⏱️ Read time: ~3 min
Let me tell you about Monica.
Monica is a Leadership and Team Coach. Sharp, experienced, and genuinely good at what she does. But like most coaches I know, she had a meeting prep problem.
Not a laziness problem. A time problem.
Prep happened when it happened, which meant sometimes it was thorough, sometimes it was a quick scan on the way to the call, and sometimes it was mostly just showing up and trusting her instincts. No systematic approach. No pre-information from clients flowing in automatically. Just Monica, her calendar, and whatever time she could carve out.
Sound familiar? I've certainly been there myself.
From Manual Prep to Automated Intelligence
Monica is one of the coaches I work with inside AI Lab. Over the past few months, we've been building out her AI-powered workflows, starting with meeting minutes and automated offer generation, and then moving upstream to tackle the thing that was quietly draining her before every client interaction: preparation.
Here's what her meeting prep system looks like now:
When a prospect books a meeting through Calendly, they answer a few questions that help Monica prepare.
Zapier then picks it up and sets everything in motion. ChatGPT Business researches the prospect, builds context around the meeting, and generates guidance based on Monica's desired outcomes for that conversation. All of it gets saved to a central repository and pushed automatically into Hedy.ai (her meeting sidekick) before the call even starts.
By the time Monica sits down for the meeting, she already has:
- Background on who she's meeting and their context
- A clear picture of what she wants to achieve
- Relevant talking points and guidance at her fingertips
No manual research. No scrambling. No hoping she remembered to Google them the night before.
And let me be fully transparent. The setup took real effort. Monica hadn't worked with automations before, and getting the workflow right took time and iteration. There were moments where she probably wanted to throw her laptop out the window. Totally normal. AI-powering our daily work is work. But once it clicks, it clicks.
Monica now walks into every meeting with more insight and better preparation than before, without spending more time on prep than she used to.
The workflow also doesn't stop there. The same intelligence that prepares Monica for a meeting feeds into her offer generation process downstream, and into audience insights that can shape future offerings. One input. Multiple outputs.
That's what a well-designed AI system actually looks like.
Monica's system isn't magic. It's a few connected tools, a clear workflow, and the willingness to invest time upfront to save it consistently later.
That's the kind of work I find most satisfying to build with people.
If you've been wondering what that could look like in your own practice, watch this space. I'm working on something for a small group of coaches who want exactly this. More soon.
Til next time,
Elena
P.S.This works just as well with pretty much any toolstack. Claude, Gemini, Langdock, Make, N8N, Google Drive, Fireflies, Fathom... they are all built to be connected into workflows that fit your needs.
P.P.S. That image? OpenAI's Image2 on the basis of this newsletter edition. I briefly described what I wanted, asked it to create the prompt, reviewed and tweaked it and then had it generate the image. 2 minor tweaks. Done. No wait... I then asked it to turn the work we had just done into a skill, in case I want to generate similar images in the future.
