If I asked you how you’re using AI, what would you say?
If you asked me, I would say, so many ways!
Besides having trained my own bot (which I make available to everyone who has the Simplest Marketing Plan (SMP), including my 1:1 coaching clients of course), my own personal use includes:
- indulging my curiosity -- I get answers to questions that randomly occur to me and that makes me smarter!
- analyzing feedback from members of the SMP community -- we get a lot of feedback and take it very seriously
- as a strategic thinking partner to determine the next step and direction for my business.
- BTW I don’t actually use it for my own writing because I like to write and writing helps me think.
When I recently asked one of my 1:1 coaching clients, Kate Purcell, who is a creative strategist and designer who works with social impact organizations, she started sharing so many interesting ways I had to bring her on the Marketing Mentor Podcast to share them with you.
In Episode 559, Kate and I talked about how she uses AI to do things for her clients she could never afford to do before. We also talked about how she uses AI to streamline her own marketing process. Lots of very actionable ideas here for you.
So listen here (and below):
If you want my help figuring all of this out, take advantage of my free mentoring session.
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Read the complete transcript here
ilise: Hi there. This is ilise benun, your marketing mentor, and this is the podcast for you if — and only if — you're ready to leave the feast-or-famine syndrome behind. And I mean for good.
ilise: So if I asked you how you're using AI these days, what would you say? If you asked me, I'd say: so many ways, besides having trained my own bot, Artificial ilise, which I make available to everyone in the Simplest Marketing Plan and to my one-on-one coaching clients. My own personal use is mostly indulging my curiosity — I also analyze feedback I get, and I use it as a strategic thinking partner to help determine next steps and directions for the business. But I don't actually use it for writing, because I like to write.
ilise: When I asked one of my coaching clients, Kate Purcell — a creative strategist and designer — she started sharing so many interesting ways that I had to bring her on the podcast to share them with you. In today's episode, we mostly talked about how she uses AI to do things she could never do before for her clients, but we also talked about how she uses it to streamline her own marketing process. Lots of actionable ideas here for you. So listen and learn.
ilise: Hello, Kate. Welcome to the podcast.
Kate Purcell: Hi, ilise, it's great to be here.
ilise: I'm so glad you're here. Before we launch into anything, go ahead and introduce yourself.
Kate Purcell: So I'm Kate Purcell. I'm a creative strategist and visual designer, and I work with social change organizations to help them communicate their impact.
ilise: Beautiful. How's business, Kate?
Kate Purcell: That's a good question. Good, I guess, is the basic answer. It's been a tough year — a year and a half, really — for social impact organizations. But my business is steady at the moment.
ilise: Say a little more about what exactly you do for these organizations.
Kate Purcell: I've really been leaning into the term "impact communications" lately. As a creative strategist, I do a lot of different things under the creative bucket. I've done a lot of work on impact reports over the past few years. I used to do a lot of websites — I still sometimes do them. I have several branding engagements right now. But really it all comes down to helping social impact organizations communicate — whether that's through a marketing piece, a report, or a website. I would've called myself a graphic designer 20 years ago, but now it's broader than that. It really comes down to helping them communicate, with a strong focus on the visual.
ilise: It's your business, but I know you have people who help you, and we're going to talk about how you're using AI to help you too. So before we get into that — without naming names — give a little context on what kind of help you already have, and then we'll add the AI layer.
Kate Purcell: Sure. I have partners and contractors. A couple of people are more partner-level — one specifically is a website developer, so we team up on projects where I handle strategy and design and he handles the technical development. I have some folks helping in more of an assistant or project-manager role — if we're working on a website, they might come in and add content or develop graphics. I also have other designers I hand work off to — say, on a report, I'll do the creative direction and they'll do a lot of the production work. Most of the time it's collaborative: I keep the high-level creative on track, and there's more detail-oriented work that others do. And then I have a couple of writers or strategists I work with on projects — I wouldn't call them part of my business, but they're part of my network.
ilise: Say more, if you would, about the evolution of calling yourself a "creative strategist" instead of just a graphic designer. I feel like that's a direction a lot of my clients are moving in, and yet they don't always feel comfortable using the word "strategist" because they didn't go to business school, or whatever they think they should have done to earn that word. How do you think about that, and what do you actually do with your clients?
Kate Purcell: It's funny — years ago I wrote a blog post about creative strategy, and the word "strategy" actually comes from war — people planning their campaigns, which is also a word that comes from the military. That was an interesting, if not the greatest, connection to realize. But really it's about setting a goal and being tactical. Actually, it's interesting you bring this up, because when I knew you wanted to talk about AI, I made a list of everything AI helps me with, and there's also "creative director" on it — although I think of a creative director as someone working more at a high concept level, like a big campaign to get everyone to drink more water, pulling together all these resources. That's part of why I don't usually use that term — I'm not working at that high-concept level.
Kate Purcell: I think of a strategist more like this: say we have a report. We have things we need to communicate, we've done the research, we know our audience and our content, but we need to figure out how to present it in an interesting way. A graphic designer might be more, "give me the content, tell me what you want, and I'll do it." With creative strategy, it's more like: you have an idea of what you want to say, but I might help you think about whether you really need all that content, or whether there's a piece that would make it more interesting — do you have a story? That's something you've helped me lean into over the years, ilise — bringing my own ideas to the clients I work with. That's why I use the term creative strategist. It's not a formal term, I don't think, but it's dancing around the idea of having a goal, working toward it, being creative about how you get there, and not just taking orders.
ilise: Right — that's the phrase that was coming to mind. You're more than an order-taker. A graphic designer, in the context you laid out, is the order-taker: give me the information, give me the content, I'll lay it out. As opposed to: here's the content, now let's decide how to use it to communicate the message.
Kate Purcell: Yes, exactly.
ilise: That makes a lot of sense. One more question about that — when you call yourself a creative strategist, do you think your clients know what that means? Do they care? Do they think that's what they need? What's that communication and positioning like?
Kate Purcell: That's a good question. I don't think they know what it means. I like using it because I want my clients to know, whether explicitly or implicitly, that I can do more for them. Most clients come to me the way they always have — they have an idea of what they want to do and need some help. They're not usually coming to me saying, "I have this goal, how do I get there" — I'd love more clients like that. Usually they have a pretty concrete idea: we need to release a report, we want to build a website, we need a new logo and brand. Sometimes the job is to open their eyes to what else they might need, or that they don't need what they think they need — but that's not the easiest thing to do.
ilise: Okay. So we're going to talk about AI, but I want to tee it up with an idea — not original to me, but everyone I respect who talks about AI frames it in a two-pronged way. One is efficiency-oriented, the other is opportunity-oriented. The easiest way to use AI is to let it help you be more efficient and productive in the things you're already doing — whether you or I use it that way is a choice, but that's the easy path, in my opinion. The part we haven't fully wrapped our minds around — because we still don't know what AI is actually capable of — is the opportunity-oriented side. Since that thought came to me, what's become clear is that AI can help you do things you could never do before. And when we were talking recently, you literally said that to me: "AI is helping me do things I could never do before." That's what turned the light bulb on for me — I'm always listening for a good podcast topic, and there it was.
ilise: So — feel free to back up and talk about your experience with AI and your take on it, but what I really want to get to is: how is it helping you do things you never could before, and what are those things?
Kate Purcell: It's funny, because being a visual designer, whenever I explain some of my use cases to people, they're surprised — a lot of people use AI for writing and thinking, and I do too, but I also use it for digital visual creation. Most people's day-to-day use is words. I think that efficiency-versus-opportunity framing is interesting — I'm definitely more interested in opportunity, because when I try to be more efficient with it, I usually just feel burned out. Have you heard the term "brain fry"? I definitely experience that when I try to be really efficient with AI — managing multiple AI tools, how fast they're all working, switching from project to project — it just feels horrible. I don't want to do that.
Kate Purcell: So here's my list of the things I feel excited about — because, like a lot of Americans, I sometimes have a doomsday feeling about AI too. One of the big ones: last year I was hired for one of my first solo illustration projects. I wouldn't call myself an illustrator, but I've always liked drawing, and I've done it occasionally for clients — though it's usually too time-consuming and they don't have the budget for it. I was hired for a specific illustration project, loved it, and so did the client. Maybe six months later I came across a tool called Exactly.ai — it takes your own illustrations as an illustrator, trains an AI on them, and generates new illustrations in your style. It was a thoughtful company — very focused on making sure the original artists retained copyright rather than having their work stolen. I experimented — it was a little expensive, but I treated it as an investment to see what it was about, and it blew my mind. I'd ask it to draw something in my style, after training it on about 15 images, and I actually felt a sense of ownership over the results — like I'd drawn it myself. It's weird.
ilise: In what way is that something you couldn't have done otherwise?
Kate Purcell: I think the big thing is cost. I'm not an illustrator for a reason — I enjoy it sometimes, but it's slow and painstaking, and it doesn't fit my personality that well. More importantly, my clients are mostly nonprofits and some social enterprises without big budgets — they'd rarely be able to afford illustration work at all. But I've been able to bring a lot of illustration into their projects, and not just in one style — I developed several styles, because it was fun. All I had to do was come up with 15 images in a certain style, and then I could ethically use that style for clients. They really like it. No one would have gotten those illustrations otherwise, because they couldn't have paid for it — it just wouldn't have happened. I think it adds value. This fits another way I've been thinking about AI when people complain it's "taking work away" — mostly what I see is that it's not taking work away that was getting done some other way. It's adding opportunities for work that never would have been affordable before.
ilise: Yes.
Kate Purcell: Here's another example — Claude Design came out a few months ago. When I do website projects, I create wireframes — a black-and-white sketch of what the site might look like, used to talk with the client about content and image sizing before it gets designed. When I first saw Claude Design, I thought, "oh my god, this is going to take my job — it's doing exactly what I do." But what I've found so far is that it helps me think through concepts I might have been a little too lazy to fully explore, because I also had to implement them. I'd think, "I don't know if I want to suggest this idea, because then I have to build it and show them what it looks like." Now I can just tell Claude Design to try something, and I get to see it too. I think it makes the ideas better, because it's not that I'm lazy — it's that testing an idea used to take five hours, which isn't affordable for me or the client. If it only takes ten minutes, we can quickly see whether it's a good idea, and then invest more time if it is. That's a thing that wouldn't have existed before and now does.
ilise: That connects back to the beginning of our conversation about being a creative strategist — it seems like it's helping you build out strategic ideas so you can see if they're worth investing in.
Kate Purcell: Yeah — although I try to be careful about brainstorming too much with AI, because I've read about and experienced this thing where it tends to "average things out." A lot of ideas that come out sound good to the user but are actually similar to everyone else's, in terms of concepting. But here's something I've been enjoying: I love doing project kickoffs. I always think of the start of a project like a treasure chest — you open it up, take everything out, ask lots of questions, put it all on the floor, and then my job is to put it back together into something. What's cool is I can record those conversations now, and AI can help with some of that work too.
Kate Purcell: Say we're doing a website, or a report on the web — I'll say, here are my ideas. One thing I try to do — I don't know if you do this, ilise — is ask AI to come up with ideas, then close or hide that window and come up with my own ideas separately, so I can compare them and make sure I'm not just relying on it. Frequently it doesn't come up with the ideas I come up with, for better or worse, but occasionally it does come up with something I think is genuinely good. It feels like having another staff member with different ideas — sometimes helpful, sometimes we merge them. Another nice thing: my brain can only hold a couple of things at once, but I don't miss things anymore. In the past, on a client call, I'd be scrambling to write everything down, or record and transcribe it. Now I don't have to worry about forgetting a detail — if a client says "make sure this is included," it doesn't get lost, because AI remembers it. That's a small thing, but not small in terms of time.
Kate Purcell: Another item on my list is proofing documents. I'm definitely not a details person, but I'm frequently required to be one — I might work on a 60-page PDF report through 15 rounds of revisions for an organization that's about to print it and send it to investors. Proofing something like that is hard. Now I can upload it and ask if there are any errors, and there always are. It's a small thing, but it saves me a lot of time — and it saves my clients time too, since they're not coming back to say "you missed something again."
ilise: And it makes you look better.
Kate Purcell: Exactly. One question I imagine people wonder is: if you can use AI this way, why couldn't your client just do it themselves and remove you from the equation?
ilise: Are you concerned about that?
Kate Purcell: Yes and no. Ezra Klein made an interesting point about this once — talking about his dermatologist. He said something like, "I don't have to talk to my dermatologist anymore, I just Google it all" — but then realized he actually does need to see the dermatologist for things he's not sure about. I think some of my clients probably are doing things themselves that they used to ask me to do — maybe something like a social media graphic — and honestly, if I'm not thinking about the money, that's a good thing; you should be able to make your own high-quality social graphics, assuming you're using AI well. But I do think people still have to make decisions and judgment calls, and AI doesn't seem to be great at that in my experience. It can do almost everything except have discernment.
ilise: Part of it might also be that it's just not consistent — sometimes it has discernment, sometimes none at all, because we don't fully understand how it works.
Kate Purcell: It's also very open to suggestion. So many times I've asked it for a piece of advice, gotten an answer, argued with it, and had it say "you're right" — and then I think, I can't really trust it to make good decisions if it's just going to cave to me every time. So I think for some things people will use it directly, and for others, maybe not — but there are days I do worry that someone will just take what it produces and plug it in without judgment. I'm not sure.
ilise: What else is on your list?
Kate Purcell: A small one — writing headlines. Clients often send me copy with mediocre or bad headlines, and writing good ones takes time and thought. If that's not part of the contract scope, I won't spend much time on it — but AI makes that process a lot faster. Of course, the client could do that themselves too, or maybe they're already trying and just don't have the discernment for it — not sure.
Kate Purcell: Another one is photo editing. Nonprofit clients — and I imagine a lot of small businesses too — often just don't have good photos. I was recently working with a client who had these really compelling stories about people they'd helped, but the photos were grainy with cluttered backgrounds. AI did a great job increasing the resolution, and then I removed the cluttered background and replaced it with a plain sky so we could put copy over it. It turned a low-quality but sweet photo into something that was a real visual asset. For my birthday recently, we took a photo Bonnie Fanning had taken of me and turned it into a birthday image — she did some AI magic and added this gorgeous scarf. I said, "I want that scarf — now you have to sell me that scarf."
ilise: But that's an example too — Bonnie was doing that for you. You could have done that yourself.
Kate Purcell: No, there's no way I'm doing that.
ilise: That's what I mean, though — everybody can't do everything either. This attitude is actually one of the most important things to be aware of, when you start feeling insecure about what AI will or won't do, can or can't do — because clients choose you, or me, or whoever, first because they like and trust that person, and because they don't want to deal with it themselves.
Kate Purcell: Exactly. I don't want to deal with my own images — I want someone else to do it.
ilise: Are you telling your clients you're using AI?
Kate Purcell: That's another important question. I want to normalize it, partly because I know some people aren't using AI, and I want my clients to feel the value they're still getting from me, even while I'm using it. It's almost the reverse of what you might expect — I want them to understand they're still getting value from my work on these things even though AI is involved.
ilise: How do they understand that?
Kate Purcell: I'm making the assumption that they don't necessarily know how to do all the things I'm doing — it also gives them the opportunity to say, "oh, I do that too" or "can you show me how?" Nobody's actually said that to me, but with proofing, for instance, I tell clients all the time, partly because I'm doing my best and I think it's where things are going. Being open about it opens up the relationship — if they're already privately wondering whether they could use AI for this themselves, they might feel comfortable raising that with me directly, instead of doing it behind my back because they assume I'm not using it.
ilise: When you tell them, is it before you deliver the work, after, or do you have something in your contract or on your website about it?
Kate Purcell: No, I don't have anything like that — I haven't really thought about formalizing it. Usually I just mention it in the moment: if I edit a photo, I'll say "I edited this," or "I used AI to write a batch of headlines, and these are the good ones." They can usually tell anyway. I had a client tell me recently about a time they used AI for a task, and when their own client found out, they were furious — so there are definitely clients out there who are against AI entirely and don't want anyone using it on their behalf. I think it's on both parties to discuss it in advance so that doesn't happen.
ilise: That's a good point.
Kate Purcell: Another way I've used AI — the last one on my client-work list — is with coding. I worked on a report recently that's my favorite I've ever done: an interactive online report. I wanted some cool interactive elements, and the client didn't have the budget to hire a specialized animation developer. I knew how to do some of it myself, but I used AI to help — for instance, wanting one element to slide at a different rate than elements on the left and right. It took some trial and error, but it helped me get there, and the end product was great. I can't imagine a client being annoyed that I used AI for coding — it's not something they'd expect to do themselves. They might get more annoyed about something like image editing, because they can see and evaluate that directly — and there's also a copyright question: who owns the copyright when AI is involved in making an image? I understand that's a real issue.
ilise: Interesting. Alright, we have a few more minutes, and I want to get to something you alluded to — that's the end of your client-work list. How are you using AI in your own business?
Kate Purcell: It helps me write proposals quickly, which is wonderful, because proposals can take a long time. I've honed my process, so I have a strong proposal template — sections about why I'm a good fit for a particular project, for instance — and I can ask AI to do a lot of that writing and tailor it to the specific situation. It removes a lot of busy work.
Kate Purcell: I also use it — and I'm still figuring this piece out — for identifying people I want to work with. I remember when I first started working with you, ilise, one of the light-bulb moments was realizing I could go to membership-organization websites for the kinds of clients I want and research who might be a fit. AI can do a lot of that now. I started letting it actually take actions on my computer, rather than just chatting with it — now if someone seems interesting, or I come across something relevant, I'll just say, "add this to my list of people to reach out to," and it'll add it to my Notion list and do some research too. It's amazing what it can do — if I send it a LinkedIn profile, it can search the web, find out what company someone works for, what they do — a lot of detail that would otherwise be legwork.
ilise: Is that Claude you're using for that?
Kate Purcell: That's Claude — I only use Claude right now, except for the image generation work.
ilise: Why Claude? What do you like about it?
Kate Purcell: It seems like a better company, for one thing — Anthropic. I used ChatGPT for a while and felt Claude was much better at thinking things through and generating ideas. I don't know, I just like it.
ilise: I personally don't think it matters much — it's whichever one you like and that gets to know you.
Kate Purcell: I did have a breakthrough recently, though. Jenny Blake runs office hours for learning about AI, and I'd been using Claude for about a year without realizing you could create markdown files.
ilise: Tell us what that is.
Kate Purcell: Basically a simple, structured version of information about your business that the AI can quickly read. I built a whole business profile that way — it took about a week of work, a lot of time talking to Claude about my business — but now I have this file, and I make sure that whenever I'm discussing something important, it's actually read that file, because it doesn't always do so automatically. You'd think it would, but it doesn't.
ilise: How do you know whether it has?
Kate Purcell: I just ask it — "have you read it?" And it'll say, "no, let me read it now."
ilise: Oh my god, that's what's weird about it.
Kate Purcell: I remember working on things and it would forget details about my business, asking "what's your business again?" — and I'd think, I'm losing my mind here. But now, with the file, it remembers and has a lot of detail about my goals, so it's a lot more helpful. Learning about that was a great find.
ilise: All right — any final thoughts or suggestions about anything we've talked about?
Kate Purcell: The only other thing I wrote down is that it's a little odd, in this moment, that it's not human. Every time I start to want it to be — not that I actually want a relationship with it, but I catch myself starting to act like it's human — it just keeps not being that. I think that's a real limitation, maybe not permanent, but it can't yet give you that feeling of genuine collaboration. It can do tasks, make amazing things, consolidate information and find patterns — but that human feeling of collaboration, you can't get from a machine right now. I think that's where our value still is.
ilise: Yeah, I agree. Okay, final question for you, Kate. A couple of months ago you sent me a message that articulated something I think a lot of people are feeling, and I shared it in one of my office hours for the Simplest Marketing Plan. I want to read it back to you and see if you still feel this way, or what other thoughts you've had since then.
ilise: You wrote — and this was beautiful — "It feels like all of humanity is walking in a dark tunnel with a light at the end, ready to spill out into another world, but we have no idea what is there and what we might need to have when we get there. The only thing that I feel certain of investing in is people and relationships, and the strength of my own mind, I suppose." What would you say about that now?
Kate Purcell: It's funny — I was having a conversation just last night about being on a tidal wave, about the pace of change generally, not just AI. We were saying we don't know if this tidal wave is about to crash, or if we're going to ride this long surfboard for a while — but the quality of the unknown right now is pretty intense. Whatever happens, though, we're social creatures — we need each other, we love each other. I think AI, in a way, makes me want to lean even more into human relationships, and into meditation, and into my own mind.
ilise: I love that — "the strength of my own mind, I suppose." I remember writing back, "oh, for sure — the strength of your own mind."
Kate Purcell: Yeah.
ilise: Alright, Kate, thank you so much. Tell people where they can find you online.
Kate Purcell: You can go to kpcreativestrategy.com — that's my website — and I'm on LinkedIn as well. I also just started my own podcast — I'm a fledgling podcaster — it's called Messy Beautiful Impact. It's about having conversations around impact, pretty broadly defined. I work in the social impact space, so there are a lot of nonprofit and foundation voices, and a focus on the complexity and messiness of that work.
ilise: Let's connect that to what you just said — everyone's got a podcast these days, and even when I suggest to people that they start one, the first thing they say is "but everybody has a podcast." It's not like you need advertising on it — I don't have or want any ads on mine. It's just an opportunity to have great conversations with people who practice what I preach, or who have something interesting to share, and then share those conversations publicly. I know that's part of what's behind your impulse to do this too — what would you say?
Kate Purcell: Yeah, the term I keep coming back to is "generative conversations" — I really believe that when two humans get together and talk, and there's rapport, these beautiful, unpredictable things emerge. That's why I like listening to podcasts of people just talking about anything — it's genuinely beautiful. For me, it's definitely a response to AI right now — like I was saying earlier, AI is helping with everything but is also missing something. I'm not saying AI is bad, but it's made me realize how important these human conversations really are. And yes, everybody has a podcast — there's a guy, Pete Holmes, who has a podcast with his wife, and his idea is that it's basically a relationship hack: if your relationship is in trouble, start a podcast with your partner. So I think it's just a medium — a creative tool.
ilise: Awesome. Alright, thank you again, Kate — I'm sure we'll have another conversation.
Kate Purcell: Great, thanks, ilise.
ilise: Did you learn a little something? Do you have new, innovative ways you're using AI to do things you could never do before? If so, I hope you'll reach out to me — maybe you'll be a guest on the podcast too. And if you want help figuring all of this out, take advantage of my free mentoring session. You can find that, and lots more resources including the Simplest Marketing Plan, at marketing-mentor.com. Enjoy, and I'll see you next time.