Stop Using AI Like a Search Engine — Build a Flywheel Instead

[00:00:00] For years, my inbox was basically mission control. Every project, every deliverable, every follow-up, it all lived in email. But something shifted. And I don't mean I found a better email app. I mean the entire center of gravity for how I get work done literally moved. It moved into my conversations with artificial intelligence. And here's what nobody is talking about yet. The more you work inside these tools, the smarter they get about your business, about your personal brand, your voice. And it compounds.

[00:00:29] I call it the AI workflow flywheel. And once it starts spinning, it changes everything about how you should be approaching your marketing. I'm going to break down exactly how it works, the two mistakes that keep most marketers from experiencing it, and how you can start building your own this week. So make sure you stay tuned for this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast. Social Media Content Influencer Marketing Blogging Podcasting Vlogging TikTok LinkedIn Twitter

[00:00:59] Facebook Instagram YouTube SEO SEM PPC Email Marketing Whew! There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice.

[00:01:16] Good thing you've got Neil on your side. Because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neil Schaefer.

[00:01:40] Hey everybody, this is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schaefer. And welcome to another episode of my podcast. Your home for anything and everything digital content influencer and social media marketing and generative AI and AI. All the digital threads you need to cover in order to be successful with your business. Leveraging digital and social media and AI at the heart of it.

[00:02:02] This is the magical episode number 44444444. And today, I want to talk about something that has fundamentally changed how I run my business, how I create content, how I even prepare for speaking engagements, how I serve my consulting clients. I mean, really, how I do everything. I'm calling it the AI workflow flywheel. And the reason I'm bringing this to you now is because I think most digital marketers, entrepreneurs, business owners are still thinking about AI the wrong way.

[00:02:32] Maybe they're thinking about AI. Maybe they're thinking about AI. Maybe they're thinking about it as a tool you use sometimes. I want you to start thinking about it as the place where your work actually happens. By the end of this episode, you're going to understand what this flywheel is, why it accelerates over time, and how you can start building your own today. All right, so let's start with how we got here. Think about how you've organized your work life, at least I have, for the last, I don't know, 15, 20 years. For most of us, the inbox became the default

[00:03:00] operating system for our professional lives, right? You wake up, you check email, someone sends you a brief, you reply, a client asks for a proposal, you start drafting in a doc and email it over. Everything flows, at least in my case, and maybe yours through that inbox. It's not that anyone designed it that way. It just kind of happened over time, right? Email became the touchpoint where work lived, whether it's Gmail or Outlook.

[00:03:25] Now, I'm not saying email is dead. Email is still a critically important touchpoint, as we know from a marketing perspective. But what I've realized, and I mean this in the most practical, non-hype way possible, is that my conversation history inside AI Tools has become an even more important touchpoint. And I think that's a completely different paradigm, in my honest opinion. And here's what I mean. When I open up Claude, which is my preferred tool these days, I'm not just asking a quick question anymore.

[00:03:51] I'm looking at my projects. I'm looking at what am I working on? What project might I have forgotten about? What strategic initiatives I should be prioritizing? And then I'm asking, are there more efficient ways I should be doing this? Is there a better angle for this presentation? Did I miss something in this content strategy? That is not how people used to think about AI. It's not, hey, write me a blog post. That is using AI as a workspace, as a thinking partner, as the hub where your best work gets developed.

[00:04:21] Either way, your inbox tells you what other people need from you. Your AI workspace helps you figure out what you should be doing for your business. It's a very, very different posture. One is reactive. The other is proactive. And as marketers, as business owners, we need to be spending more time in that proactive space, right? The data backs this up. Jasper released their State of AI and Marketing Report for 2026, where they surveyed 1,400 marketers.

[00:04:48] And they found that 91% of marketers are now actively using AI in their work in some capacity. 91%. So adoption is basically universal at this point. And I'm assuming if you're a listener of this podcast, you are digging deep into AI as I'm speaking. But here's where it gets really interesting. And this is the gap I want you to pay attention to.

[00:05:09] The CMO survey, which is run by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in partnership with Deloitte and the Marketing Association, want to throw that all out there, found that generative AI is currently deployed across only about 15% of actual marketing activities. 15%. So 91% of marketers say they're using AI, but it's only touching a fraction of their actual work.

[00:05:34] That tells me the vast majority of marketers are still treating it like a one-off tool, a fancy search engine, a writing assistant you open when you're stuck. And that means they're leaving an enormous amount of value on the table. Now I know some of you might be thinking, but Neil, I use ChatGPT all the time. I'm not leaving value on the table. And I hear you. But there's a difference between using AI frequently and actually integrating it into how you work. Frequency is not the same as integration.

[00:06:03] And that's really what the AI workflow flywheel is all about. So what is this flywheel that I keep talking about? Well, let me break it down for you. I like to think of it this way. You know how a flywheel works, right? It's a heavy wheel that's hard to get spinning at first. You push and push and it barely moves. But once it gets going, its own natural momentum keeps accelerating. Each push adds to the last one.

[00:06:27] If you've read Good to Great by Jim Collins, one of the best-selling business books of all time, he made this flywheel concept famous. He even wrote a follow-up book just about it called Turning the Flywheel. And I think it perfectly describes what happens when you start organizing your work inside AI conversations and projects instead of just asking one-off questions and having tons of one-off conversations. Here's how it works in practice. There are really four stages to this flywheel. Number one, you start a conversation.

[00:06:57] You bring a project, a problem, a strategy question into your AI tool. Maybe it's a content calendar for next quarter. Maybe it's a LinkedIn strategy for a client. Maybe it's preparing for a keynote. Whatever it is, you're putting context into the system. You're uploading documents. You're explaining your brand, your voice. You're sharing your goals and objectives. This is the initial push. And yes, this part takes effort. Not going to sugarcoat it, right? Front-loading the context takes time. But it's an investment, not a cost.

[00:07:27] Number two, the AI learns your context. And I don't mean in some vague futuristic way. I mean right now today, these tools remember. In my case, I use Cloud extensively. And what I've noticed is that with every conversation, it gets to know me just that much better. It can pull from previous conversations. It remembers my frameworks, my preferences, my voice, my brand positioning. So even when I start a brand new project, I often have to give less information to get a better answer. That is the flywheel starting to spin.

[00:07:56] And I think a lot of other heavy AI users have also already experienced this. It's that moment when you ask yourself, how does Cloud or Chachapiti know me this well? And the answer is because you've been feeding the flywheel even if you didn't realize it. Number three, you get better output faster. Because the AI already understands your context, your business, your audience, your style. The quality of what it produces goes up. And the time it takes to produce that goes down.

[00:08:25] You're not starting from scratch every time. There's this idea repurposing happening in the background where insights from one project inform the next. It's like having a team member who is in every meeting, read every document, and remembers all of it perfectly. When have you ever had that, right? You haven't. That is an absolute superpower that I want you all to experience. Number four is you reinvest that time savings. You take that extra time, and it can be significant. We're talking hours per week.

[00:08:53] And you put it back into more strategic work, more creative work, more human work, which generates even more context for the flywheel. And the cycle continues, each revolution faster than the last. Let me give you a real example from my own work. I'm preparing for some upcoming speaking engagements right now. In the old world, I would start from scratch each time. Pull up old slide decks. Try to remember what I'd said at previous events. Manually customize for each audience. It was time consuming.

[00:09:22] And honestly, I was probably forgetting things or missing connections between ideas. Now, the AI is reminding me of things I've talked about, things I've uploaded, things I've written in the past that I'd honestly forgotten about in some cases. It's helping me develop my content better and faster. And here's the really practical part for those of you who speak at events or even present to clients or in internal meetings. I've always customized my presentations for every speaking engagement. That's something I've prided myself on.

[00:09:51] It's part of my brand and my value. But I can now do this to a much higher degree with a higher quality product and in significantly less time. The personalization that used to take me hours now takes a fraction of that because the flywheel has been accumulating context about my frameworks, my examples, my audience insights, all of it. That is the power of the flywheel. It's not just faster, it's better, and it keeps getting better. And that's what truly excites me about this. We are still in the early days.

[00:10:20] All right. So now you understand the concept. Let's talk about why most people aren't experiencing this. Because I think there are two big mistakes I see over and over again with the way that marketers use AI. Mistake number one, treating AI as a one-off tool instead of building a system. By far the most common one. People open ChatGPT, they ask it to write a social media caption, they copy-paste, close tab.

[00:10:45] It's like having a brilliant marketing consultant on retainer and only calling them once a month to proofread an email. You're not even scratching the surface. The flywheel only works if you commit to working inside the tool consistently. That means, and this is important, instead of just asking for quick outputs, you start building projects. You set up project instructions. You upload relevant files. You develop conversations over time rather than starting new ones for every single question.

[00:11:15] And you provided feedback to help it improve itself. Think of it like the difference between texting a friend, a random question, versus actually sitting down and having a strategic working session with a trusted advisor. Same technology, completely different outcomes. And I see this a lot when I teach my AI content creation workshops. Students come in thinking AI is about writing the perfect prompt. And look, prompting matters.

[00:11:40] If you've been following my advice from Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth, where I introduced the Ask Neo framework, well, that was really meant as a starting point, a great way to get your feet wet and optimize those initial conversations, especially if you are a beginner. But once those conversations start going and evolving, once you start creating projects and developing instructions and dropping in files,

[00:12:03] that framework becomes less about the individual prompt and more about the entire ecosystem you're building around your work. That's the evolution. It's moving from prompt engineering to what some people are now calling context engineering. And I think that shift is fundamental. All right, mistake number two, being over-reliant on a single AI tool without ever trying others. Now, this might surprise some of you because I just finished telling you to commit to one tool.

[00:12:32] But I want you to hear me out because there is a nuance here. I'm a big advocate for going deep with one tool. I already talked about that. But I also think it's a mistake not to understand the landscape. And here's why. Now, I've talked about this before. I use a tool called Typing Mind, which allows me to send the same prompt to multiple AI models at once and compare the responses side by side.

[00:12:53] It was actually going through this process, seeing how Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and others each responded to the same request, the same prompt, that I started to see the real strengths and weaknesses of each model depending on the type of task. Some are better at creative content and visual. Some are better at data analysis. Some are better at following nuanced instructions. Some are better at maintaining a consistent voice over long conversations. And it's one of the reasons I ended up shifting a lot of my work from ChatGPT to Claude.

[00:13:23] Because for my specific workflows, like content creation, strategic thinking, maintaining my voice across different projects, Claude was consistently producing better results. Now, that's my experience. Your experience might be different. The point isn't which model is best. I'm not going to cheerlead and, you know, evangelize one over the other. But the point is that you won't know which one is best for you until you compare all of them. So my advice is this. Experiment early, then commit.

[00:13:50] Spend a week or two testing different tools with the same types of tasks. See which one resonates with how you work and then go all in on that one. Because here's the key. The flywheel only builds momentum if you're consistently feeding one system with your context and your work. If you keep switching between different AI platforms for the same types of tasks, you're essentially starting that flywheel from zero every single time. You lose all that accumulated context, all that memory, all that momentum.

[00:14:18] It's like training a new employee every month instead of investing in the one you already have. And the research supports this idea that it's not about the tool, it's what you put into it. But NVIDIA released their state of AI report just this month. And they found that 53% of business respondents said improved employee productivity was the single biggest AI impact or the biggest impact that AI had on their operations.

[00:14:43] But the same report also found the number one challenge cited by 48% of these same responders was data-related issues. Not model capability, not cost, but data. And I think for individual marketers and business owners, that translates directly to this. The productivity gains only come when you're feeding the system the right information consistently. The flywheel is only as powerful as the context that you give it. Okay, so now the practical part. How do you actually start to build this?

[00:15:13] Because I don't want this to be one of those episodes where you go, well, that was interesting. And then go back to doing exactly what you were doing before you put those headphones on or you went on your drive. I want you to take action this week. Here's your challenge, your homework, and I'm going to keep it simple. I want you to find one workflow, something you work on regularly. Maybe it's weekly, monthly, daily, doesn't matter. It could be your content calendar. It could be your email newsletter. It could be client reporting, internal work.

[00:15:41] If you're allowed to use AI for it, it could be social media scheduling. It could be your SEO keyword research. I'm throwing out lots of ideas for you here. Whatever it is, I want you to take that one thing and begin a conversation in your AI tool of choice about how to make that work either better or get it done faster. That's it. That's the starting point. Don't try to move your entire operation in the AI overnight. That is a recipe for overwhelm. Trust me. Start with one thing. And let me walk you through what that actually looks like because I think it helps to be specific.

[00:16:11] Let's say your one thing is your weekly LinkedIn content. True story. Instead of opening a blank document and staring at it, you start a conversation. You say something like, here's my business. Here's my audience. Here's my brand voice. Here's what I've been posting that's been performing well. And here's my goal for the next quarter. Help me develop a content strategy. And then let's create the first week of posts together.

[00:16:34] You might even upload some of your top performing posts so the AI can see what's working and maybe what's not working if you have poorly performing posts. Now, that first conversation might take you a little while. It might take you an hour. I don't know. It might take you longer than writing that post yourself would have. And that's okay because you're not just creating content. You're establishing that flywheel, right? You're making the initial investment of time and context.

[00:16:58] So next week, when you come back to that same project, that same conversation thread, all of that context is already there. The AI already knows your brand, your audience, and your voice and what's been working. Now you're building on top of a foundation instead of starting from zero. Week three, it's even faster. Week four, you're not just getting posts. You're getting strategic suggestions you might not have thought of before because the AI now has enough context about your business and, you know, the data you share with it to start making connections you might have missed.

[00:17:28] That is the flywheel in action. And honestly, that's when it gets fun. That's when it stops feeling like you're using a tool and starts feeling like you're working with a collaborator. And that truly is what AI is about. And here's where it really gets exciting for digital marketers specifically. Once you have this flywheel going for one workflow, you start to see opportunities everywhere. Your content strategy conversation starts informing your email marketing. Your client research starts feeding into your presentation prep. Your LinkedIn strategy starts connecting to your SEO approach.

[00:17:58] Believe it or not, the walls between your different marketing activities and silos in some cases start to come down because the AI is seeing all of it and drawing connections if you allow it to. So remember, AI remembers better than we do. I'm finding that as I prepare for these upcoming presentations, these AI is reminding me of things I might have talked about or uploaded or written in the past that I forgot about.

[00:18:22] And it's helping me develop my content better and faster, allowing me for a more personalized approach for everything I do. My presentations, my consulting work, my newsletter, and yes, even this podcast. Everything gets better because the flywheel keeps spinning.

[00:18:37] Everything gets better than what I would have gotten just a few months ago because the flywheel has been building context the entire time. Now, I want to address something because I know it's on a lot of people's minds.

[00:19:03] In 2025, everybody was talking about how it was going to be the year of agentic AI. AI agents that can go out and do tasks autonomously. AI automation that connects your tools together. All of that. And look, that's coming. It's real. It's already here for some businesses and some people. But here's what I want you to understand.

[00:19:28] Something you can start building right now today with the tools that already exist just by changing how you use them. No fancy automation, no setup, no coding, no complex integrations. Just you having deeper, more consistent conversations with AI about your actual work. And this is the beautiful part.

[00:19:46] When you start building this flywheel now, when those agentic AI tools do become more practical and accessible, and they will, you're going to be in an incredibly strong position to leverage them because you'll already have your processes, your workflows, your context living inside these AI systems. The agents will have something to work with, literally. The people who are still treating AI as a one-off tool at that point, well, they're going to be strambling to catch up.

[00:20:13] So think of the flywheel as both an immediate productivity win and a long-term strategic advantage. You're getting value today and positioning yourself for what's next. So to make this really concrete, here is a five-step action plan that I developed for you for this week. Step one, pick your one workflow, the thing you do regularly that takes up meaningful time. Step two, open a dedicated conversation or project in your AI tool of choice. Step three, front load the context.

[00:20:43] Upload files, explain your business, share your goals, describe your audience, give it everything it needs to understand your world and the world of your business. Step four, work through that workflow collaboratively with the AI. Don't just ask for an output. Have a back and forth. Pushing the ideas, refine together. Step five, the one most people skip, come back to that same conversation or project next time instead of starting fresh. That is how the flywheel builds. That's how the momentum compounds.

[00:21:11] So let me bring this all together one last time. The AI workflow flywheel is this idea that when you stop treating AI as a one-off tool and start treating it as the workspace where your projects actually live, something fundamental changes. The AI accumulates context about your business, your brand, your audience, your preferences. And with every conversation, every project, every file you share, the output gets better and faster. It compounds. It is a flywheel. Two mistakes to avoid.

[00:21:41] One, treating AI as a one-off tool instead of building a system around it. And two, bouncing between platforms without committing to one long enough to build that momentum. Experiment early, then commit. And finally, your homework. Find one workflow this week. Bring it into an AI conversation. Front load the context. Start building. That is the power of the AI workflow flywheel for digital marketing and really for anything. And I want each of you to experience it as soon as possible.

[00:22:10] Now, if you want to go deeper on how AI intersects with your overall digital marketing strategy, well, that is exactly what I cover in Digital Threads. And if you're specifically looking to level up your LinkedIn game using AI, check out Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth. That's where you'll find the Ask Neil framework I mentioned, which is a great starting point if you're new to working with AI. Both of these are available wherever fine books are sold.

[00:22:35] And if you want to be the first to hear about new frameworks, new insights, and episodes like this one before they drop, make sure you head over to neilshafer.com slash newsletter and subscribe. I share things there that I don't always get to share in the podcast. And it's really the best way to stay plugged in to everything that I am working on. All right. I hope you are as excited about this AI workflow flywheel as I am. So all this stuff to say is I look forward to hearing from you.

[00:23:03] Did this episode have impact? Are you already building a flywheel or are you going to start to build it today? Feel free to reach out to me. I'd love to hear from my listeners. Find me on all the socials. Or email me, neil at neilshafer.com. I am the real Neil. N-E-A-L-S-C-H-A-F-F-E-R dot com. Well, thanks again for tuning in. This is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schaefer, signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach.

[00:23:32] Questions, comments, requests, links? Go to podcast.neilshafer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilshafer.com. To tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community. If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach. This is the second one. This is the development coach.

[00:24:02] This is the alternate one. We'll be right back.