AI: What’s Actually Working Right Now?

What are business owners actually using AI for right now—and which tools are delivering real results?

In this episode of Real AI Use Cases: Business Owners’ Roundtable, Elizabeth Gearhart and Richard Gearhart are joined by Sonia Satra, Lisa Lane, and Lauren Lane for a candid conversation about how they’re using AI in their businesses today.

The discussion goes well beyond theory. The group shares practical AI use cases involving content creation, e-commerce, business research, marketing, AI visibility, regulatory monitoring, brainstorming, analytics, and automation.

Lauren explains how she uses AI as a tutor to quickly understand a new business and analyze what is happening across major e-commerce platforms. Lisa shares how tools such as TikTok can transform a single image into video content, helping brands create marketing assets faster. Richard discusses using AI to monitor changes at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and across the regulatory landscape—work that would otherwise require significant staff time.

Elizabeth shares how she is experimenting with AI to repurpose existing podcast content into structured, searchable blog content and discusses why businesses need to think about AI visibility and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)in addition to traditional SEO.

The conversation also gets into some of the frustrations and risks of working with AI. How much should you trust the answer? Does an AI become biased toward what it thinks you want to hear? Should you use ChatGPT or Claude? And how careful should businesses be about putting confidential information into an AI platform?

Sonia shares her experience with Claude repeatedly telling her that instead of asking more questions, she needed to take action—leading to a discussion about how increasingly human AI interactions can feel.

TL;DR

  • AI is becoming a practical business tool, not just an experiment, with uses ranging from marketing and content creation to analytics and regulatory research.

  • ChatGPT and Claude behave differently, and the group discusses why some users prefer one over the other depending on the task.

  • AI visibility is becoming increasingly important as customers use ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other answer engines to discover businesses.

  • AI still requires human oversight. Facts should be verified, important processes need clear instructions, and confidential information needs to be handled carefully.

  • The most effective approach may be to let AI assist with ideas, research, analysis, and repetitive work while keeping human judgment, expertise, and voice at the center.

In This Episode

The group discusses:

  • How businesses are using AI to create marketing content

  • AI-powered TikTok and e-commerce tools

  • Using AI to learn a business faster

  • Monitoring regulations and industry developments with AI

  • Turning podcasts and other long-form content into searchable articles

  • SEO versus Answer Engine Optimization

  • How businesses can become more visible in ChatGPT and other AI engines

  • ChatGPT versus Claude

  • AI hallucinations, bias, and limitations

  • AI privacy and data security

  • Building AI agents and assistants

  • Why human judgment and authenticity still matter

Frequently Asked Questions How are business owners using AI right now?

Business owners are using AI for content creation, research, brainstorming, e-commerce analytics, marketing, regulatory monitoring, business education,...

Chapters

  • (00:00:00) - Intro: AI in daily brand work
  • (00:00:43) - Round table intros and first AI use cases
  • (00:02:23) - Video content generation with TikTok AI
  • (00:02:50) - Tracking IP regulatory landscape with AI
  • (00:03:37) - Answer engine optimization and blog discoverability
  • (00:05:40) - Presenting AI marketing tips to CPAs
  • (00:06:35) - Schema code and AI visibility basics
  • (00:07:42) - The Claude 'take action' story
  • (00:08:57) - AI's emotional tactics and user engagement
  • (00:09:28) - Claude vs ChatGPT preferences
  • (00:09:50) - Limitations: transcripts, linear thinking, agents
  • (00:11:23) - AI learning your brand and bias questions
  • (00:12:42) - Testing Gearhart Law visibility across LLMs
  • (00:14:16) - Adding personal voice and disagreeing with AI
  • (00:14:48) - Privacy concerns and multiple AI assistants
  • (00:15:44) - Closing remarks

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