:

Not an hour of people telling you AI changes everything. Seven operators walked through the specific workflows they run every week, and what those workflows replaced.


Monica Froese ran a 31-day skill drop entirely on automated workflows and finished the whole event 15 days early, after the 21-day version the year before burned her out.


Kate Kordsmeier built an entire event in two days that she'd budgeted weeks for, and says she felt like the CEO for the first time — one part-time human contractor and dozens of AI employees.


Jodi Bourne has around 200 skills and discovered her own library had grown so large it was confusing Claude about which skill to use.

The most-discussed thing on the panel wasn't a workflow at all. It was Obsidian, and the argument for owning your AI's memory outside of any one platform.


On this panel: Ashley Clayton, Monica Froese, Jodi Bourne, Dama Jue, Kate Kordsmeier, Jamila Payne, Ruth Poundwhite

What we covered:

  • [6:45] The opening question: the one AI workflow that actually saved you time this month.
  • [7:15] Dama on connecting Drip and Airtable to Claude, pulling a past launch's emails, and moving the webinar date a week without retyping a single email.
  • [8:30] Monica's 31-day skill drop, fully automated. A skill to create the skill, QA it, write the instruction doc, build the shop listing, make the image, publish the email in Kit. She finished 15 days ahead and took time off for the first time in years.
  • [10:15] Kate built a full event in Claude Code in two days, with the MCP connection to her email platform writing dozens of emails in her HTML template to the right segments. She only reviewed and scheduled.
  • [13:15] Ashley's YouTube system: it interviews her, logs ideas to Airtable, connects to vidIQ to decide what to make next, then repurposes the transcript afterward.
  • [14:30] Jamila's blog engine. A skill audits every post she's ever written and decides what to merge, rewrite, or kill. Weekly workflow, Drive folder, Gemini notification to her assistant, Asana task, then an automated check that the H1s, keywords, meta description, and schema are right. Her point: this isn't time saved, it's work she'd never have done at all.
  • [18:30] Jamila on using Claude desktop to clear a personal inbox that had gotten away from her.
  • [20:15] Prisca's question: anyone using Google Studio? Dama's answer on triggering drafted replies from a keyword, and why it needs a paid Workspace plan. Plus how it replaced manually clicking a Gmail template 50 times during her inbox experiments.
  • [22:30] The Obsidian question, and the longest stretch of the hour. Ashley on it as a personal knowledge management system in plain markdown, with folder-level control over what AI can see. Monica set hers up a week ago and is already an evangelist: raw, wiki, output folders, a Friday scheduled task that reads everything and builds wiki files, and 75 active skills that stay dynamic across platforms. Her argument is portability — when everyone moves off Claude in six months, you don't rebuild your brain.
  • [30:30] Suz's question: if you started from zero, what would you do first? Kate says brand voice and skill library. Ruth says brain dump on voice mode first if you're overwhelmed, and use Wispr Flow. Jamila fed a year of coaching call transcripts into a brand voice skill.
  • [36:00] Jodi on adding writing guardrails, not just voice. Her em dash reversal, and why "butter my biscuits" is what happens when you tell AI you like Southern slang. Training is a daily thing, not a setup task. Also her anti-slop skill.
  • [38:45] Ashley on starting with the job you're hiring AI to do, and why the "it's not X, it's Y" pattern shows up.
  • [40:45] Megan's question: how do you remember to use the automations you built? Ashley's daily brief and skills janitor that counts when each skill was last used. Ruth on skills firing on their own being the thing custom GPTs never did for her brain. Jodi renamed and reorganized all 200 of her skills, found the library was confusing Claude, and learned that Claude actually reads the project instructions.
  • [48:15] Monica on a $200 Claude plan being roughly $8,000 in API usage, what happens when the subsidy ends, and why a portable brain is insurance.
  • [49:45] Wendy and Sharon's questions: what to read to keep up. Monica runs a weekly task that summarizes a few newsletters against her business. Ruth on following people doing the work you want to do instead of trying to know everything. Jamila on curating YouTube for demos you can actually copy.


Grab the panelist gifts: https://lab.destinicopp.com/closed-door-hub

Keep all five panels permanently, plus searchable transcripts, takeaways for each one, and the live Q4 Money Map session on the 20th. That's the Back Room, $47.