Episode Transcript
Kyle James (00:01.282)
Hey, welcome to the AI Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. And today we'll be diving in headfirst into how a public relations and communication services company called Inquisitive Communications is using AI inside of their own business. And we'll share the exact steps that you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Now, before we talk about that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside of your own company? Or maybe just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT Trainer.
GPT Trainer literally builds out and manages your AI for you, eliminating hallucinations for good. Go to gpt-trainer.com. I promise you, it'll be the biggest time saving decision that you've made all year. Trying to set up AI on your own is like trying to build a house from scratch. Sure, you could do it, but the time of frustration it's going to take you to get it finished, it may not be worth it. It's a thousand times faster and safer to hire professionals.
Schedule a consultation today. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Say hi with me on the show, Dan Nessel, who is an award-winning founder of Inquisitive Communications. Dan has built his reputation fusing traditional communications excellence with cutting edge innovation. With over 25 years of senior leadership experience, he helps organizations, executives, founders, and entrepreneurs navigate AI transformation.
through strategic guidance, practical training, and his executive influence engine methodology. Really excited for this conversation today. Hey, Dan, welcome to the show. How are you doing, my friend?
Dan Nestle (01:37.532)
Hey, Kyle, it's great to be here. Thanks so much. And just shout out to GPT Trainer. I started playing around with it the other day. I got to say, it's pretty cool. create your own chat bot within your company, within your own app. And it really does a great job.
Kyle James (01:53.24)
Man, we always appreciate shout outs, my friend. I appreciate that so much.
Dan Nestle (01:55.509)
Ah, man, I love getting new tools in my hands. And GPT Trainer's no difference, I got to say, or no different. I'm always trying to figure out the next thing or whatever can streamline my day a little bit more. And yeah, I'm going to play with it a little bit longer. But I created a pretty cool chatbot. And I'm sort of tweaking it to see if I can actually implement it onto my website. Yeah.
Kyle James (02:22.124)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, there's, there's a lot happening in the AI space today, isn't there? So, and we appreciate that. And so tell me Dan a little bit here, like tell me about inquisitive communications, like give us the origin story. How did it come to be and walk us through that a little bit here.
Dan Nestle (02:27.06)
for sure.
Dan Nestle (02:35.916)
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because so many people are out there now starting their own company and they're all saying, doing AI. I'm doing AI. I'm an AI expert. I'm an AI pro. I'm an AI this, I'm an AI that. My path was, I don't know if it's that much different than a lot of folks in a similar position, but I was a corporate communications and marketing pro. I worked for large companies for a very long time, some agency work. And then last year,
victimized by the economy, shall we say. I got laid off, but I was kind of expecting it. I was working for a very large Japanese company. the whole time though, and for many years before that and even now, I've always been kind of obsessed or focused on building my own personal brand. And it's really kicked into high gear in the last couple of years because I realized, especially after November of 2022 when ChatGPT came out,
that not that you can be replaced, but that the only thing that you have to protect yourself from the economy and from employers and from all that stuff is to have a strong point of view, a strong business offering, a strong personal brand, which you can turn into a consulting business or another opportunity for employment. But you have to be known. And if you're unknown or if you're invisible, it's not going to go anywhere.
Kyle James (04:01.624)
Yeah.
Dan Nestle (04:02.472)
Yeah. So after I got laid off, I had seen the writing on the wall for a while. And like I said, I had been, I jumped right into AI as soon as ChatGPT came out. I was doing training for AI within the company I was at far before most people were even thinking about doing trainings. I really love the theoretical side of it all. And I just love the creative and innovative capabilities that it gives you. And as a communicator and a marketer, was just like, it was like a godsend.
So I dove deep when a lot of people weren't really. And as soon as the bell tolled for me, I was ready. I said, OK, fine. I'm going to start my own AI-powered communications consultancy. And that's what I did a year ago. Refined it and pivoted since then. But now, if anything, I'm even more focused in bringing AI solutions or, shall we say, helping my clients and customers.
grasp AI and help them kind of move into the future or even into the present as it
Kyle James (05:08.782)
Yeah, definitely the graph, the grasping is such a big deal too. I got ready to study one time. It was like saying like the, total U S like I was just U S or like the world population. All right. For sure. It's a world population is like only like maybe 20 % of people are using AI. I'm like, it's crazy to think like there's still such a huge amount of people who are still not using it. So like, therefore there's that, there's that a lot of market share still out there that we can, we can press into. like, far as like what you're using, like, I mean, you're using inquisitive or AI over inquisitive communications, like what, like.
Dan Nestle (05:22.162)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Dan Nestle (05:30.474)
100%.
Kyle James (05:37.986)
Like specifically, like what's the main challenge you're trying to like maybe knock out of the park, right? With using the AI and like kind of paint the picture for me on that one.
Dan Nestle (05:46.782)
So I have a broad oversight, I'd say, or a broad understanding of all the LLMs that most people can use or most people do use, and certainly a bunch of proprietary tools or unique tools that either I've been introduced to or that I've found over time. So I've cobbled together a sort of ecosystem of different tools for different use cases. And I keep coming up with more. But for my business,
The mainstay for me is Claude. And I'm just obsessed and deeply involved with Claude, and to the point where it's unhealthy, maybe. I call Claude my BFF, and I dare anybody to change that. But Claude has so many capabilities for what I do. And the main area that I'm focused in is in content creation for my clients and for myself. And AI for content creation is like the most basic use case.
That's the cause of all the AI slop that's out there, really. There's so much terrible AI content. People know it's AI. It's kind of generic. So I have 25 years of comms and executive communications experience. I know what works. I know what's supposed to happen with your content. I'm a good writer. So I've been refining and refining a content engine that I've
put together using several different tools. And it's more of a service than an app, right? But I create content for myself and on behalf of others using a fairly robust process with a couple of different tools, ending usually with Claude, because it's a great writer. Then internally, for my own business, I use these tools. I also use
a business advisor that I've set up through Claude and through ChatGPT to help me answer questions about my business when I have things I need to figure out. You don't have to hire people anymore to figure out, what's the best way to operationalize something? Or how should I deal with this particular issue for taxes? There's a lot you can do just with AI, as long as you check to make sure it's not giving you false answers. So I use it as my business advisor. And then I have
Kyle James (08:06.008)
Hmm.
Dan Nestle (08:11.836)
like value added on tools that I bring to my clients, like a brand story creator, for example, that was created by a great friend of mine, Park Howell, and his team over at Business of Story, the Story Cycle Genie, it's called. I use that to do brand reviews and brand analyses for clients. I'm working with a new tool that is not, I don't think it's out yet, but very
promising for measuring the presence of your company on an AI, on a given LLM. So you can see on a score of 1 to 100, how well is your company doing from the, as concerns its visibility and its brand reputation within, let's say, chat GBT or within Claude. So it's pretty powerful stuff. Yeah, but I'm always looking for new things and adding things on.
Kyle James (09:05.301)
Yeah.
For sure. So like with a, you know, cause I think there's a, there's so many tools and there's a lot of valuable tools out there that a lot of creators have made. yeah, like say like, it's just like, mentioned like the Opus clip before our podcast, like as an example, like if someone didn't know about that, right. Like, or about Descript or any other tools, like they didn't know about those tools. They're going to try and build it from scratch. And so like having the advantage to talk to me like a little bit, like the advantage of
Dan Nestle (09:21.84)
Mm-hmm. Great tool.
Dan Nestle (09:30.964)
That's right.
Kyle James (09:35.106)
having access to all these tools available because when your client does come aboard, right, you're bringing them on, they're like, I don't know where I'm starting. I don't know where I don't know where to go. but you're just using like, for the most part, like a lot of these tools and you're building that process of building that system out for them. So kind of like, what does that look like from on your end?
Dan Nestle (09:48.04)
Right. Yeah.
At some point, the clients are all familiar with, my clients anyway, are all familiar with, of course, ChatGPT or with your standard LLM interactions. There are some people out there that have only been exposed to copilot and I really feel terrible for them. What an awful existence that must be. But generally speaking, many people, especially who are solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, who are small business owners, they at least understand, okay, yeah, I can go to ChatGPT and get an email done.
But they haven't gone any deeper than that. So to get started and to move forward, it's not necessarily about introducing new tools. It's about, what are you using and what are your use cases? It's better to start with what your needs are than with what the tools are. So a good example is, look, the only thing I really need to do is create sales scripts. Because sales is my weakness, just as a hypothetical. If sales is your weakness and you're
your salespeople are constantly off message and you're just not sure what's going on. I really just want to fix that problem. Well, then you can just choose an LLM and get the prompting right. And boom, you can create some great sales scripts. Now, how well you do the prompting and what context you give it is another thing. But at least that's where to start. So you back into it. In my case, and I think in the case of a lot of folks, especially like podcasters or people who are content creators, my...
I think the a-ha had, or the kind of light bulb that went off for me with how I can really use AI to blow out my own content, was the advent of Notebook LM. So great place to, if not start, least to kind of use Notebook LM along with any other LLM you're using. So Google Notebook LM is available for free for any Google user.
Dan Nestle (11:48.02)
And the free version is quite powerful. The paid version is better, of course. But really what it is is a research tool for your own stuff. So you put all of your own goodies into a notebook, and then you are able to use the AI to research all of your own stuff and to create content or to create, to synthesize what's in there, to find new ideas, to find old ones, to get specific information.
that's within that body of content that you've just dropped into a notebook. And you can create like 50 notebooks on the free version. It's like something like 300 or 400 for the paid version. And the number of sources changes. imagine if you have a podcast like I do, taking 150 episodes of your podcast and just dropping all the transcripts into one place. Well, that's a lot of data. It's a lot of information. So now I can go there, and I do.
Kyle James (12:43.81)
Mm-hmm.
Dan Nestle (12:47.526)
And I say, hey, what do guests of my podcast are called the Trending Communicator? So I'll ask Notebook LM, what do guests of the Trending Communicator have to say about the future of communications in the AI age? And it's a generic question, but it will provide eight or 10 quotes from my show that kind of back that up, or it'll help me answer my questions. So it's a really great baseline.
for people who want to have more, I think, substantial evidence and power behind their content. So it's a great place for creators to go. Then you take that content and you go to an LLM that you like to refine it into something that you're willing to put out into the public. So it's great. It's a really amazing tool.
Kyle James (13:33.045)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's just like so much, like I think a lot of people don't realize there's so many tools at their hands that they could start with today, but they like, it's just knowing what it is. And like, even if it's basic, it's just like, just a little like left turn, right turn straight ahead on the right. Like that's it. But it's like, well, if you don't know, you don't know. you know, and talking a little bit about like, um, kind of like maybe some of the results you've been seeing, cause you've worked with a lot of clients and you've helped them on board. Like what's something that maybe it's worth highlighting both.
Dan Nestle (13:53.385)
for sure.
Kyle James (14:05.742)
both maybe externally with some of your clients that you helped them accomplish and then maybe even internally with your own team since you've been kind of gathering these tools. I keep picturing, I'm sorry, I have to say this, keep picturing like my daddy's got so many tools in his toolbox, like just all the tools. What does that look like on your side?
Dan Nestle (14:21.874)
like that.
Dan Nestle (14:27.284)
Yeah, why do you need another screwdriver? You already have seven of them. You know, it's that kind of thing. Well, let me be clear that or clarify. Inquisitive Communications, the team is me and Claude and ChachiPT and notebook L.M. and Gemini. Like, that's my team. My team is an AI team. And if I have projects that are larger that require more...
Kyle James (14:29.006)
Yeah.
Dan Nestle (14:55.412)
concurrent capabilities than I bring people in on a project basis. I think the best results that I've been bringing to clients so far has been in the content creation space, you'd have like one of my clients is a great example. She runs a boutique consultancy. She is a solopreneur, entrepreneur, but has been in her business for 30 years and is very well known in her space.
time poor. So she's content rich. has lots of writing and plenty of blog posts and she's been in so many videos and had media coverage and all this stuff. But who has the time to deal with building your business or expanding your business or your reputation with the way that the audiences are all fractured over multiple platforms, different types of content needs. And now, of course, with AI looking at content in a different way with GEO, with generative
engine optimization, being found on AI. How can one solopreneur who has a business to run really kind of handle all that? And the answer is that it's hard. mean, they can't really as one person. So I help her with her thought leadership platform, her executive content, the kinds of things that she's putting out there in newsletters on LinkedIn, helping her prep for interviews, helping her figure out
best way to rework her website with the content engine that I've created. And then I advise her on content strategy, because that's kind of my backbone. And she's seeing great results so far. Now, this is new. So I can't come out here and say, yeah, she's increased her sales by x % or whatever. But I can say that her engagement has been increasing rapidly. Her message is getting to be crystal clear. And she has found.
herself more confident in talking about her business, especially with media and with others, with her clients. So there are a lot of these benefits that are coming up that I really didn't necessarily bank on, but that are really wonderful. But mostly the biggest benefit is time. She is able to save so much time and she doesn't have to worry about the quality because that's what I'm here for. And as long as we have the 100 %
Dan Nestle (17:20.436)
It's not 100 % AI, but it is 100 % human kind of angle to this. It works pretty well for people like that. So that's one key way that I'm helping people.
Kyle James (17:28.046)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think too, it's just like it, there has to be like, it's very challenging. think like getting very challenging to get a rocket out in space. Like there has to be a lot of momentum. I think like for a lot of like soulpreneurs and startups and like even teams that are smaller than 50, like how can they, how can they get out of the, you know, the atmosphere to where they're finally floating? Right. And feels light. It's not as heavy. I think that's the going back to is like having that AI in your case, like some of your clients might have
a little bit of usage on the chat, GBT and Cloud and other LLMs, but for you to go, hey, look, let's build a couple of different agents here or perspectives. And that's going to help you build that artificial team so that way you can get to that place where you're out in space.
Dan Nestle (18:14.206)
For sure, yeah. And it's interesting because the more you dive into one area, the more you see opportunities for other use cases with that. So I developed this My Content Creation process, my methodologies, my IP, what I'm calling the Executive Influence Engine over time. I think it's fantastic. It needs to be improved. I'm always figuring out how to improve it. I want to turn it into an agent in and of itself.
coming in the future. But looking at it, I'm like, wait a second, this is for people. I could do the same thing for a brand. So for a brand or a company. So the next development that you're going to see coming from Inquisitive Communications is the brand influence engine, which is based on the same methodology, the same IP, but I've been able to change it at the core level so that instead of speaking for an individual, it's now able to represent a brand.
And I have high hopes for that too. I think it's going to be a fantastic solution for marketing teams and comms teams for larger companies and even for medium sized companies.
Kyle James (19:21.422)
Yeah, for sure. For sure. So walking into like this next couple of years, like where do you see inquisitive, like they're kind of upcoming AI initiatives. Cause you talked a little bit briefly about like, like maybe the library a little bit more on that and like, is it going to play made that biggest role in your operations?
Dan Nestle (19:31.54)
Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
Well, I do, think, and I hope, and I hope I have the foresight to understand, I think the content creation part of this is not going to go away. And in fact, there's going to be an increasing need for good, good work out there. It's a little boutique. It's a little bit maybe niche elite type of stuff. But I'm not looking to go mass market with anything. So I think that as long as I can refine the engine and still make it
benefits clear for the people that use it. Time, confidence, savings, certainly, because you don't have to hire freelancers or agency or anything like this. So as long as these things remain clear, and they're confident in the quality of it, and they trust me, I feel like that's going to be the direction for a while. But in a more stratified way, so to create offerings that are for different types of people, and also to build out
a course so can teach people how to do this. the other, think, there'll be a book in this at some point for sure. So building out my own content at the same time. So that's one direction. The other one is in the training side of things, because organizations, large and small, think that the best way to deal with it, well, they don't know the best way to deal with AI. They don't know how to start. So they default to, OK, it's software. I'm going to just.
Kyle James (20:43.032)
Hahaha
Dan Nestle (21:06.846)
We're going to create these videos and have people train on it and then let them go. But AI is so different because it's like a friend of mine said recently that it's like having a PhD in your pocket. When you give every employee a PhD in their pocket and you restrict them with heavy guardrails or guidelines or you train them that it's supposed to be used a very specific way.
Kyle James (21:19.64)
Mmm.
Dan Nestle (21:32.988)
you are killing the innovation potential of your employee base. So how can you as a company understand this and really build an innovative team that's also going to deliver constantly on your strategic priorities and on your business priorities without getting distracted? know, and AI is a tremendous enabler in this as long as your organization has a grip on how work is done, where it's done.
Kyle James (21:36.686)
Hmm.
Dan Nestle (22:02.759)
You know, even when it's done, there's organizational dynamics at play that I'm not, that's not my specialty. But as companies come to grips with all this, I think the need for training is going to continue and grow. beyond basic, here's what an LLM is, it's going to be more about innovation training, how to play with AI. It's another thing that I've developed as a framework for play.
like how you start, like experiment and start with AI, like what are the things you want to do and have fun with, encouraging that having fun mindset at first. These are all maybe soft skills you might want to think in a way, but I think the training for that and the need for that is going to be increasing. I don't think prompting is going away anytime soon either. So I think we need to be really solid in prompting and that's something I'm pretty good at.
Kyle James (22:40.27)
Hmm.
Kyle James (22:53.122)
Yeah, right.
Kyle James (22:59.342)
Yeah, that skill set on the prompting side is like, yeah, I've heard it to you before, like the AI, oh, at some point, the AI is not going to need you. There's no more prompt engineers. Like, I don't know. I've seen some of the work from just an LLM out of the box. It doesn't always work the way you expect it to, you know what mean?
Dan Nestle (23:07.88)
I don't know.
Dan Nestle (23:16.734)
Well, yeah. just you're seeing agents start to come out now and to varying degrees of usability. Even the agent, even GPT trainer, for example, you can plug it in and do all your stuff. And it's great. Don't get me wrong. But it takes another level of understanding. you dig in and you look at, what's the prompt set up to be like, it's so much easier to really customize it and make it sing, right? As it is, it will work.
Kyle James (23:32.462)
Mm-hmm.
Kyle James (23:42.978)
Mm.
Dan Nestle (23:45.736)
like 98 % well or 90 to 98 % well for most people. if you have those prompting skills, are now at the kind of, you're taking it to a more extreme level and your skills are more relevant. And I think that's gonna continue to be the case in all disciplines.
Kyle James (23:48.152)
Sure.
Kyle James (24:03.672)
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Dan, I appreciate having you on the show today. It's been awesome hearing your perspective. for those listening, again, thanks everybody for listening in. But where can they learn a little bit more about you that you'd recommend them go check out, and even with inquisitive communications, that they should know as a next step?
Dan Nestle (24:18.57)
yeah. Well, learning about me and Inquisitive Communications is almost the same thing. Not quite, but almost. I just relaunched my website literally last week at the time of this recording. Go to be inquisitive.com. That's B-E-Inquisitive.com. check out the site. Check out the offerings and the content and the blog I'm building there. Go to my sub stack, is my podcast is Trending Communicator.
Kyle James (24:23.502)
Yeah.
Dan Nestle (24:48.084)
StubSubstack is also a trending communicator. Trendingcommunicator.substack.com. And finally, I am an open book on LinkedIn. I spend a lot of my time there. So just look for me on LinkedIn. And I'm sure that Kyle here is going to include my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. But just go to LinkedIn and just search for Dan Nessel. You'll find me.
Kyle James (25:08.718)
Cool. Awesome. Love it, Dan. It's great having you on, And thanks, everybody, for listening in. And remember, if you're trying to implement AI into your business today, it's pretty clear. Please, don't try and do it yourself. The time and stress that AI could cause, it may not be worth it. Schedule a call with GPT Trainer. Let them build out and manage your AI for you. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Signing off for now, have a great rest of your day, everybody. Looking forward to seeing everyone on the next episode of AI Chronicles.
Dan Nestle (25:35.54)
Thanks Kyle.
