Episode 192: Build an AI Assistant That Sounds Like YOU w/ Kinsey Soderberg
In this episode of the Gloria Chou PR Podcast, I sit down with Kinsey Soderberg—founder of Authentic AI and host of the Authentic AI Podcast—to reveal how small business owners can create and train their own AI assistant to sound exactly like their brand voice.
If you’ve ever wondered how to use AI for content creation, social media, or email marketing—but felt overwhelmed by prompts or disappointed with generic-sounding outputs—this episode is your go-to guide for building a custom AI workflow that feels human.
Why You Don’t Need Perfect Prompts to Use AI for Your Business
Kinsey introduces the concept of “Procrasta-Prompting”—getting stuck trying to perfect prompts instead of just starting.
Her solution? A human-first approach. Brain-dump your raw, unfiltered thoughts into your AI tool like you’re talking to a real assistant or coach. The more human and natural your input, the better AI can mirror your brand’s tone.
How to Train Your AI Assistant on Your Brand Voice
One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is expecting AI to “get it” without any training. Kinsey breaks down a repeatable process for building a branded AI system using her AI Brand Blueprint.
She shows how to train ChatGPT (or any AI tool) with your brand’s:
Mission, vision, and core values
Ideal customer personas (beyond demographics)
Signature brand tone, humor, and writing style
Favorite content formats, emojis, and real-world examples
Once trained, your AI assistant can produce content that sounds like you in seconds.
What to Include in Your AI Brand Blueprint
To get AI content that feels aligned and authentic, Kinsey recommends including:
Core Identity – Your mission, vision, beliefs, and positioning
Customer Clarity – Pain points, desires, and specific psychographics
Brand Voice – Your tone, humor, formatting style, and writing preferences
Screenshots + Samples – IG captions, emails, or posts you admire
Bonus Personality Layer – Add Human Design, Myers-Briggs, or astrology traits to guide tone
This document becomes your AI’s “user manual”—saving hours each week while ensuring brand consistency.
How to Use AI in Your Small Business Right Now
Kinsey shares practical ways to implement AI today—without overhauling your entire business:
Treat ChatGPT like a business coach or VA
Use voice memos to capture ideas on the go
Upload client call MP3s or brainstorming transcripts
Screenshot IG posts for style inspiration
Feed in your customer journey or brand strategy
Top AI Tools for Entrepreneurs and Content Creators
ChatGPT – Best for creative copywriting and tone alignment
Perplexity – Real-time web research and content inspiration
Google Docs – To create and store your AI Brand Blueprint
AI Note-Takers – For fast transcription and team meeting summaries
AI Strategy Tips: What to Do (and Avoid) When Using AI for Content
✅ DO start small—like captions or emails
✅ DO experiment with a human-first mindset
✅ DO edit and personalize all AI outputs before publishing
❌ DON’T try to automate your entire business overnight
❌ DON’T rely on random generic prompts
❌ DON’T skip brand training before assigning tasks
Final Takeaway
Learning how to train AI on your brand voice doesn’t require a tech background or hours of prompting practice. With the right system, you can save time, write content faster, and finally feel like your AI assistant “gets you.”
What you need is:
✅ A strong brand foundation
✅ A reusable AI Brand Blueprint
✅ A human-first, strategic mindset
Ready to make AI your best team member? Kinsey shows 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/428633254951941
Connect with Kinsey Soderberg:
Website: diywith.ai
Instagram: @ai.kinsey
Podcasts: Authentic AI and Human First Founders
Additional Resources:
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TRANsCRIPT
00:00:00 Gloria: What's up, Small Business Heroes. Welcome back to Small Business PR where we make PR and marketing super accessible for the everyday small business hero.
00:00:08 Gloria: So AI, AI, AI, you've heard me talk about it. And if you don't have an AI assistant, then you are honestly missing out, not only on just the speed, the efficiency, but the ability to run your business at a much higher level. So today my friend Kinsey Soderberg, she is a founder of Authentic AI. She also hosts the podcast – Authentic AI Podcast which I've been on, she will talk all about how you can build your perfect AI assistant. And this is a game changer, y'all. So welcome to the show.
00:00:35 Kinsey: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to nerd out about AI stuff today with you.
00:00:41 Gloria: So there's so much AI out there, right? So many gurus and experts telling you this prompt and that prompt. And what I love about your approach it's really not about the formulaic prompts. It's just about feeding it as much information. I think a lot of times people get stomped on even using ChatGPT because they're like, I never had the right prompts. So I love your approach. Just dive in. So can you tell us a little bit about what your method is to get our AI assistant to really sound like us whenever we're using it for email, for social media, for customer service, for all of those things.
00:01:11 Kinsey: Yes. Oh my gosh. I love that you brought that up too, because I call it “Procrasta-Prompting” or trying to become a master prompter is not helping. And often too, that's just like a distraction and won't get you the best, most on-brand results. The exact results that you're looking for from your tool, if you're trying to make the prompt perfect, that is usually how you end up going back and forth with it, feeling like you're pulling teeth, just trying to get what you want out of it and feeling like you could have done it faster if you just did it yourself, right?
00:01:42 Kinsey: So I usually teach what I call a human-first approach to AI and essentially that just means bringing your own ideas, thoughts, opinions, beliefs, language to the tool first and then allowing AI to help you organize, clarify, expand, amplify your own original thoughts, ideas, and essence basically. So instead of thinking that AI is going to do all the work, or do all the thinking for you. Instead, we are working with AI in a collaborative way. Starting with our human first, our self first, and then just working with the tool to get to where we want to go.
00:02:23 Kinsey: And that's truly how I have found that AI will understand where I'm coming from and be able to produce results that sound like me, not just sound like me in the language, but also feel my brand and feel my perspective and that my audience can relate to. You know what I mean?
00:02:42 Gloria: Yeah. I love what you said before, which is you validated my journey with AI was that I got so intimidated again by the prompting that I was like, I don't want to take a class on prompting. I just want to dive in and brain dump everything. And the more that I have conversations with, the more that it will learn instead of following this path. So can you talk to me a little bit about your brain dump method?
00:03:00 Kinsey: Oh, I love brain dumping. Yeah. And basically, I just use brain dumping for anything that I'm using AI to help me with, right? Whether it's organizing my to-do list for the day, I'll open up ChatGPT in the morning and be like, hey, this is what we got to get done today. But also this and wait here over here is this and somewhere I got to fit this in, you know? I'm just brain-dumping. You don't have to worry about complete sentences. You don't have to worry about correct spelling. Your AI assistant can understand your meandering buzzing beehive of thoughts and take that and turn it into an organized to-do this or a social media caption that makes sense or help you clarify this awesome idea that you had into a strategy that actually makes sense. If you're uncomfortable chatting with your AI assistant, I always like to tell people, think of your AI assistant as a human.
00:03:50 Kinsey: So literally, if you are wanting to brainstorm an idea in your business, think about it as your business coach, how would I just be messaging my business coach about this idea. Or if you want it to help you get a task done, think of it as a human assistant or VA, how would I explain this task in Slack to a new VA I hired? Or I always like to bring up to if you're like me, and you love to get your AI assistant to help you with mindset stuff, think about how would I complain about life to my therapist, talk to ChatGPT in that way too. And it can help you with mindset stuff too.
00:04:24 Kinsey: But literally just starting with a brain dump. And again, it can be messy, it doesn't have to be perfect. AI can understand that, telling it all the things you can think of first, and then getting it to do the task for you. That's what I use every day. And that's what a brain dumping initial prompt is how I start out every conversation with ChatGPT, be honest.
00:04:46 Gloria: Yeah, so good. So one of the bottlenecks in my business that AI has completely transformed was social media captions and email, because what we do is so much content, right? I'm writing three to four emails a week. We do three Instagram posts a day. So can you imagine my VA having to wait for me to write all of that? And what has absolutely transformed was teaching our AI exactly who our customers are, our mission and values, what we stand for, what we stand against. And so now it's been able to just synthesize such resonating content. I get comments all the time. And it's actually changed my life because I had such a big team before and it was stressed out and our profit was down. So AI has single-handedly transformed our business.
00:05:23 Gloria: So for someone who wants to have an AI that not only can answer customer service emails, but also create captions and social media and emails. How do they start?
00:05:32 Kinsey: Yes. Okay. So this is something that I always love to encourage people to do because I think it's one of those things, those big mistakes that a lot of people make when they first start using AI tools, right? Is not training your AI on your business first from the get-go. So this kind of falls into again, how a lot of times people will find generic prompts online and they'll be like, oh, cool, here's this cool prompt that this bro gave me. I'm going to try it with ChatGPT. They put it into ChatGPT and it doesn't give them the results that they want. And usually that's because they haven't trained their AI on their business first so that their AI assistant can think and sound like them and do the best job possible for them.
00:06:15 Kinsey: So that's something that you definitely got to do first, guys, is train your AI assistant on everything that it needs to know about your business and the tasks that you want it to do so that it's able to do the best job for you. Because if you think of it as a human intern, if you hired a human intern first day on the job, they walk in the door all shiny face and happy and you go, "write me a social media caption," and you didn't tell them anything else about your brand, your audience, your strategy, that human assistant would try to do a good job for you, but they'd probably do a pretty crappy job and end up going home and crying at the end of the day, right?
00:06:50 Kinsey: No, we don't want that to happen to your AI assistant either. So what we need to do is train it on your brand, tell it all the things that needs to know about your brand first. And I actually have a few different suggestions that I make for how to train AI to think and sound like you.
00:07:06 Kinsey: The very lightweight, low lift way, the easiest way that you could just start out training an AI assistant to think it sounds like your brand is literally just opening up a new chat window and introducing yourself to the chat. Just being like, hey, my name's Kinsey, my brand is Authentic AI, we help da da da. Here are some of our offers. Literally just set a timer for like two minutes and just share whatever you can think of about your brand, your audience, your strategy with your assistant. Introduce yourself. That will already get you better results.
00:07:38 Kinsey: But in my own way of working with AI, I quickly realized that just introducing myself to every new chat that I opened within ChatGPT was not repeatable. It was wasting time. I was like, there's got to be a better, easier way, a way that I can deep dive into training AI on my brand strategy um in a repeatable process. So I'm not having to type everything out every time. So what I've developed is what I call the AI brand blueprint method. And it basically allows you to deep dive, train your AI assistant in one click and 10 seconds on everything that it needs to know about your brand.
00:08:15 Kinsey: Super quickly in a repeatable way. And man, when you can train your AI assistant in that deep, deep way, it's like having a human assistant that has worked with you for like five years and knows your brand almost as well as you, man, the results can be so freaking awesome when you fully train AI on all the things that needs to know. And the cool thing is that AI can actually hold that information. Unlike a human assistant, which it takes us time to learn things, AI can learn everything in 10 seconds and understand all the facets of it, which is so awesome.
00:08:48 Gloria: I love it. I love it. Okay. So you start with a Google doc, right? And you kind of, what are the sections if I were to kind of create this brand book so that I can have it and then feed it into any AI software that I use?
00:08:58 Kinsey: Yeah. Yeah. So the AI brand blueprint, basically what it is, I outline five core strategies of my brand into one single Google document. And once you create this, you can upload it to any AI assistant like you just said, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini. The AI can read it in 10 seconds, hit the ground running, doing whatever the heck task you want it to do for you. So when I create a brand blueprint document, I like to outline the five core strategies. Like I said, the first strategy is your brand's core identity. This is your mission, vision, values that lead you the opinions and beliefs that really just make your brand who it is and stand out in your industry. It's also your ideal customers.
00:09:43 Kinsey: So this is really important for helping your AI assistant understand who you're speaking to when it's writing copy for you and also strategizing for you. So this is going way deeper, of course, than demographics and lifestyle. You also want to share with ChatGPT the pain points that your ideal customers are having that you help them overcome, as well as the desires that you help them achieve so that it can understand the strategy behind your ideal customers.
00:10:09 Kinsey: The third strategy that I love to outline in the brand blueprint, and this is where it's so important for writing content for you, is your brand voice and writing style. And this is where a lot of people get frustrated. So ChatGPT just is overly cheesy or overly generic or sounds like a Ted talk. It doesn't sound like me. And that's because often when people try to make their AI assistant write content that sounds like them, they say, right in a friendly tone of voice or something like that. But if you think about the word friendly, there's a whole umbrella of words underneath that would fall under the umbrella of friendly. You could be a bubbly, friendly, or you could be a kind-hearted, friendly. friendly is probably one of the most generic descriptive words that we could use for someone's personality.
00:10:57 Kinsey: So when it comes to really deep diving into your brand voice and writing style, you really want to pinpoint those specific descriptive nuance words that make ChatGPT fully understand exactly who your brand is. You can also train it on your writing style, your formatting style, emoji usage. One of my favorite things to train it on is my humor style because humor is one of those things that really plays into your personality, your copywriting. And like if ChatGPT can understand how you crack a joke, man, the copy that it writes for you is so much fricking better. I love it. And this is actually my favorite strategy to go through the process of training ChatGPT on because it's so fun to learn more things about your own personality and writing style.
00:11:46 Kinsey: So for example, when I was training it on my humor style, I found out guys that I apparently have a self-deprecating sense of humor. It's a dry wit, but also self-deprecating. It was like, you know, I had one of those moments, but I was like, okay, self-deprecating, short, ChatGPT, if that gets you to write content that sounds more like me, great. It also had some really fun, like a little bit more fun insights than the self-deprecating humor. I'm a rebel archetype too, so that was fun. But yeah, you can totally get into almost this personality quiz results type of thing. But man, the responses that ChatGPT gives you on the backend are so much better.
00:12:25 Gloria: Yeah, that's so good. Cause I was thinking about I had a late night complete conversation about my human design. And you can actually put your human design and astrology and Myers-Briggs into this prank book, right? For it to understand you. And one of the easiest ways that I didn't even think about was as we're scrolling on Instagram is just screenshot posts and captions that you love and then feed it into ChatGPT and say this is a style of caption and storytelling I love. And so, you know, a lot of times it's as easy as literally taking a screenshot on your phone. So, are there any other easy ways for us to collect and accumulate information to feed to ChatGPT in an easy way so we're not constantly typing it out?
00:13:03 Kinsey: Oh yeah, I'm so glad that you brought up the screenshot method, because actually that's like something that I teach and use all the freaking time, especially for Instagram reels. And guys, this is where you can actually scroll for inspiration and it actually is productive and you're not just like, haha, wasting time on the backend. People ask me all the time, how can we get ChatGPT to find the trends on Instagram right now? And yeah, you can try to have ChatGPT look at the Instagram trends and stuff, but honestly, the robots are behind the times a lot of times and when you're dealing with social media platforms like Instagram, the API is all weird.
00:13:37 Kinsey: Sometimes I can't really actually find what is trending right now unless you set up all these automations and stuff. So I usually like to say guys bring the trends to ChatGPT. Scroll Instagram for inspiration when you find a real hook that you think is awesome then screenshot that, upload it to ChatGPT. It can help you recreate that trend for yourself so easily. Same thing can be said about captions like you just said.
00:14:00 Kinsey: Also just voice memo-ing into ChatGPT is so nice for those people who are talkers and not typers. I myself am like a mixed of both typing and talking. If I'm really feeling high energy and triggered about something, man, I'm whipping out my phone and I'm voice memo-ing ChatGPT for 10 minutes, which is great.
00:14:19 Kinsey: But also you can just type random fit into it. But yeah, any time when you can really share with ChatGPT your authentic language, how you would actually speak to another human. It's so great because then ChatGPT can pick up on those cues from your conversation and voice memo-ing is awesome for that too because it can hear how you speak instead of just how you're typing which often comes off as more professional sometimes, you know what I mean?
00:14:44 Gloria: Yeah, one of the hacks I love is just literally opening up the microphone tool in my iPhone. If I'm having an in-person brainstorming session with someone and then uploading it, the MP3 into ChatGPT. And also we have all these AI note takers who we can easily upload the transcript of us speaking or presenting into ChatGPT. So, for anyone that's saying like, oh, I have to feed it so much information. That's a lot of work. We already have a body of work. It's just a matter of like, how do you upload it in a leveraged way? So we don't have to start from zero. And that's what I love from what you said.
00:15:13 Gloria: Can you talk to me a little bit about, now ChatGPT has so many new advancements and it can scrape the internet. So one of things I love to do is to be like, "Hey, can you give me a summary of this podcast episode?" Right. So how can we use the web search tool to our advantage? Can we just upload a URL of someone's Instagram profile for it to get a sense of for example, I really like this content creator. Can it kind of scrape all of that or not really? I have to do like upload each post one by one.
00:15:37 Kinsey: Yeah. Oh, and also just real quick, going back to the microphone thing. So ChatGPT's app on your phone actually has an internal microphone and speaking system and stuff. And it's really actually fun because they just updated it so that you can have a real time conversation back and forth with it. It's not like a speak, transcribe, send situation is more of a I'm speaking into this thing and ChatGPT is understanding it in real time and then speaking back to you in real time.
00:16:06 Kinsey: It's actually really fun. You can change the voices around too. I have the British woman because she makes me happy, but there's lots of different voices. But yeah, going back to how ChatGPT and/or AI tools can integrate with web search and whatnot. This is one of those things where different tools do a better job. I know that you are a Perplexity fan, which I'm so happy about and yeah, Perplexity is one of the best tools that you can use to really scrape the web and understand it looks for current articles on specific topics.
00:16:39 Kinsey: It's what I usually recommend whenever people are trying to do research where they want to look through all the web and they can then get the most current information. ChatGPT, you totally can search the web. I'm still always questioning whatever ChatGPT brings me back something what was your source, and is this the most up to date information because ChatGPT doesn't do the best job at that or not as good as Perplexity, but it still is really good.
00:17:07 Kinsey: ChatGPT is really much better, I'd say at the creative thinking part of it. So if you want to give it your URL for your sales page and be like, hey, tell me where I can improve my copy on this kind of thing. That sort of thing is where I'd use ChatGPT versus maybe doing research on SEO keywords and stuff in Perplexity more so. And then yeah, as far as Instagram, so this is an again where you want to just try lightly all the time.
00:17:35 Kinsey: Guys, these apps are always improving. These AI tools are always improving. And so what I'm saying today could totally they could fix the problems next week. And that's awesome. I love it. But at this point, different social media platforms have different API requirements. So for a long time, if you posted something on Instagram, it wouldn't necessarily show up in Google search as the answer, your caption wouldn't necessarily show up in Google search or something like that.
00:18:03 Kinsey: That's because Instagram's API has limitations that it likes to keep its information to itself, which whatever Instagram. But that also means that not all AI tools can be trusted to scrape specific social media platforms. And especially Instagram is one that I would be a little concerned about. Now, a really fun thing is that YouTube actually is fully integrated with Google. And also YouTube automatically transcribes all of its videos. So actually YouTube and ChatGPT or AI tools are pretty like great at like, okay, analyze this episode kind of thing.Usually AI can do that pretty well.
00:18:43 Kinsey: For the Instagram situation, I would probably just do a screenshot of someone's profile more so and or screenshots of multiple posts of your favorites, especially if you're having it kind of analyze someone else's and just say like, please read these. What are the commonalities? What trends do you see? Why is this speaking to me? Just getting curious about that. But for Instagram, I'd always use screenshots. For the other social media platforms, test it out, but always tread lightly and use your critical thinking brain when it comes to the answers it's giving you.
00:19:14 Gloria: So good. I mean, you've given us so much to think about. Do you have any quick do's and don'ts as we embark on this journey?
00:19:20 Kinsey: Oh man, totally just like yes, do get started. Get curious. So many people will start feeling like they're behind and/or they start learning about AI tools and they go down an AI rabbit hole and they're like, oh my gosh, I have to completely AI-fi everything in my business. It's so much easier to get started with AI tools than a lot of us think it is. And then once you just start dipping your toes into the AI world, just take it one tool, one task, one day at a time. Think about the pressure points in your own business, in your own life and think where would I love to speed this up or where would I love to just delegate this task that I hate doing.
00:19:58 Kinsey: Slowly start just implementing an AI tool here and there that will snowball and pretty soon you're going to be saving oh so much time every day, week, month in your business without feeling like a deer in headlights or ending up not saving time because you're going down the AI rabbit hole and you're not doing the tasks you're actually supposed to be doing in your business. So yeah, just get curious and just realize that you are already ahead of the curve just by getting curious about AI and just getting started right now 'cause we are on the cusp of this thing you guys have. And then something that I definitely say don't do is definitely do not copy paste anything from ChatGPT into putting it into the world, into your content without rereading it, double checking it.
00:20:42 Kinsey: I always like to make sure, yes, use that human first approach and also make sure that you're using the human last approach as well, where you're running it through the filter of your brand, making sure that you're tweaking something here or there and making sure that you're putting stuff out into the world that you actually would have put out there and that you're proud of and that you can stand behind. Because yeah, that's one of the most important things for my brand too. That's actually why I ended up starting my business is because I didn't want the internet to become faker than it already is.
00:21:12 Kinsey: And the awesome thing about AI tools is that they totally can help us save so much freaking time, get so much more done, find so much more freedom in our lives. And we don't have to sacrifice our authenticity. It doesn't take that much of an extra step to make sure that you're using the tool in alignment. And I really think that the more you can lean into yourself and your authenticity with the help of AI tools, that is truly going to make your brand stand out so much more from the noise, from the crowd, because so many people are using these tools in a generic way.
00:21:45 Kinsey: So use the tools, get curious about them, start implementing them here or there, and just remember that you get to choose how you use these tools and you can use them in alignment with yourself and your brand and your people.
00:21:59 Gloria: Yeah, I love what you said about chasing this shiny object syndrome. I think the reason why we get overwhelmed is because every day there are 50 billion new AI things. And if you actually boil it down, three or four tools can encapsulate all of these things. And so I think in the beginning, I was also like, oh my God, now I need to learn this. You can actually just use ChatGPT and with ChatGPT, you can do all of those things. I'd rather go much deeper in training one tool than to try 50 different tools and not having each one really understand me. So that's just a real reminder for you.
00:22:28 Gloria: Don't fall into the trap of trying all the new tools and not really leveraging any one of them fully. So you've got so much to think about. I love this. I've also done this brand book exercise in my own way. And so I've been able to reap the benefits of it. It's absolutely game changing. It's freed up my time in so many ways that I can show up for my people in a deeper way. So how can people find you and get to know you more?
00:22:48 Kinsey: Thank you so much for having me. You can find me. My website is diywith.ai. So that's diywith.ai. On Instagram, I am @ai.kinsey or at Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs. Either one is me. Send me a message. Let me know that you came from the podcast. I'll be sure to give you a follow back. And then yeah, I do have two podcasts, Authentic AI podcast and the Human First Founders podcast. So you can catch me over there. And Gloria was an amazing guest on my Authentic AI one. I love that episode so much. So... Yeah.
00:25:18 Gloria: Thank you.
00:23:27 Gloria: Hey, small business hero, did you know that you can get featured for free on outlets like Forbes, the New York Times, Marie Claire, PopSugar, and so many more, even if you're not yet launched or if you don't have any connections? That's right. That's why I invite you to watch my PR secrets masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought after industry expert.
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