Training AI for Creative Collaboration and Personalisation at Scale

In this second part of my conversation with Joachim Lépine, author of AI Resilient, we discuss how to use AI practically and intentionally, content refinement and decision-making, cloning without losing your voice, and ethical guidance for staying in control.

Welcome back to Part 2 of Becoming AI Resilient. In Part 1, Joe Lépine and I talked about the mindset, ethics, and trust-building foundations needed to navigate AI without compromising who you are or how you work. If AI can speed things up, how do we make sure it still sounds like us? In Part 2, we discuss tools, workflows, and how to train AI without losing your voice, values, or creative control.

Now, we’re shifting into action. In this episode, Joe shares his favourite tools, how he integrates AI into programme design and content workflows, and how to strike that delicate balance between human creativity and machine-powered support. We also talk about cloning — both your own voice and even borrowing from others — and how to stay in command of your ideas in an age of infinite output.

Let’s dive in.

PREFER TO LISTEN?

Training AI on Imagination Not Information

JAY: If we are looking at AI to streamline stuff that you are doing, whether it’s designing programs, developing content, marketing, new offers would be the kind step-by-step way to approach that and what would you advise somebody, start with this, then do that? How would someone approach something like that?

JOE: Foundationally for me I love this quote. This is from Albert Einstein, I’m paraphrasing here, but basically he said that imagination is more important than information. So I’m a big fan in journaling. I start with what do I want to create and just to give you an example, I’m gonna be recording two YouTube videos this afternoon, and the way that I came up with those video scripts, so it’s not quite what you’re describing, but it’s analogous.

I’m taking some time to enjoy the quiet in the morning, listen to the birds, look at the beautiful sunshine, and I’m jotting down ideas, and later what I did is I entered that into my into my computer so I can see my notes when I’m gonna record the video. But I also went to AI. I have a specialized AI that I use for this.

I don’t use ChatGPT, I have something much more powerful in fact. And when I go there, I basically say: Hey, this is my outline. What am I forgetting? What can I do better here? Do you have any critical feedback on this? So instead of going to ChatGPT to validate my ideas and say oh, isn’t this great, or can you create something? I’m saying here’s what I’ve come up with. Give, me your best critical feedback. And so it actually gave me a couple ideas and said: Hey, if you thought about this argument. Maybe you’re forgetting this. Why don’t you include some of that? I thought actually, yeah. Okay. That makes some good sense.

So I was able to include a couple of things I would not have included otherwise, and I was also able to use it to research some elements that I wanted to flesh out. Because when I do YouTube videos, I don’t want it to just be a bunch of nice ideas. I wanted to be grounded in proper research. I can do also things like: Hey, I love author X, Y, Z. Go and find a quote of his that might connect with this topic. So like I’ve read that author, but I don’t have time to go and read all my notes from all their books. But it’s really great to be able to go grab that.

And then when I do a video, it’s going to be research grounded. It’s going to be thoughtfully sequenced, and it’s not going to have the holes that it might have had otherwise. So it’s very down to earth. But essentially, I’m big on extemporizing. So I will come up with the idea myself. I’ll refine it with AI, and then when I hit record. It’s me speaking the way I would speak to a friend.

But I’m enriching my content with the AI, so this is my flow. I realize other people use it differently and I do know people that have good outputs from doing a lot of training and they really get the AI to create for them, but based on their past stuff, that’s not my personal approach. I’m more imagination first, and then AI for refinement.

And I know that’s not going to necessarily be right for everyone, but it works beautifully for me and I find that it works for my sense of ethics and my moral imperatives, if you will.

JAY: Yeah, that makes total sense.

Borrowing Influence Without Losing Originality

JAY: So is that an app that you’ve created yourselves, like you’ve brought things together?

JOE: No, actually, believe it not, the app I use it’s a clone of a business coach that I like a lot – who’s Graham Cochrane. I’m a huge fan of his stuff, and I find it just resonates with me Now. He has something like 750 YouTube videos out, so he has a lot of content and he trained an AI so you can go and consult it and get his perspective. I find it’s really, it’s non-generic. It’s well done. And I don’t use everything. I never use it wholesale, but I get one or two great ideas that I find that I can implement in some way.

And it’s so interesting because makes me think about coaching, like coaching and AI. People who have a lot of proprietary, like they’ve got their IP, their intellectual property, they can train an AI and then scale further. So it’s very interesting that it almost looks like there’s like a tipping point.

Like for, Graham, this is a winning technology. It’s growing his business; it’s growing his impact. It’s not diminishing his bottom line because there’s still people that will want one-on-one, VIP days, and things like that with him. But I’m not against using a business coach AI, if it can give you unique insights that you find align with your brand, and even if you use 5% of it, but that 5% is genuinely useful and brings you further, I think that it’s absolutely a win. So that’s why I use his AI app.

JAY: Yeah you touched a little bit on this earlier as well, that essentially you can prime AI with all of You. We talked about style and branding; and making sure that your voice is what it’s writing and how it’s writing that it’s aligned. Always. But there’s a lot also in the insights and perspectives that, that if you’ve got a book, upload the book and it’ll know like how you think and all your philosophies and your values are inside that. Upload a whole lot of content that you’ve produced.

So you can definitely create your own clone of your own self, your expertise. But I haven’t really thought about borrowing someone else’s. ’cause we also, we all want to turn up unique, but actually when you think about it, there isn’t a lot of unique, we build on and scaffold on top of other things and other mentors that we’ve had in the past. I’ve got hundreds of quotes in my first book, Leveraged Consulting because these people have influenced my thinking and my philosophies and my approaches to things. And you take the best and leave the rest, right?

And so that’s what you wanna teach your AI to do as well, is like, these are the things that I care about. These are the way that I think. So I’m quite curious as to cloning someone else versus, as you said, shaping it for yourself and like, where’s the beginning and the middle and the end of that.

Can you unpack that a little bit?

JOE: Do you mean in terms of how I use it myself?

JAY: Yeah, in terms of what’s borrowed and what’s unique to you and drawn from your way your, clone as you like.

JOE: I find that Graham has an approach that is very integral; it’s very upright. He has a vibe that I really like, and so when I consult his app, I find that it tends to align with my values and then the ideas.

I would say now that I really sit down and think about it, maybe 50% of the time I may use an idea. Let’s say that 5% like, oh, that’s a good idea. I didn’t think to include that in my video, for example. And then maybe 50% of the time it sparks another idea. Yeah. I wouldn’t have had that idea if I wasn’t thinking totally differently because I was speaking to this AI that’s basically got I don’t wanna say it’s like a, copy of his brain, but it’s got massive amounts of information to draw on hundreds of hours of footage of, very brilliant mind that’s going to.

Sometimes be a stepping stone to an idea.

JAY: Yeah.

JOE: I know Danny in also talked about this in in ACES, he was talking about how you can, if you use AI you can come up with better ideas. And sometimes that’s a more interesting thing than just saving a little bit of time. It’s great if you save a little bit of time, absolutely. But if you’re getting better ideas, wow, watch out, right?

Because that’s what business is, that’s what leverage is. It’s getting better ideas that take you a little bit further.

JAY: Yeah, it definitely is. And in fact, that’s no different than what we do in Masterminds is where we spark off each other. To use that phrase is like totally ideas come from discussion and exploration and they evolve. They’re organic in that sense. And as I said, you borrow from all sorts of different sources and you assimilate and synthesize and come up with a new way of teaching the same thing.

So a lot of people, sometimes they say: this isn’t new, this is like fundamental stuff. I just teach it in a different way. A member, a mentor of mine who would say something like that. And I thought, yeah, you’re right. This is fundamental, like old wisdom in many respects.

The Mindset Shift Every Business Owner Should Adopt

I’ve got a couple of other questions. One is, and again, we’ve touched on these things, but just to the question around what’s a capability or a mindset that you believe every business owner should adopt in the next 12 months, say, to stay relevant. ’cause your book’s all about resilience and that’s all about staying current, staying relevant.

JOE: Just experimenting, jumping on and trying stuff is already huge. Like I said, a lot of people, they shut down and it was just like, too much AI, but just jump on and try some stuff. I think that’s a good thing to do. Try some of the new apps that are out there. You have to be willing to put some time into it and just try stuff.

And then in terms of like how to stay resilient. We’ve talked a lot about AI, but the other piece really is the human relationships. So it’s great to keep learning about AI. The other part of a resilient business is also, I believe, leaning more into the human side. So a lot of providers consider that their service comes first and then people come second. So I often find myself reminding people that I coach that, Hey or better yet, I’ll ask them a question.

Questions are usually better. And I’ll say something like have you ever stopped to think how much business you’ve gotten from relationships compared to just saying, I offer X, Y,  Z .

So there’s building on AI and improving our thought processes with AI and our offers and all that. But then the other thing is really upping our game with human relationships, and that’s a lot of what I talk about in AI Resilient. The bulk of the book is about building trust. Yeah. And this is again, a place where AI, I think really falls short.

Let’s take the book, right? I’m sure you had your book cover professionally designed as did I. And so when I had it designed, I could have gone to AI, but I went to a human who knows, you know how large your name should be on a business book, for example. That’s important because that’s what’s going to get clicks and sales.

And so you want someone who masters the psychology behind the type of book that you’re creating to maximize your impact, and I’m so glad I hired a human. Of course, I could have done everything for free with AI, even when I went up to KDP when you upload your book, it now says automatically generate your cover with AI.

But I’m glad I went with a human. I placed that trust in her. And I think it came back to me many times over because the book was done professionally. I think it has a more human feel to it.

I teach people you want to build trust with your clients so that they hire you. And the corollary to that is that we, as entrepreneurs, service providers, coaches, we should also be hiring humans. So I’m hiring humans for all the critical things in my business. I have a number of people that I turn to for different things.

And so yes, I’ve got my AI to help me take my thinking further, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need a coach. I still need a coach to help me strategize. And trust cuts both ways. It’s like we want people to trust us; we want to develop relationships. I think it’s also good for us to continue to hire humans for mission-critical, image-sensitive core things that will define our business.

The People Factor You Can’t Outsource to AI

JAY: I was gonna say sense checking and also looking across things. But of course, AIs they do that pretty well too. But they don’t read between the lines in the way that a human can. They don’t get into empathy and some of those emotionally intelligent areas.

You said something a while back about “service first, people second” and, that actually switching that, and we talk obviously in business strategy about lifetime customer value, as if it’s a monetary thing. But it is all about building trust and to do that, you’ve still got to have the relationship building.

JOE: Sure. They can write you the emails in your style and it feels very personal. But there’s something between the lines I think that – whether that will evolve and get filled in, I don’t know – but I think that’s where we’re still in command of that element.

JAY: I would agree.

And if we wanna take another down-to-earth example, the editor, right? I could have just gone to ChatGPT and said, edit my book one chapter at a time. But because I hired a human that I trusted, not only did she do a great job with the editing, but she asked me difficult questions. She said things like, don’t you think you should maybe talk about this in this other chapter? Have you considered that you already talked about this at length here. Have you looked at the word counts over across like chapter three and sevens like. We want to have some consistency.

So the kinds of questions she was asking as well came from sense making from, genuinely understanding the text. And so definitely I think if you want to get a good book published, you need a human editor. I don’t see that changing. There are a lot of people writing with chat, GBT people editing the chat GBT, but it’s what are we doing here?

If you want to just flood the market with ChatGPT books you can try to do that. But if you want quality, you still need to have a human take a look at it and give you a human perspective. And that exchange of points of view, I didn’t agree with a hundred percent of what my editor said. I might have agreed on 97%. A few things, I was like, no, I think this should be this way, or okay, I’ll tweak it, but I want this other thing instead. But that’s constructive dialogue and that’s what makes the book that publication quality and not just some AI-generated thing that’s out there sitting on a shelf, a digital shelf somewhere.

JAY: Yeah, if we have more time, I’d love to play devil’s advocate on that.

It’s evolving so much that you feel that at some point there would be, and I think that’s part of what you are pushing back on saying, no, there’ll always be this other thing. So I would say to people, go read the book ’cause the devil’s in the detail. I can play devil’s advocate all I like, but people are gonna make their own decisions. But knowing that the capability and the partnership with AI is continually evolving and you have to keep playing, as you said. You have to keep exploring and go with it rather than trying to fight with it.

The question I ask all of my guests when they come on the leverage business show: in your business, what would you say is your superpower for creating leverage in that business or for helping others create leverage?

And obviously it’s gonna be drawing from your book right now, but generally speaking…

JOE: oh, that’s such a great question. I think for me if I think of my business like a plane. For me, trust is the fuel. So that’s always my number one. That’s my leverage, is building trust with people. And there are many ways that you can build trust. You can build trust through great content. You can build trust through value, although that’s a tricky word, I don’t necessarily mean giving away free tips all day.

Value can have many forms, including a fresh perspective on things. There’s genuine value in that. But are all different ways to build trust. And a very simple one is to meet with people. So even if you’re an introvert, even if you’re uncomfortable with like big networking events, if you have a prospective client, why not jump on a call?

Yeah. And get to know them a bit and see if they’re a good fit or not. Those are the kinds of things that are simple, easy to do. They cannot necessarily be outsourced to AI. But they bring us back to our humanity, and I found that if you build that trust through real relationships, then the day that you make an offer, there’s a much higher chance that your offer will do well.

JAY: And lots of people will take you up on it. Look each other in the eye as they used to say.

JOE: Right on.

Why Trust Matters More Than Tools

JAY: So your book, is there a sense that you’ll need to update it soon? Like I’m thinking already about mine. It hit number one in five categories on Amazon. It was an international bestseller. Part of this is pick a topic that doesn’t go out of date, but what’s the advice to other people and, for yourself as well in terms of what do you do with the book now? Or like how do you keep going and keep teaching this? What’s next?

JOE: Even though it has AI, like in these giant letters here, you really can’t miss that. But paradoxically, the book is by and large about building trust. And so responding to AI as an opportunity to redefine ourselves as business owners who build trust with other humans. And it’s going in the opposite direction so I’m not too worried about those things being outdated.

The part in the book where I talk about AI itself, certainly the tools will change and it will need an update.

As for where to go from here, I’ve already got some ideas in mind for a book series AI Resilient is the first, but I’ve got a few concepts I’m toying with at the moment.

I may be creating AI smart or AI savvy. Next, where I get more into how to use AI yourself.

JAY: Love it.

JOE: Yeah, so I think that going to be developing sort of a series around this. That’s really where my heart is. That’s what I would love to do. I think there’s a real need for people to figure out how to start using it themselves. And then yes, it will be tricky to update that book. It’ll probably need frequent updates or perhaps it will be simply time for a new book after a while, it’s gonna be hard to up. no magic bullet that I can foresee in terms of the content and the apps we talk about.

JAY: You’ve said about trust, and maybe that’s the answer to this question, but if listeners take one idea from AI Resilient, what would you want it to be and how can they start applying it right away?

JOE: Right on. We want to build trust, and the way to build trust is through relationships, and so the wonderful thing is that there’s no shortage of ways to build relationships.

Meeting with clients is a great one. Simply taking the time to comment. If you’re active on LinkedIn, for example, there’s so much advice out there on how to craft a perfect LinkedIn post, and there’s so little advice out there on how to comment effectively. But many influencers found they were actually more successful using comments in terms of their boost in the algorithms than with all the posting they did.

Really genuinely engaging – like we forget that these social media platforms are about engagement, so of course you wanna put out good content – but engaging in dialogue with other humans, whether it’s through social media, whether it’s through face-to-face, these things, I think are the key to building trust.

The other one, just to give a quick tip that I use every day now, is that, for any kind of delicate email or a longer email, or perhaps a more in-depth question, I record a quick video. So I use an app called Vento that lets me record a video where I just jump on and say: Hey, I got your email. I’m just gonna live answer. And I send them the link. And people are so appreciative. They often write back and say, oh my God, I can’t believe you made a video just for me. But for me, it took a tiny fraction of the time to record a video compared to writing out a long email. And that builds a lot more trust because it’s face time with people.

Building trust does not have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time. It’s just remembering to do it really, and coming up with a few key ways to meet with people, whether it’s synchronously or asynchronously. I think that’s really key to building that trust.

JAY: Yeah. I’m finding something that like fits and feels like you, I think is a really big. For me, jumping on an app to record a quick video is not my go-to thing. And I think a lot of people feel that way. It’s like Facebook Lives never appealed to me at all. YouTube videos and things like that, I’ve not embraced it.

So you have to go, I think with something that feels like what you would do in the non-digital world, how do you build connections with people and use the mediums that fit to that? And maybe that’s a way of changing your mindset about video, for example, because somehow when you hit the record button, everything goes. I find that.

Connecting with Joe Lépine

JAY: And you’re doing YouTube things as well so people can find you on YouTube, right?

JOE: I do have a brand-new YouTube channel. I’ve not really announced it to the world yet. A few people have sent me emails and said, Joe, you’re on YouTube? I said, yes, it’s a top-secret project. I haven’t yet widely announced it to who follow me on different channels, but I have started a modest YouTube channel, but I’m actually really enjoying it.

And I love what you’re saying too about being natural. I try to, it’s a lot of what I do in my coaching is like when we’re in everyday life and we meet people, we act one way. Yeah. Especially when we meet one-on-one and we’re comfortable and then we start marketing or we start doing videos and we get weird.

JAY: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

So I try with YouTube, I try, I’m trying to, I try to bring the natural feel of having a one-on-one conversation. Yeah. And the same thing with all the videos I do, and it’s not something that I immediately loved, but with a little bit of practice, I’m finding it’s actually, it’s a highly learnable skill.

I’m really glad you shared that because I speak from vulnerability because I know a lot of people really have trouble in certain media, and so that’s actually a really great piece of advice. And, yeah, I think we’ll all go and follow you on YouTube now, but LinkedIn, we can find you on that as well.

Anyway this has been fun. There was a lot of stuff that I would want to go into and dig into your book even more, but maybe that’s an excuse to get you back.

JOE: Anytime. It’s been an absolute pleasure, Jay. I, really appreciate the opportunity.

JAY: And AI’s evolving rapidly. So there’s an awful lot that we’ll still continue to, talk about. Final pieces of wisdom that we haven’t touched on. I think AI resilience is going to be a game changer, it’s been good. I think it’s the tip of the iceberg. Lots more to talk about.

JOE: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Fantastic. Love talking to you and let’s do it again, maybe sometime in the next few months.

JOE: Likewise. Have a beautiful day. Thank You.

Connect with Joachim Lépine on LinkedIn, YouTube, and his Lion Academy website. Focusing on strategies to build trust in the age of AI, Joe’s book AI Resilient is available on Amazon.

Related articles