Small Biz
AI Marketing

The Prompt Shop Podcast

The best brains in the room, and one of them better be yours.

Short, practical episodes on making better marketing decisions with AI, from a marketer who has run it inside real small businesses. Real client stories, the issues owners are grappling with now, and why quick wins today do not always win long term.

Explore first. Then plan. Then build something that lasts.

5 to 10 minutes. New episodes on Wednesdays. Hosted by Dan MacInnis.
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Latest episode

Episode 4. How agents get your work done

Episodes and show notes

Series one: play, customise, build, connect. New episodes on Wednesdays.

Ep 1 Explore first: the weekend that changed how I work Why the opportunity comes before the plan, and how to spend your first weekend with AI. 5 min 41 sec

What this episode covers

  • Why Dan is back in the studio after 11 years of podcasting: small businesses are grappling with another big change, and this time it is AI.
  • Easter 2025: four days playing with ChatGPT, from planning a holiday and tidying drafts, to realising it could be customised to work like another employee in the business.
  • The tools will not replace you. They change how you think: fewer low-level tasks, more room for strategic decisions.
  • The trap of AI slop: more content and more output is not the point. Better decisions are.
  • Without a harness on the tool, and without customising it, it will not serve your business as well as it could.
  • Step one: spend a weekend just playing. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or all three. Ask it questions. Don't buy anything, don't build anything.
  • Step two: customise it. Find the personalisation area in whichever tool you use (ask the tool if you can't find it), then ask it to interview you about your business, how you work, your ideal customer and what makes your brand different.
  • Why that matters: an uncustomised tool gives you flatpack advice, the same as everyone else gets. Customised, it becomes custom made for your business. Output improves tenfold.
  • Next episode: how to build skills and workflows that streamline how you work.

Resources mentioned

Download the transcript (Word)

Read the transcript

I'm Dan MacInnis, and I did a podcast for about 11 years, almost 15 years ago. But I've jumped back into the recording studio because what I've found is small businesses are now grappling with another change, and that is AI. So this podcast is about how you leverage AI for small business marketing, what you need to know, and how you get the best brains in the room, making sure that one of them is yours.

I started with AI in April last year. It was over the Easter break, and I was really just playing with ChatGPT. I was doing the usual things: planning my next holiday, asking it questions, researching, taking a draft of something I'd written and trying to make it sound better. Over those four days I went from understanding ChatGPT as a resource of knowledge to understanding how to customise it to make it like another employee for my business.

I imagine a lot of you are playing with lots of tools and trying to work out how this could be a point of leverage for your business. That's what I encourage you to do. Take what you do in your business and see how these tools can improve it. They can't replace you. It's a new way of thinking: using the tools to improve your decision-making and take away the low-level tasks, so you can do more high-level strategic thinking.

It's about thinking about how you work with AI, not just creating more of what they call AI slop, which is just more content, more output. I know it's tempting, but this is a really powerful shift in the way people work, particularly for small businesses. It gives you the ability to be an expert in so many areas because it can take over tasks you're doing manually or outsourcing. But without a harness on whichever tool you're using, and without customising it, it isn't going to serve your business as well as it could.

So let's talk about the first thing I would do. Spend a weekend just playing with it if you've never used ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot before. Perhaps use all of them. Just ask it questions. Just play. After you've done that for one weekend, the next thing is to customise it so it's useful for you.

What does that mean? In each tool there's an area of personalisation. Whenever you're in doubt, just ask the tool and it'll show you where it is. Ask it to interview you so you can customise it for your business. It'll ask what your business is about, how you work, who your ideal customer is, what makes your brand different. If you upload that into the personalised section of the tool, whichever tool it is, the output improves tenfold. Instead of general advice it starts to fit you. It recommends things that are much more relevant. That gives you a little insight into how powerful this platform is, and then you can start to harness it for much better workflows and outputs.

So first play, then customise. Next episode we'll talk about how to build skills and workflows that will streamline how you work.

Ep 2 Teach it your customers, your competitors and how you decide Build the context bank that turns generic AI answers into ones that fit your business. 5 min 43 sec

What this episode covers

  • Your AI only knows what you have told it. Last episode was play, then get the tool to interview you. This one goes deeper.
  • Teach ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot who your customers actually are, what they worry about and why they would choose you over a competitor.
  • Then ask it to read its understanding back to you, and correct what it gets wrong. That correction is the work.
  • A quick test to see whether AI already recommends your business.
  • Why FAQs written as real questions help you get found by AI.
  • Feeding competitor research back into your project folder.
  • The customisation most people skip: telling the tool how you like to make decisions.
  • Next episode: memory and skills.

Resources mentioned

Ep 3 Memory and skills, the shared brain and the tasks it does on repeat Why memory matters, what a skill actually is, and the three questions to ask before you install one. 6 min 24 sec

What this episode covers

  • Two settings turn a chat window into a coworker: memory, and skills.
  • Everything you have fed the tool over the last two episodes builds a shared brain between you and it, as long as memory is switched on, whichever tool you use.
  • Skills: specialised, repeatable tasks you create or download so the tool does the job the same way every time.
  • Where skills live, and what a GitHub repo is in plain terms.
  • Why every skill you add uses part of your setup, and why a lean list beats a loaded one.
  • The three questions to ask your AI before you install a skill.
  • Next episode: agents, groups of skills in a workflow, and how work gets done.

Resources mentioned

Ep 4 How agents get your work done If it has a trigger, inputs and steps in an order, and it runs without you, it is an agent. 5 min 56 sec

What this episode covers

  • What an agent is, in one sentence, and how it differs from a skill.
  • The 7am agent: reads Drive, Gmail and the calendar, flags what is urgent and drafts the replies. The first version was email triage; it became a priorities dashboard.
  • The monthly marketing report as an agent: pulls from analytics, your email platform and social, and lands as a dashboard or a deck.
  • The easiest one to try first: a clean-up task that filters promotional email out of Gmail or Outlook every 30 days.
  • Why you need a paid plan for these to run, and why the first version usually is not the one you keep.
  • The only test that matters: are you using what it gives you, or working around it?
  • Next episode: the knowledge base, how to give your AI more to work with than its memory can hold.

Resources mentioned

Ep 5 Point it at your filing cabinet Coming 7 October 2026. The knowledge base that stops you pasting the same documents into every chat.

If you have pasted the same style guide, price list or proposal into more than two chats, you need a knowledge base, not a better memory. One repository the AI can reach, how to get the AI to build the scaffolding for you, the paste-more-than-twice test for what belongs in it, why Markdown saves tokens, and why a good and a bad proposal side by side teaches the tool more than either alone.

Takeaway: The Knowledge Base Starter (free PDF), available now.

Ep 6 Connect it: stop being the courier between your inbox and your AI Coming 14 October 2026. Plug Claude or ChatGPT into your email, calendar and drive, in the right order, and get out of the middle.

Until your AI is connected to your tools, you are the courier: you carry the email in, do the draft, paste the calendar into the chat. The two connections to make first (the email you send from and the calendar you live in), what they unlock for a service business, why your drive is next and banking is never, the gate to run before every switch, and the safety habit: draft before anything sends, deletes or books.

Takeaway: The Connection Checklist (free one-pager), available now.

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