[AI Series] AI Tools That Transform Your Business With Nicole Donnelly

Nicole Donnelly is the Owner of AI Smart Ventures, a company dedicated to helping businesses leverage artificial intelligence through customized training, strategic consulting, and implementation services. Since 2013, she has helped over 20,000 people use AI to work smarter and save more than 10 million hours.

Nicole is also the Founder of AI Smart Marketing, an agency that uses AI-powered tools and emotion-driven experience design to grow brands and optimize marketing operations. With 18 years in marketing and three successful exits, her aim is to help leaders build sustainable, values-led growth with AI.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:44] How Nicole Donnelly transitioned from building a baby brand to running a marketing agency using AI
• [7:45] Overview of top AI image tools Leonardo, Midjourney, and Firefly, and their creative applications
• [12:59] How HeyGen enables multilingual video creation, dubbing, and lifelike avatars
• [18:55] How AI search differs from SEO and helps small businesses outrank big competitors
• [21:24] Using Press Jockey, Dripify, and Instantly to automate press and LinkedIn outreach
• [24:14] How AI hyper-personalization drives 90%+ email open rates and deeper engagement
• [29:32] Why Jasper’s AI knowledge base improves accuracy for technical content creation
• [34:30] Defining AI agents and examples of automating accounting and communication workflows
• [36:29] Best practices for AI security, compliance, and avoiding unsecure public tools
• [55:24] How CycleWise supports women’s hormonal health and self-care

In this episode…

Artificial intelligence is changing the way businesses operate, from automating tedious tasks to unlocking entirely new levels of creativity and efficiency. But with so many AI tools launching daily, how can business owners separate the hype from the truly transformative solutions? Which technologies are actually helping teams save time, grow faster, and make smarter decisions?

According to Nicole Donnelly, a marketing innovator and AI educator, the key to harnessing AI lies in experimentation and integration. She explains that her team has spent nearly a decade testing tools like Gemini, Claude, Copilot, and Jasper to determine which deliver real results in content, design, and automation. Nicole highlights that consistent experimentation — such as testing prompts quarterly across different models — helps businesses stay ahead as the technology evolves. By weaving AI into workflows, from video creation and outreach to SEO optimization, she shows how even small teams can achieve enterprise-level productivity and creativity.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Nicole Donnelly, Owner and Founder of AI Smart Ventures and AI Smart Marketing, to discuss AI tools that transform business operations. She reveals her top-tested platforms for design, outreach, and automation, and how to use AI for hyper-personalized marketing. Nicole also shares how companies can stay secure, compliant, and innovative while adopting new technologies.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Nicole A. Donnelly on LinkedIn | Website
• AI Smart Insiders
• AI Smart Ventures
• AI Smart Insiders Resources
• AI Smart Insiders Courses
• EO Seattle

Special Mentions:

• Google Gemini
• Jasper
• Claude
• Microsoft Copilot
• Leonardo AI
• Veo 3.1
• Midjourney
• Adobe Firefly
• Ideogram
• Pictory AI
• HeyGen
• Suno
• Loom
• Open Forge AI
• Udemy
• Coursera
• Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
• Press Jockey
• Dripify
• Instantly
• Zipify
• AI Smart GPT
• AIPRM
• Gamma
• Canva
• OS CRM
• GoHighLevel
• ClickUp
• TextExpander
• SaneBox
• Read.ai
• Otter.ai
• Yoodli
• Fyxer
• Chatbase
• Talkadot
• Hoop
• Workflow & SOP Creator
• AI Use Policy
• Emotionality
• CycleWise AI

Related episodes:

• “How to Sell More And Save Time with Robert Hartline of Absolute Wireless” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “The Importance of Integrity with Robert Hartline of Absolute Wireless” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “EO Atlanta | You Can Have It All With Ethan King, Co-Founder of Zeus’ Closet” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “EO Tulsa | Real Estate Investment With Mat Zalk of Keyrenter Property Management” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “Every company has those things, and if you can pull it out and help people not do what they don’t like, you’ll have a happier team.”
• “We dedicate a minimum of an hour every week just to experimenting together as a team — that’s how we stay ahead in AI.”
• “Small companies are outranking big companies because their sites are more AI-friendly. Flexibility is the new competitive advantage.”
• “Seeing 90% open rate consistently is unheard of, but with hyper-personalization and AI, it’s absolutely possible.”
• “The people who come to mind as mentors are all the ones who said I couldn’t do it — they pushed me to keep going.”

Action steps:

1. Dedicate regular time to experiment with AI tools: Set aside consistent time each week to explore new AI tools and features, turning ongoing learning into a sustainable habit that keeps your business ahead.
2. Optimize your website and content for AI-powered search: Update your site structure and maintain an active online presence to boost visibility and competitiveness in AI-driven search results.
3. Implement hyper-personalized outreach and automation: Use AI to tailor communications and automate follow-ups, increasing engagement and strengthening client relationships.
4. Experiment with AI-driven design and content creation tools: Leverage platforms for image, video, and copy creation to quickly produce professional materials and reduce creative bottlenecks.
5. Establish clear AI use and security policies: Create and enforce AI guidelines to protect data, ensure compliance, and maintain client trust as AI becomes part of daily operations.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is definitely no different. I’m super excited to introduce Nicole Donnelly. You can check her out at AISmartVentures.com. And we’re going to talk about all things AI today. Everyone’s favorite topic, Nicole. 

Before we launch into it, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. Since this is, you know, actually I have a lot of cool EO members on, right, Nicole like yourself and highlighting some of those are some great stories, and I feel like EO members also get vulnerable and don’t just share the big wins, but they share the challenges along the way. And so, you know, I’ve had on Robert Hartline. Robert Hartline, EO Nashville built, you know, I don’t know if you know, Robert. You do? Okay. Everyone knows Robert I feel like, but he built up a chain of cell phone stores. And he also has software. And he’s now, you know, helping companies with EOS. 

Ethan King, EO Atlanta talks about his companies as well, and some interesting kind of apparel personalization that he was doing and some of the interesting people he created that for. And Mat Zalk of EO Tulsa, just talking about he was investing in properties and then he’s like, this is a pain to manage these things. So he decided to be that solution for other people. So he started you know, does property management across Tulsa, Oklahoma and Arkansas and those things. So check those out. More on InspiredInsider.com.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a few ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability and the full execution, production. Also, number two, we’re an easy button for a company’s gifting. So we make gifting and staying top of mind for your clients, partners, prospects, even your staff from a culture perspective. Simple, easy, affordable. And you know, you just send us the addresses and we do everything else. 

So, you know, Nicole, we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that are running in the background to make it stress free for a company to build amazing relationships. And I found like the number one thing in my life is relationships. So I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And personally, I find no better way over the past 15 years to profile the people I admire and share with the world what they’re working on in the podcast and sending them sweet treats in the mail. So if you have questions, go to Rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. 

I’m super excited to introduce Nicole Donnelly, a former pro snowboarder turned entrepreneur. She built a global baby brand from her kitchen table and that’s an incredible story. Now she leads AI Smart Ventures, and she helps businesses use AI to work smarter and grow faster. Who doesn’t want to work smarter and grow faster? Nicole, thanks for joining me.

Nicole Donnelly: 03:33

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:35

I want to start off and we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of AI, but just start off about AI Smart Ventures and what you do.

Nicole Donnelly: 03:44

Yeah. So after I sold my first company, which was the baby company, what I learned in that experience is that I’m naturally good at marketing and those are the things that I like to do. So I started a marketing agency, and in my marketing agency, we started using AI back in 2015. So we’ve been using AI for the last ten years to make our jobs easier and adopting the tools along the way. And we still have the marketing agency.

And in January of 2023, we consciously put new business development on the back burner for the marketing agency. And we launched our AI courses, and we did that because of course, we see this opportunity, and we had been using AI prior to that, you know, for seven years. And so we have this hands-on daily experience using AI. And in 2023, my goodness, if you were paying attention to AI, tools were never developed so fast, and it was the year in my, I think, my whole life that I learned the most, and it was constantly trying to keep up with things. Now it’s settling a little bit.

You know, there are still updates every week, but it’s not 10,000 updates every week. And I like to play with it. It’s fun. That’s how we started getting into it. And we have people on the team now with different expertise, and we test out tools in the different areas that people care about.

And we dedicate a minimum of an hour every week just to experimenting together as a team. And then we publish on this site, actually the AI Smart Insiders, there’s a resources page and we publish the tools that we are currently using. We actually just updated this list yesterday, and it just a little blurb about what we use them for And we teach how to use the different tools in class. Why? You might want to choose one over the other.

We also cover different AI models and what they’re good at, what they’re not good at, and it changes all the time. And so this is something we were just talking about before, and we did a bunch of testing yesterday on the different models with a set of prompts that we’ve been testing quarterly for three years. And yesterday Gemini one big we used Gemini free and paid, Jasper, we use ChatGPT free ChatGPT paid. We did four, five and five.

Oh, and we did Claude free. Claude paid, Copilot free and Copilot paid. And we tested all of the prompts and used the different models inside the tools. And we have a set of four prompts that we test every quarter, and one is code, and we have a math prompt and we have what are the top ten Netflix movies in the US today? And that might seem simple, but Gemini was the only one paid. Gemini was the only one that got that right, you know? And so this is like, that’s what we do for fun. We play with the tools and we test them out.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:15

You have John’s dream job. That’s literally he wishes he probably could do that all day long. So let’s talk about this page for a second. We’re if you’re watching if you’re listening, there is a YouTube video on this and you can see we’re at AI Smart Ventures. And then we kind of navigate it over to AISmartInsiders.com.

And we’re on the resources page here. And this is constantly updating. So in this point of time, this is what it looks like. Let’s maybe talk about some of these I don’t know which category do you want to start on.

Nicole Donnelly: 07:45

And we can start at the top. Okay. And the reason why we have this little collection of tools that we use, things like Leonardo, you can do a lot of things for free. And people outside of the US can still get tools like Veo, which is Google’s video tool, because they’ll put it inside of Leonardo and that might be a reason to choose. It is because you’re across the border and you might not have access to it.

Leonardo is really fun. You can hand draw things and it will create realistic images. You can take realistic images and make it look like hand drawings. You can do video, you can do product shots. You could do product design in here. 

And it’s really inexpensive, easy to use. Midjourney is the super high quality. If you’re somebody who is a cinematographer, graphic designer, and you know how to describe what you want, Midjourney is kind of the most. It requires the most description to get the good images, and you can do images that can replace a $20,000 photo shoot, because if you know the language to describe them that well, it will produce photo shoot quality images in sizes big enough for a billboard. Firefly is Adobe’s online tool. You can do a lot for free, and you can get paid, but then Firefly will take your images.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:14

And I’ve seen so many commercials on this, I think. Are they just heavily, just pouring a bunch of media into this. Do you see the same thing?

Nicole Donnelly: 09:24

I mean, Adobe’s a big company, so they have the money and Firefly is the most intellectual property safe model that’s out there because it’s Adobe and everything’s watermarked in there. And they create vector images out of the images in there. Which means if you’re a Photoshop person, you know there’s layers to your images. And so in Firefly, they’ll create the layered images so that you can apply. You can adjust anything in the picture and pull it apart and put it back together how you want it to.

And so anybody who’s on Adobe Suites, probably using Firefly and there’s AI built into Adobe, into Photoshop and all of the others now. But we want to show Firefly because it’s a design standard, Adobe’s design standard, which, you know, our designers use Adobe as well. And then Ideogram is like the cheap version of an image tool where you don’t own the intellectual property. You can do celebrity likeness and Ideogram says when it’s off of our platform, we take no responsibility for what you do with these images. And so it’s not IP safe, but on ideogram it’s really easy to design things. 

You can use other people’s prompts that are on there. It shows the prompts to get the images and I just designed some stickers and if somebody wants some AI Smart Ventures stickers and they want to use my images somewhere, I’m okay with that. You know, it was just the easiest place to go. Design some stickers because ideogram does a good job with text on the images, and the other models are getting there more now. But ideogram was the first one to do a good job with text on images, which is still a challenge in ChatGPT. It’s getting better. 

Video-audio. Pictory is really simple, not sophisticated. You can get great videos and you can start with anything from a PowerPoint presentation to a pile of photos, and you can make videos, and it’s a really easy one to use. So and you can do voiceover in there when I go speak at EO chapters, they want a video. And so if it’s the same topic, I have a standard video that I use and I just rerecord the voiceover and it includes B-roll in it too. 

But I just rerecord the voiceover and say, hey, EO Panama, I’ll see you here. Hey, EO New Jersey, I’ll see you on this date and the rest of it stays the same. And it’s just so easy to use. I’m not a video editor by any means, and I can do it. HeyGen is really good for us. 

We have our training in multiple languages. We can use the dubbing and change the language, and they actually match the mouth movements to the new language. It does a really good job with that. It does the avatars too. So I have avatars of me that my assistant can make videos with. 

They’ve just updated to this avatar for. It’s so good. You and the avatar, you can just take a photo and then it gives you a lifelike video. It does user generated content. It’ll take a page from your website and create an ad out of that page for a product or service. 

Or if you have an Amazon store, it’ll do that too. HeyGen is a more sophisticated one. We are HeyGen partners. We love the product and we use it every day.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:59

Do you feel like that’s gotten better? I feel like when it first came out, it seemed a little granulated. I don’t know what pixelated, I guess. I don’t know, it seems like it’s gotten better.

Nicole Donnelly: 13:10

Leaps and bounds. So we’ve been using this one since September 23rd and it’s so good now. They just did a really big update this last week. And V0 Gemini’s video tool is inside. HeyGen now too.

So you can create videos from nothing and you can make them speak and speak multiple languages and make user generated content from it. And then if you have a long video like this one we’re doing right now, I drop it into OpusClip. Opus chops up long form video and is great for the content on social media. So if you wanted to say. If you wanted to have a specific part of this, cut out and say, only show the clips where Nicole’s talking about video and audio tools. 

It will select those sections and you can choose the length of section or leave it open. You can edit out ums and ahs. You can equalize the audio and you can put the image, the text on top. Add some music. You can do all of that inside of opus. They just keep improving it to Suno is music. You can make your own songs.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:27

Suno is unbelievable. It’s crazy what you can do.

Nicole Donnelly: 14:33

Have you played with it?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:34

Yeah, I was with someone and it was a past guest of the podcast and I just kind of copied their home page, put it in a pseudo because we were just chatting about country music or whatever. And so I said, create a rap and in like probably less than two minutes, I created a rap and country song with their company, all about their company, and then post it on LinkedIn, and they were like, you know, it just blew their mind, you know, that you can do that.

Nicole Donnelly: 15:07

Yeah, I used it. I spoke at the Women’s Summit in Montreal and we each had walkout songs. And Jenny Feder said she wanted Jenny from the Eastern Bloc. And in a couple of minutes, I had a version that was her new walkout song, Jenny from the Eastern Bloc, made with snow.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:26

Unbelievable.

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