What You Should Stop Doing Manually Right Now

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The short version

• An AI agent named Luna booked this episode. She has gotten me booked on over 20 podcasts in the last month. My wife tried the same job a couple of years ago and got me two, and she hated it.
• Earlier this year I had a team of 12. I let every single team member go. It is just me and AI, and we run a $7,700,000 community.
• The three things I would take off your plate first: systems and outreach, call transcripts turned into tasks and follow ups, and proposals or plans.
• Start with ChatGPT or Claude, then Grok if you want something running when your laptop is closed, then Hermes if you want fully autonomous.
• Keep your magic. I do not outsource my visionary work to AI. I outsource the integrator work behind it.
• The question to ask before your to do list: is this the best use of my time?

An AI agent booked me on this show

The most honest thing I can say about AI agents is that I did not have to lift a finger to be on this podcast. Luna booked it. A couple of years ago my wife tried to book me on podcasts and she hated it. It was tedious, she did not do a good job at it, and I think I got booked on two. So I stopped. No podcasts for a long stretch.

About four months ago I decided I could probably build an agent that did it instead. We started building Luna and her first task was podcast booking. At first she was a little rough. We trained her, we taught her, and now she is better. She has gotten me booked on over 20 podcasts in the last month, including an Instagram live with David Meltzer, who has 800,000 followers on Instagram.

Here is the part people miss. I knew how to do podcast outreach conceptually as a human. You study the show, you study the host, you look at the kind of guests they have, you listen to episodes, you time the pitch to what they are talking about, you follow up continuously, and you do it for hundreds if not thousands of people at a time. Humans typically do not have the capacity for that. That is not a motivation problem. That is a volume problem, and volume is exactly what an agent is for.

I've been booked on, I think, eight in the past week from our AI agent.

The three things I would take off your plate first

Rishabh asked me what a one person business should stop doing manually today. My answer was strategy, outreach, and follow up, in that order of pain.

• Any system in your business. Do you have to run a report? Reach out to someone? Hold accountability with someone? AI can probably do a better job at that than you can.
• Your call transcripts. Luna comes to all of my calls. You can also just use Otter or Fathom, grab the transcript, and drop it into AI when you are done. Ask for every task, every due date, every deliverable, then have it send the follow up email to both parties on the call and assign the tasks in your project management suite or your calendar.
• Proposals and plans. I did not want to write a 10 page proposal. I cannot format graphics pretty, I cannot make the PDF look nice with the logo and the typesetting. So AI does it, and I trained our models to handle it.

One client I coach on sales and marketing was getting great strategy on calls and not always taking action on it. Now after every call our agent writes a playbook with the exact strategy in a PDF, so they can keep it at their desk and go back to it and go back to it. Same conversation, wildly different outcome.

I want to be very clear about the line here, because people get scared of the wrong thing. I am not having AI do my strategy. I am having AI listen to my transcripts and my words and wrap the strategy around it. Putting the plan together was always my weakness. I am great in the moment and on calls, and I am far more verbal than written. AI is just polishing what I already said.

I'm not having AI do my strategy. I'm having AI listen to my transcripts and my words and wrap the strategy around it.

The four tools I would actually start with

There are four things capable of this work right now, depending on your level and your tech stack. ChatGPT connects to your email, your Google Docs, your calendar, and it can create PDFs for you. You hit the little plus button, connect the apps, and let it take action. Claude will do the same thing.

Then there is Grok, which is x's AI. ChatGPT and Claude work when your computer is on, roughly on schedule and with your interaction. Grok builds a virtual computer for you and runs twenty four seven, so if you want it following up on your emails it will do that while you are on a plane with no Wi Fi.

The fourth one is Hermes. It is an agent that came out around the time of the OpenClaw craze, when everybody was buying Mac minis. It is six months old today, and it lets you build things that run autonomously. Claude and ChatGPT are support agents for us. Hermes is the core of our fully autonomous system. A little more advanced, not that much more advanced, and there is plenty of YouTube content on it.

None of this has to be technical. My wife is not technical like me at all. She does UGC for brands and she could not remember what she had promised a client across a thread of emails. I told her to ask Claude. We connected her Gmail, one button, one confirm, and asked what did I promise this client. Two minutes later she had the full set of deliverables and Claude asked if she wanted it to email and confirm. Hours of digging or two minutes of connecting.

What that podcast email turns into on my end

At some point Rishabh is going to edit this and send me the video, because that is what every podcast host does. Most guests say thank you and move on, and the host is left holding all the promotion work, hoping the guest does the clips and the tags.

When that email lands, our AI knows what needs to happen. Download the recording, clip it, put the thumbnails together, build a couple of carousels, schedule the posting across my platforms. That is my job as a guest. I am busy and I do not want to do it, so I taught our AI team to do it instead. It runs on Hermes because Hermes runs for us twenty four seven.

For the actual posting we use a tool called Zernio, connected to my Instagram, my TikTok and my YouTube. It costs me about $18 a month for those three platforms, and it posts at the optimal time based on my stats and audience. I know we are in an attention economy. I was on the Internet when Gary Vee was on the Internet back around 2008, and if I had done what he did we might have two very popular Garys right now. I am not an idiot about it. I just do not want to open my phone and log into three platforms.

Why people are scared of this, and why the fear is misplaced

With one client we have deployed AI agents across over a 100 physical therapy offices to answer phones and handle bookings. The pattern is always the same. People are scared it will not perform, scared it will sound different, scared it will make a mistake, scared their writing will sound like AI.

What they do not understand is that you can teach and train an agent to run autonomously without hard programming every word it says. I gave AI substantial amounts of my content so it could learn my voice and we could build a persona around it, then we pushed it out into the world slowly. And we own it. AI never pretends to be me. I am always me. Luna is Luna, and we identify that she is AI.

The real argument for it is the training economics. As a solo or small business I have hired assistants and VAs and team members. You cannot afford the best benefits or the top pay, and almost always that person leaves. All that training work, and you stop everything to do it again. I want to train once and be done. Teach it, get it working right, then release it off your plate and build agents that check up on it for you.

There is a longer view here too. Gary Henderson the human is only going to be on Earth for so long. Gary Henderson the giraffe, the one you see on Instagram, could live forever. If I can get something trained with some of my knowledge and some of the way I think, I get freedom back and I can still make an impact.

I don't wanna keep training. I wanna be able to train once and be done. That's what we built.

Keep your magic, automate everything behind it

Rishabh asked the opposite question, what should you absolutely not automate. My answer surprised him. I think you should automate it, you just have to find a tasteful way to do it. We all have unique magic, or god's gifts, or genius, whatever you call it. Hold that. Then find ways for AI to complement it.

My unique genius is coaching and coming up with ideas on the spot. I am a visionary, and I am not good at documenting what I say on the fly, turning it into a plan and making sure it gets executed. So I keep the visionary work and give AI all the integrator work. AI is never coming up with ideas for me like that.

The difference shows up in client feedback. Before AI, clients would say our two hour kickoff call was great, but then it kind of fizzled because the backup stuff did not work great. Now they say the call was great and the plan nailed it, this is my bible. One client just ran a webinar. I have built webinar follow ups for dozens of clients, so instead of digging one up I asked for a four page document mapping the rest of the schedule. It remembered a team member's name on that client's team that I did not even know existed, because it had seen them in emails, and assigned tasks accordingly. Two minutes, sent as a Google Doc. Old Gary would have said let's jump on a call so I can tell you everything you need to do.

Luna does the same thing in our community without me asking. One member was going to his final inspection on a house he was building, and the morning of, Luna wished him luck. Another member, Ollie in The UK, was printing three d parts for his bicycle, and she messaged him to ask how the printing was going. I never told her to do either. I told her I want you to be the best community manager, help our community stay accountable, help them reach their goals, help them win, and be there for them when they need you. So now she is.

The attorney story, and what it taught me about autonomy

I had a client on a $7,500 agreement. They paid 2,500, decided to take a different path, and did not want to pay any more. Our agreement said they owed the whole amount. They involved their high dollar New York attorney, a partner at a New York firm for twenty some years. I involved my AI.

My AI documented the entire conversation, gave legal references, and proposed a settlement number. An hour later the attorney wrote back and said he recommended his client settle. They paid two thirds of what they owed and I let go of a third, and we parted ways as friends.

Without AI I would have just let it go, because hiring a good attorney over 2,500 makes no sense. The attorneys would have eaten the money and both of us would have been out. I would also not have felt in integrity with myself, because I did the work and did not get compensated for it. AI also helped me handle a child support court case on my own, without an attorney.

I involve my AI. Their New York attorney told them to pay me and settle.

The one question to ask before you touch tomorrow's list

If you open your laptop with 20 things on your to do list, ask this first: is this the best use of my time? As a solo, you only make as much money as the jobs you are doing every day. If you are doing a minimum wage task, you are only going to make minimum wage. We clean our own offices, make our own appointments, do all our own manual follow up. If everything on your list is genuinely something only you can do, then do it. I would challenge you that almost everything on it could be done by someone else or something else.

Then look at your Rolodex. Are you part of a community that is building with AI, so you have somewhere to go when you need a conversation? If not, put that on the list. Then decide whether you want to solve it yourself or have someone help you. Coaches are experts, but not experts at everything. Birds fly great, fish swim great, and you have never seen either one do well at the other job.

For picking the first task, keep a piece of paper next to you and write down things you are doing that you do not want to do. Drop that list into ChatGPT or Claude and ask what can you help me do. Let it tell you. Maybe you are not comfortable having it reply to your email, but you could have it archive the spam so you only see what matters. Pick one, and do not move to number two until the first one is right. A lot of us have ADHD or undiagnosed ADD. When it is working, let it breathe for a couple of days, because it will mess up a little, exactly like a brand new employee would. You would forgive them and guide them. Do that with your AI.

And reevaluate every couple of months. When ChatGPT first came out, those videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti were horrible. Now Will Smith can eat spaghetti pretty good on video. Get the help you need to solve it today, then check back and see whether AI has just gotten good enough to do it on its own.

You did not build your business to waste your life on it

Everything I believe comes back to time. I started my business to get my time back. Neither you nor I know how much we have left. We have this bank of time and nobody knows when it runs out. So do I spend mine digging through email and writing proposals, or do I spend it with my family, on a bike ride, outside, with my head clear enough to actually be the entrepreneur I am?

You have the same amount of time in a day as Alex Hormozi, as Elon Musk, as the founder of NVIDIA, who did an average of $1,000,000,000 a day in revenue in third quarter while the CEO was on stage dancing and having a good time. You should not be punished because you are a solo entrepreneur. Hard work is not what gets you there anymore. Smart work is.

You did not build your business to waste your life on your business. You built it so you could go live a great life. That used to be hard because you needed team and trust and office space and technology. There has never been an easier time to build a solo business that does millions. Use the technology at your disposal and go make the difference.

You didn't build your business to waste your life on your business. You built your business so you could go live a great life.

The moments worth clipping

Short cuts from this episode, if you want the highlights before the full thing.

Questions people ask about this

What should a solo business owner stop doing manually first?

Three things. Any repeatable system, like outreach, running reports, or holding someone accountable. Your call transcripts, which should be turned into tasks, follow up emails and calendar items automatically. And your proposals, plans and playbooks. In short, your strategy documentation, your outreach and your follow up.

Which AI tools does Gary Henderson actually use?

ChatGPT and Claude as support agents, both of which connect to email, Google Drive, calendar and Docs. Grok, which is x's AI, builds a virtual computer that runs twenty four seven even when your machine is off. Hermes is the core of the fully autonomous system. ElevenLabs was used to create Luna's voice, and Zernio handles posting to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube for about $18 a month.

Is AI writing Gary's strategy for clients?

No. The strategy comes from the call. AI listens to the transcript, takes the words that were already said, and wraps them into a formatted plan or playbook. Gary is a visionary who keeps that work himself and gives AI the integrator work behind it.

What is Luna and what does she do?

Luna is an AI agent. Her first task, about four months ago, was podcast booking, and she has since booked over 20 podcasts in a month. She joins calls, answers the phone with a voice built in ElevenLabs, and works as a community manager who checks in on members about their goals. She is always identified as AI and never pretends to be Gary.

Why did Gary let go of his team of 12?

Earlier this year he let every single team member go. It is now just him and AI, running a $7,700,000 community. Part of the reasoning is training economics. As a small business you cannot always afford the best pay or benefits, people leave, and you have to stop everything and train someone again. He wanted to train once and be done.

What is the one question to ask before starting a long to do list?

Is this the best use of my time? Solo operators only earn as much as the jobs they are doing each day, so if you are doing minimum wage tasks you make minimum wage. If a task is truly something only you can do, do it. Almost everything else could be done by someone or something else.

Watch or listen to the whole conversation

The full episode is on The Rishabh Jain Show, hosted by Rishabh Jain.