Answer Engines: How Brands Build the AI Advantage

Learn how to build your first AI workflows to automate tasks and save time. Discover real examples and tools ideal for small business productivity.

Show Notes

In this episode of Answer Engines: How Brands Build the AI Advantage by Advantage Labs, we explore how businesses can design their first AI workflows to automate tasks, save time, and increase productivity.

As AI-driven systems become embedded in daily operations, understanding how to move from experimentation to execution is critical—especially for small and mid-sized businesses. This conversation breaks down what AI workflows actually are, how to identify automatable tasks, and how tools can be used to create practical, repeatable systems that support real work.

This episode covers:
• Why AI workflows matter for business productivity
• How to identify tasks that can be automated with AI
• Real-world workflow examples for meetings, content, and planning
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About the Show
Answer Engines: How Brands Build the AI Advantage is a podcast by Advantage Labs exploring how brands earn visibility, trust, and recommendations in the age of AI-driven search. Through conversations with business leaders, founders, and technologists, the show examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping discovery, authority, and decision-making across systems like ChatGPT, Google’s AI-powered search experiences, and other emerging answer engines.
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Host:
Sheridan Wendt
Visionary technology leader with 15+ years of experience driving transformative change, delivering $4B+ in global infrastructure projects, and leading AI implementations that improve efficiency and revenue across Fortune 500 organizations.

Guest:
Jonathan Foster
Cyber Security Engineer & Analyst with extensive experience in network systems and electronics. Jonathan has worked with KBR, Inc., VT Group, Serco, and the US Navy, specializing in system installations, technical support, and military-grade network security. His background includes managing shipboard systems, ensuring compliance with strict security standards, and training personnel on system maintenance and troubleshooting.
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Chapters
00:00 – Introduction
00:46 – Why AI workflows matter
01:22 – What is a workflow?
02:21 – Identifying automatable tasks
02:43 – AI meeting summary workflow example
04:09 – AI content creation workflow
07:42 – Before & after: workflow example
09:26 – Jon’s first workflow plan
10:33 – Using AI for planning use cases
12:40 – Next episode preview
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https://advantagelabs.ai

Watch on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@AdvantageLabsAI

Listen on more platforms:
https://podcast.AdvantageLabs.ai

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Support the Show
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Creators and Guests

Host
Sheridan Wendt
Visionary technology leader with 15+ years of success driving transformative change while building secure, scalable infrastructure for global organizations. A decorated US Navy veteran and technology strategist who bridges the gap between technology and business needs, aligning technology with strategic goals and guiding executives on emerging technologies.
Guest
Jonathan Foster
A seasoned Cyber Security Engineer/Analyst with a diverse background in network systems and electronics. Over his career, Jonathan has worked with KBR, Inc., VT Group, Serco, and the US Navy. His expertise includes leading system installations, technical support, and network security for military-grade operations. Notably, he has managed shipboard network systems, ensured compliance with military standards, and trained personnel on system maintenance and troubleshooting. Jonathan's experience also spans handling classified material, optimizing network uptime, and auditing security policies.

What is Answer Engines: How Brands Build the AI Advantage ?

Answer Engines: How Brands Build the AI Advantage
by Advantage Labs

Answer Engines: How Brands Build the AI Advantage is a podcast by Advantage Labs exploring how brands earn visibility, trust, and recommendations in the age of AI-driven search. Through conversations with business leaders, founders, and technologists, the show breaks down how artificial intelligence is reshaping discovery, authority, and decision-making across systems like ChatGPT, Google’s AI-powered search experiences, and other emerging answer engines.

Each episode goes beyond hype to unpack what’s actually working, what’s changing, and how companies can build lasting authority as search shifts from links to answers.

You’ll hear practical insights on:
• Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and AI search visibility
• How AI systems evaluate authority, trust, and relevance
• Real-world applications of AI in marketing, operations, and growth
• What it takes to be recommended—not just ranked—in AI-driven experiences
• The future of discovery, buyer behavior, and digital trust

Whether you’re a founder, marketer, operator, or technology leader, Answer Engines helps you understand how AI is reshaping search—and how to position your brand to win in this new landscape.

Produced by Advantage Labs, an AI solutions and implementation firm helping brands build visibility, authority, and scalable advantage through answer engine optimization, agentic workflows, and AI-driven systems.

Learn more about AEO implementation:
https://advantagelabs.ai

Sheridan Wendt (00:00)
And by the way, if you're listening and you want a framework for how to do these workflows, here's my three step formula for getting started. right. Identify a repeatable task, map the steps that it takes to complete the task, and then replace or enhance one of those steps with AI.

Welcome back to the AI Advantage where we explore how AI is helping business leaders work smarter, not harder. I'm your host, Sheridan Wendt

Today, we're getting practical. If you've been listening and wondering, okay, I get what this AI thing is, but how do I actually use it? This episode is for you.

Jon Foster (00:38)
this is the one I've been waiting for. I want to go from AI sounds cool to AI saving me time because right now it feels a little abstract.

Sheridan Wendt (00:46)
Yeah, yeah, abstract, I mean that's totally fair. So today, we're gonna map out how to spot bottlenecks in your business, know, those slow, repetitive tasks and show you how AI can automate them or accelerate them. And by the end, you should have your first real AI workflow idea ready for you to go test. All right, let's get into it. So how do you actually start building your first AI workflow?

Jon Foster (01:14)
So before we dive in, when you say workflow, are we talking exactly like a checklist, a process?

Sheridan Wendt (01:22)
Exactly. Yeah. So think of a workflow as any repeatable series of steps that could lead to a result, right? It could be tasks. It could be a checklist. It could be a process, sending client follow-ups, creating social media posts, onboarding a new lead. Anywhere you find yourself doing the same thing more than once, that might be a workflow that you can automate with AI.

Jon Foster (01:45)
Okay, so like simple tasks that like eat my time up during the week.

Sheridan Wendt (01:49)
Yeah, now that is the best starting point, starting small. We don't have to try to AI-ify your entire business. I would say start small, see real results, and build from there.

I usually tell clients to look for three different kinds of tasks. Tasks that are repetitive, things that you do over and over again. Tasks that are rule-based, things that follow like a predictable pattern. Or something that's time-consuming but it's low skill, right? It doesn't use your brain power, your creative genius, it just uses your time.

Jon Foster (02:21)
I can already like think of a few, like replying to emails, summarizing, notes, organizing leads.

Sheridan Wendt (02:29)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, those are good examples. So for instance, an AI workflow could take a meeting recording, summarize all of it, pull out the action items, and send those to your team all automatically. There are a lot of tools that do that already.

Jon Foster (02:43)
That's like half my week right there. How do we start building that?

Sheridan Wendt (02:47)
Well, those tools exist already, so I wouldn't recommend building them. But if we were going to build them, you'd start with one simple question, right? What is the outcome that I want? And then you map out the steps that it takes you to get there, right? So that in this case, the outcome that we want is we want the action items from the meeting to be sent to the whole team, right? So that's the outcome. And the steps that it takes to get there are we got to record the meeting, we got to transcribe the audio,

with AI, right? It's gonna take a look at the recording and just take out the words and give you almost captions. And then we've got to summarize and extract the key points, which AI is very good at. LLMs are very good at summarizing text. And then we've got to send that text to your team in an email or a Slack or however you guys communicate.

So that's, I mean, those are, that's like a very simple workflow. That's a lot of steps and people might be thinking, well, how do I get AI to pull the, you know, a recorded video and pull the text out of it? There's tools for that, definitely. But let's start with a different workflow. One that's a little bit more fun. A simple AI workflow that creates content.

Jon Foster (04:04)
Okay, well not much of a content creation, but you know, it sounds exhausting, so let's hear it.

Sheridan Wendt (04:09)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

So here's what the workflow might look like. Let's say you start with an idea, right? You think this is what I wanna post about, or this is the topic, or this is the message I'm trying to get across to my audience or to my followers. And then you wanna use AI, you could use AI to draft the post, maybe the captions, maybe a blog article about it.

⁓ Then you want to review and edit it, make sure that you're keeping your voice. So it's not just AI and not set. You don't sound like Chad GPT, right? ⁓ You don't sound like the LLM and then use some sort of automation workflow automation platform to put that out there, right? You could use Zapier or make or N8N to take that piece of content and distribute it across different platforms. ⁓

Jon Foster (04:42)
Yeah, right.

So I can like

make like one podcast into five different pieces of content automatically.

Sheridan Wendt (05:05)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's a little bit different. That's like some extra steps in the workflow. So then we're talking about taking a long form piece of content and chopping it up into micro content. Now you're thinking, man. Now you're really thinking. So it's about leverage, right? It's about taking one input but having multiple outputs.

All right, and with that, we are gonna take a quick break to hear a message from our friends and sponsors over at Advantage AI.

All right, and we're back and I'm here with Jon Foster and we're talking about building your first workflows with AI.

Jon Foster (06:48)
Damn, bro, that looked a lot easier than I've been thinking. Like, I was thinking you have to do like this whole entire building this crazy AI system, you know?

Sheridan Wendt (06:57)
Yeah, no, I think that's a big misconception. It's like a sacred cow. It's a myth, right? The first workflow can be simple, right? You got to start somewhere. Even one AI prompt, right? One workflow connected to an LLM to do a single task, right? You got to start with something that saves you 10 minutes a day. And once you see the impact, think you kind of get addicted to finding more things to automate away out of your life.

Jon Foster (07:26)
Yeah, I mean, think it's like small win is like small win It's not as complicated as like building a spaceship, right?

Sheridan Wendt (07:32)
Right, right, right. The more small tasks and the more small workflows that you stack up, the more time and focus you free up over time.

All right.

Jon Foster (07:42)
Can you like, before we go further, can you give like a quick before and after example?

Sheridan Wendt (07:47)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So say, let's say you're running a coaching business. The before would be you get a lead, you're manually following up with the leads after every discovery call, right? You do a call with this person, then you're sending them an email and doing a follow-up. And the after would be AI drafts, personalized follow-up emails using your meeting notes.

⁓ and it sends them automatically, right? So you, maybe all you do is review it just to make sure it doesn't sound crazy. And that would be your first workflow, right? So you have this meeting, AI summarizes the meeting, and then drafts a follow-up email to send to them. And that's your first workflow.

Jon Foster (08:28)
Okay. So just like you were saying earlier, let's like the, meaningless tasks that, know, I mean that just sink time it's, and this is just helping you save like brain power and stuff.

Sheridan Wendt (08:39)
Yeah, that's it. Yeah, save your brain power for stuff that makes you excited. Let AI handle the busy work so you can handle the meaningful work.

Jon Foster (08:48)
Okay, that sounds easy enough. Like, a lot to digest.

Sheridan Wendt (08:53)
A lot to digest, every day you stack up those small winds and it turns into, it's like a snowball effect, right? It gets bigger and bigger and bigger and all of a sudden you got a big boulder worth of automation working for you.

Jon Foster (09:01)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, man, like...

It's pretty simple and I like that. It's definitely not as big as I was thinking, so I think that I can actually incorporate this into my own life now.

Sheridan Wendt (09:20)
What's something that you think you might actually try to automate like a task or workflow just for you?

Jon Foster (09:26)
Personally, for me? Well, there's some pretty much like meeting transcription. Like right now, like going back and like just keeping track of what people said at what time during the meeting, that way that I can recall it that way that, you know, because I trust a short pencil over long memory any day, you know, so it helps me kind of like get in there.

Sheridan Wendt (09:43)
Sure.

Yeah, yeah, no, I love it. There are a bunch of tools for that. I'm gonna pull a couple

there. I don't know how free these are. Some of them might be freemium, where you start off for free and then they wanna charge you. But there's Otter AI, there's TurboScribe AI, NoteGPT.io, HyperNote.com, and then there is another one that I know of called Fathom AI.

Jon Foster (09:57)
Yeah

Sheridan Wendt (10:11)
So those are just a few that I know that you can add them like usually as a plugin, as a desktop app, or as like a Chrome plugin, and they'll join your meeting with you. And when the meeting is over, they'll email you a summary and a list of tasks. They all have different features, of course, and different price points, but you can get started with an AI note-taker for free.

Jon Foster (10:33)
Okay. so I'm about to start like sending out invitations for like weddings and stuff like that. Like how, with, with my wedding, how do you think that we could potentially like utilize AI for like doing that kind of like wedding pro level project management stuff.

Sheridan Wendt (10:51)
Well, can, man, I just have like this flood of ideas. All right, so number one, right, you can use AI to help you plan the wedding, which I think you already have a good solid plan already, right? So then you could use AI, you could use it to help you with, you could tell it what the plan is for the wedding and maybe ask it if there's any tasks or things you might not have thought of. When it comes to invitations, you can use it to help draft the invitations. You can use it to generate images for the,

Jon Foster (11:01)
Yeah.

Sheridan Wendt (11:18)
invitations unless you have images that you want on there, but maybe you have like some stock image on the front or or You know small little logo heartwarming type thing of a little ribbon a little wedding ring Right and then on the inside a picture of the two of you You could use it for a website, right? It could be Essentially a place for your guests to go and register for your wedding that way You know who's coming?

If they wanted to register online and you didn't want to pay for some existing wedding registry tool, you could just have AI build you a quick website for it. You could also use it for when somebody registers some sort of workflow that goes out and it drafts them an email like thanks for registering and send them a thank you.

I think that kind of, to me those are some of the best ideas I can think of right now off the top of my head for how it could help with your wedding registry.

Jon Foster (12:06)
because currently right now, like we're going through and we're looking at a couple of different sites and stuff like that. And I don't really like the whole entire privacy policy where they get all your like people that are coming all their information and your information and they download your cookies and then sell it. That's pretty much how they make their money ultimately. But yeah, like it would be super dope if if I can get ⁓ to like help me create like a website.

to just do everything and have control over that. That would give me more like peace of mind.

Sheridan Wendt (12:40)
Okay, yeah, well, we can definitely do that.

All right, so I hope if you're listening out there, hope you're able to take something away from this episode. In the next episode, episode four, we're gonna be talking all about different AI tools that will be worth your time. We'll test a few, we'll talk about which ones are actually useful, and maybe even break a few myths. So thanks for tuning into the AI Advantage.