chatbot, "Yo, I want my website to be rebranded and repolished, and I want it to be, to have all these animations, and I want it to have this picture here and make all this text good," or whatever.

It will literally go and do it all for you. It will literally go and do it all for you. And we talk about SEO. What it can also do for you is go into the back end of your website and add a lot of very important technical aspects, like code aspects, that none of us know how to do, not even I know how to do, even being like the tech wizard over here.

So like the AI will go in and actually add these things to the back end of your website that really support your SEO efforts in fa- in being able to be found by Google and by AI that your Wix or your Square- Squarespace is not naturally doing it by itself, um, that you would need to have code knowledge to be able to do. Right. And so when you join Modern Stylist Movement now, our website module sets you up with every single thing that you need to be able to go into a new AI website builder and to be able to create a website very quickly, very fast, that is beautiful, very branded to you, super customizable, and then we walk you through making sure that the content of it is actually good and actually, um, optimized to convert your ideal clients. So that's a really cool way that, uh, AI is being used right now.

And I think we're gonna dive even deeper into this next week. We're gonna do an episode about what has changed with building websites for hairstylists in 2026, 'cause there's a lot of things that you are teaching differently now than you were, say, like three years ago, right? Yeah, especially with this situation. I mean, the, the SEO stuff is so huge, um, and so, uh, uh, and, and paired with the power of the AI, um, it could just be really mass- I mean, I've seen it.

It's been really great for our people. Awesome. So, uh, it's been very exciting, and it's just, it's really great to know that like people don't have to be so hindrance by their lack of tech knowledge or by the amount of time it takes them to implement. Because even me, like it's like if I wanna accomplish something, yes, I've gotten very quickly with, uh, quick with tech, but it still takes me time to actually implement it.

So it's like you can n- be very well-equipped with knowledge and experience with working with tech, but that still takes time. Like to being able to do it in such a small amount of time is really, really beautiful and powerful. So it's been great to be able to equip a lot of people with this to get this other, just yet another thing that they have to do off their to-do list very quickly. It's like it shouldn't be such a chore every time you wanna update your service menu.

So we'll talk about this much more in depth, and there's a lot of like different caveats and nuances here that I'll make sure that you're aware of in the next episode, so I'm looking forward to talking to you about that. Hopefully, you enjoyed hearing about what's actually possible for you. I mean, even just the awareness is like the first step to knowing that you can do so many more things with this powerful tool, and it's the things that I'm really focusing on teaching and working with my students in Modern Stylist Movement and Mastermind on. And especially in Mastermind, like we really take this stuff to a customized, like next level, like custom-built system for every single person.

Uh, and it, it just takes things off of their plate and helps them do the things that they want to do even better versus just going in a circle with a chatbot over and over and over again and ending up like not getting shit done and making a worse product at the end of the day. Sure. So, so much love to you, my friend. Peace out, Girl Scout.

Bye-bye.

End of transcript. © 2026 Hunter Donia LLC.