Small Business AI Mastery for Speakers

You may use AI most days, and you’re keeping up as well as anyone can while running a business and getting on stages. Then, you hear about AI running someone’s entire business. You try to copy it, get lost, and conclude that AI is either over-hyped or is beyond you.

Neither is true. What’s missing is not your effort, and it’s not your aptitude.

What’s missing is a way to measure where you are today, to see what becomes possible at the next levels, and most importantly, how to get to the next level without chasing every new tool, trend, and shiny object that comes along.

And you need the workflow, prompts, time, and support to build what your business needs to move towards your next level.

That is what this day gives you.

Morning Presentation:

• Finally understand what is happening when you have a conversation with AI: where it excels; where it breaks down; and what all the terminology you keep hearing actually means.
• Learn to stop AI from confidently making things up: the “eager intern” problem; the exact rules that prevent it from guessing when it lacks facts; and the settings that keep your business data from becoming AI training data.
• Determine where you stand in implementing AI in your business and what is possible. Map yourself on the AI Competency Ladder, watch a real behind-the-scenes walkthrough of a small business whose daily admin runs on AI.
• Identify your next 3 steps to leveraging AI in your business
• Paste in your instruction prompt to ensure consistent tone, negative constraints, and zero unverified guessing across all future chats.

Working Lunch

Bring your own food. During lunch, we’ll make sure you are setup and ready to build, so the afternoon starts with everyone in the same place. Coffee, tea, and water provided.

Afternoon Build Workshop:

• Build, Style, and Publish a Live Speaker Landing Page (Zero Coding Required): Walk in with your bio, headshots, talk topics, and brand colors. Walk out with a live speaker web page, published.
• Learn the Art of Rapid Prompt Iteration (“Vibe Coding”): Experience how to direct AI using simple, conversational English to change layouts, restyle colors, add video players, and adjust page sections on the fly.
• Build a Working Post-Event Audience Follow-Up App & Testimonial Dashboard: Create a complete app that displays a presentation QR code you’ll show at the end of an event, collects attendee contact info, automatically delivers your digital giveaway, gathers feedback, and displays incoming reviews on a clean, visual dashboard you can share with event planners.

Bonus Digital Takeaways

1. The General Instructions Template: A pre-engineered instruction prompt ready to paste into your AI settings to ensure consistent tone, negative constraints, and zero unverified guessing across all future chats.
2. The General Instructions Template: A pre-engineered instruction prompt ready to paste into your AI settings to ensure consistent tone, negative constraints, and zero unverified guessing across all future chats.
3. The “Stop Writing Like AI” Tone Optimizer: A dedicated prompt and rule set that strips out robotic clichés, corporate fluff, and telltale AI jargon so your drafts sound like a real human.
4. The AI Glossary: A clean reference dictionary defining core technical terms (tokens, context windows, non-deterministic outputs, closed vs. open models, and connectors) in plain English.
5. The Website & App Prompt Vault: The exact copy-paste master prompts used during the workshop so you can rebuild or iterate your web pages and audience apps at any time.
6. The Small Business AI Automation Idea Bank: A comprehensive reference guide compiling actionable business automation use cases (including inbox triage, multi-channel repurposing, proposal generation, expense reconciliation, client prospecting, and event briefing sheets) designed to free up time for high-value client connection.

Attendee Prerequisites

Mandatory Must Haves:

• A one-month $20 Claude subscription. https://claude.ai We will build using Claude. Everything you learn in Claude, you can translate into the other LLMs. We’ll show you how at the end of the workshop.
• Laptop, laptop power cord, and extension cord.
• Headset/Airpods. Needed if using Wispr Flow or if you want to block out distractions during work sessions.
• Bring your own food. During the working lunch break, we will verify everyone has Claude downloaded and their files are ready to use. Coffee, tea and water will be provided.
• A file on your desktop with digital assets for your new webpage: bio, headshots, talk topics, brand colors & fonts; testimonials; products and/or services; etc. If you don’t have all that, then plan to use your LinkedIn page during the building experience.
• A digital giveaway file to use in your audience app: slides; whitepaper; tips; instructions, etc. If you don’t have something, then any file will do as a placeholder.

Highly Recommended:

• Wispr Flow. https://wisprflow.ai This app facilitates thinking with AI. Instead of composing carefully constructed prompts at the keyboard, you can talk through context, nuance, corrections, half-formed thinking, and what you’re actually trying to accomplish. It automatically cleans up your brain dump into coherent English – without having to type. Test out the free version or grab a one-month subscription for the workshop. It’s a gamechanger.

Got Questions? Need Support?

You have 2 opportunities to ask questions, get help downloading Claude, and/or getting familiar with it:

1. AI Day Pre-Session (1 hour, virtual) with Synthia Smith on Wednesday, September 23 at 11:30 Central.
2. During the Working Lunch before the afternoon build session begins.

Meet Carey Rouse

Carey Rouse is an endurance athlete and the founder of Velo Escapes, which runs small group cycling trips. 

Carey runs his business on AI systems he built himself, and he is not a developer. 

His back office has no code in it: AI jobs run around the clock on his email, seven publishing channels, and a 2,000-clip video library – all on $100 a month.

Before that, Carey spent 28 years managing large technology projects.

Carey wrote Find Meaning Through Relentless Discipline and has published ten guides on how he built an AI-first company. When he’s not leading cycling trips, Carey speaks and consults on putting AI to work in a small business.

Learn more about Carey at careyrouse.com and linkedin.com/in/careyrouse.