Losing Course & Membership Clients to AI? Probably. | Ep. 57

Are you losing course and membership clients to AI? In this video, I dive into how AI is changing online education and why your course or membership delivery needs to evolve. We’ll explore AI tools for course creators, the future of online learning, and how to add human value to your offers. I share my experience with MindPal, custom GPTs, and practical shortcuts for transforming your programs to stay relevant and irresistible.

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Transcript

What if I told you the very thing you are selling online? Your online course, your membership, your meticulously crafted step-by-step program will be obsolete very soon. Not the knowledge within it or your expertise, but the delivery mechanism that you're using to deliver the knowledge and expertise. Now, I'm not a fear mongerer. I'm not here to instill fear in you. If you follow me at all, you know that I have ideas and solutions in ways to think outside the box. So I want to talk about it here on this episode of Video Brand Infusion. If you are new here, my name is Meredith and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business so that you can generate consistent revenue and build your thriving video brand.

And I'm coming to you with some thoughts after I have joined several new courses and memberships this year, partly because I want to learn the material and I want to get the results and the promises that those courses and memberships promise, but also because I'm very intrigued and curious about how other top-tier course creators and membership site owners are utilizing AI tools inside of their programs and how they are protecting their content in this age of AI. Because if you think about it, for years now, probably ever since the internet existed, course creation has been like the ultimate shortcut. It's an easy offer to help somebody get to a desired result, get from point A to point B to learn something, to get some type of a desired result. Using the shortcut of, I will transfer my knowledge to you, and you just follow the steps and do it right. Just think about the fact that 30 years ago, if you wanted to learn how to make sourdough bread at home, for example, you would either need the recipe in a book, you might even need an entire book to help you kind of figure that out because it is kind of complicated. 

So I've heard, I've never been successful at it myself, but nowadays you can buy a course from someone who is an expert and has lots of different sourdough recipes and lots of different techniques to teach you and share with you. And then you might have access to that person to ask questions or you know, if you have problems or you run into issues, you can kind of like get that solved from that expert, from the person that might have been the author of the cookbook back in the day, right? You get to go straight to the course of the information and not have to do all of the trial and error yourself of figuring out all of these recipes, figuring out how to make sourdough and how to troubleshoot when it doesn't work. But today, you could open up ChatGPT and tell it exactly what the problem you're having with your sourdough is, and it will probably give you an answer or a couple of possible solutions to try. And it's not just making that up. I take that back; it could just be making that up. AI has been known to hallucinate, but where does it get that information from? It gets it from all of the content that exists on the internet already. Where are people gonna go in 5, 10, 20, 30 years to get straight to the desired result that they're looking for? It's gonna be some kind of an AI tool. They're not going to be watching 20 hours of video content lessons inside of your course if they could just go to ChatGPT and have AI tell them exactly what to do. 

So stick a pin in that for just a moment. Because the concept of a course or a membership being the shortcut is exactly how I think we should be thinking about implementing AI in our courses and programs to make sure that we are still here 5, 10, 20, 30 years from now as the subject matter expert in our niche and industry. Because here's the thing: selling a course or a membership or some type of a program has never been about selling the information. If you've been in the course membership, digital product arena for any amount of time, you know that you're not selling information, you're not selling a course or a membership. You're selling a transformation. You're selling a desired result, a destination. The information is just what helps people get there. So if you think about all of that information and the process, you put it together and the delivery mechanism with your lessons and your notes, and you know, maybe there's a workbook or something. 

When you think about all of that being a shortcut, just think about how you could utilize AI in your programs to make it even more of a shortcut so you can provide all of the information, you can provide all of the lessons, but you can also provide tools, resources, calculators, workflows of any kind, which I know sounds kind of abstract, right? It's like, what are you even talking about? What is a tool? What is a workflow? I'm gonna talk about that in just a minute. But there are tools, resources, and things that you can create easily and provide to your clients, students, and members to help them actually get to that desired result faster, easier, and perhaps even more fun. Because when you think about all of the different ways that people like to learn, some people don't want to watch a video; some people want to read, and some people don't want to read. They want you to just show them how to do it on video. Some people just want to put the information into a magical tool and wave a magic wand and have some desired result come out the other end. 

And if that sounds too out there for you, I'm here to personally tell you that's what we're creating inside of our membership and our courses. At least those of us who want to still be around in five, 10, and 30 years from now, because nobody wants the information. They want the transformation. They want the desired result. That's why they bought your program to begin with. I just recently logged into a course that I bought like two years ago to kind of re-familiarize myself with the content, and I watched a bunch of the lessons; didn't do any work. I just watched the lessons, and then I just waited for the lesson that was like, "Okay, now go do it. Here's step one and here's step two and here's the worksheet." That lesson didn't exist. You know what was there instead? The custom GPT that they created trained on everything that I just watched, but now I don't really have to think about it. I can just open up the custom GPT, follow the steps in there, and it does the work for me. Is it perfect? No, AI isn't perfect. Sometimes it can be pretty close to perfect. It sure did save me a lot of time and a lot of brain power because all I had to do was plug my info in and hit go.

Now the wacky thing is, and this is what I want you to hear, and I’m not the only one that does this. I promise I really don't think I am; I'm not the only nerd who does this. The wacky thing is I had already downloaded the slides. This course creator provided the slides of all of the content, and as I was watching the lessons, I downloaded the slides one by one for each lesson because I thought, I'm just gonna put these into a custom GPT and train my own custom GPT on this stuff so that even when I do the work myself, I can at least plop it into my custom GPT and have it analyze and see, did I do it right? Do you have any suggestions? Did I miss something? This is the new way of learning. It's learning and implementing at the same time. And if you don't do this for your clients and students, just provide a basic custom GPT, even if you wanted to start with that. If you don't do it for your clients and students and members, not only will it take them longer to get to the desired results that your course or membership exists to help them with, but someone else will or they will. 

So as a course creator, membership site owner, and a student, client, and member of other people's courses, programs, and memberships myself, I can tell you without a doubt, there is no way that courses that are only just like video lessons or written lessons will survive if there is an AI alternative, if there is a custom GPT or embedded MindPal workflow alternative. They came for the results; that's what they want. I'm sure your lessons are great. I think I have like hundreds of hours of lessons inside of the Video Brand Academy lesson portal, and I use all of that to train the AI tools that I create. But at this point, I would never want or expect somebody to listen to all of that material if I could create the ultimate shortcut of providing custom AI tools for them to use. And if you're anything like me, your brain might start to like, go down this road of like, "Okay, so am I not a course creator anymore? I'm a prompt engineer. I'm just creating AI tools." Like, where does your irreplaceable value lie? Why would someone want to use your AI tool over somebody else's AI tool? The answer is you. The answer is you are still a human.

The way I kind of see this in my mind, since I’m a visual thinker, is like an online course membership situation where you have lessons and videos and workbooks, worksheets, and stuff, and you are there on camera, or maybe your voice is at least delivering whatever the content is on the screen. Maybe it's Zoom calls live. Maybe it's recorded Zoom calls that are just the replay of those recordings. That's you; that's your personality, that's your personal brand. That's your mannerisms, that's your tone, that's your style, that's your nonverbal cues. AI tools remove that personality, right? That on-camera, even a Zoom call, even a replay, even just your voice, it removes that personal touch, right? So how do you get that back inside of your offers? You show up; you show up as a human, which I think is something that, it's almost like the way that we've been doing courses and memberships, or at least the way I have been doing them and experiencing them for the last 10 years has been like the middle of the road. Yes, you have me on camera, and yes, you have my information, and now we're like, and now you have my AI. And so how do you compete with that? How do you make your offer really magnetic and irresistible? You add more of yourself into it.

And honestly, in the age of AI that we're living in right now, I have never been more glad that I have started and stuck to my membership program because I'm showing up there. We have two meetups every single month. That's me live on camera. We get to talk and chat, and you get to ask questions, and we get to have conversations. And if all I ever did was create standalone courses with prerecorded material, I would then have to go and figure out how do I add myself? How do I bring myself as the human element into those standalone programs? So I am very happy and pleased with myself that I have a membership. If you are somebody who has a membership, I hope you can kind of see how future-thinking you might've been without even realizing it because now people want that human touch. People want you as a human, and now you have the ability to create these really great shortcuts, teach people stuff with your content, and be present as a human and create that connection with people, to help your customers, students, and members get to the desired result that you are here to help them with faster and more enjoyably.

I guess what I'm saying is I see AI as something you can do to help people make it really easy and really fast, but then you as a human is what makes your offer and your program yours. And especially if you are on YouTube as a creator, growing your audience with YouTube as a means to grow your business, it only makes sense that more of you, more of the human version of you is what people are gonna want over time because no one can replace that, right? No one can take you from your personal brand.

And the good news is integrating AI as part of your deliverables of your course or membership is not as hard as it sounds. In fact, it keeps getting easier and easier. So to give you an example, back in February or March maybe, I started using a tool called Mind Pal, which is basically a way to create, think of a custom GPT, or just think of a chatbot in general, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever. If you just think about a chatbot in your mind with Mind Pal, I can create a chatbot that I train. It's not just taking information from wherever and hallucinating; it's using all of those LLMs, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and so forth, to process information. But I'm giving it my information. I'm giving it my expertise that I teach inside of my membership and providing instructions so that my clients and students can go straight to my bot or my Mind Pal workflow and put in just an idea, topic, anything just off the cuff that they're thinking about creating their next video on. 

And it's going to give them title ideas and a description. Here's the thing: there are lots of tools that do that. You can go straight to ChatGPT for that, and your titles and descriptions will sound just like they're written by ChatGPT. The difference in my tools, my Mind Pal tools, is I trained them. I'm giving you like, if Meredith was gonna write your title for you, here are like 10 different options that Meredith would probably choose. And if Meredith was gonna write your description, this is based on what I know works for me, not whatever some AI tool is assuming and guessing and hallucinating at what's working.

But I will admit, one thing that I've had trouble with over time is, "Okay, I can create anything; you know the experts, the gurus are saying you can create anything with AI. So what do I create?" And it took me a while to wrap my head around what made sense. I've created AI tools here and there over time. For example, I'll give you a little list of what I have here, and maybe this will spark some ideas for you. So I have a "Pick Meredith's Brain" chatbot, which is trained on everything inside of Video Brand Academy. You can ask it questions. The idea is you don't have access to me 24/7, but you have access to that tool 24/7. I created a keyword research tool, so my members inside of VBA don't have to pay for TubeBuddy or VidIQ. They can use my research tool. I have what I call a "Brainstorm Breakthrough" tool. I have a "Three by Four Method Idea Generator" if you know about the three by four method, you may have heard me talk about that before. You can just plop your stuff right into my idea generator, and that bot will create those for you. There's a complete YouTube video creation workflow from idea to title, description, outline, and script. There's a YouTube bio optimizer in there and some tools to craft essentially to optimize your title and your description. There is also an opening hook helper because one of the things that we know inside of Video Brand Academy is that there are like a handful, maybe five or six key metrics inside of your YouTube channel that tell you what to fix. If you look at those metrics, and one of those is your 30-second retention, you can fix your 30-second retention by having a great opening hook. So I created a tool to help my members do that before they hit record.

And just this week I created something that I call the "Video Brand GPS Growth Planning System." Everyone knows what a GPS is, right? You put in where you're trying to go, it knows where you are, and it gives you a path to get to where you wanna go in 60 seconds or less with just five questions. I created this AI tool. It's multiple choice; you just answer the questions. It tells you exactly what to do inside of Video Brand Academy. It knows if you don't have a YouTube channel, you need to start there. If you have a channel but it's not getting views, then start here. If it's getting views but non-subscribers, then look at this. In less than a minute, it can tell you exactly where to go inside of Video Brand Academy and what to start working on in the first week, the first month, and the first 90 days. And I did that with Mind Pal. So that is an example of a shortcut that I think anybody could create if you have a membership that helps people understand where to start based on where they are.

This is perfect for a membership that has some core content and has what you might think of as a customer journey or a success path structure where there's some core content that everyone kind of needs to do in order to be successful to get to the desired result that your membership promises. But some people might be coming in at different stages and different phases. I mean, my members can watch a 10-minute video that helps them figure out, go on a little scavenger hunt and figure out what phase they're in by answering a couple of questions, or in less than a minute, they can answer five questions and my Mind Pal workflow will tell them exactly where to start in the program. Amazing shortcut.

And I think this would work even for a course. If you have clients and students that come in at different phases and you don't want them to waste their time maybe watching some of the beginner videos, if they already have that figured out, you can create an AI tool that helps them to know exactly where to start and know what to skip to get to the desired result faster, quicker, and a lot more enjoyably. I sure hope "enjoyably" is a word because I think I've used it twice now. Now I've seen lots of courses that simply provide a link to a custom GPT that's trained on the course material, and I think that's great. I think that's so easy. That's probably one of the easiest ways to integrate AI as a shortcut within your course or program. The downside of that is you have no control over where that custom GPT goes; they can share it with a friend, they can share it wherever they want. Anyone can use it, and maybe that's okay. Maybe you’re okay with that. I have a whole suite of tools inside of Video Brand Academy, so I'm using Mind Pal to embed those tools right into my Kajabi platform so that you have access to them as a member, but you don't get to use my tools that I trained on my material and my content when you're not a member. Plus, they work great inside of the Video Brand Academy app as well. If you want to see an example of this, you can actually download the Video Brand Academy app for free. I'll put a link to it down in the description. There is a free AI tool in there that rates your YouTube channel. All you have to do is put a couple of screenshots of your YouTube channel. You can do this completely on your phone. You upload those screenshots and it rates your channel on a scale of cringe-worthy to binge-worthy. I created that tool with Mind Pal. It's the only AI tool that I have that's not inside of Video Brand Academy. You can use it for free. You can use it as many times as you want. Just go download the Video Brand Academy app and check it out. 

So to the title of this video, are we losing our course sales, our membership members, and our clients to AI? Probably to some degree, but now you have the opportunity to be the creator of those tools. You're already the subject matter expert in your niche or industry at getting your clients and students to the desired result that you are known for and that you're selling. You also have the opportunity to be the creator of the tools that are going to get them there even faster. I'm just coming to you with my own experience as a course and membership creator, owner, business owner, content creator, and a student of other membership programs, and I can tell you that the one thing that I think we're going to all experience as AI becomes more and more widely used and accepted is that it's going to be expected. So I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you have implemented AI tools into your course or membership, let me know down in the comments. I'm curious what you've seen that's been working for you. What tools are you using and how are your clients, students, and members responding to them? Do they love it? Because Video Brand Academy members love the AI tools that I've created, and honestly, I have so much fun creating them too.