Laura Unravels AI

Laura Brittingham (Rottingen) recently wrapped up a 7 year run leading and growing the People and Recruiting team at YipitData. She took the company from 50 to 500+ employees! Since January, she’s been building PeopleIQ Coaching , a Leadership Coaching and Development practice. This venture has allowed her to explore combining her passion for creating great workplaces with her background in psychology and love for the 1-1 relationships built when helping leaders scale and reach their full potential.

The most recent things she’s geeked out over were the Psychology of Happiness (highly recommend looking up talks by Shawn Achor), building a new Kitchen Garden and home DIY. She could happily spend all day chasing after her toddler and labradoodle, reading in the garden and cooking up new recipes.

Laura and I met through Venwise and regularly trade learnings and challenges that come with the solopreneur life. Excited for you to learn from her!?

About Laura

Name: Laura Brittingham

Pronouns: She/Her

Occupation: Leadership and Development Coach

Industry: Tech, Startup

Location: Westfield, NJ

AI Tools:?

• ChatGPT (free)/Claude (free), NotionAI, Canva, Fireflies/ZoomAI, Clockwise/Reclaim, Apple PlantID, Amazon Alexa

How would you rate your AI knowledge?

I don’t know if this is over selling myself or under selling but I think I’d give myself a 5… I am a scientist at heart and am in a big experimentation phase. I’m constantly testing out and exploring the next thing I hear about (many of which come from these interviews!) and putting different tools up against each other to see which will work better for me.

What sparked your interest in AI??

I’ll admit I wasn’t a first adopter, and did a few eye rolls when my husband was constantly (and very excitedly) chatting with ChatGPT when it first rolled out. Maybe I was just jealous that ChatGPT was getting more attention than I was!

There were two things that really ended up sparking my interest:

• A chat I had with my CTO at the time about the future of where AI could go and the idea that it could become a knowledgeable personal assistant who knows our preferences and can make decisions and suggestions quickly on all kinds of things, like what is the best flight for you for the upcoming trip based on your history of flights and preferences. The idea of treating AI like a personal assistant excited me.
• Venturing out on my own to build up a new business while finding out I was pregnant again 3 weeks in! Solopreneurship is no joke on its own and then mix in first trimester fatigue and I realized quickly that I needed tools and tricks to help me be as efficient as possible. This is what really kicked off my path of experimentation.

Laura's 24 hours with AI?

MORNING:

Now that it’s so nice out, I often spend mornings outside with my toddler and pup. We just moved into our home a little under 2 years ago and our gardens are definitely a continued work in progress. I feel like I use the PlantID feature on my iPhone almost every day. Sometimes it’s identifying a plant that is struggling in one of our garden beds, a new weed popping up (is that a weed or something that’s meant to be there?! Is that invasive?!) or ID’ing something we see along our neighborhood walk that I think would look good in ours.

Once our Au Pair takes over, I start my day with planning time. I block an hour every Monday morning for it. Since starting PeopleIQ, I’ve been using a planning template in Notion to keep organized. On Monday mornings I always start with journaling a bit about how I’m feeling this week, what would make the week great and what I want to work on this week to get closer to my goals. I then use the AI feature to help me add some to-do’s for the week that will keep me committed to this intention. The prompt I use is “Suggest some to-do’s based on the How I’m feeling, What would make this week great and What I’m working on sections”.?

I also use ChatGPT to generate an inspiring quote that will reinforce my intentions for the week. I’ve tried Claude and although I liked some of the quotes better, I found that they were sometimes made up or attributed to an inaccurate author. It’s only meant to motivate me so it probably doesn’t matter, but it just didn’t sit right and I don’t feel like going through the verification work every week! This week, my prompt was “This week I am feeling a bit burnt out and want to give myself some space to slow down, but I also feel a great sense of urgency to keep working hard. Acting as a coach, suggest a few motivating quotes to set the tone for this week, recognizing that slowing down can also be productive.”

During my planning block, I also review my calendar and what’s coming up to make sure I’m managing my time well. I’ve tested both Reclaim and Clockwise for managing my calendar and ended up landing with Clockwise. I have my Clockwise set up to make sure I have lunch blocked off every day and that I maintain a certain number of focus hours each week. If there are to-do’s coming up on my list that I need to block time to focus on, I use the AI scheduler to get it on the calendar by asking it something like “find me a 2 hour block over the next week to do X”. The other thing I loved about using Clockwise within a larger org was the fact that you can connect it to your Slack and it can signal to others when you’re in a meeting, in focus time, outside of your work hours or on vacation. It was a huge automation game-changer for hybrid/remote work. Next up, I’m considering whether to shift my scheduling links over to clockwise to help be even smarter about my time management. Time to experiment a little!

AFTERNOON:

Having an AI notetaker has possibly been my favorite AI discovery so far. Removing the need to take notes during a conversation allows me to be more fully present in the moment with my coaching clients and helps me spend less time preparing for the next meetings. The ZoomAI tool is OK and gives me enough of a refresh to come back to a conversation, but Fireflies has really been a huge level up. It not only is way more accurate, providing a full transcript, but it also gives you stats like the percentage of time each participant was speaking which can be really helpful as I continue to build and fine-tune my coaching style.

When I first kick off with a client, I like to come back to them and suggest baseline goals that we’ll achieve together based on the discovery call. I take the notes from my notetaker, remove anything identifiable or sensitive and feed it into ChatGPT to help me do a first draft of goals. “Acting as a certified Executive Coach, how would you narrow these topics down into 3 motivating goals to work on over a 6 month period?”

I also send out my own newsletter biweekly and I find the hardest parts of writing for me are just starting to get words on paper and grammar. I love to read and write but grammar has always escaped me! I’ll often use ChatGPT to start my outline (Prompt – “Draft an outline for a blog post by a Leadership Coach that is about ways to flex your communication styles.”). My end result is usually vastly different from what it gives me but getting those first words down are exactly what I need to get the writing juices flowing. My worst habit is saying too much so I’ll finish up by plugging my writing back in and asking it to suggest edits to correct grammar and to make my writing more succinct. NotionAI does this too and I just tested it on these responses. I used the prompt “Suggest edits on the above writing to correct any grammar or spelling errors.” It came up with great suggestions including a few style suggestions that I took.

I’ve also used ChatGPT to help me plan events - most recently I helped host a Happy Hour for female executives from several different companies. I used the prompt “I’m hosting a happy hour for executives from X, Y, Z, etc companies in NYC. Suggest some spots that are easy to travel to from their offices that will have a professional vibe.”

Finally, as I’m still getting started on my business, I’ve been using Canva to make a lot of my resources like 1-pagers and presentations. I’ve been testing out the document transform feature - most recently I did a presentation for a group of HR folks on building up Manager training programs and used the feature to transform my presentation into content marketing ideas. It was a great brainstorming step to turn my work into content that I can share more broadly! I’ve also tried the prompt “one-pager to sell a manager training program with group coaching add-on” and got a decent starting point.

EVENING:?

The majority of my Evening AI is spent with Alexa… I’m in the kitchen cooking dinner almost every night and we tend to sit down to eat around 6. At 6:20 she lets us know what the weather is going to be tomorrow and we’ll chat about what we’ll do based on what the day will be like. I’m also a BIG fan of home automation and love testing out new things. I actually don’t know if these truly count as AI, but we’ve added smart light bulbs around the home and lots of smart plugs. Two of my favorites:

• “Alexa, Merry Christmas” - Christmas playlist starts + all of our string lights in the home turn on. Our son LOVED this one.
• “Alexa, Goodnight” - Bedroom lights go off, white noise machine turns on, backdoor locks.

The next thing I’d love to add is smart shades to add a ‘good morning’ command to turn off the white noise and let the light in!

The next thing I’ll be putting ChatGPT and Claude up neck to neck on? We have a wedding coming up in Malibu and are looking to extend somewhere that’s a bit cheaper. Here’s the prompt I used: “We have a wedding in Malibu, California the last weekend of July. We'd like to extend the trip by 2-3 days and would like somewhere interesting but more affordable to stay and explore. We care a lot about good food, spending time outdoors and are open to airbnb or hotel options. Please suggest areas to stay and activities to do while there.”

I still need to do the work of looking into the options but on first look, ChatGPT response has come out on top again!?

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I'm Amanda Halle , author of Unraveling AI. You can call me Amanda, Mands, or AJ (my middle name is Jane). I've been in and around the HR/people space my entire career and started my solopreneur journey 3 years ago. I focus on fractional people support, advisory in HR and AI, and project-based work primarily in the L&D niche from my years in leadership consulting and change management.