How Monica Froese Got Her Life Back by Letting AI Run Her Business

I recently sat down with my friend Monica Froese for another round on the podcast, and honestly, I came away with my brain buzzing. Monica has been through a lot of business pivots over the years, but this latest one, moving fully into AI powered systems, might be the biggest shift yet. Her revenue was cut in half two years in a row, and instead of heading back to corporate, she decided to dive headfirst into learning everything she could about AI. What she’s built since then is honestly wild, and I wanted to share the highlights here because I think every single person reading this, no matter what kind of content or product you create, can pull something useful from her story.

From Prompt Engineering to a Full On Orchestrator

Monica walked me through how fast things moved for her, starting with basic prompting in early 2025, moving into custom GPTs mid year, and then landing on what really changed everything for her: connectors and skills inside tools like Claude Cowork. Once her software started talking to each other through these connectors, she stopped being the one doing the tactical work and became what she calls the orchestrator. She now runs her day across roughly ten open project threads, checking in and redirecting rather than executing every task herself. The proof is in the results. She relaunched a ten year old family budget spreadsheet almost entirely through AI, from the design updates to the Shopify listing to the walkthrough video, and she ran an entire thirty one day product launch event with about eighty five percent less labor than a similar event she ran the year before.

Skills Are the Secret Sauce

One of the biggest lightbulb moments for me was learning what a skill actually is. It’s essentially a markdown file that teaches AI your voice, your brand facts, and your repeatable workflows, and it can be called into any chat once it’s built. Monica has built skills for her brand voice, her storytelling patterns, her image direction, and even her daily inbox triage. That last one is what she leads with for anyone just getting started, because everyone has an inbox that eats their time. She has AI archive newsletters, flag podcast pitches, draft responses, and even pull promo materials from summit and bundle emails into her project tracker automatically. It only gets smarter the more she refines it, and she treats it like an ongoing conversation rather than a one time setup.

Where the Human Still Has to Show Up

What I appreciated most about this conversation is that Monica was clear about her boundaries. She doesn’t let AI record her podcast, respond to customer service emails, or send anything out the door without her reading it first. She’s not connecting her financials either, at least not yet. Her philosophy is that AI should handle the mundane so she can show up fully for the things that actually require her face, her voice, and her lived experience. She brought up a planner she’s building for women going through divorce, something she has personal experience with, and made the point that AI has never been through what her customers are going through. It can help her produce faster, but it can’t replace the human connection that makes people buy from her in the first place.

Related: AI and Finding Your Voice in Business in 2026

My Big Takeaway

If you are feeling overwhelmed by everything we covered, I get it, because I felt the same way sitting across from Monica. Her advice, and mine too, is to start small. Pick one repetitive task, like managing your inbox, and let AI take a first pass at it. Don’t try to overhaul your entire business overnight. Monica pointed out that AI is only as good as the expertise you bring to it, so if you already know your craft, you have everything you need to start training these tools to sound like you and work like you. I signed up for her daily inbox triage freebie the moment we got off the call, and I’d encourage you to do the same and just take that one first step.

You can find this podcast episode by going to Apple or Spotify. 

Connect with Monica Forese

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Transcript:

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[00:00:00] Kate: Okay, let’s talk about AI. It is the topic of the day. Everybody is interested in it, but it feels like it’s moving so fast all the time. You are busy running a business, and frankly, you don’t have time to babysit every task on your to-do list. Today, we’re going to talk about how AI tools are saving hours every week: analytics, scheduling, image creation, tactical things, daily tasks. My guest, Monica Froese, who is a friend of mine as well, is going to share how she has built a business where AI and smart systems can handle the mundane stuff so that she can really focus back on the work that actually needs her. Monica, thank you so much for coming on The Simple Pin Podcast.

Monica: Well, thanks for having me back. What is this, the third or fourth time?

Kate: [00:01:00] I know. I love it. It’s been years though. I actually think what’s interesting about how your business has iterated over the years is that you’ve been very smart to go through these processes and see where the market is going and how you fill those gaps, and I think sometimes people don’t do that well. And your iterating has landed you in this AI space, and one of the things that you and I have talked about is that this lights you up. It gets you out of bed in the morning. You’re so excited about it, whereas some other people, it doesn’t light them up. It actually feels like it’s a ball and chain, or they’re behind the eight ball. They’re struggling to keep up. So I want to start there, at this big ten-thousand-foot level. What lights you up about AI and keeps you in this space of teaching people how to do it?

Monica: Well, first I would say it got me my life back, and I say that as, [00:02:00] in the last two and a half years, I was working eighty hours a week, and I’m not exaggerating. It got to the point where my children were saying, “Mom, you’re not nice. You haven’t been nice in a little bit.” And that’s alarming because I only have my kids half the time, and I had always said that’s not what I want. When I tried to shove too much of my work time into my non-kid time because I wanted to be available, it just kept bleeding over.

So the big high-level overview for me is that my business revenue was cut in half in 2024 and again in 2025. So my journey into AI initially was almost by force. On January 1st, 2025, I woke up and said, “I basically have to take back everything tactical in my business.” I was facing, am I going back to corporate or am I going to pivot? At this point, I had really not learned anything AI because I was going through a lot of personal stuff, but it was staring me in the face when I woke up. Teaching digital products, there was no world in which I could keep ignoring AI, otherwise I wasn’t going to be relevant to teach it.

[00:03:00] So I grappled with that for all of five minutes, even updated my resume, and then said, “There is just no way I can go back to corporate. This is not going to be a thing. I can’t do this.” So my answer was to dive in. I have a lot of corporate tech background. I remember when cloud computing became a thing, and we were starting to sell from on-premise licenses to cloud licenses, and I remember looking up at the sky and thinking, “What’s in the cloud? I don’t understand this concept.”

Kate: Totally. I’ve been through so many tech changes, but I’ve never, ever seen something like this. This blows my mind, but it didn’t blow my mind right away.

Monica: So the evolution has been fascinating. I wake up January 1st, 2025 and decide, “Okay, I’m going to dive into all things AI. I’m going to learn everything there is to learn, and I’m going to become an expert on it.” When we entered 2025, people were all still about prompting, [00:04:00] prompt engineering, how good are your prompts. Then about halfway through 2025, we started talking about custom GPTs, and these were interesting because the way I would explain it is basically it’s a set of instructions that power a bot. It’s like a chat back and forth, and let’s say I teach with frameworks, so I could load my frameworks in and be very detailed on when my students are trying to reverse-idea find their digital product, ask them a series of questions, and then I put source files in, and it would benchmark the answer off of these source files.

That was the next iteration. I was able to get people through what used to be a very manual process in about half the time. I noticed the creation process and the validation process, I was really pulling people along much faster. So I thought, “Okay, now we’re onto something.”

But still, in the second half of 2025, this term agentic AI comes out a lot, and the summation of agentic AI is just hands-off, literally your AI is doing work for you. I remember thinking around [00:05:00] September of 2025, “It’s not doing things for me.” It’s helping me finish tasks faster, but it very much still required me to be in the chat responding. Chat asks a question, I respond, I explain what I want. So my outputs were faster, but it wasn’t doing anything for me. I still wasn’t wrapping my head around agentic AI. The place closest to that was us using Zaps, but we’ve been using Zaps for a decade. Zaps pull information from somewhere, take an action, output it somewhere else. So I thought, “What’s this going to even look like? Is it just a glorified Zapier?” And then there were some other things people talked about, like Make.com and n8n. And I’d open it and think, “I don’t know.” It still was not connecting.

Then about February of 2026, I woke [00:06:00] up to the invention of Claude Cowork and Code, and the world completely changed. I would say in the last ten years, no matter how often I pivoted, how I worked didn’t change all that much. I still had Kit open every day for emails, and Thinkific for my course software. I don’t have any of that open anymore. I operate either in Codex for ChatGPT, which is the equivalent of Claude Cowork, or the Claude desktop app.

And essentially, within the last two months too, which is even more wild to me how fast it’s changed, I am the orchestrator. I don’t do hardly anything, and the reason being is because of a few different things. Probably the main reasons are, one, these things called skills, which we [00:07:00] can talk about what a skill is and what it does for you, and then connectors. Basically, all the software I use has a native connection into Claude and ChatGPT. And what that means, the way I explain connectors, is I can point Claude or ChatGPT into my software. I can direct it to do stuff in my software, but then it can also come back with information to me, which I can then take and put into another software. So you can start chaining these together.

It’s like, “Hey, go to Airtable, find my weekly brief, write me an email in Kit on it for my weekly newsletter,” and they’re scheduled tasks. MCP and connectors are interchangeable, just so we know. Basically, what my workdays look like now is I have about [00:08:00] ten different tabs open in Claude Desktop, and they’re all different projects. Let’s say I’m working on a new spreadsheet, or a new funnel, or a shop listing, because Shopify has an MCP now too. I basically set a direction, these are the things I need to get done, and then my day is rotating between them, making sure it’s doing what I need it to do for the final outputs, and then I’m off thinking of the bigger strategic things that, when I took everything back in-house, I had zero room to really think strategically.

I was just getting by every day. And now, my quality of life is the best it’s been in three years. I executed an entire thirty-one-day event, a new product drop every single day, every twenty-four hours, and I took more time off in July than I have in the past three years.

Kate: [00:09:00] This is so crazy. Okay, there’s so much to extract from this. I feel like we went ten-thousand-foot level down to zero, but I love it. Okay, so you wrote an email, “Here’s the five things I don’t do in my business anymore.” I want to talk about that epiphany that came to you. Was it an all-of-a-sudden realization, like, “Oh my gosh, it worked”?

Monica: I think there are two distinct epiphanies. One was me relaunching some products on Redefining Mom, the B2C side of my business, and then also running the thirty-one-day event. The easier one to talk about first is the Redefining Mom one, and then I’ll compare two events I ran, one in October of 2025 and then July 2026, and how they were so similar and yet my workload was [00:10:00] eighty-five percent less.

Kate: Wow. Okay. Let’s talk about that.

Monica: Okay, so the spreadsheet first. We’ll get to talking about skills as this comes out. So Fable 5 is a model that got released on Claude. When they first released it, it was around June-ish, and basically it was supposed to be the most powerful model that’s ever been out there. The US government was trying to temper it down, and they basically made it available to all Claude users for about ten days. I thought, “I’m going to take advantage of these ten days.”

Part of it was I still felt like I was doing more than I have to do, but I didn’t know how to make AI do some of these nitty-gritty things. So I thought, “Well, while we have this Fable 5 usage available, let’s just think big.” I had been wanting to relaunch my family budget spreadsheet for the last ten years. It has sold tens of thousands of copies, [00:11:00] mainly thanks to me indexing my funnels on Pinterest, and my Pinterest pins, which I haven’t pinned since 2020, are still driving me traffic. That is a huge win, still bringing it in. I’m so glad the platform I doubled down on was a search engine back in the day, because it just keeps paying dividends.

I wanted to redo it, but I’ve never had the time, and I don’t really have spreadsheet design skills, and I didn’t really want to hire out for it. So I pointed Fable 5 to just the Google Drive link and said, “Hey, I’ve been selling this spreadsheet for ten years. It has sold tens of thousands of copies. I would really like to up-level it.” Over the years, I had thought of different ways I could enhance it. I wanted dashboards, I wanted the design to be better, I wanted different tabs added. So I had a vision. This is important. I didn’t just say, “Hey, AI, update this.” I had a vision for how I wanted to up-level this spreadsheet, but I did not have the time or the design skills. I have the formula skills, not the [00:12:00] design skills.

That’s really all I said. I gave it my brand kit, which it kind of already knew anyways, and set it off to do the work, and what it came back with blew my mind. That was when it really clicked that you should just keep asking it if it can do more. It came back with this spreadsheet, and I said, “Most of my people use this in Google Sheets, so can you do a quality check, work with it in Google Sheets to make sure nothing will break?” So it did that, found some things that were broken, and fixed them.

Then, because I’d worked with it so much, it knew I was going to need an instruction PDF to upload to my Shopify listing. It said, “By the way, I’ll just create your Shopify listing for you. Would you like an opt-in to go with this and a sales page to go with it? We’re connected to your page builder, so we’ll just go do that. We’ll create your opt-in form in Kit too.” It did all of this work for me with very little intervention. [00:13:00] And all of it’s done and ready for me to sell.

The last thing I had to do, all my spreadsheets I usually do a walkthrough video for. I was just about to open Loom, and I thought, “Why should I do this? It’s going to take me an hour. I’ll have to edit it, upload it to Vimeo.” Vimeo also has a connector. So I thought, “I bet it can do this for me.” I said, “Hey, I usually do walkthrough videos. Here’s an example of one I’ve done. Can you do one for me? Make the instruction tab on the spreadsheet even more detailed, since I’m not going to be doing a formal walkthrough. Do a walkthrough, give me the thumbnail, upload it into Vimeo, get the embed link, and put it in my sales page.” It did all of that.

Kate: And it wasn’t your voice?

Monica: Yes, it was, because I have trained it. So that’s where we can layer in skills. [00:14:00] Skills are what they call markdown files. They’re just text files that AI can read easily. And the great thing is both ChatGPT and Claude have what they call a Skill Builder. So you don’t really need to know all the technicalities, because when you’re working with AI now and you perform a task, it knows we can make this a repeatable workflow.

This was a great example. I went through pretty nitty-gritty steps it had to take. We talked about at least five or six pieces of software it touched throughout this. It also logged it on my funnel tracking spreadsheet in Airtable, all without me doing any of it. Think about it, I just did this multi-step workflow of creating a spreadsheet. Well, I create lots of spreadsheets in my business. So at the end I said, “I’m going to be doing this on a lot of my spreadsheets on both sides of the business. Can you create a skill so it knows exactly what the process is, [00:15:00] step by step, what software to access, how to create the opt-in forms, all of that.”

So essentially, the skill file is now knowledgeable on this workflow. A similar thing you can do is your brand voice. You can create a brand voice skill that knows, for me, it knows my bio, facts about me relevant to the business, all my brand information. And now that I create all my emails and sales pages in HTML, it also has links to approved headshots and flash graphics you can use, like on opt-in pages, of me networking with people and stuff like that.

Kate: Okay, that makes sense.

Monica: So now these files contain all this knowledge. When I told it, “Make sure the spreadsheet is in the Redefining Mom brand,” it knows to pull in the Redefining Mom skill. So skills kind of layer on top of your entire account. [00:16:00] They can be called into any chat.

Kate: Okay, so I want to bring it down to how someone, we’re going to go a little bit back to your email with the five things you’re no longer doing in your business. What I hear right now is what you were experiencing, feeling a little bit of overwhelm, feeling like things are moving so quickly, and at the same time struggling with your business model. I appreciate that you addressed in the beginning that your income dropped in half, because that is a very common story, and I think a lot of the business community doesn’t talk about it. But once we’re behind closed doors, we’re like, “Yeah, I’m struggling too.” It is really this whole shift in our industry that has impacted where the money is, how it’s working. So I just want to call that out. And I think the pivot you’re making is one everybody can do in their business, regardless of the topic they’re covering. [00:17:00]

So let’s talk to the person listening whose mind is already tweaking out a little bit. They’re thinking, “This sounds overwhelming.” Let’s say they are a content creator who has been doing the same rhythm: write blog post, do the SEO stuff, then go into socials and scheduling. You know the drill, you’re a content creator too. They’re looking at this pathway and thinking, “I can’t see how I can remove myself from this,” because one of the big pushbacks to AI is, what if it doesn’t sound like me, or what if it does something without my approval? So if you were helping somebody at this beginning stage of transforming [00:18:00] their blogging, what are some things you’d tell them to start with to get out of that grind?

Monica: I think the magic of what Cowork did when it came onto the scene, the reason it made agentic AI so accessible, is because it has permissions.

Kate: Can I ask a clarifying question? When you say Cowork, that’s in Claude?

Monica: Yeah, and agentic, agents, Cowork are kind of interchangeable terms.

Kate: Is that correct?

Monica: Cowork is technically part of the Claude desktop app, it’s kind of the name of that section. And the connectors, the software you’re connecting it to, is really what makes it agentic, because it can perform tasks on your behalf in [00:19:00] that software.

So there are a few things. One, you get to control those connectors. When you install a connector, it’s going to tell you exactly what it can do. For example, my Kit connector, when I install it, will say it can create tags, create this, edit this, and so on. I can choose to have it always ask me before performing a task, or there can be tasks I become comfortable over time letting it do because I trust it won’t go rogue. So you have a full spectrum of how much control you give.

I’ve also set parameters where I don’t let it have direct access to my financials. It’s not connected to my QuickBooks. I’m not yet comfortable with that, so that’s a personal thing. I also have a rule: nothing goes out the door that I don’t review. I am the face of the brand, so there’s no world in which I’m not reading every email that goes out. I don’t have AI record my podcast for me. I’ll have it edit it and help with the [00:20:00] script, but it’s still me sitting behind the mic doing it.

When you think about it, if you could focus on the things no one else can do, no one else can be sitting at my mic recording a podcast that’s supposed to be me, unless I want it to be my AI voice, and I don’t know how I feel about that yet, so I don’t want that.

Kate: And you wouldn’t send your AI voice to do this conversation with me?

Monica: No, that would be weird, right? We still believe in human connection, and I still believe humans buy from humans. At the end of the day, we’re trying to get a human to buy from us. So my take is I want AI to do as much behind the scenes as possible so I can show up for the things that really move the needle and require my face, my voice, my expertise.

One of the first things I’d tell people to do, oddly one I was resistant to and now think is life-changing, should’ve done it sooner. I’ve taken everything pretty much back [00:21:00] on. I do have help, I have two help emails, and Natalie, my admin, manages those. I also don’t believe that when my customers have a problem or question, they should get an AI answer. I want a human answering that, because that’s honestly how I close more sales, by having good customer service. And when you have terrible customer service, like a lot of big companies have abdicated to AI, it’s so frustrating, you’re going in circles and wasting more of your time, not less.

So I’ve had to think about how I want to leverage having an admin. Now, because so many checklist tasks can get done by AI, I can choose: I want her answering the emails and help, I don’t want to give that up to AI. Or, help me build my community out. A lot of the mundane things, checking here, uploading there, I could take off her plate so she can help me elevate [00:22:00] my voice on the human level.

So I have those two inboxes, but then I have my personal work inbox. Because I’ve taken on my own scheduling for podcasts and don’t have an admin helping with my daily CEO responsibilities, my inbox almost never got to zero. I probably got a little lazy over the years and started subscribing to email newsletters for my work email that I had to weed out.

So I have what I call a daily AI triage skill.

Kate: Isn’t this the one you asked me about too?

Monica: Yeah, it was. That’s how our Voxer conversation started that led to this podcast, isn’t it?

Kate: Yep.

Monica: So that skill, I call it an interview skill, because when you load it into your account, it’s going to ask you a series of questions so it understands your preferences for managing your inbox. And then after it understands your preference, it’s going to [00:23:00] create a brand-new customized skill for you that you install into your account.

It’s a click of a button, that’s it. And then, once it knows what I want it to do in my inbox every morning, I schedule a task. Every morning for me at 6:00 AM, Claude uses my Gmail connector to go into my inbox and do a few things. It archives, labels, and marks as read certain AI newsletters, because I have another scheduled task that reads and summarizes them for me, so I don’t need to see them in my inbox. So we’re getting that out before I even wake up. It responds to guest pitches for your podcast, and it’s really good at recognizing when I’m being pitched, and it puts a pitch label on it.

Kate: That is the majority of my inbox.

Monica: But it also can summarize, because I probably have actually missed a good pitch because I’m just so behind. So I have a pitch folder, [00:24:00] but I also once a week have it summarize the pitch folder. I also have it draft all of my responses. I never have it send something from my Monica-at email. I’m not having AI do that. But I will say it sounds so much like me, because it has years of history in my email account to understand how I’ve responded to people.

I also am in tons of summits and bundles, and there is always a million forms to fill out, or I have to know where the affiliate hub is. This is one of the most magical things it does for me. It goes in and grabs the promo hub and my affiliate link and the forms I need to fill out, moves it over to Airtable into that bundle or summit event I’m taking part in, and then it assigns me, flags the date I have to have it done by. Instead of having to go find all the forms in my email and search, it’s all there. I didn’t even have to put it there.

So I just think through things, and it only gets better with time, because as the first pass-through I [00:25:00] did, the first morning I had to manage my inbox, it was like, “Okay, this was good, but that wasn’t good. It’d be really great if…” So you have to keep updating it and refining.

Kate: Yeah.

Monica: So you just go back to the scheduled task. When you’re in a scheduled task, it’s going to show you all the threads from however often you have it run. You just go to the most recent one and say, “Hey, here’s something I noticed we could do better.” And then it will update the instructions of the task, and the next time it will do it.

Kate: Yeah. Okay. Magic. Well, I’ll say that’s step one for our content creator, because they probably are swimming in their email. That is a thing that content creators, service providers, and product sellers can get caught in, and it can take you hours. Sometimes it’s scanning, then reading, then categorizing. And a lot of times I will leave a lot of stuff open, thinking “I want to get to that,” and then I never do, [00:26:00] and it catches up. That takes us away from the good work we’re doing.

So let’s say this content creator is then having to write a blog post. Let’s talk about writing a little bit, because people will push back on the writing. You said something a second ago about how the skill is trained on your voice, all the history, so that it does sound like you. Because there is that line where we see AI slop, and we want to stay as far away from it as possible. Especially when it comes to writing, people are more hesitant to say, “Help me write XYZ blog post.” How do you see that tension, and what is a good middle ground that still keeps the human part in it?

Monica: Okay, so I have so many ideas here. I think probably the most impactful one is that I have a storytelling skill. I feel very fortunate that I’ve [00:27:00] created content on the internet for ten years before AI was a thing. It means I have a ton of content I can train AI on in totally different modes. How I present on a webinar, how I record a solo podcast episode, how I write my emails, all the workshops I did, all the courses I created. I have such a plethora of content that AI never touched that is one hundred percent authentically me, and all of that helps train it.

One of the early things I did was I took ten of my best solo podcast episodes from before AI, uploaded the transcripts, and had it analyze my patterns and the way I talk. I did the same thing with my sales webinars, because I do a lot of selling through webinars, and I’m really good at it, and I certainly don’t want AI to take over and make my conversions go down because it scripts me weird.

But time and time again, no matter how many [00:28:00] transcripts and emails I’ve written without the help of AI that I uploaded, one of the things it kept reminding me of is that I like to storytell. So I now have a storytelling skill. It has built up a lot of stories about me over time based on different information and transcripts I’ve given it. Every time I think of something, I make a quick voice memo on my phone, and whenever I need fresh content, I dump those voice memos into Claude and ask it to update my storytelling skill.

So when I want to write an email, if I’m launching a new product, it knows I like to lead with [00:29:00] storytelling, and it will read my storytelling skill.

Kate: Okay. Sorry, I just had an epiphany when you were saying that. Let’s take specifically a food blogger. A lot of food content creators listen to this. I’m envisioning, with your voice memo piece and your storytelling skill, that as somebody’s perfecting a recipe and shooting it, they could record themselves on a voice memo talking through the steps, like, “Here we’re going to brown the chicken, four to five minutes on either side,” and then upload that and say, “Can you create an instructional but also storytelling type of blog post that goes along with this recipe?” And they don’t have to write it.

Monica: Correct. Oh my gosh. You could do it with a voice memo, or another app that has changed my life. At first I did not see how it was going to change my life, but now I’m [00:30:00] sold. Whisperflow.

Kate: I was just going to ask you if that was it. I heard of that this morning, and I went and looked literally an hour before we started this call.

Monica: Okay, Whisperflow. What makes it so awesome? Everyone in my peer mastermind was praising this thing, and I was like, “It’s just a dictation thing, you’re just talking into your phone,” and I couldn’t get it. But it is dictation. My father-in-law always uses the voice feature on the iPhone, he talks and it types.

Kate: Yes, me too. But then you get the message from him and you’re like, “Is this English? Are you speaking English?”

Monica: Yes. So what Whisperflow does, the first obvious thing is it cleans it up. So you might be trying to come up with an idea and you’re like, “Well, I kind of like that idea, no, no, no, I don’t want that,” and it cleans all that up. So there’s that benefit. But the [00:31:00] bigger benefit is, my girls think I’m a little nutty because I just talk to my computer all day now. I hit the button and say, “Okay, I want to do this new spreadsheet, this is what I’m envisioning,” and I just start rattling it off.

And when I go step by step, it even bullet points it out. My day now is going through all these different threads and directing AI. I’m not typing. I’m like, “Hey, okay, now we need this. Done.” Whisperflow also just launched a meeting transcriber feature, and it has an MCP now.

Kate: And you’re using it on desktop, not just on your phone?

Monica: Both. I have it on all of my devices, to the point where I was working with my best friend last week in Connecticut, and she’s on a lot of work calls, and I said, “I’m so much slower because I have to type now.”

Kate: Yes, true. Well, and honestly, as I’ve been [00:32:00] working with Claude a little bit, and I’m going to say you’re a level eight in this, and I’m a level four, in the experience use of AI. But one of the things I have found frustrating is that I love to use Claude to dump my ideas, to vision cast, and that’s where I think it becomes the most powerful. Because I see it, I can envision it, and I want it to come to life. So I’m feeding it all these things by the typed word, and that feels limiting to me because I’m trying to come up with a creative way. So what you’ve just shared brings down that barrier. We do podcasts every week, we do YouTube, well, I’ve been taking a break from YouTube for a little bit on our educational videos, we still do the podcast ones. But there are so many thoughts I have during the day, like, “Oh, I’d love to do this.” My limitation has been I’m not in front of my computer, [00:33:00] I can’t type it out. I just looked up the Pinterest MCP right before this too, it’s not public yet, it was released in June though. But I have thoughts about it, and Whisperflow sounds like a really great way to vision cast your thoughts.

Monica: And everything you’ve dictated across devices is saved in their app too, so you can build up a dictionary of different words. My friend Kristen spells her name K-R-Y-S-T-E-N, very different, and now when I say Kristen it knows how to spell it. It doesn’t even have to be a voice memo, you can just open the Whisperflow app, start it, and it creates a new entry. And since there’s an MCP, now I’m envisioning I can just open Whisperflow, speak into it when [00:34:00] I’m out on my walks, and then come back to the computer and say, “Hey, I just had a fabulous idea on my walk, let’s start executing on it.” It can go pull that note and start executing on my vision.

Kate: Okay, I love this. I met with somebody this morning, Kate Ahl, who I coach in my other business, service providers, and that’s a whole other level of trying to figure out where AI works, because there’s so much human connection in service providers. There is a little bit of resistance to using AI because it’s like, “It’s going to replace my job.” I think it’s really important to think about how you keep your job and the human connection, lean into those parts, and get rid of the mundane.

So even as we’re talking about this content creator example, think about, “What are the [00:35:00] things I need to speed up, or the things I need to get out of that don’t really require me all the time?” Now I want to jump to the second layer, which is imagery, and there’s lots of debate over that. Pinterest, we know, has struggled with AI images or flagging. They’ve had multiple iterations over the years of AI-modified marking, sometimes it’s not even there, you can turn off AI. And certainly we had it flooded with AI slop. So especially when it comes to images, since Pinterest is image forward, where do you think we’re landing right now with imagery that doesn’t look robotic or off-brand? Are we out of that phase and into one where it looks like we’ve spent hours in Canva creating it?

Monica: All right. So first, just today I read that Anthropic, [00:36:00] the parent company for Claude, announced they’re going to be watermarking all image output, it’ll be in the metadata. Here’s the thing, even though I haven’t been actively using Pinterest in years, I’m still in the creator world and I hear all the buzz about AI slop. In my opinion, it’s getting to the point where I can create very compelling images in ChatGPT. I don’t even use Canva anymore, I haven’t touched it in months. Almost all my images come out AI. As AI gets better, if you just give it a brief description, you’re probably going to get something that looks generic, like what everyone else sees. But now that you can educate AI so much, I have an AI image director skill that has studied all of the images I’ve created, not with AI, about my brand and my aesthetics, and it gets me so much closer to stuff I would’ve paid to have created.

My kids’ school sent me an email right before I got on here about a garden club, and it’s so funny, I opened it and thought, “Oh, ChatGPT did that.” It’s a look, straight out of the box. But because we’re creators, we know what we want our aesthetics to look like, so it’s our job to educate it enough. So I don’t think Pinterest is going to be able to just say, “Oh, it was created in ChatGPT, so we’re going to flag it as AI junk.” We’re entering an era where that won’t hold.

Kate: Well, that’s my question. When you hear about the watermark piece, does that make you nervous, or do you think, “That’s the way everybody’s going to go”?

Monica: It doesn’t bother me that it’s going to have an AI watermark. We’re always going to have bad actors, we know this. But because I don’t let things that represent me go out the door without me feeling good about it, [00:38:00] there’s a stopgap.

Kate: Yeah, and I think that’s probably the most important thing we can talk about, especially in the creator world, making sure we’re staying grounded. Like they say, go touch grass.

Monica: Right, we want to still touch the grass. Creators, the reason we’re creators, is because of our genius that we’re trying to share with the world, so we don’t want that genius to be overtaken. One example: I’ve been working on a really robust planner for Redefining Mom, the Empower Divorce Planner. I had an extremely amicable divorce, and yet it was one of the most traumatic things [00:39:00] to happen. You’re asked to make decisions in that moment that impact you for the rest of your life, and if you have young kids like me, for the next ten to twenty years. You’re making decisions at a point when you’re not thinking clearly, and a year later you’re like, “Why did we decide that?” Or our kids’ schedule, we thought switching a lot was fine, but my kids don’t like that.

So I felt really compelled to help. I wanted to develop this planner to help women prepare, especially when they have young kids, with things they might not be in the mindset to think through. When I was teaching a digital product class, people were concerned, like, “Can’t they just get AI to do this?” And I said, “AI’s never been through a divorce. It can’t cry with you, it can’t hug you. It doesn’t have human experience.” [00:40:00] If someone’s in that emotional state, do they want to hear from someone who has been through it and can say, “I know, I feel what you’re going through”? ChatGPT isn’t telling them that. Do you take it the same as someone who walks alongside you, who you can hear their voice, who says, “I’ve been there, I’ve done this, and I want to help you have a better outcome”?

Kate: Yeah, that’s what we all want. We want that personal connection. But to your point, now you’re taking all of that and putting it into the planner and connecting with them, and they can feel it. A lot of people have communities too, and I think those are even more important, because people get this frontline tool, and then they think, “I want to hear more of Monica’s story,” because her story, her experience matters. It’s not just some answer from wherever, it’s what they can get from her.

Monica: And you know what’s even more wild? For years, when I started teaching people digital products after my Pinterest [00:41:00] days, around 2020, people would come onto my webinars and say, “Yeah, but can I get that for free off of Google?” And I’d say, “Well, if I thought that, I would’ve made several hundred thousand dollars less off the seventeen dollar spreadsheet.” People buy it from me because it’s based on real, lived experiences I had, a tool I created to help make that experience easier, versus you going to Google and putting something together, not knowing if it actually helps anyone or if the formulas are broken.

So it’s really no different than the objections I was getting five or six years ago about, “I could just get that on [00:42:00] Google.” Yes, you can go to AI and get almost anything today, but AI is only as good as you knowing what to ask it. If you’re not the expert in that topic, it’s slop in, slop out.

Kate: Yeah, exactly. Okay, now let’s talk about production and pushing out to the world. We’ve talked about building, structuring, doing images. Now it’s ready to push live, and we have to tell people. We talked about the Kit MCPs, and I set mine up this morning and I’m starting to use it, which feels like a huge win. But you’ve got to write an email, post on the socials you’ve chosen, we’ll say Pinterest for this example, but also Instagram, those are the two most used. Where do you see agents, Cowork, and skills helping facilitate that process quickly while still keeping the human part of it?

Monica: [00:43:00] Okay, so I’ll give an example. I have a newsletter I theoretically send every Friday, I’ve gotten a little behind, but I’ll use this workflow as an example. Part of writing this newsletter starts with current AI news research. So I have a scheduled task that kicks off on Wednesdays and scans my inbox for related news. It has parameters for what I’m looking for, trusted sources, and so on. It comes back with a direction for my Friday newsletter and puts it in Airtable. When I approve it, I move it from draft to approved, and then on Thursday another scheduled task pulls the Airtable through the MCP, checks if I’ve approved it, and if so, then on Friday morning another scheduled task reads my Empowered Edge newsletter skill, which knows how the HTML should be formatted, [00:44:00] the different sections, and it takes my approved draft.

All I had to do was toggle a button to approve. When I sit down at my computer Friday morning, this newsletter, which has to go out at 3:00 PM, is drafted fully in Kit, formatted the way I want it, in my voice, with the topics I approved. When I took back all my emails, around June 2025, I was developing them in conjunction with ChatGPT before this agentic era. I would sit down at 8:00 AM on Friday, and sometimes wasn’t done writing until the deadline, like 2:00 or 2:30 PM, before I was ready to schedule it. We took something that, if well-researched, was a four or five-hour [00:45:00] task, down to a couple of manual interventions by choice, because I don’t want it to go rogue and create a draft when it doesn’t even know if I agree with the topic.

So I toggle a button on Wednesday, or tell it, “This is not the direction I want to take.” Then I wake up Friday to a finished draft with a subject and preview line. That’s the human touch, I’m reading it, making sure it doesn’t use colloquialisms I don’t like. I can’t stand when AI says, “Not this, but that,” or, “This isn’t fluff or theory,” why is everything theory? It drives me nuts. And sometimes it overuses words like “actually” and “genuinely,” and I think, “I would never write it that many times.”

So I go through and make quick edits, maybe say, “We could make this [00:46:00] part a little more robust.” Because it’s connected to Kit, I can go to Claude and say, “Here’s what I want to change, I don’t like this sentence,” and in one swoop it edits the HTML in Kit for me. I go back to Kit, read it again, “Okay, this is great,” hit schedule. So a newsletter that used to take five hours now takes fifteen to twenty minutes.

Kate: Great, that’s incredible.

Monica: I’ve hypothesized since June that my output in a month is about what my output used to be in six months, and I’m not even joking.

Kate: Wow, that’s amazing. It’s inspiring. We’re talking about a lot of things, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. I feel overwhelmed. I recorded a reel this morning on my [00:47:00] Instagram saying it’s okay to ask AI dumb questions, because you’re going to feel behind sometimes. You’re not actually behind, most people aren’t where the online world is yet. But you can go to the tool and say, “I don’t know how to do this, will you walk me through it?” Our old way of thinking was, “I need to crowdsource this, take a course, consume it, then learn it, then do it,” but none of us actually do that. We all have courses sitting dead in our inbox we’ve never gone through. So asking the questions is a big part of this. And I think one of the things that makes it feel more approachable, and correct me if I’m wrong, is what you did in July with all the skills. Can people still go back and buy those?

Monica: Yes, they’re all in my shop. So quickly, [00:48:00] since I promised I’d explain the event: in October of 2025, I did a themed event called Potion a Day, where every twenty-four hours, in my Empowered Shop Shopify store, I dropped a new custom GPT. That launch started at $9 for the twenty-four-hour window, then went up to $29. Every day there was an email announcing the new custom GPT, so the custom GPT had to be created, the instruction doc, the shop listing, the images, the email, all of it.

At the time, I remember being so burned out. The email had to go out at [00:49:00] 9:00, and I’d be up at 8:00 still working on the shop listing. I had someone helping with about half the execution, but most of the shop listings I did myself. Connectors weren’t a thing yet, there was no Shopify connector. Fast-forward less than a year later, when I told Natalie I was going to do thirty-one days in July, she about fell out of her chair.

Kate: Are you sure? Are we sure we’re doing this?

Monica: I said, “No, it’s going to be so much better.” This event was thirty-one days of a new skill drop, since we’ve moved past custom GPTs to skills. Because I’ve created so many skills in my business, I brainstormed with AI the skills I wanted to create, and ran the entire event with skills for each layer of what had to get done, plus scheduled tasks.

So I peeled it back, like, “Okay, day one is the inbox flow skill,” and there was a description for it. Step one, we create the skill, so I had a skill that helped create the skill. Then a skill that helped quality check it. Then a skill that built the instruction doc, very detailed, explaining what the skill does, how to install it, how to access it, and it also knew what folder to put it in in Google Drive and how to make it available to anyone who clicked it. Then a Shopify skill that knew the exact structure, SEO, product description, and collections it needed to go in.

It also knew how to go into Canva and use the template for all the shop images. I only did the final publish, I didn’t let it publish the listing until I checked it. So now [00:51:00] I have assistants creating the skill, and QA checking, which used to take forever, is now done by two agents that try to break each other’s work using a scoring rubric, all skill based.

Then the delivery process, which used to be all manual, is completely done by a skill, I’m not touching the shop listing. And the last skill had the entire structure of how each email should look, including the header image for the event. So the email skill knew to go to the shop, look at the listing, and write the email in that same structure. It was incredible, I’d be at 8:50 AM in October scrambling to get the email out, but this time I was fifteen days ahead, [00:52:00] I’d just approve a schedule for that date.

Kate: And nothing went out without your review?

Monica: No, I tried all the skills, after the QA I still checked it myself. That due diligence was truly the piece that required me, so I was putting out something I knew was good and felt integrity behind. But that was fifteen percent of the labor I did in October, and I didn’t have to pay anyone to help me, I did it all myself.

Kate: That is crazy. Your fellow mastermind member, Kate Kordsmeier, I was messaging her on Voxer last week, and I’ve kind of observed you and Destiny and Kate, you guys are all in together, and one of the things I find so inspiring is that you’re having fun. For years we talked about how business was hard, [00:53:00] how labor-intensive it felt. I told her, “It’s so cool to watch someone having fun in their business,” and she said, “You’re right, I am having so much fun.” I told her to tell her people that. We hear this passive income trope for years, but more importantly, you’re having fun being an entrepreneur, and that’s what it’s all about.

Monica: Us having fun and making money, it’s a win-win. This should’ve been one of my most stressed-out months, since the kids aren’t in school, but instead they’re commenting, “Mom, you say yes to a lot more.” It’s a remarkable difference in everything in my life, even the kids notice it. My oldest makes fun of me for AI, [00:54:00] I guess that’s what teenagers do.

Kate: My kids do too. I guess that’s what teenagers do, make fun of their parents.

Monica: Yes, and I’m like, “I would just like to remind you what’s paying for the mortgage.” This is paying for your life, so you don’t have to love it, but you have to let me love it. My best friend also thinks it’s funny that I talk to the computer all day long.

Kate: Oh my gosh, of course. Okay, well, these are all my notes I’ve been taking as we’ve been talking. Do you have one final tip for people, especially since it’s a lot of information?

Monica: One of the podcasts I listen to religiously is called Everyday AI, and he just came out with an episode on nine automation workflows he uses every day in his business. This is similar to what I’d tell you to do with this episode too: I took it and thought, “How much of this could I implement in my business, or what gaps do I have?” I took the transcript, [00:55:00] ran it through Claude, and it came back with three top things I could implement that would streamline things I’m still manually intervening on.

So I do that a lot now. With this podcast, if you’re thinking, “What did she just say?” take it to Claude or ChatGPT and ask, “What could I leverage out of this to make my business run easier?”

Kate: Yeah, one hundred percent. Okay, I have a couple rapid-fire questions for you. Do you think, for people, you have Natalie on your team, does she use your account too, or does she have her own separate account?

Monica: She has her own separate account. Because I’ve been so cost conscious about the rebuild, I’m open to team accounts, but we’ve been operating a lean business. She can use [00:56:00] the same skills I use, I’ve given her the brand voice skills and stuff like that, so it’s easy to share. And because she has the same connectors as I do, she can connect into Asana and Airtable as well through her own account. So I’m definitely open to team accounts in the future, but you can work with a teammate and share the skill files, and they can connect with their own login through Asana. You can muddle your way through quite a bit before you really have to get a Teams account.

Kate: Okay. Do you think it’s good for people to create skills for themselves that feel unique to their internal workflow? Is that a fair prompt, to go into Claude and say, “I want to build a skill for this,” or, “This is how I do this workflow, can you help me build it”?

Monica: I do it all the time. I have a CSV I download from my membership that requires [00:57:00] five or six steps once you get it, and it’s all documented in the skill, so there’s no reason I should have to run the workflow manually, it’s all there. Someone just needs the CSV, and the skill runs, as long as they have the same connector hookups.

Kate: Okay, I have your website open, and I’m wondering, if people were to go to one place, because I have your shop catalog open too, what’s the one thing you’d say, “Start here”?

Monica: Well, it’s very relevant, because if you’re on monicafroese.com, my main opt-in is the daily inbox triage skill. Since everyone has to process their inbox, everyone has an inbox. When I teach about agentic AI and connectors, it’s the first thing I demonstrate to people too, so that’s where I’d start.

Kate: Well, I am actually putting my money where my mouth is, and I’m putting in my email right now, because you told me to do it the other day and I didn’t, but I just did it. I think what I want to continue encouraging people to do is make micro changes, don’t think about macro, because you’ll shut down, especially if you have ADHD or some other neurodivergent brain where it’s really difficult to take on big tasks in huge chunks. You might just need to say, “I’m going to do this one thing,” and do the one thing. We’ll link to Monica’s freebie with the daily triage inbox skill. I’m doing it, and we’ll continue to take steps from there. I’m going to look through the skills myself, I’ve got some more ideas, but I’m going to definitely pick Monica’s brain after we stop recording. So maybe we’ll do a second podcast depending on people’s feedback. If you’re listening on YouTube, leave a comment below on what you want to hear more about. If you’re listening in [00:59:00] podcast players, you can email us at [email protected].

Monica, where can they connect with you?

Monica: I’d direct everyone to monicafroese.com, and my Instagram handle is monica.froese, so you can DM me there too.

Kate: Got it. And will you spell your last name so someone doesn’t put a Z in it?

Monica: Yes, it’s F-R-O-E-S-E.

Kate: Perfect. Monica, thank you again, this has been so enlightening. My brain is ready to explode, but I am inspired by it, and I think we’re just going to do great things. Thanks for coming on.

Monica: Thanks for having me.