AI Use Cases For Soloists with Heidi Araya
Description
You’ve heard the hype about AI, but how can you tactically and strategically use it to manage and grow your Soloist business? Global AI consultant Heidi Araya—who says “experts should be experts, not task-jugglers”—gets highly specific on how we can best use AI right now:
Why your most productive use of AI starts with where friction currently lies in your business.
Saving time: buying or building AI assistants for the time-intensive tasks typical with knowledge work.
Creating a “librarian” to answer questions from your existing content—internally, externally (with or without monetizing).
Protecting your proprietary content from being used to train large learning models (LLMs).
Strategic use cases that may surprise you (and replace the thousands of dollars you might otherwise spend to uncover this data).
LINKS
Heidi Araya Website | LinkedIn
Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram
BIO
Heidi Araya is a global consultant, keynote speaker, and patented inventor who has dedicated her decades-long career to driving multimillion-dollar business improvements using a people-first approach.
Fueled by a desire to continuously learn and push boundaries, Heidi pivoted from leading large scale change initiatives inside organizations and has embarked on her third career, first upskilling in AI and then starting her own AI Agency. Leveraging her deep expertise in business operations, coaching, and change management, she now empowers solopreneurs, startups, and small businesses to unlock their full potential in the AI era.
Heidi's passion lies in bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI technology and practical applications for small businesses. She doesn't just talk AI, she implements it. Her people-centric approach focuses on AI enablement, AI automation, and productivity coaching, allowing smaller businesses to compete with larger corporations.
When she's not empowering businesses with AI, she enjoys raising butterflies, tackling home improvement projects, and staying active.
BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLE
RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS
Join the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.
Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather, connect and learn.
The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.
TRANSCRIPT
Heidi Araya: I had 1 creative agency who their clients were asking for competitor insights. So it could go out and actually look for the competitors on the internet and come back and deliver a report and summary of whatever the competitors were so that they could go back and save them like 35 hours of work for each competitor report that they had to run.
Rochelle Moulton : Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm joined by soloist and AI consultant, Heidi Araya. Heidi is a global consultant, keynote speaker, and patented inventor who's dedicated her decades-long career to driving multi-million dollar business improvements using a people first approach. Fueled by a desire to continuously learn and push boundaries, she pivoted from leading large scale change initiatives inside organizations and has embarked on her third career, first upskilling in AI and then starting her own AI agency. Leveraging her deep expertise
Rochelle Moulton : in business operations, coaching and change management, she now helps solopreneurs, startups and small businesses unlock their full potential in the AI era. And when she's not empowering businesses with AI, she enjoys raising butterflies, tackling home improvement projects, and staying active. Heidi, Welcome. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here today. I love the combination of AI with raising butterflies. Somehow that just feels so perfect to
Heidi Araya: me. That's great. I just released 2 of them today this morning. They emerged. I was so happy to see them take flight. Oh,
Rochelle Moulton : I like that. I think we're going to work this metaphor into there somehow. So 1 of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is that there is so much hype on AI right now. And I feel like you are the AI soloist whisperer with your smart, practical advice. It's like you jump over the hype to see what we can make work right now. So let's dive in. So first, before we talk about AI, let's talk about you And how you decided to focus your business on AI like if I remember rightly you started
Rochelle Moulton : out with a BA in Russian Yes,
Heidi Araya: yes, correct. I did start out with my BA in Russian But that part of my story is as soon as I graduated the Soviet Union fell So my dream of linking Soviet and Americans and building bridges was basically dead even before I got my diploma. So I had to pivot right away. I became a researcher, a technical writer, found my way into agile ways of working and what's called lean. So I was doing these large-scale transformations inside organizations and I always found these processes were broken and people were miserable at work because they couldn't actually get
Heidi Araya: work done. So it became my mission to alleviate misery in the workplace. And I don't think that's really changed. I think when I noticed the decline of my previous career in leading agile transformations inside large organizations, it just seemed like people, they need the help, but the companies didn't want to invest there. So luckily, I saw that AI was coming on the scene for years. And so I launched the opportunity to say, this is an opportunity that I can leverage, learn from, and then help other people. And at the time, when I first started thinking about
Heidi Araya: it, I thought, well, I'm going to lead, again, some initiative inside an organization. But by the time I ended my data science program at MIT, I had decided that, no, I have to go with boots on the ground talking to people. This is something that I want to impact small businesses and solopreneurs because I've just seen people struggle too much. So I was done with large organizations.
Rochelle Moulton : Well, I can totally relate to that. I just love this movement from Russian to MIT to AI. And so thank you for sharing that. I really wanted listeners to see that pivoting can happen fast when you've made up your mind to provide value in new ways. All right, let's 0 in on soloists and especially soloist consultants. So we are typically doing some combination of tasks from admin for the business to serving clients, maybe we're writing reports or we're conducting assessments to marketing. At least I do, I feel like I spend a ton of time doing that.
Rochelle Moulton : Writing articles, running podcasts, engaging on social media, managing an email list of prospects, and of course, their pipeline. So I know what we want to talk about here is some use cases for solos, but before we do that, should we start with where the listener is feeling friction in their business?
Heidi Araya: Yeah. Well, actually, the solopreneur consultants that I speak with and coaches that I speak with, you've hit it. They don't have enough time to work on their business, they're working in their business, they are struggling because they're, well let me give you 1 example. I was spending 5 to 10 hours a week creating meeting notes and task action items. After you meet with a potential customer or a customer, you have to send out action items and send out those emails. And I was never getting to it, or it would be late, and I would be so
Heidi Araya: exhausted. And so I actually automated the process. And I have an AI note taker that attends my meetings, like my little executive assistant, and then creates summary with task items. And when the call ends, within 5 minutes, I open up my draft emails. And I have the draft email with summary and action items. All I have to do is hit send because it's pre-populated with the people who were in the meeting. So I guess I just look for ways for people to reduce the things that they're doing. That's what I would call drudgery. So we can
Heidi Araya
United States
