UNDERSTANDING AI By Liz Wool Using AI to gain a competitive advantage in your business AI is not the future—it is the present. Every day you delay using AI is a day your competitors gain ground. I use AI across every corner of my business: not to replace my voice, but to give my ideas wings. From the boardroom to TikTok Live, from investor decks to email sequences, AI is a silent co-creator behind everything I build. Dynamic business planning A business plan is not a document you write once and file away. It is a living, breathing blueprint—and AI keeps it current. I give AI my context, goals and financials. Then I ask AI to generate the plan structure, flag my blind spots, and prompt me quarterly. What has changed in my industry since my last review? A stale plan is a liability in a funding conversation. AI makes staying sharp effortless. Market research & competitive intelligence Meaningful market research used to require teams, expensive tools, and weeks of analysis. AI compresses that timeline into hours. I ask AI to identify my top competitors, expose their messaging weaknesses, and expose any gaps I can position myself to fill. I walk into every meeting armed with intelligence that makes me the most informed person in the room. Financial calculations & investor preparation Numbers tell stories. AI helps me build the models, stress-test the assumptions, and translate data into language that moves investors to action. I generate three financial scenarios—conservative, moderate, and optimistic—then run a simulation the night before every funding meeting. The greatest communicators share one trait: they know their audience more intimately than the audience knows itself. For every person I write for, speak to, coach, or train, I build a complete AI-generated profile—their fears, aspirations, exact language they use, the objections they raise before they buy. This helps me fine tune the messaging for my services and products. Accurate messaging is not about saying what people want to hear. It is about speaking directly to the gap between where they are and where they desperately want to be. The path from first awareness to loyal advocate is where most businesses silently hemorrhage revenue. AI maps every stage and friction point before it costs me a client. I ask AI to play devil’s advocate: What are the five reasons a qualified prospect would NOT buy from me? Then I build solutions to every one of those answers. My voice is my brand. I speak my raw thoughts into a voice memo—unfiltered, unedited—and paste the transcript into AI with one instruction: rewrite in an expository style with alliteration, vivid metaphor, and rhetorical depth. Do not sanitize the personality out of it. I review, inject what only I could know, and publish. The results are consistent, compelling and unmistakably mine. Hook titles & speech openers The first five seconds of a speech determine everything. The opening is the audition—and most people fail it in silence, because no one tells them they have lost the room. I ask AI to generate ten hook titles per topic and five speech openers per keynote. I ask for curiosity gaps, pattern interruptions, bold counterintuitive claims and rhetorical question sequences. I deliver each one aloud and choose the hook that quickens my own pulse first. That is always the one that holds the room. The moments after a prospecting call are the most fertile in the sales process—and the most wasted. Most people send a generic “Great to connect!” that vanishes into the inbox graveyard. Within minutes of hanging up, I speak a 60-second voice memo and paste it into AI to generate an email. The result: a follow-up email that is warm, specific, and impossible to ignore. AI does not think for me. It does not lead, coach, or command a room. It does not build the relationships, hold the space, or make the judgment call that only comes from years of lived experience. What it does is free me to do all of those things more fully, more frequently, and with far less friction. The entrepreneurs who thrive in the next decade will be the ones who wield AI with intention—infusing it with the irreplaceable humanity, wisdom, and presence that no algorithm can replicate. That is the AI advantage. And now it is yours. LIZ WOOL is Founder and CEO of Public Speaking & Presentation Pros, a WBENC-certified business on a mission to help you speak like a pro. The firm specializes in helping entrepreneurs and business leaders reach higher levels of success through public speaking. Liz is a member of the Enterprising Women Advisory Board. Connect at https://lizwool.com/. enterprising Women 51 Pasuwan / Shutterstock.com
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