7 Ways I used AI this week in business and life

+A remote creative role at Netflix that pays up to $370K!

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Diana Kelly Levey
April 02, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes

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If you’re a generative AI hater and are tempted to hit “unsubscribe,” I encourage you to stay.

You don’t have to use AI in your freelance business, but I will suggest you play around with the tools and find ways to use them in your everyday life.

Why?

Every industry is impacted by AI.

I am a believer that if you don’t at least try to learn about it, your career and business will suffer.

(I recognize it’s not an equal comparison but everyone using email didn’t completely replace the postal worker in the U.S. and if you’re resolved to only send article pitches via postal mail, well, you’re going to fall behind.)

Of COURSE, I will add the caveat that you shouldn’t trust everything you find on AI tools. You need to fact-check it.

  1. Market research

I used to hire a virtual assistant to help me with “market research” in my niche freelance writing industries, like pet clients and sleep clients, but now I asked Chat GPT to come up with a list of “pet companies” I’d like to target.

Prompt: “Find me 25 veterinary health brands that have shown significant growth, passing $1M in revenue in 2024, include the company name, what their product or service is, their valuation or earnings as of 2024, and if they have a blog, include that URL.” Then, I have Chat GPT put that into a Google sheet.

  1. Help me improve my LOI.

The “letter of introduction” is a cold email I use when pitching clients like those that would appear on the list above. It mentions who I am, my background in their niche space, clients I’ve worked with previously, and what I’m trying to offer them. 

I asked Chat GPTto rewrite a shorter version and a longer version. Then, I asked Chat GPT to make it "20% chattier.” (I learned this prompt from Georgie Darling in her Freelance Summit conference I recently attended.)

  1. Help me with my schedule.

I work less than 20 hours a week and sometimes have to schedule appointments while my kids are in school. I’ll occasionally ask Chat GPT to help me improve my schedule, also letting it know when I have ideal energy for deep work like writing:

My Prompt: “You’re my virtual assistant and master productivity artist and superstar scheduler. Help me figure out an ideal workday on a Monday where I can get some client work done between 5 AM and 6:15 AM from 6:15 to 7:15. I’ll spend 20 minutes reading 10 minutes, listening to a podcast, and the rest of the time eating and helping my kids get ready for the day.”

  1. Show me how to hone in on my ideal content marketing freelance client.

The prompt: “Describe an ideal client for a freelance content marketing writer specializing in pet consumer brands.” Then, after it spit out the results, I asked for additional details like this: “What are their challenges, what type of content do they need, come up with a persona of who you are speaking to.”

This type of prompt and discussion with your AI co-pilot can give you an idea of who you’re speaking to, identify their challenges, and help you keep those top of mind when you’re approaching these clients with cold email LOIs or writing for these audiences.

  1. Give me a hand with dinner.

I seriously encourage those of you who are dipping your toes in the AI waters to play around with how AI can help you in your personal life. I’ve asked it for ideas of “rainy day activities to do with toddlers in the home” previously and I sometimes ask it to come up with ways to make dinner more interesting. I’ve even asked it for recipe ideas when I have a few ingredients but I request a link to the actual recipe online so I can read it.

The prompt: Help me come up with a dinner menu. I have ground beef for tacos Sunday night. Thursday is pizza. Help me come up with easy, healthy kid friendly dinners for Monday Tues Wed. Tuesday or Wed can be leftovers

  1. Capture these screenshots and convert them into a Google Sheet.

I pay for the professional ChatGPT service so I’m not entirely sure if this can happen on the free version but, today I asked the AI tool to take my screenshots of the names I grab from my LinkedIn app and pull names and companies from the images into a Google Spreadsheet. This makes it easier for me to add them to my Social and check them off.

  1. Help me be funny.

Yes, many of us are writers, but sometimes we can turn to AI for creative assistance. I was posting a photo of my salmon lunch on my Instagam Stories (@dianakellyleveyfreelance) and had the elements of a joke about not needing to deal with discerning coworkers in an office with my stinky lunch.

Help me come up with fun copy to put on top of an Instagram story post. I’m a freelancer who works from home and I am showcasing salmon as part of my lunch. I wanted to make a funny pun or reference to having a smelly lunch and not needing to worry about it with my coworkers.


AI said: Love this! Here are a few funny, pun-filled ideas for your Instagram Story caption:

  1. “Smelly lunch? Can’t relate—my only coworker is my dog.”

  2. “Salmon at lunch. Zero side-eyes from Susan in Accounting.”

  3. “Working from home means salmon o’clock is anytime I want. Sorry, cubicle people.”

  4. “This lunch would get me banned from the office microwave… good thing my office is my kitchen.”

  5. “Freelancer perk: eating fishy lunches without judgment.”

I didn’t use any of these outputs word for word (and I can’t find the Story to link to for you) but I liked the elements of “side-eyes from Susan in accounting” and made it my own.

Chat GPT Tip: I heard that there are a certain number of prompts you can input into OpenAI’s Chat GPT free version each day but freelancer Georgie Darling mentioned she uses the Desktop application for some and the app for more.

In this blog post on Best Freelance Tips, freelance writer Jennifer Della’Zanna shared the Top Apps for Productivity for Freelancers.

Discover ways to digitize your business and make it more efficient so you have more time for creative tasks.

Thanks for being a subscriber and reader.

Diana

P.S. Missed last week’s newsletter or a recent post? Check them out here.

P.P.S. Keep scrolling for jobs. ⤵️

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What’s Happening in Business and Life This Week

What I’m watching: “Hacks” on MAX. It’s with Jean Smart whom I loved in Designing Women. Funny and heartwarming.

What I’m listening to: I have a few new podcasts to add to the queue after my LinkedIn audience shared their recommendations on this post. If you have “podcasts for freelancers” to recommend, reply to me here or on that post.

LinkedIn tip: I’m using the LinkedIn search field with the following phrases to find new contacts in my network and beyond who might work with freelancers: “head of” “content” “team of” shows results of “people” > those whose profiles say they manage teams of freelancers.

Freelance Jobs, Contract Jobs, or Remote Jobs I Found

(These were active and available within a few days of this newsletter going out. I have no connection with them.)

Good luck! Let me know if you get any of these jobs. I’d love to share your success in a future newsletter.

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