Transforming Online Coaching with AI: Wendy Breakstone's Success with AI

Wendy Breakstone's Story

For online entrepreneurs, learning how to efficiently scale your time is a key to success. The company lives and breathes off of your time. At Pickaxe, we see hundreds of online businesses use AI models in intelligent ways to transform their operation, from embedding AI tools into their customer-facing websites to creating internal dashboards of AI widgets for their team.

*Wendy Breakstone, coach & strategist leveraging AI in her course creation.*

In this blog post we’re featuring Wendy Breakstone, an online marketing strategist and coach who is leveraging AI to move faster, smarter, and more efficiently. In addition to coaching clients, Wendy runs her proprietary Micro Audio Summit® System, a successful program that teaches people how to add hundreds of leads to their email list in just six weeks. Today we’ll be sharing how Wendy integrated Pickaxe into her business to serve more customers, more thoughtfully.

So let’s explore how Wendy supercharged her online course with AI.

AI & Online Coaching

‍There are many things to sell in the economy. Food, cars, software, but one of the most valuable commodities is human expertise. It takes a long time to acquire it and a lot of work to sell it, but it’s one of the most valuable services a person can offer. “Professional Services”, as it’s commonly called, are occupations where people offer their expertise and time.

*"Professional Services" cover a large swath of industries.*

Traditionally, the limiting factor of a business like Wendy’s has been her time. However, AI changed that. AI models, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the ability to scale previously unscalable activities like coaching. If you can teach AI some basic frameworks for, say, writing a specific type of email, it can then emulate that fairly well.

While AI is a scary word for some coaches, others see a lot of value in it as a super-scaling work multiplier. The smartest coaches understand it’s better to use advantageous technology, share knowledge about it, and teach others how to use it. For many consultants and people working in professional services, the more value you provide clients, the more you become a value center for them, a resource they will return to over and over again.

That's certainly how Wendy thinks. So obviously, AI felt like it could be big for her clients.

Adding ChatGPT to Online Courses

Wendy Breakstone works as a coach and strategist. Like all good coaches, Wendy wants to offer more value to her clients at a more scalable rate - so they get results faster. She doesn’t just want to feed her clients a fish. She wants to teach them how to fish.

Wendy's exploration of AI began here— out of a desire to offer real value to her clients. She was looking for a way to make her Micro Audio Summit System faster and more repeatable, ensuring more people could benefit from the results.

Like many coaches and course creators, Wendy was intrigued by AI and what it could offer her business. Her first step was to use ChatGPT to speed up her own process— to generate content and ideas, which she then passed on to her clients.

The clients were thrilled- but Wendy didn't stop there. Using AI for your own processes is just the beginning. Wendy knew she could teach her clients the same processes.

As mentioned before, Wendy wanted to teach her clients how to fish. So she taught her clients how they could use ChatGPT. She gave them prompts to generate content, instructions for how to use the prompts, and a basic rundown of ChatGPT prompt design best practices.

This process made the clients self-sufficient, but it still wasn’t optimal. It required a lot of hands-on education with clients. Clients also had to jump between her course and OpenAI. Ideally, Wendy wanted to keep her clients within her ecosystem - to create a seamless, uninterrupted process that made the most of technology without taking away from the personal touch that is so integral to her service.

Wendy needed a way to offer her clients guided ChatGPT experiences while keeping them in her ecosystem and focused.

Using Pickaxe to Embed Tools

Then Wendy was introduced to Pickaxe. Pickaxe let her turn her prompts into what she calls, "mad libs style, fill in the blanks" templates. This allowed Wendy to share her prompts with all their intricacies in a way that was easy for her clients to customize with their own details.

*Screenshot of the Pickaxe tool builder*

But the real benefit was the ability to seamlessly integrate her Pickaxes into her website. Instead of giving her clients prompts and sending them off to OpenAI, she embedded the prompts into her website as AI Content Generators. This allowed her clients to easily use her prompts in the form of pre-built Pickaxes without ever leaving her website.

Wendy’s Micro Audio Summit System instantly became two-times faster for her clients, as well as a more cohesive experience. As each module explained an aspect of producing a Micro Audio Summit, she made an accompanying AI Content Generator to create the necessary content. And of course, Wendy had dialed in all the Pickaxe prompts so that they generated high-quality content according to her specifications. The course worked perfectly. As one module of the course outlined how to do proper outreach, an accompanying Pickaxe embedded in the module could write emails for them.

*Examples of Wendy's AI Content Generators*

The results were great. Clients were working faster and producing Micro Audio Summits more efficiently. And Wendy was spending her time more effectively. She was taking less calls, doing less 1-on-1 AI coaching, and feeling more confident in her clients’ independence. She was able to spend her time focusing on higher leverage actions than sharing prompts and explaining how ChatGPT worked.

The nature of coaching is personal and time-intensive, but with Pickaxe, Wendy was able to scale her time without ever compromising value or personal touch.

Wendy Breakstone's case is a fantastic example of a customer success story. It showcases how building AI tools can transform the way your website or online course offers value to customers.

As she continues to scale her services and replicate her expertise through AI emulations, Wendy is an early pioneer of AI in the coaching and course-creation space, and has set a wonderful example of how AI can be used to amplify and enhance - not replace - human-centric services like coaching.