For my third consultation, I visited Jeff's, a vintage clothing store in downtown SLO. The store opened in September of 2024. The owner, Jeff, is 30 years old and is passionate about the mission of his business: "I have a passion for vintage clothing and trying to eliminate fast fashion in the clothing world. I think it's a big problem – caring about the climate is a core value of our business and helped ignite my flame for entrepreneurship." Jeff worked in the creative space prior to opening Jeff's, primarily focused on video production. Jeff is optimistic about the future of AI: "I use ChatGPT slightly, I think it's sick; it's the future. I think it's funny that schools hate it so much." Sidetrack – I really agree. From a student's perspective, it's clear that AI has been mismanaged in schools thus far. It has been more than two years since ChatGPT became one of the most popular consumer technologies, yet there have been no noticeable changes in class curriculums to reflect the new capabilities that we've been armed with. It's like we're playing basketball on Fisher-Price hoops. Moving on…
I was excited that Jeff was open to experimenting with these tools. Through the Claude-assisted discovery process (using the system prompt in the materials section), I learned that a significant portion of Jeff's day-to-day responsibilities involve digital tasks, mostly inputting information into shopify and making sure his online inventory stays current. I have never used Shopify, but Jeff was able to show me what this process looks like. I was surprised to learn that there's already a number of AI features integrated into Shopify e.g, a GenAI product description tool, and a sales analysis dashboard that creates visualizations related to product performance. In these cases, it seems like using an external AI tool would be unnecessary.
Jeff spends a lot of time managing his employees. Jeff considers all of his in store employees to be a part of his "team of marketers" – everybody that works at the store plays a part in maintaining Jeff's active social media presence by creating content. Jeff has hired a full-time social media manager to keep things running smoothly. I asked Jeff if he ever has considered managing social media himself: "I certainly have a hard time delegating away all of the social media work because of my background in video – I still spend time coming up with new ideas." I then gave Claude the persona of a "social media strategist specializing in local business marketing in the San Luis Obispo area" and requested Claude to create a two week schedule for social media posts. We assisted Claude in this process by adding some more relevant details (remember, context is key): "I am looking to create short form content on Instagram, our content is targeted toward Cal Poly students." Jeff saw some value here: "I can see how Claude could be used as a brainstorming buddy." Exactly – now that Claude has spent some time getting to understand Jeff and his business, it is much more effective in creating outputs that may actually be useful. This is what I hope clients see after these sessions.
During the discovery process, Claude asked Jeff if he experiences any challenges in business communications: "I spend some time texting employees and maintaining relationships with returning customers, but I wouldn't describe this as any sort of pain point." Claude then suggested, by itself, that it could help create newsletters for customers that have purchased from Jeff's. Jeff hasn't considered creating a members only newsletter, but he acknowledged that this was a "good idea." Based on the fact that Jeff doesn't struggle with business communications, and given the nature of retail, Claude saw an opportunity for Jeff's to enhance customer relationships. This wasn't Claude simply acting as a brainstorming partner, this seems to be at least a step above that - Claude engaged in actual strategic business thinking by connecting relevant information to generate meaningful recommendations.
At about 20 minutes into the session, we said goodbye to our friend Claude and said hello to CCP agent, DeepSeek. I wanted to enable DeepSeeks search feature to conduct a competitive analysis (Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, has announced publicly that a search feature is coming soon, so I won't have to continue using DeepSeek!). The competitive analysis was interesting – DeepSeek conducted an entire SWOT analysis in about 10 seconds of four competitors, two of which Jeff had never heard of. I think a lot of this information is valuable. As someone who is used to communicating with AI systems, I've noticed that I take some of these outputs for granted. I think I can be quick to move on to the next prompt when it may be wise to spend some time letting the client grasp what's in front of them.
I ended this session demonstrating Claude's beta version of computer use. This has kind of become my grand finale if you will. I showed Jeff how fast Claude could begin clicking around in Shopify with just one prompt. As mentioned earlier, Jeff spends a lot of time in Shopify, so a tool that could automate this for him would be "game-changing." I think the theme of these sessions so far have been consistent: letting AI gather lots of context about your business + growth in your prompting skills = noticeable improvements in performance, which leads to more practical ways in which AI can help your business. At its current stage, AI might still be somewhat limited; they aren't magic boxes that can solve all your problems, but, if you are skilled at working with these tools, I promise that you will see real productivity gains. And it's best to start now – the slight productivity gains you notice today will turn into massive productivity gains as new features and versions of these models continue to drop every couple of months. I sent Jeff a follow up email thanking him for his time and highlighting some of the tools/prompts we used. I don't think it'll be long until I see Jeff again though – I saw a vintage Seahawks hat in there that I just might have to cop. #GoHawks