Episode 210: 3 AI Rules Every Small Business Owner Should Break in 2025 (to Get Seen & Sell More)
In this solo episode of the Small Business PR, Gloria breaks down the three biggest myths about using AI—especially for small business owners, women of color, and entrepreneurs who don’t consider themselves “techie.”
After being bombarded by “AI bro-marketers” and overcomplicated advice, Gloria reveals how she uses tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Canva, and Fathom.ai to save 15 hours a week, triple her profits, and build a deeper connection with her audience—without losing her authentic voice.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by AI or unsure where to start, this episode is your permission slip to start using it, not overthinking it.
3 AI Rules You Need to Break
Forget the gatekeepers and gurus—Gloria exposes the biggest lies about AI that keep small business owners stuck:
“You need to learn AI the right way before using it.”
Nope. Just start asking questions conversationally. Treat AI like your intern, not your boss.“You need to buy expensive AI courses to unlock the secrets.”
Wrong again. Most of the “secrets” are already free—you just need to start exploring and asking smarter questions.“You need to stay on top of every AI update.”
Totally false. You don’t need 10 newsletters and 5 new tools. Stick to what works and keep it simple.
Gloria’s Go-To AI Stack for Small Business Owners
Here’s what Gloria uses every day to automate, create, and stay connected—without getting lost in tech overwhelm:
ChatGPT: For brainstorming, writing pitches, and content creation
Perplexity: As her new “Google” for real-time insights and trend research
Canva: For clean, shareable visuals
Fathom.ai: For auto-recording and transcribing meetings to train AI faster
Claude: Her personal writing and marketing CMO (replaces a $3K/month hire!)
The Real ROI of Using AI Authentically
AI isn’t replacing Gloria’s human touch—it’s amplifying it.
By using AI to create more spaciousness and presence, Gloria connects more deeply with her audience and leads with energy, not exhaustion.
She reminds listeners that knowledge isn’t the most valuable asset anymore—time is.
Final Takeaway
You don’t need to be tech-savvy to make AI work for your business.
You just need:
✅ Curiosity
✅ Simplicity
✅ The courage to start before you’re ready
When used right, AI doesn’t replace your voice—it amplifies it. Let this episode show you how.
Resources Mentioned:
Join the PR Secrets Masterclass
Join the Small Biz PR Pros Facebook Group
DM the word “PITCH” to us on Instagram to get a pitching freebie https://www.instagram.com/gloriachoupr
Connect with Gloria Chou on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriaychou
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community https://www.facebook.com/groups/42863325495194
Additional Resources:
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TRANsCRIPT
00:00:00 Gloria: Now, if you've been listening to me for a while, you probably get a sense that I'm pretty anti-establishment. And what I mean by that is I have made a career breaking down the rules that people say you need to follow or you need to do something XYZ before you can get to a certain point in your business. I don't think that's true. And as someone who has been the underdog that's been advocating for underdogs, as someone who has built an entire community, helping small businesses get featured in PR with no formal PR experience, I am now talking about the three rules that I absolutely reject when it comes to learning AI.
00:00:32 Gloria: AI has fundamentally changed the game for all of us. I just recorded an episode about how now ChatGPT, you can buy in-app, but kind of broke the internet with how shopping is done. And it means that if you're not recommended on AI search, it just means that you're just invisible. That's why PR is so important. But in terms of everyday AI, AI has given me so much free time back. I work 15 hours less. I'm three times more profitable. And no, I am not a robot.
00:00:55 Gloria: In fact, my audience resonates with me more than ever, because I really use it not as a replacement for me, and I don't use it as it's my boss telling me what to do, but it's a tool that allows me to create spaciousness and all things that I can go deeper with all of our small businesses. I can show up with full presence, and you feel that energy. I think that before, when I was so burnt-out hustling doing all the things that the bro-marketers told me that I should do, the energy just wasn't there.
00:01:21 Gloria: It was one of very fight or flight. It was desperation. It was close to sale. And now that I've freed myself from that expectation of what success looks like, because there's so much richness that's not measured on a spreadsheet. There's so much richness that's not in just money and dollars. I've been able to really show up fully, and my message is resonating. I love AI. It has transformed my life, but I need to record an episode about how people have been gatekeeping AI, and all of the different thought leaders and experts, especially the AI bro-marketers. Yes, that's a new wave, telling us what we need to do that is actually keeping us back.
00:01:56 Gloria: And I've been able to shift so many perspectives in our community, and a lot of them are women of color. English is not their first, sometimes not their second language. They're older women, 50, 60 plus, not techie people at all, right? Been able to leverage the same tools, because I simply don't think it's fair for people to not use AI. Why? Because they've been told by the AI bro-marketers, they need to do something. So let's just break it down.
00:02:22 Gloria: The three biggest rules we need to break, three biggest myths about AI. So the first thing is that we somehow need to learn how to use AI the right way before we can start using it. And that's absolute BS. I think that's how I started AI later than I could have. I could have leveraged that so much earlier. But how many times have you been told you need to learn prompt engineering, or you need to download a worksheet on how to structure your prompts the right way.
00:02:48 Gloria: I attended so many webinars a few years ago, when AI was all the rage and people were just starting to use it. And it was so complex, and these bro-marketers would be talking about the inputs and outputs. It was like coding that I was like, there's no way I can use this. And now I can't survive without it. Now I'm teaching people how to get found on ChatGPT. So AI has been a core part of our business. And now with AI, you've been able to write a pitch, brainstorm a pitch and get featured within five minutes, whereas before you'd have to stare at a blank screen.
00:03:17 Gloria: AI has changed so much. First rule we need to reject is that we need to learn how to use it the right way. There is no right way. Okay? You just start opening ChatGPT or Claude, and there's a microphone button on the mobile app, and you can literally start dictating to it. You can say, "How do I do this? Can you help me do this? Can you help me do this? Do I need to buy this? Where can I go for here?" What it's doing is that I want you to have a conversation with it.
00:03:39 Gloria: Instead of being like, oh, I need to prompt this and then put this spacing and this sub headline, just start asking it. Can you help me do this? If so, what are the steps I need to take? Or is this the best way you can help me do this? Or is this output the best? Or what kind of questions do you want to ask me so that I can give you the context so you can give me the best answer for whether you're writing something, whether you're asking it to make captions, you can always ask those clarifying questions.
00:04:06 Gloria: You absolutely do not need to learn how to use it the right way. Just start talking to it. It's not your boss. It's not your teacher. It's your intern. Use it conversationally and ask, "Can you help me do this?" It could be no, it could be yes, it could be, well, not me, but you can use another tool. So that's the first thing that's really helped people is just start talking to it. The second rule that we need to just break, because all the AI bro-marketers have been gatekeeping it is, oh, you need to pay thousands of dollars for the real secrets of how to use AI.
00:04:35 Gloria: So they created all these courses of all these complex things. You need to pay XYZ to get the secret formula. There is no secret formula. It's free. The whole point of AI is that it's democratizing knowledge. So it doesn't seem fair that they're gatekeeping the knowledge when it really is all already within the large language model. Start talking to it. Don't accept gurus that say, "You need to buy this course or that course." A lot of the secrets are already free, and AI doesn't gatekeep, so just ask AI.
00:05:05 Gloria: Of course, there are certain times where you want to get guidance, but a lot of the prompts and stuff, you can even ask ChatGPT. Like, "Give me a prompt library.", and it will give you that. Don't believe it when people say you need to pay thousands of dollars to get the real secrets. It's not true. The third rule that we need to break, and I absolutely reject, I've been helping so many small business owners leverage AI by rejecting this, is that there's this myth that you need to keep updated and subscribe to 50 billion AI newsletters so that you're on top of the game and you know what's going on. And that way you can optimize for the perfect AI tech stack.
00:05:39 Gloria: I'm all for optimization, but there's hundreds of different tools and softwares and updates. That is so overwhelming for my small business community. A lot of them are single moms, they're picking their kids up. We don't have time. That would be a full-time job just to keep up with what's happening in the AI world. Don't think that you're behind because you don't have the update on everything. We don't need to know everything.
00:06:00 Gloria: If I'm walking, I don't need to know every single walking shoes out there or apparatus. I just need to find the one that I like. Same thing with AI. There will always be so many newsletters to sign up for, there will be so many new fancy things. Don't get overwhelmed, just stick to the basics. Yes. You should follow somewhat of the tech news, but don't get into a rabbit hole, start subscribing to 10, 15 different newsletters, and you just wake up in the morning feeling stressed because you're like, "Oh, now I gotta spend three hours reading these newsletters."
00:06:30 Gloria: You can literally start talking to ChatGPT or Perplexity and be like, "Hey, this is my business. I have an Etsy store, I pour candles, I sell on Amazon. What are some of the AI updates for what I'm doing?" And then it can curate a daily newsletter for you, for your audience. I think that's a much better way to stay abreast of all of the AI happenings than signing up for 10, 15 different newsletters, webinars where people are just trying to sell you stuff.
00:06:52 Gloria: We don't have time for that. And if it's one thing that I've been doing in my PR accelerator as we've been upgrading is, "How can I get people who are so busy, who do not have the team, the bandwidth, the time of a big company to be able to get them results quickly?" This is one of the things is, don't get bogged down consuming and learning. Just start using AI. And in my program, you're not even learning anything anymore. I'm not even teaching you how to write a pitch because my body of work is already out there on the internet. You can just ask ChatGPT or Perplexity, write this pitch and glorious CPR method. That's my signature framework as the number one small business PR coach.
00:07:27 Gloria: People who make things complex and try to drown you in all this information. I'm not sure that they're making things more accessible for you in this day and age, because knowledge is not a precious commodity, time is. So we don't want to necessarily just give our attention away and follow people down a rabbit hole, when we're already overwhelmed. Do not get into the shiny object syndrome, where you're spending so much time learning about what's out there with AI to optimize your tech stack when honestly, a lot of the main tools are constantly adding new features in and of itself that you don't need to have the AI tool.
00:08:00 Gloria: And if you buy too many AI tools or install so many things, a lot of those AI companies might go bust with just how quickly things are springing up. It's absolutely wild. Don't get caught up. I can talk a little bit about the tools that I use every day, and in the Accelerator program, I'm constantly trying to show people why simple is better, why streamlining is better. This is from someone who spent tens of thousands of dollars on every software. Before it used to be webinar software, email software, you name it, I've tried it. What we need now in this age of AI, in this age of information overload is going back to the basics.
00:08:35 Gloria: For me, the three or four that I use every single day is ChatGPT. I use it to synthesize information, draft up quick responses, pull snippets for my podcast that I can then use as standalone snippets, maybe reformat an Excel spreadsheet. But I love Perplexity as well. Perplexity is my Google. I have replaced it. And this is how I find out information in the world. It has helped me find the best hotels in Thailand. It has helped me find out who are the best facialists in my area. And I also teach this in my program that using Perplexity, by the way, it's free, and that's why I love it. The free version is great.
00:09:09 Gloria: Perplexity gives you the best insights to what customers are doing now, what are the trends of the season, and that's what editors want for PR. We want to pitch them what people are looking for, and that's what Perplexity allows us to do. It gives us the best real-time citations, and it also compares the editorial likelihood of those angles. So from a PR point of view, it has absolutely changed the game, because before we would have to guess. What are journalists writing? How do I get onto this person's podcast? But now Perplexity does all of the work for you. You can even ask it from your competitor analysis point of view. What are the stories that my competitor has been on? And give me a list of that. It is absolutely game changing.
00:09:45 Gloria: Now, I did record an episode on how to use Perplexity for PR. There are five ways, so definitely go back and listen to that. But just to recap, I use ChatGPT every day, jack of all trades. I use Perplexity to replace my Google. I don't even use Google anymore. The third one is I use Canva. Canva's great. You can make presentation slides, mock-ups, simple graphics. Canva is an oldie but goodie that I will keep using. There are very fancy tools like Midjourney and Nano Banana for certain images. And if you make products, that could be good. I don't make a physical product. So for me, the images aren't really that important.
00:10:20 Gloria: So I can get away with Canva, but Canva is improving. I also like Canva because it's shareable, it's editable, and for what I do, which is a lot of teaching, it's more about words and less about the product photo. Because again, I don't make skincare or jewelry. So ChatGPT, Perplexity, Canva. I also love fathom.ai. It's the best meeting recording tool, so anytime I'm on a sales call, teaching call, call with my team, I just have it on. I just have it join my Zoom. So that way, it takes the call recording and transcript, and then it becomes a repository of all of the knowledge.
00:10:52 Gloria: When it comes to AI, one of the biggest barriers is that people think, "Oh, I don't have time to train this, or I have to set aside months to train AI." But if you have something like Fathom that's automatically sitting in every meeting, it's gathering the text, the information, then you can just train AI with one click because you already have all of those recordings. You have the transcript, you can copy and paste those transcripts easily, and then upload it. So that's what's so beautiful about Fathom is that it just sits there and it becomes a wealth of knowledge that's trained on who you are, how you lead, what your conversations are like. Even for sales conversations, I have it, I take the transcript, and then it analyzes for me like why someone joined and why someone didn't, and it comes up with the trend. So I actually pull the transcript into ChatGPT. That's what I use it for.
00:11:36 Gloria: The last one that I love that I use all the time is Claude. Claude is my everyday marketing CMO. I used to have a CMO, I paid $3,000 a month. She wasn't able to grow my account. And now I've trained my Claude, which is a writing tool, it's a marketing tool, it's super great. It's superior for writing compared to ChatGPT. It's less robotic, and it really understands personal brands. And I'm a personal brand. I'm not just writing product SKUs and descriptions. The reason why people are in my network and that they trust me is because of this vulnerable, authentic storytelling. But there's no way that I can write all of those emails and captions every single day.
00:12:11 Gloria: So Claude, I've trained it to be a really amazing writing partner. It writes my captions, my blogs. It's also doing my SEO blogs, also does my show notes for my podcast. It helps me ideate workshop ideas and all of the emails that people love to read. They always say, Gloria, I love your email so much. It's with Claude. Now, Claude is something that you need to train just like all AI. But I didn't buy a prompting course, I didn't pay someone to train it. I just started to take screenshots of emails that I liked, of captions, posts that I liked and didn't like, and put it in an iCloud album. And then that way you can just upload it into the project knowledge of Claude.
00:12:43 Gloria: So as you go about your day scrolling, emailing, seeing things that are written, you can start to take screenshots. I recommend you have a iCloud album of content you like, the content you don't like, and that becomes your repository to train Claude, and now Claude understands my voice. I even put in the astrology human design session that I have with ChatGPT, those late-night sessions I have with ChatGPT, and I put it in there as well. All that information now helps Claude write in my tone of voice and takes my ideas, my inspirations into a longer form narrative format for email that sounds less rigid and more unique than ChatGPT.
00:13:21 Gloria: Claude is great. By the way, I pay the $100 a month for it. It's not cheap, but we create so much writing in our business, where it's very copy and text that it's worth it for me. You could probably get by just with the $20 plan or the free plan. But the reason why I love Claude is that there are integrations. So it integrates with Gmail, integrates with Google Calendar and Drive, so it acts as your personal assistant. I can start chatting with Claude and say, "Hey, tell me my meetings for today." or I can say, "Who is this person on my calendar? Can you bring up my previous conversations with them?", and it'll actually remind you by going through your Gmail.
00:13:57 Gloria: It can't send emails yet. I think there's a lack of integration that where, for privacy reasons, you can't send emails from Claude into Google, but it'll give you everything you need. If you don't have the budget for a personal assistant, if you want to quickly come up with your schedule, who this person is remind me, like my previous chats with this person, Claude integrates with Gmail and Calendar and Drive. It's super powerful. That's why these five, I use it all the time. The foundational building blocks of how I've been able to be three times more profitable while working 15 hours less and still maintaining a very authentic and deeply nurturing and engaged tone with my audience where it doesn't sound robotic. And no, it has not taken away from my voice and my agency and my ability to engage with people.