I hate filing quarterly sales tax. I don't do that anymore. Claude does that for me. If you're a business owner and you're paying $20 a month for ChatGPT and you're sitting there hearing all the hype wondering if you should be paying more for the higher level subscription or switching to Claude so you can take advantage of Claude Cowork or maybe switch to Gemini or find out what Grok bot is about, listen, I totally get it. I run AI engineering teams for a living but the truth of the matter is you already have everything that you need to be successful in your business with the AI that you've already got. The challenge is you're only using 10% of what you're paying for and that stops today. We're going to demystify all this stuff about what you should be buying and make sure that you're getting the value out of the tools that you're already paying for. So I get it. I understand exactly where you're coming from. You don't want to be an AI expert. You're trying to run a business and you hear people all the time talking about the magic of AI the value that they're getting out of it, how everything is possible with AI and you can just sit on a beach somewhere and let AI run your business and you don't have to do a thing and you're wondering whether or not you're missing out. I totally get that. And not only that, if you are spending 20 or 100 or 200 dollars, you're wondering if it's the right 100 or 200 dollars and exactly where your money should go. I get that too. In my business, I'm actually using AI from all different kinds of providers all the time. I pay for routers that let me test all different kinds of models. I pay for the maximum Claude subscription. So I thought today what we could do is I could talk to you about what I spend my own personal money on to run my own personal businesses and my wife's business and how I can help you decide which AI you should be spending your money on. And more importantly than that, how to get the maximum value out of the money that you are spending on AI. Sound good? All right, let's go. I've been working in corporate America for more than 35 years and most of the executives that I know want the bottom line up front and I know that you probably do too. So here it is. If you're already using ChatGPT or Claude, I would absolutely just stay right there. And if you're heavily invested in the Google infrastructure, you use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets and all of those Google tools and you already use Gemini, I'd stay right there too. For $20 a month, give me Anthropic and Claude every time. It's my favorite tool. If you're attached to ChatGPT, that's a very close second. But my personal opinion is that the best tool for small business owners today is Claude. I literally use Claude and Anthropic tools every single day in my corporate life, in my personal life, in my personal business, in my wife's business. And I'll tell you, I think it's the best value, especially at the $20 a month level. Now, one thing I'll say is that all of these tools aren't good at all the things. I think they're all pretty good at most things. I would say Claude is very, very good at writing things and it's very, very good at controlling your computer. ChatGPT wasn't as good at controlling your computer six months ago. It couldn't even do it at all. And now they've just released a new model that's fantastic at it. So these companies are leapfrogging each other. The one thing that Claude still doesn't do very well that I need to do quite often is actually generate images. And so that's why I pay for ChatGPT in addition to Claude, because I like the images that ChatGPT creates. Here's the thing that most people ignore. Switching has a real cost. So again, if you're already using ChatGPT and you're happy with that and you're getting value, and after you hear from me about the ways that you should be getting value from these tools later in this video, if you're comfortable with what you're using, stay there because there's an opportunity cost involved with switching. The fact that you've been using a particular tool for a month or six months or a year means that tool has a lot of context about you and your business, which is what makes these tools really powerful to begin with. And while there are ways to transfer that information, starting over has a cost. And I don't want you to ignore that. So then the question is, why aren't you getting the value out of these models that you could be? And the truth is most people are using AI in small business as a glorified search engine smart helper. They need to write a piece of document. So they say, hey, will you go ahead and research this for me? Or even better, will you write this for me? That's really asking Claude or ChatGPT to answer questions for you, sometimes in the form of a work product that you can actually copy from the Claude window and paste into a Word document. Literally, when this all started almost three years ago, that is exactly where I started. And if you're there, too, that's fantastic. But here's the thing. The big unlock is when you shift your mindset from using AI as a tool that can help you learn about things or know things to a tool that can actually do things. There's a lot of difference between giving you raw data and information and things that are almost finished work products and using AI as a tool that can actually do things. Now, let me give you a concrete example from my actual life and my wife's business. My wife is a very popular local photographer in our hometown. She does family portraits and senior pictures. And what does she need? Like all photographers, she needs clients. And like all business owners, my wife also needs clients coming from Google search and AI search. And where that comes from generally is from website presence like blog posts and other search engine optimized content. Creating blog posts is just simply not my wife's favorite thing. After all, she's really busy taking pictures and editing them. No one really appreciates how much work photographers have to do after the picture is taken. Managing clients, talking to them on the telephone, helping them with their photo orders and so forth. She just doesn't have a lot of time to write blog posts. So here's what we did that took us from this idea of creating information that could be used for blog posts to actually creating the post. We asked Claude to watch her social media accounts, specifically her Facebook and Instagram accounts. And whenever it saw a post that she did about a photo shoot she had just done, it observes that post, takes the image and the caption, analyzes it based on what's in there. And then using information that we've told it about Paula's business and her voice and the objectives that we want to achieve from a marketing standpoint, it actually takes that information and creates a draft blog post. It uses the image and it actually writes a draft blog post in her voice based on the event that she's already posted in social media. And then it pushes that content automatically into WordPress as a draft post for a review and it sends her an email and says, hey, I just created a draft blog post based on this. Here's the link to go review it and edit it. Now she'll make some edits and that's great because that takes the content to an even higher level. The truth of the matter is, if that draft blog post had not been created, Paula might not have ever gotten around to it. And that's the magic of actually changing from typing at the computer, hey, ChatGPT, would you please draft a blog post for me based on this thing I just did? That requires an initiating action from you, the user, to a totally different kind of scenario where ChatGPT or Claude actually notifies you that, hey, my job is to create draft blog posts for you. I noticed that you created some content. I've repurposed it and it's out there waiting for you to approve and publish. You don't have to copy and paste it. It's already on the blog. That's an idea I like to think of as giving Claude or ChatGPT hands, these connectors that it can use to reach into the tools that you normally do to do your work every day and actually do that work for you. That's the huge unlock that I want you to take away from this video. Move from using ChatGPT or Claude as a tool that creates a bunch of words on the screen that you have to then copy and paste and do something with to create a work product. Change from that to using Claude or ChatGPT as a worker who does that content creation or whatever it is and creates the final result for you or the final result that needs human approval or that human touch or the special thing that only you can do. That's a huge shift because not only does it do the work for you, it keeps you accountable on a cadence to do things like blog posts or invoices or whatever it is that you need to do in your business. Another quick example is Paula has to file quarterly sales tax. I get to do that job because I'm the business helper guy in our business. I hate filing quarterly sales tax. I don't do that anymore. Claude does that for me. And that's just another example. Every quarter Claude wakes up and says, hey, I'm going to go get all the sales data. I'm going to download the data. I'm going to sum it up. I'm going to compute the sales tax we owe. I'm going to open the state website. I'm going to put the numbers in there. I'm going to write in our spreadsheet that we keep a record of everything that we're telling the state, document all the evidence and then notify Mark that it's time to verify those numbers and push the button. That's a huge unlock for me having to pencil in on my calendar that I need to go figure all this stuff out to seeing an email logging into the website and pushing the button to send in our state sales tax. That's a huge unlock for our business. I thought I'd also talk a little bit about Copilot because Microsoft is so ingrained everywhere across, especially corporate America. It's worth a mention. I don't love Copilot and I don't use it very much. And therefore, I am not an expert on Copilot. But if you do love it, more power to you. And let me know in the comments what it is that you like about it and what I'm missing with Copilot. Personally, I feel like Microsoft is behind, which is hard for me to imagine. I'd like to actually do some experiments with Copilot and input from you would help me out a lot. That said, don't change off of Copilot just because I don't like it. If it's working for you, keep going with Copilot because one thing I'm sure of is that a year from now, all of these foundational models are going to be plenty good for whatever you need them for. So one question I get a lot is what size plan should I be paying for? Is the $20 plan good enough? And the answer is absolutely yes. The $20 plan for Claude, the $20 plan for ChatGPT, they're plenty good enough for almost everyone to start. And let me tell you, if you're getting value out of AI and you recognize that you're running up against your limits and you've got more work to do and you're excited about the fact that if you just had a few more AI credits that you could get a bunch more work done, it will immediately be obvious to you whether or not you should spend more money on AI. This is just a return on investment question. So don't worry about the fact that Claude has a $20 plan, a $100 plan and a $200 plan. Just start on the $20 plan that unlocks almost all of every feature you're ever going to need. The thing on AI is it's all about return on investment. If you're getting return on your investment, you should spend the money on the bigger plan. You know, a year ago, I felt it was really important to pick the right AI model for your particular situation. And now things have changed and I don't feel that way. You use whatever you want. One of my very, very good friends uses ChatGPT every day and he would never consider switching to Claude. And that's perfectly fine. And the reason it's perfectly fine is because as all of these AI models get better and better, most of them, their minimum capabilities are going to be far above what you need to run your business. And so it's not going to matter which one you use. They're all going to be fine for your particular use case. So try to ignore all of the AI, bro, FOMO, YouTube videos. This model is incredible. You must try this or you're missing out. That's not for you. Remember, you're running a business. You're trying to get stuff done. AI is just another tool in your toolbox like your computer or a typewriter or a pencil. If you've got a landscape business, it's like a lawnmower. It's just something that you're using to get work done in your business. It just needs to be good enough to do the job and cost effective. That's all you care about. So here's the bottom line. Most people today are using AI like a search engine. Tell me about this. What do you think about that? Help me create this paragraph of text. But not you. You are going to make sure that you're investing in AI so that you can unlock the potential of having AI actually do things for you. The way you do that is you invest in a tool like ChatGPT Work or Claude Co-Work and you actually have it do things for you. Connect it to your tools. Get things done. It really doesn't matter exactly which one you use. What matters is that you use it to actually get things done. That's the big unlock that takes you to where 90% of the people are getting 10% of the value and it makes you one of the 10% of the people that are getting 90% of the value out of AI. Now, I told you that one of Paula's secret unlocks is that she tweaks her blog posts to leave a little bit of Paula in every post because she doesn't want AI slop in her business. And so, in next week's video, we're going to talk about that very thing. In a world where everyone has AI, what do you need to be doing as a business owner to make sure that your business is uniquely yours? Hey, thanks for listening to another episode of The Mark Mason Show. For more content like this, hit subscribe or head on over to markmason.com. Hook up with us on social media or leave feedback. Until next time, ciao.