Applying AI to Marketing and Business: Lessons From the Trenches
The host, Michael Stelzner, and guest Allie Kelly reveal how Social Media Examiner has transformed its business by deeply integrating AI into every layer of its operations—far beyond simple automation. Instead of treating AI as a tool for minor efficiency gains, they’ve used it to rebuild their entire content curation, product development, and marketing infrastructure. The most striking revelation? Allie Kelly, with no coding background, developed a fully automated AI news curation system using Claude, Manus, and Cloud Code—cutting her daily research time from hours to minutes and reducing costs to just 30 cents a day. This wasn’t just about saving time; it was about creating a self-improving system that learns from user feedback and refines its own criteria over time. The episode also details how they repositioned their flagship product, the AI Business Society, by using AI to analyze customer data, competitor messaging, and brand reputation—leading to a complete sales page overhaul that now speaks directly to the evolved needs of mid-stage AI adopters. The result? A system that doesn’t just generate content but acts as a digital workforce, turning one training session into a rich library of transcripts, tips, timestamps, and newsletter content in under two hours. This isn’t the future of marketing—it’s the present for those who’ve stopped treating AI as a novelty and started treating it as a co-founder.
Build AI systems that learn from user feedback—Allie’s curation tool improves over time by collecting reasons for declined stories and refining criteria every two weeks.
Use AI to turn one piece of content (like a webinar) into multiple assets—transcripts, tips, timestamps, newsletters, and social posts—in under two hours.
Train AI on your domain expertise: your judgment, experience, and brand voice are the most valuable inputs—AI becomes a force multiplier, not a replacement.
Replace manual processes with AI workflows: what once took a week (transcribing videos) now takes 30 minutes, freeing up time for high-value work.
Reposition your product using AI-driven market research: analyze competitors, customer data, and brand reputation to craft messaging that resonates with today’s AI-savvy audience.
…and 3 more takeaways available in PodZeus
The AI Overwhelm Crisis
Michael opens with the universal marketer’s struggle: drowning in AI tools, updates, and frameworks while trying to run a business. He introduces the AI Business Society as a solution to cut through the noise.
Why AI Is a Game-Changer
Michael shares his personal journey with AI since ChatGPT’s launch in 2022, calling it a decade of change in four years. He frames the current moment as a historic inflection point in human history.
Eating Our Own Dog Food
The team at Social Media Examiner has applied AI to every aspect of their business—from launching the AI Explored podcast to creating the AI Business Society and AI Business World conference.
AI as a Co-Strategist
“I went into Claude and I use Claude projects... and it said, okay, what about this? What about this? Boom, boom, boom.”
The News Curation Problem
Allie explains the challenge of filtering AI news for marketers—cutting through politics, IPOs, and data center talk to focus only on what actually impacts daily work.
“You don't need to know how to code. You just need to know how to direct the AI to tell you where to go and what to do.”
“I'm on free plans of these tools and the only cost is the cost of the AI usage to fetch the stories and create the content, which right now is working out to be about like 30 cents a day.”
“And the fact that, you know, 17 years of doing this thing. And that is something that matters to this audience because we are known to this audience.”
Host
Guest
allie kelly
person
social media examiner
organization
claude
product
michael stelzner
person
ai business society
organization
manus
product
gemini
product
cloud code
product
zoom
product
github
product
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