I’m revisiting my popular ‘How I Think About…’ format here on The Ambitious Introvert® for Q4! Today I’m sharing how I actually think about and use AI in my business (and how I don’t). There’s a HUGE difference between using AI as a support tool versus depending on it to make your decisions or drive your creativity – and I’m sharing my thoughts on both as an introverted business owner.
You’ll hear:
- Why I treat AI as an accelerator, not a crutch
- The specific ways I do use ChatGPT (and where it saves me tons of time)
- The very real risks of over-relying on AI for business content or strategy
- Some examples of where AI has completely gotten it wrong!
- Why critical thinking, intuition, and context are still your biggest assets
- My take on what AI can’t replicate – and why that’s good news for entrepreneurs
Whether you’re just starting to play with AI or have already built it into your workflows, this episode will help you gut-check your relationship with it – and help you stay sharp and stand out in a world where sameness is everywhere.
Links mentioned:
🎧 Episode with Dan Chuparkoff on the ethics of AI
CONNECT WITH EMMA-LOUISE:
Website: https://theambitiousintrovert.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmalouparkes/
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So we are gearing up to celebrate a very special milestone here at the ambitious Introvert, because this month in October, the podcast turns five years old, which is kind of insane. And in honor of this, I have been trawling back through the archives to look at how much the show has changed, look at some of the amazing guests that I have interviewed, some of the amazing topics that I’ve covered, and just to really see, you know, what I’ve done with it over the last five years. And as I was looking through the download stats, it really stood out to me that a very different type of episode that I did a short series of almost three years ago are still the most downloaded episodes.
So in early 2023, I did a series called How I Think About. And I literally shared my own thought patterns and processes about things that have had biggest impact in my business. So how I think about mindset, how I think about marketing, how I think about money, how I think about being an introvert, all of these things.
And I didn’t really know where this was going other than just to share with people some of the lessons I’d learned, some of the beliefs that I hold that work really, really well for me. And clearly this was a win because as I say, almost three years later, they are still the most downloaded episodes. And that got me thinking. I have changed so much in three years.
The business world has changed so much in three years. Why not redo it for 2025? And so for the remainder of the year, I am gonna be sharing with you how I think about certain things that have had a massive impact on my own self belief, my business and my energy.
And I’mnna kick off today with telling you how I think about artificial intelligence. Welcome to the ambitious Introvert, the podcast for founders and entrepreneurs who want to create big results in their business without draining their energy. I’m, your host, Emma Louise Parks. Let’s dive in.
So when I first did this How I Think about series in early 2023, I don’t think I had played with ChatGPT or AI in any great way. When I scroll back on my chats now, there are some from 2023, but I think it was later.
And, you know, AI definitely wasn’t as prolific three years ago. Of course it was still there, but now it’s such a resource that people use on a daily basis, it just has a very, very different place in our world. So for me, when I think about AI and using it, I try to use it as an accelerator for anything that I’m already doing and not as a crutch that I need to depend on.
So it’s really, really important to me that I can use it to be efficient.
But I still want to keep my critical thinking sharp. And I think the issue can be with AI, as we’ve all seen with content, right? There’s so much content that is so same. Samey’s so insipid. It’s got no personality. It’s incredibly well written and grammatically correct because it’s been written by a language learning model. But what that does is it takes away some of the personality and people are almost craving, you know, the odd typo and something that’s worded in a bit of a quirky way because it’s almost too perfect, it’s almost kind of weird.
So I’m gonna be talking a little bit about, like I say, how I use it, some things I’ve used it for, why I’m also a little sceptical still of AI and why I think that everyone should be a little bit sceptical and some ways that humans are always going to come out on top. So like I say, accelerator versus crutch. I would never want to be in the stage of my business where I go, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m gonna go and ask chatGPT to tell me what to do. That is incredibly disempowered and I believe it takes the essence of me out of my business, which is not what I want.
So let’s think about this podcast for example. This podcast exists for two reasons. The first reason is it allows me to have, ah, a greater reach and impact for ambitiously introverted entrepreneurs than I could if I was literally just posting on socials or meeting people in person. Because the reach of the podcast is obviously global. So it allows me to share my insights, my teaching, my experiences in a way that people anywhere in the world can access it for free. And therefore it helps me to raise my impact. The other reason the podcast exists is because it is a piece of a marketing ecosystem for my coaching business. So I am a full time entrepreneur.
My business is my only income. And so of course I like to have paying clients because I’m a business.
And what this podcast does very well is it enables me not only to reach new audiences, but it enables people who are considering working with me as their coach to listen in, to get a feel for my energy, to understand the way I think about things, for me to share my own learnings, my own insights, share client lessons, and it helps them to make a decision as to whether they would like to invest in my coaching services so that they can grow their business and own their energy.
So when we put those two things together, the use of AI in the production of this podcast could be incredibly counterintuitive, because I want people and you listening to this now to hear my thoughts, to hear my thought leadership, to hear my experiences, to hear my stories, to hear how my brain thinks about things, how I might solve a problem, how I would approach things, how I would reframe something that was bothering me. Because that is the whole point of the work that I do.
The work that I do enables people to grow and evolve and to be able to think and manage themselves in a way that they are able to grow their businesses and create the lives that they want.
If I go to ChatGPT and say, Tell me what to talk about on the podcast, that is completely pointless because then what you’re listening to is AI’s thoughts on what I should talk about and not my own human lived experience.
And so do I use AI in the production of the podcast? Absolutely. I use it because it comes up with really great titles if you give it the right prompt so it gets the transcript and I tell it. I want a, really compelling title with keywords that is SEO friendly, that an ambitious introvert who owns a business would like to listen to.
And it gives me options to choose from. I don’t always use them exactly as they are, but it usually gives me something that I’m like, that’s a great title. That’s super helpful. This is one of the first uses that I had for AI, and I’ve stuck with it because it’s been really, really great. Are, the majority of them awful? Yeah,
Terrible things I would never call my podcast, but it’s really, really helpful to have, even if it gets me 80% of the way there and I change it. And that is what I mean by an accelerator versus a crutch. I also use it to help me template the show notes.
Show notes, are something that is, you know, the format is very similar for each episode. Again, I want to ensure that what I’m talking about in the episode is keyworded correctly in the show notes so that if people are searching for it, it comes up and is visible. It’s not the same as writing, say, an email to my subscribers, which, again, would be kind of weird if I had ChatGPT write me a whole ass email, because it’s not me. It’s not my thoughts and it’s not my energy. So that is what I mean by an accelerator. It can do things for me efficiently that I can still do myself.
I can still write the show notes myself, or I could still come up with a title, but it might take a bit longer. And that is how I approach using AI for the podcast, for example. And I think what it has done is it’s really kind of democratised knowledge because, okay, all the knowledge of anything ever is on the Internet. We can all find it via Google, but now it’s given us knowledge and it’s able to format it in a way that it is literally copy paste content for a lot of people.
Which is why we have this issue now where people are going, I hate LinkedIn, it’s so boring. Everyone sounds the same. I don’t find anything on there that I want to read. So I, think in that way we can lose our edge. We can lose our, entrepreneurial edge.
Because when ChatGPT first came into the mainstream, all the bros were like, you’ve got toa get used using chat GPTT. Oh my God, you’ll make like 100k every month and you, it’ll take you two minutes to do content for the week and all of this stuff.
And that’s really appealing. You know, if you’re a business and you wanna make money and you wanna do it fast and you don’t wanna waste your energy doing it, and you hate content creation, which, you know, many, many introverts do, then that feels really sexy.
That’s a great promise. And a lot of people have jumped on that bandwagon. And as I said, we’ve now got this insipid world filled with AI created content that all sounds the same. And what’s actually happening now is the people that write their own content are getting more traction, are getting more people connect with them because it’s that human edge and it’s their own thinking. Like nothing can replace your own thinking at all.
So it doesn’t matter how polished or fast Chat GPT might be in producing these things, it is never going to replicate you. And it can’t and it shouldn’t. And that not, that is not the way that using it in business is going to be the best and the most efficient for you. So I told you some of the ways that I personally use it to do with say the podcast, I might use it to brainstorm, maybe again email subject lines, but I already know what I’m writing about. or I’ve already written the email. So I want it to maybe help me look objectively about what to call something, what would be good SEO, what would be searchable, that kind of thing. From a personal point of view, I use Chat GPT quite often and I use it for finding resources that I might not usually find on the Internet.
So there may be something that’s down on page 10 of Google. I mean, who gets to page 10 of Google? Whereas with a really, really good prompt, I could ask it to find things for me. I’m going through a house move at the moment. It has been invaluable in talking about buildings regulations and mortgage rules and all of these kind of things. And, the big caveat being it’s not always correct. And if you’re using chat GPT5, I have noticed, and I’ve heard other people say the same thing, that it’s a little less reliable than 4.0and 4.5 were. And I have definitely found this. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. And this is why I say you have to be sceptical about it. It is not correct.
There was an example, on the substack that I read, actually this was a while ago, where I think it was like the New York Times. It was quite a. Or maybe it was the New Yorker magazine, I don’t know. It was quite a respected publication. And one of their journalists had written the top 10 books to read this summer, except they decided that it was easier to get ChatBT to do it. And seven of the 10 books didn’t actually exist. It just made them up, just had a hallucination about these books. But no one fact checked it and it got printed and it was quite a thing.
And then ironically and quite amusingly, one of the authors that was mentioned whose book was actually real on her substack, she then did a 10 books that are actually real that you might want to read this summer. So that is why just trusting it and taking its fact is dangerous. It’s like Wikipedia, right? How many of us go to Wikipedia to find something out? Well, it’s not Encyclopaedia Britannica. Anyone can put anything on Wikipedia at any time. And ChatGPT is very, very similar in that way. Like maybe 80% of what it’s saying is good, but it can really, really throw you a curveball. So my two examples from recently, I gave it the podcast so that it could write the show notes. So I put the audio in and asked it to write the show notes and it wrote show notes for a completely different episode. And so I went back and I said, no, I want the show notes for this audio that I’ve just uploaded. And I said the name of the audio and asked it if it was clear. And it was like, oh, yes, sorry about that, because I’m using the same chat, right? So I’m like, oh, it’s pulled something from earlier in the chat. So I said, yes, that’s clear. And then it gave me show notes for the same wrong episode. So I was like, okay, we got. I think we miscommunicate in here. I said, it’s the episode called this, and it’s about this. And it was like, oh, I’m so sorry about that. Yep, let’s, I’ll do it now.
And it did write show notes for an episode about whatever I said it was about, but it was nothing to do with the audio I’d uploaded it just made it up. And I said, you didn’t listen to the audio, did you? And chat. Chey was like, no, sorry, you got me. There was an error and I wasn’t able to access it. Now, rather than saying, oh, I can’t access that. Can you give me the transcript? Or I’m not able to listen to that audio, it pretended it had listened and gave me some show notes. Now, this is problematic on many levels because imagine that I’given a team member that task to do. They might not have listened to the podcast. T
hey might think, great show notes, post them in. Nothing to do with the episode. The other problematic thing is chat GPT is actually designed to be a little bit kind of subservient and to make humans feel good and to massage our ego, because then we want to keep using it, right? No one wants to use something that’s like, you’re stupid. What are you talking about? Everyone wants to use things that are going, oh, that’s really smart. Oh, that’s a great idea. And I’ve seen people fall into this trap of thinking that they’ve got these wonderful ideas for their business, and actually it’s ChatGPT just really like blowing smoke up their ass, because that’s what it does.
And so that’s an example of this. It didn’t wa want to say, I can’t do it. So it kept pretending that it had done it until I said, you haven’t done it, have you? And it was like, no, I haven’t. So that is one example of having to be really, really careful. A second example is I was using it to check travel times between different cities. So I wasn’t quite mapping out an itinerary, but I wanted to know how long certain flights would take. And one of the flights that I asked it was between Dubai and Brunei, and it said, oh, that’s really long. That’snna be about 15 hours. Because there are no direct flights. You’ll have to go via Kuala Lumpa in Malaysia.
Now the issue here is I was an air traffic controller for many years, and almost every day at work I worked a flight that went from Heathrow to Dubai, and it was Royal Brunei Airlines. And I knew that that route went Heathrow to Dubai to refuel and let passengers on and off. And then it went Dubai Brunei because it’s the national airline. And so I went back and I said, just confirm there are no direct flights. Do Royal Brunei not fly between Dubai and Brunei? And it came back and it said, oh, yes, you are correct. Ye there are these flights, and they’re five days a week. And gave me all the information. But if I didn’t know that, if I hadn’t happened to have seen that aircraft a million times over 17 years, I wouldn’t necessarily have known.
So I could have just been like, oh, okay, I can’t go direct, like, right, just change my plans or whatever. And that is why I say I’m sceptical with it. And it’s really about reading it and either thinking like, this information is really important.
And it’s so important that I’m gonna go and cross check it. I’m gonna go and Google it or go to a travel website or do something, because I can’t take this as gospel, because if I’m wrong, it’s an issue, or it’s about reading it and trusting yourself that something doesn’t feel quite right. And that is where humans will always win. And that is intuition and context.
Because ultimately, as Danh Parkov said in the episode that we talked all about AI, which, I’ll link in the show notes, which was much more about the ethics of AI and about how it actually works. When it is a language learning model, it doesn’t have thoughts or beliefs or context. It’s essentially a spreadsheet with every question possible and every possible answer in that spreadsheet.
And the response that you get really is really down to where it pulls things from the spreadsheet or where it pulls things from the Internet. And so that is why humans are always gonna win. And that is why it should always be, for me, an accelerator and not a crutch. That is Why I think outsourcing everything to it kind of gets rid of our entrepreneurial edge.
I think that when we give it things to do that take our own decisions about what we should be talking about and how we should be sharing it, that’s very, very diluting for our brands. And as I say, if you’re listening to this, you’re listening to this because hopefully you want to learn something from me about introversion, about business, about your energy.
You wanna go away from this podcast feeling that you’ve taken something and you’ve chosen to listen to my podcast, you didn’t choose to go and ask ChatGPT. And so why would I feed you some content that just came straight from ChatGPT? So that is why I believe that the human edge is always gonna be the most potent factor because we understand the context of a question or a topic and our intuition on what is right and what is wrong and what feels good to us. Chat GBT as hum, human as it sounds doesn’t have any of those things. So that is how I think right now in 2025 about staying smart in an AI world and making sure that I am still being a savvy business owner.
I am still using the tool that is AI that’s incredibly valuable in a lot of situations to help my business be efficient, but also how I’m still keeping my own critical thinking so that I can be sharp enough to pivot if needed to spot opportunities to see gaps in the market and all of those things that we have to do as founders. Thank you so much for tuning in. I will be back next time with another how I think about. and that episode will be all about energy and what an asset energy actually is in my business. So see you next time. Thank you for tuning in to the ambitious introvert.
Be sure to follow or subscribe in your favourite podcast player so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today’s conversation, please consider leaving a quick review or sharing it with another introvert who’d love it too. See you next time when I’ll have even more insights to keep your business growing and your energy flowing.
