The AI Advantage: How Freelancers and Solopreneurs Can Thrive in the Age of AI

In this episode of Second Act Freelance, host Judson Voss explores the transformative potential of artificial intelligence for freelancers and solopreneurs. The discussion covers how AI can enhance project management, scheduling, and content creation. Judson also delves into the broader shifts in hiring practices and new business opportunities that AI can provide. Key tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and various management systems are highlighted for their role in improving efficiency and profitability. Listeners are encouraged to embrace AI, adapt to changes, and leverage their unique skills for greater success in freelancing.

Visit SecondActFreelance.com for more resources including our free ebook, Success in Your Second Act.

00:00 Introduction to AI in Freelancing 
02:23 Understanding AI Tools for Freelancers 
05:13 AI Benefits in Project Management and Scheduling 
10:29 Leveraging AI for Content Creation 
14:45 Future Opportunities and Challenges with AI 
25:42 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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Transcript

Welcome to Second Act Freelance, the podcast where we dive into the dynamic world of freelancing and solopreneurship, helping you navigate your second act with confidence and success. I'm your host, Judson Voss, and in today's episode, we're exploring an incredibly exciting and relevant topic, the positives of AI acceleration, specifically for freelancers and solopreneurs.

Now I've got two or three more episodes in the wings to talk about how AI and freelancing, uh, sort of where they're going, but, and we'll brush on those briefly today, but there's some even more exciting things I think happening with AI that the entrepreneurial types listening in will want to dig deeper into artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming industries across the globe, as everybody knows.

And while some may fear the changes it brings, it's not Today, we're going to focus on the opportunities that it offers, especially for independent workers like us or folks that want to become independent workers. From boosting efficiency with AI tools to, I think, new work paradigms that are definitely going to favor freelancers, we're going to cover all that.

So grab your favorite notes app and let's dive into the future of freelancing powered by AI.

Before we get started, if you find this information interesting, I would love it if you head on over to iTunes, Spotify, or wherever it is you're listening to the podcast and rate us, highly preferably, but honestly, it's a great All the same and also subscribe to this podcast. So you're automatically updated when new episodes come out.

And then also if, if you'd like more information about becoming a freelancer in your second act, head on over to secondactfreelance. com. And there is an ebook there. You can pick that up and go through eight different steps on discerning if freelancing is for you. Number one. And then number two, leveraging your experience and your years working in your industry or doing your job to become a freelancer to, to provide some flexibility in your schedule and hopefully to increase your financial security too.

So that's second act freelance. com.

I think to, to start with probably, it doesn't hurt to talk a little bit about, um, AI in the freelance world and just AI in general. I, I was, and the reason I say that is because I was surprised that I, I should back up. I, I use chat, GPT and other AI tools. I, I all day, every day. Maybe not every single thing I do, but a lot of things that I do.

I use it for. And so I was surprised when I saw a study the other day that says that about 27 percent of professionals currently at least dabble in using AI to make their jobs more efficient or get more work done. That type of thing. Which obviously means there's 73 percent of the folks that aren't. So I thought maybe it's a good idea that we start at the beginning and talk a little bit about AI, AI tools, and then very briefly developments there.

Um, specifically when it comes to freelancers and solopreneurs, things that we should be paying attention to. I think when we'll talk a little bit more as far as the obvious benefits in a minute, but understanding. New things that are coming down the pipe, the way that some of these large language models are changing the tools like chat, GPT and Claude, and those things are getting better at not just providing information.

And that's what you always hear about the accuracy piece of it, but also how they're interacting with us and becoming less of a type something and figure out how to be a prompt engineer, which is crazy when you think about how quickly AI is moving, there was going to be a job that was a prompt engineer.

And now AI is. Figuring out how to be its own prompt engineer by having a conversation with you, which actually makes sense because when you say it's a chat that it really should be a conversation and not a prompt, uh, an engineered prompt. But anyways, it is moving that quickly that it's becoming less about just knowing how to ask the models.

What you're looking for, but actually having conversations with them. And so, um, it's sort of the speed of light right now in the landscape and AI technology, but in general, most sort of free platform things like chat, GPT and Claude, and there's plenty of others, co pilot and so on and so forth. They allow you to ask questions and get responses and do things with those tools.

And then there's other on platform tools that, um, Say again, copilot packaged up in a Microsoft product, allow you to do things within existing other tools that are being enhanced with artificial intelligence from inside there. So, those are sort of the way I look at the 2 different areas. For AI.

Now let's talk a little bit. I would call the obvious benefits, but the things that stand out first that when you, when you stop and ask yourself, how can I use AI to be a better or more efficient freelancer? Um, number one, and I've got about three of them here, but number one is project management.

There's tools. Um. Touches us on a Trello Monday, those types of things that you see out there, uh, that, that allow you to, to manage your projects. But there's also other tools that are coming out that are solely AI tools that help you manage your product projects in your time too. But within those tools, the, the sonas, the trellis, the Mondays, et cetera, of the world, they are integrating artificial intelligence.

So many of the tasks that you used to do, and I'm going to say this also, many of the things you had to learn how to do on those platforms. Are being replaced with artificial intelligence. I mentioned that because I think that's a big piece, the how to, that it used to be that you could have sort of a leverage or a leg up on things because you sat down and you learned how to use a Trello really well, and because you learned how to use it really well, you can manage your projects well.

That is changing very quickly and people can come to tools and these tools are now using artificial intelligence to help you get up and going quicker instead of having to know what menu to go to, what item to pick, what to click and the options, the check boxes and so on and so forth. They are changing to the fact that now you say what you want to do and the tool goes through and finds the menu item and clicks on it and so on and so forth.

And I think that is a big deal, not just project management tools or even other software tools, but understanding where the benefits of AI may lead for everything across the board is being able to do those things. The other piece too, and also to be honest, what things it may be displacing that people are getting paid to do today.

Another area that's an obvious benefit to freelancers going along with the project management is scheduling. There's a bunch on platform like the Calendly's and the Google calendars and stuff that have AI tools that are now being able to help you manage your schedule to put the best things first and figure out times for things.

But there's also dedicated applications now that integrate with your Google calendar and other calendars. That allow you to do the same thing. It's sort of like asking what is the greatest and best and most profitable use of my time and set up my schedule in that manner. You may not have a lot of clients right now.

You may not have varying rates on clients, but even I can see. Being able to say, look, this client pays me this much. This one pays me a little less. This one pays me even less than that. And obviously I want to do all the work, but I want to optimize my profitability when it comes to those rates. So help me schedule the things in that are the most profitable, the highest paying first.

And work through the rest as they go totally valid. And while you could do it before, it took a lot of time and energy to think through that. And you could use artificial intelligence tools to do that for you today. Um, probably one of the biggest ones that I find useful is being able to use things like this to automatically reschedule meetings two ways.

Um, and hear me out of this number one. Um, as far as rescheduling meetings, you know how people constantly reach out to you, you schedule a meeting and hopefully more than five minutes before, but sometimes not, they will reach out and say, Hey, I can't make it. Can we do it another day? Here's the times I have available.

So, and so forth. You know how that is when you add in a group of people. Now, you've made it exponentially more difficult and time consuming to figure out how to reschedule that meeting. There's a lot of tools in these, in these sort of AI scheduling tools that are making it so it does the work for you.

And you don't have to doesn't mean there's not back and forth still. It means you're not involved in the back and forth. I think that's immensely important when it comes to project management and, and meeting scheduling the other part. And this is the part that I want you to hear me out. I'm going back to that best use of your time.

There's just going to be times. When you have meetings coming up in the next day, hopefully not the next hour that, um, there's other things you could be doing that are more profitable, better for your time. Maybe even just need to get done sooner because of a deadline or something, being able to use artificial intelligence to let it do that work, to be the one now saying, Hey, I turns out I can't meet at that time.

Can we schedule another time? Here's what I've got. So on and so forth. I think that's it. Big deal. Uh, you may be the kind of person that's like, well, Hey, I scheduled the meeting. We're going to have it no matter what. I would challenge you to rethink that. And it doesn't mean that you're just going to blow off anybody for any reason, but to rethink about being a business, optimizing your profitability and your client success.

And in times you just, it just would work out better by if it wasn't such a pain to reschedule that now, number three, I'm going to take a hard left turn here on this one, since we talked a little bit more about the management side of the scheduling and that it's content creation. As a, as a freelancer, there's sort of two things you do.

You, you work, you do the work for clients and you look for work from clients. And that second part is, is sort of your, your, your marketing side and your content creation, um, your interaction on social media, all of those go together. And there have been huge leaps and bounds, um, tools like Jasper, copy AI, even if you think about Grammarly, it, it works in a way that it's using AI and that's part of your content creation.

I use some other ones, um, what's it called? Copycat or holy copycat or something. It does email journeys and sending. Writing emails for you within notion. I use notion AI all the time to write up content. There are more and more tools I've seen lately that also help you interact on social media with commenters without having to, to do all the individual back and forth on that too, that can be another one.

Um, and then I, there's other ones too, then, you know, there. There's some cost to maybe tap Leo. Now there's just tap Leo as an example, 65 bucks a month. If you're paying a monthly rate, but it helps you with your content creation and your marketing on LinkedIn. But then also when people engage and interact with your LinkedIn posts, it works from that side to interact in a.

away with those people that allow you to nurture leads too. So not only are is it helping you with the social media and so on and so forth, it it's also helping drive leads down your funnel for, uh, for rev potential revenue from that marketing. None of that really existed other than people trying to sell you how to courses.

A year, two years ago, and now they're pretty well refined that I used Taplio and it does a great job of running through all of those processes and helping out with those. I've also found too, and so for those of you that are like, well, I don't want to use AI. I want personal touch. We can go down that road too.

There's always a use for that. Um, it is an interesting way to see how you interact with people, how people interact with you and learn from that. Right now, Taplio or these tools that I know of don't help you learn from those interactions, they, the tool learns from them, but I would like to see someday, and I'm sure it'll happen that what the tool is learning, they provide back to you.

So you learn more about. Uh, who your clients are, how you can address your clients, what things you say and do will resonate with them. It does that on the content side, it helps, you know, what content to create based on that information. But I think having that information as a human being is also useful too.

When you get on the phone with people and you can use that to, uh, to queue up a conversation and really have it resonate with other people. So those are a few of the things that I think, okay. Are sort of the obvious ways that AI is going to help, uh, freelancers and help us. Take some of the things we do now that don't create profit.

Like I always talk to people about, uh, I do X number of hours of billable hours a week, but then I have X number of non billable hours. And I, that was non billable hour times really first, first cut. That's where these AI tools are going to help. Reduce or eliminate that, that, you know, my billings, my time tracking, all that type of stuff also, which we didn't talk about today, but maybe sometime in the future, we will, um, all that stuff using these tools makes it quicker or makes it just a non issue.

We don't have to, to work with it. So that's sort of like that first piece of it. Um, And in a future episode, we're going to talk through some more specifics about how do you use AI in our actual work, depending on the type of work we do. But for today, I want to talk a little bit more about some of the less obvious opportunities with AI that doesn't mean, um, in your business working as a freelancer, but the overall sort of global macro, uh, approach to freelancing.

I think number one, there's going to be a shift in hiring practices. So the, what used to be a full time job can now be done on a part time basis because AI tools are doing a chunk of the work. So what used to take somebody 40 hours a week to do may take them 15 hours a week to do. Now, companies have a choice.

They can let go of two people and take what those three people did and put it in one person now. That may be viable, but there's also going to be situations where we have three different people that now are only working 15 hours a week, their skill sets. Are not related to each other and what I really need is three different people with three different skill sets to work 15 hours a week.

That is going to be difficult on a full time position, but for those of us that are freelancers or fractional workers, I think it is queuing us up for a, uh, a windfall to be honest in the industry, people that are already heading down the road. Uh, becoming freelancers, doing the work, building a portfolio, having some connections out there and some experience as a freelancer.

It's just going to be plug and play as these organizations realize they don't need the full time people anymore. And what ends up happening oftentimes is when a full time person has let go, they don't come back and say, we talked about this in another episode is my suggestion, but they don't come back and say, let me, Work for you for 15 hours a week and take that as a backbone to then build other freelance work that they want another job.

And so they go on and just start looking for another job. They're not, you're not taking the job that they were going to do for 15 hours a week away. Moved on looking for that full time role. And so if, if your expertise is not only that topic, that specific skill, but also managing your freelance business, again, I think there's going to be a windfall there.

I would start to think about how. I'm going to get so much work coming at me so quickly. How do I not just say no, but maybe leverage that into a small business to bring other people in to do that work too. So just my thought. Uh, on that there. Um, and then as far as new opportunities, also, I think that there's going to be a lot of opportunities partnering with companies that specialize, specialize in AI driven tasks, so finding niches where AI can enhance your freelance offerings is really useful, but using your expertise in your area to then find others that build tools, if you're an entrepreneurial type.

Stopping and saying, you know what, um, I can use AI for this, and I'll tell you how I got to this. Again, I use AI all the time. I do a lot of things with ChatGPT. We won't go into what those things are today. Maybe someday we will. But within my business, I use ChatGPT and Claude, more and more Claude too, to do things in my business.

The more I do those and build frameworks and workflows and structures behind them, the more I create prompts and steps and things like that that go along with it. The more I realized these can be packaged up as tools. And if. What I do, and I do software implementation and that type of thing and business process consulting.

If it's helpful for me, it helps me work faster, more efficiently. And to be honest with you a little bit better quality, um, because the old two minds are better than one type of thing. The chat GPT is not replacing my brain, but it thinks of things I don't think of and it ends up helping the clients out.

So I will say that, um, having. Gone through that, I, I, the, the thought, hey, I can package this up as a tool, and other folks that do what I do could use this tool to do what they do. And I think there's gonna be an opportunity for those that are entrepreneurial out there to be able to package this up.

Whether you call it an AI agent or uh, uh, or a chat bot, or you just put it in a piece of software that's backended with API calls to AI tools, whatever that looks like on the technical end. I think there's opportunities to take what you do as a freelancer and the processes you create as a freelancer, or maybe even that you do currently in your job that we'll call best practices and turn those into a service or a product of its own to service other freelancers, or even people that do the stuff you do that are not freelancers.

So that's that one's a little bit farther out there, but I honestly think it has the opportunity I think it also takes the most work, but there's an opportunity In that last thing, real quick here, as far as looking out in the future and preparing for change, AI, I think is evolving way faster than any of us can keep up with evolving faster than the folks that are building the AI models can keep up with.

But, um, I think if you're okay with the fact that things are going to change by tomorrow. By the time you try to do something and you just have to pivot and go to the next one. I think it's an exciting time. I think as a freelancer, it's exciting. Again, I think as a freelancer, if you're looking to build a business outside of just the services you provide, there's huge opportunities in that too.

I think being able to create things for, let's say you're an attorney, create things for other attorneys because of your knowledge as an attorney and because of your knowledge that you gain as a freelancer, helping out clients. Of a certain type as an attorney. I think there's huge opportunities out there in that you want to talk about scaling Instead of just trading a dollar for an hour.

I think there's big opportunities there. The hard part is the um, the learning curve I don't know if it's steep, but it keeps moving. It's more like a learning landslide. And trying to keep up with that can be difficult. It can be, um, discombobulating. But if that's your thing and you like change, I think it can be profitable.

So that's my, my thought there. Lastly, and very last, when it comes to freelancing and artificial intelligence, this, if you believe that what you do cannot be replaced in some substantive way by AI, I think that you are not doing yourself a service. I think that no matter what you do, There are parts of what you can, what you do that can be replaced, which means if you charge on an hourly basis, there's a really good chance that a half hour, maybe even 45 minutes of that hour can be replaced by an AI tool that exists today or will exist in the next six months to two years.

I also think to think about it, the 15 minutes that can't be replaced becomes much more valuable because the machine cost is pretty low and it costs a lot of electricity and there's the tools that design it and everything, but compared to what you charge per hour, it's a pretty low cost that 15 minutes that can't be replaced.

That's where the, that's where the money is in my opinion. And so you can hide under a rock and choose not to believe that AI is going to replace that, you know, half hour to 45 minutes of work that you're billing for right now, and just go along until the work starts to erode. If it hasn't started to erode already, and you're seeing your billable hours going down, or if you're in full time jobs, still finding yourself less.

Uh, if you're not going down that road, then the next question is, is what do I do as a part of this to just say, well, I need to go out and find four times as much work, or do I say, do I figure out a way to leverage that 15 minutes of work with the value it actually has and for every industry, what my recommendation is, no matter what you do for freelancing or the industry you're in, you I think what you can do is say, okay, what is it about that 15 minutes that can't be done by AI and what value does it bring to the client?

And from that, how do I position myself to clients to say, that's the thing I do. That's what's important about me. That's what you should be paying me for and what you should be paying me. A lot for, and for a lot of industries, what that is, there is the consulting, the strategy, the thought process, the change management piece of it.

And then there's the doing and the doing is the part that I think is being replaced by AI at some point in time. And the other part of it may be enhanced by AI, but I don't know if ever, or when that piece will be replaced. As a matter of fact, I asked chat GPT and Claude this morning. I'm not kidding.

about that. And they both agree that they don't think that that strategy, the human touch, the, the things that are higher level, complex business thoughts, uh, things that you learn from years of experience in your industry or doing your job. They don't see that in the next five years, at least being replaced.

And some, they said, both said to some degree, never fully replaced. So what I would recommend is instead of just waiting for the inevitable to happen, really analyze that piece of what you do and figure out how do I turn that into maybe even a more profitable and more scalable business. Then what I'm doing today, trading dollars for hours as a freelancer, that'll be a topic for another day, as far as how we do that.

And when I figure it out, I'll tell you, but, uh, I just something to think about as you're, you're heading down this journey and wondering about how freelancing can, uh, affect you, but more so the positive spin, uh, what are the opportunities in freelance and And AI and how can, can that actually ramp up your business into a new way?

So thanks for joining me today. Um, I hope you found this useful and insightful and gives you some thoughts as far as AI and freelancing. Uh, as we've seen, it's not just a disruptor, it's a powerful tool for, to be an enabler that can open new avenues and opportunities for those willing to adapt and evolve and adapt and evolve quickly.

If you found today's episode helpful, be sure to subscribe to the podcast. I connect freelance on your favorite podcast platform. And don't forget to leave us a review. Your feedback really does help us out. It helps bring more people. And it also helps me. I can ask. Chat GPT, what topics to talk about, but it does help me know what topics to talk about and provide to you all too.

So, uh, because it was in the end, just trying to support your freelance journey. Remember the future is bright for freelancers and solopreneurs who embrace AI. So stay curious. Stay adaptable probably above anything else. And you just sort of keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible and the thought of what is it that you do that provides value to a client.

If you're just starting out in freelancing, make sure you head on over to second act freelance. com. Grab the free ebook there that goes through the process of determining, are you cut out to be a freelancer? Number one, and number two, what steps should you take to move that direction? If it's something you're interested in.

And that's at secondactreelance. com until next time I'm Judson Voss and I want to leave until next time. This is Judson Voss signing off until next time. This is Judson Voss. Keep thriving in your second act.