The Introvert Leader

The 5 Rules for Using AI in your Career

• Austin Hopkins

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I’ve used AI for over 1,000 hours to grow my career, build a brand, and scale this podcast. In this episode, I’m sharing five rules to help you use AI the right way. Whether you're writing a resume, preparing for a big meeting, or trying to get promoted faster, AI can help, but only if you know how to use it well. This is your no-hype playbook for making AI a real advantage in your career.

Not sure if your job is still the right fit? Take my free 3-minute Career Fulfillment Quiz to find out if your current role is fueling you or draining you. You’ll get a custom score, insights, and a plan to move forward.
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Timestamps

  • 00:56 - Storytime: I built something cool with Artificial Intelligence. 
  • 04:18 - Rule 1: Mastery Creates Separation: Why using AI everyday is the fastest way to get ahead.
  • 05:43 - Rule 2: AI Isn’t Your Crutch: How to avoid letting AI weaken your instincts or critical thinking.
  • 07:05 - Rule 3: Blind Trust is Bad: AI makes mistakes. Learn to question the results and double-check everything.
  • 08:21 - Rule 4: Bad Inputs = Bad Outputs: I walk through the four things every great prompt should include.
  • 10:11 - Rule 5: Stay in Your Strength Zone: Use AI to eliminate the boring stuff and stay focused on what makes you great.
  • 12:27 - Career and Leadership Use Cases: Real-world examples of using AI to write resumes, negotiate salary, prep for meetings, and coach better.
  • 18:32 - Challenge for Listeners: Pick one task this week and run it through AI. Compare before and after. Was it more efficient? Did it help?





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Austin Hopkins

Hello , this is your host , austin Hopkins , and welcome to the Introvert Leader Podcast . I've used AI for over a thousand hours to navigate my career , build a brand and grow my podcast , and I've learned one undeniable truth AI won't replace you , but it will scale you . Artificial intelligence allows you to bring more of you into the world , but here's the catch when I scroll through social media , I see the same thing fake videos , cookie cutter content and gurus selling their master prompts that are going to help your career . That's why this episode is different . I don't follow trends and I only share stuff I know will be valuable . Artificial intelligence is the coolest thing to come out in my lifetime and I want to help you leverage it , so settle in . Today we're going to cover the five rules for using AI in your career .

Austin Hopkins

10 years

Story Time

Austin Hopkins

ago , I was sitting at my desk at Bank of America and I was asking myself the question that I asked myself almost every morning , which was am I on the right path ? You know I had spent years wasting time applying for the wrong jobs , staying in jobs too long and doing work that really didn't align with my highest value , and I always wished there was a simple way for me to find out if I was on the right path . Am I in the right career ? Am I doing the right stuff ? Fast forward to this year , I decided I wanted to build something , a career fulfillment quiz , something quick and easy that people could use to figure out is the work I'm doing fueling me or is it draining me ? So I googled existing options and everything just didn't look right for me . It was clunky or super expensive or really wasn't customizable to the level that I expected , and so I kind of put it on pause . I thought you know what , maybe this isn't the right time . I can't really create this right now , and who knows if anybody even wants it . So , fast forward to August of this year , gpt-5 launch and I realized I can make this whole thing myself . It didn't take any coding experience and all for 20 bucks . I could spin up an MVP , a product that I might actually be able to get out into the world . So I spent a few days working on that , customizing really what I wanted it to look and feel like , and then I did what I've always done , which is I wanted to get some feedback . So I sent it to a whole bunch of people that I knew would give me some direct feedback , and I got some great feedback . So I started to keep iterating it and making sure that it was exactly the experience that I wanted folks to have when they use this tool .

Austin Hopkins

And , day by day , that idea that I had in my head started to become a reality . So it wasn't no longer me just kind of dreaming about it . I was actually starting to see an actual product . I was able to take action and see something tangible in my hands . And the cool thing is AI allowed me to take this idea in my brain and to take a part of me that I hadn't put out in the world and make it real .

Austin Hopkins

And that's what this episode is all about . It's about using AI to scale you , to leverage AI to get more of you out into the world , to get those ideas , those passions , those insights that you have out into the world in a tangible way . And here's the best part that quiz is live today . I told you about it the last episode . I'm really pumped . Here's some of the feedback I'm already getting from folks .

Austin Hopkins

This was a great quiz . The questions actually made me think about my career . Another person said it reminded me that I need to start looking for a new job . Another person said it helped me ask myself some tough questions I'd been avoiding . So if you give me three minutes , this tool will help you figure out if the career you're in is fueling you or draining you . So the link is in the description . I'm super pumped about it . I want you to take that quiz and see where things are at . Are you on the right path ? Are you where you need to be ? What I built was only possible using AI .

Austin Hopkins

Now , the great thing about AI is it's an amazing tool , but it's only as good as the way you use it , and so I want to cover today the five rules for using AI in your career . How you approach artificial intelligence is going to determine the next decade of your life . Will AI replace your job ? Will you be a late adopter ? Will you let AI take over your life ? We're at a turning point in artificial intelligence . It's making its way into every facet of our life . I can't turn on the TV without seeing a commercial for AI . I can't go on LinkedIn without hearing about someone who just launched an AI business . So , before it's too late , I want to help you figure out how to use AI to get the things you want in your career to get promoted faster , to get more responsibilities , to stand out more , to do work that actually aligns with your highest calling . So I'm excited

Rule 1: Mastery Creates Separation

Austin Hopkins

to jump into it . So rule number one mastery creates separation .

Austin Hopkins

So I'm embarrassed to say I use AI way more than I'd like to admit . I use it every single day of my life . Sometimes it's 30 minutes . So I'm embarrassed to say I use AI way more than I'd like to admit . I use it every single day of my life . Sometimes it's 30 minutes . Sometimes I'm on it for 10 hours , 11 hours a day , using different tools . But the key is , the more I use it , the better I got at it .

Austin Hopkins

In the beginning . My prompts were absolutely crap , my outputs were crap and I was getting frustrated because I wasn't getting out of the tool what I expected from it . And then I realized that's on me . If you don't know how to use it , it's a waste right , and so the more I use it , the better I got , and I think that's the key here . If you haven't started using AI on a daily basis , you're behind , because there are people right next to you in your company , your co-workers , your competitors who are using it to level up their career and level up their life . So the key is starting now , and I want to give you a bonus pro tip .

Austin Hopkins

Here are some of the questions that I really , really like to ask LLMs . I'm using Questions like what are my blind spots ? What do I have that others need ? Where could I be working harder or smarter ? Where am I wasting time ? Does my plan need to be changed given the current trends ? Right , so we have a strategic advisor in our pocket that we can ask questions to , that can give us unbiased feedback . I mean , who doesn't want that ? Right ? That's the way we grow . That's the way we move up in our careers . So mastery creates separation .

Austin Hopkins

Rule number

Rule 2: AI Isn’t Your Crutch

Austin Hopkins

two AI isn't your crutch . So using AI as a crutch for thinking is one of the biggest mistakes you can make . Ai is fantastic . Artificial intelligence can save us time . It can do amazing things , but it's not a replacement for our brain . We were born with amazing brains that are capable of fantastic , complex thought . Why would we give that up and use a tool instead ?

Austin Hopkins

What happens if all of us start using AI every single day to make all of our decisions ? What if it replaces us ? Listening to our gut or our instincts ? Do we all become the same ? Are there any personalities left or we're all becoming clones of the same thing ? Are we all going to be putting the same things out into the world ? That's my worry . So when I think I'm relying on it too much , I need to ask myself a question and say well , why am I relying on it right now ?

Austin Hopkins

Anytime there's creative tasks involved , I want to be the one doing those . I don't want to ask AI to do that . I want them to be there for the boring , mundane stuff that just takes away my mental bandwidth . So what would happen tomorrow if your favorite LLM was just gone ? What if ChatGPT just didn't exist ? Tomorrow , could you get through your day ? Could you effectively do your job ? If the answer is no , that's a problem . Ai should be a part of the value you bring in this world . It should not be all of it . If your entire filter and how you operate in the world is all done through artificial intelligence ,

Rule 3: Blind Trust is Bad

Austin Hopkins

no bueno . So I highly suggest that you keep that in the back of your mind . So rule number three blind trust .

Austin Hopkins

In the beginning , I put way too much trust in the outputs that I got from the different AI tools I was using and I assumed every time it put something out it was probably the best answer , the most trustworthy , it was the most accurate , right . I just assumed it's pulling from the best sources . That ain't the case . In fact , I just read a study a couple of days ago that showed up to 40% of the data that ChatGPT gathers is from Reddit . That's scary . If that's where it's getting its facts , I don't want to trust those facts . There's some great stuff on Reddit , but there's also a ton of crap . So blind trust in AI is not something you want to do . You want to always be asking yourself does this output make sense ? Given my experience , given my expertise , does this output make sense ? Don't just trust . And something else that I think is worth mentioning is I don't know if you've been on these LLMs recently and realized how encouraging they are .

Austin Hopkins

Sometimes I'll put in some ideas that I have , some strategies that I think work , and it will tell me they're amazing and they're absolute crap . Like . These are crap ideas . They stink . Your tool should not be saying this is a great idea . It should be telling me it sucks , just like if I had a friend and I asked them , they would tell me it sucked .

Austin Hopkins

When we put too much trust in the outputs and just assume it's got our best interests and knows what we want at all times , we're failing . We're putting too much trust in another technology . Rule number

Rule 4: Bad Inputs = Bad Outputs

Austin Hopkins

four bad inputs equals bad outputs . So AI outputs are only as good as the inputs . So you could ask it an amazing question and you can get an amazing output . Or you can ask it a unclear , boring , dumb question and you can get very basic outputs . And so I think a lot of times people get frustrated with AI because the outputs aren't good . Ah , that's not giving me what I want , or it's just repeating the same things back to me . Well , I hate to tell you , but that's on you . That means your inputs aren't good , and I don't want to spend a lot of time giving you all of the specific prompts that I use , but I just want you to remember there's a couple of things that you can do to make sure , when you're using these different AI tools , that you get what you want . So I always kind of looked through four different lenses .

Austin Hopkins

I want to make sure that I'm giving it the role I want it to play . So is it going to be a strategic advisor ? Is it going to act as my best friend ? Is it going to act as an industry expert ? I want to give it the context what's at stake , what's going on , what's happened in the past , what is the state of the union . I want to give it the desired output . What do I want it to give to me ?

Austin Hopkins

And then I want to get the format . Do I want it in a list ? Do I want it in a paragraph ? Do I want a specific design ? So , again , I make sure I want to give it the role that I want it to play the context , the desired output and the format . And even if you do all four of those prompts , it's still going to spit out some crap from time to time . I just want you to realize that comes with the territory .

Austin Hopkins

And I want to give you a couple bonus pro tips , things that I've done that have really helped me . Number one within each conversation with whatever LLM I'm using , I make sure to have like kind of a master guidelines or prompts , and in that I'm including things like what my voice and style are going to be like , and I also have expectations on how I want the tool to challenge me . So something that I really , really enjoy with these artificial intelligence tools is the way that it allows me to challenge my thinking and really hold myself accountable to a higher standard . Okay , I want to move on to the final

Rule 5: Stay in Your Strength Zone

Austin Hopkins

rule stay in your strength zone . When we're in our strength zone , we are showing the world our best self , we're showing them our highest value , and guess what ? People resonate with that . So we don't get burnt out , we don't lose our passion . Ai enables us to stay in the strength zone .

Austin Hopkins

How cool is that ? We have a tool that can now do all the shit that we don't want to do All the boring , mundane , repetitive , low value tasks . I don't have to do that anymore . I get to spend time on the stuff I'm best at . So , as I was building this podcast , as I was building this business , I didn't have to spend hours and hours and hours doing shit I didn't want to do . I got to focus on the big picture stuff , the strategy , the vision , the creative work , the stuff that I actually enjoy .

Austin Hopkins

In my career , I never enjoyed the boring , mundane , record-keeping , operational tasks , but I always enjoyed when I got to just think creatively , when I got to think about what the future was going to look and feel like . And that's what the cool thing about AI is it allows us to do the things that suck . So where in your career right now could you start using AI ? Could you use it in some cool ways to take tasks off your place ? Could you use it to free up mental bandwidth so you can focus on the important stuff ?

Austin Hopkins

A bonus pro tip is I use it to take action . So do you want to guess ? The biggest thing that holds people back from doing cool stuff in their career and in their life ? It's they don't take action . They're waiting for the perfect moment . I'll wait till I learn more about X so that I can then do Y . I want to wait till I get a little bit more feedback before I launch that product . I want to spend a little more time and make sure that the environment's perfect before I do it . Well , fortune favors the bold , and when we take action , we separate ourselves from the rest of the world . So AI has allowed me to take action over and over again , just like that quiz . Instead of waiting for another two years to get that made , I was able to make that in a couple of weeks .

Austin Hopkins

Artificial intelligence allows us not only to stay in our strength zone , but it allows us to take action in our strength zone . So is there something right now , a cool idea , a side hustle , a passion , something at work , something in your personal life , that you could use AI to make it happen , to make it a reality ? If so , might be something to think about . So again , the five rules . Rule number one mastery creates separation . Rule number two AI isn't your crutch . Number three blind trust is bad . Number four bad inputs equal bad outputs . And number five stay in your strength zone .

Austin Hopkins

So , now that you've got the rules down , I wanna talk about how you can actually start using this in reality in your career .

Career and Leadership Use Cases

Austin Hopkins

I have a feeling this section is gonna be be your favorite , because there's going to be six actual use cases that are going to help you understand how you can use AI to scale yourself . So I've got four career use cases and I've got two leadership use cases . So let's start with career first . So the first one searching for a job . Have you ever struggled to find small to mid-sized companies that are in your desired sector ? Yeah , so have I . There are a lot of times where I want to find a job . Right , I want to find a company that aligns with what I want . Well , why am I not using an LLM , an AI tool , to accomplish that ? Why am I going and scouring the internet to spend all that time trying to find companies that fit my needs and style ? Well , here's how I would use AI to do that . I'm going to give you a prompt that might help , so it could be something like this Help me put together a list of 10 to 30 companies with under 200 employees in the medical billing sector located within a 30 mile radius of Atlanta . Organize the companies by employee rating on Glassdoor . So I am now going to get a list of 10 to 30 companies that are the exact size that I'm looking for . They have the right culture , they're organized in a way that matters to me and , great , I didn't have to spend an hour to two hours looking for that . Done for me , right , easy .

Austin Hopkins

Another career one would be writing a resume . Raise your hand if you hate writing a resume . Yeah , me too . Resumes suck . I wholeheartedly hate writing resumes . It is the bane of my existence . So much so that a few years ago , I hired a professional resume writer . I paid him like 800 bucks . He made me a great resume . But now I can do that in an hour . I don't need anyone else . I could customize the resume for each job description , or hell . There's even full tools that are do-it-for-yourself platforms like Teal that can literally make your resume from start to finish with zero input from you . So that's something I'd keep in mind . How could I use AI to write a resume that gets me noticed ?

Austin Hopkins

So the next career one is salary negotiation . So I've negotiated probably 25 times for a higher salary in my career and all 25 times I felt uncomfortable , got sick to my stomach sometimes , and it was never easy . Well , what if I had an expert to help me get through those things ? Or , hell , even just prepare ? How about if I had an AI tool that could help me role play ? Well , you can . I have used AI to help me negotiate for salaries , to negotiate with brands , and I think it's an amazing tool because it allows us to challenge our thinking , to get us out of our comfort zone , to make sure that we're prepared , because , at the end of the day , when we go into these salary negotiations , we want to have data , we want to make sure that we're prepared , right ? So a bonus pro tip is I actually have a whole episode dedicated to salary negotiations . So if you want to hear how I've negotiated for hundreds of thousands of dollars in my career , give it a lesson . I'm positive you'll find some value .

Austin Hopkins

Okay , the next two are going to be for leadership . So the first one is preparing for a meeting . So I used to be a leader of a large team and I would hold weekly meetings and monthly meetings for all of my teams , and sometimes that got really challenging to pull together all the information , to put together what I thought would be a concise meeting to make sure that when people showed up for an hour , an hour and a half , they felt like Austin put time and care into this and they actually got something out of it . So I really enjoyed using AI for preparation . It did a couple of things for me . Number one it helped me stay organized , so I was able to pull in all of my ideas , my thoughts , and kind of get a concise path . What did I actually want to achieve with that meeting ? A lot of times we have all these ideas for meetings and they don't have a structure or a theme , and so AI was allowing me to kind of refine that Another way that I used it to prepare for meetings is that I would ask it to poke holes in my agenda and poke holes in the ideas , the sections that I was going to cover , and tell me did that make sense ?

Austin Hopkins

Was that really the best use of our time ? Did that really get us closest to our goal that we had as a team ? And if it didn't , I would make changes . So it was basically again like a strategic advisor that would say , no , this doesn't make sense . Yes , it does . Yes , you're on the right track . No , you're not . Cool stuff Easy to use anytime you're preparing for a meeting . As a leader , bonus pro tip is that I would actually use it a lot of times to inject a little bit of fun . So you know , for me , I always wanted meetings to be filled with important stuff , but I also knew that I was like a human being . I wanted to have a little fun , I wanted to connect with my employees . So I would use AI to sometimes figure out what are some fun games we could play , what are some cool ways we could connect outside of just a work talk , to make sure that we're really building that culture that we want as leaders .

Austin Hopkins

The next one for leadership . The next use case is finding themes in your performance so you can coach better . So I actually have a friend who's in the consumer clothing space and he told me the other day that he uses AI every single day at work and I was like asking well , how do you do it ? I mean , you've been in the industry for a while . What are you really getting out of it , specifically for leading your team ? And he said there's two things that he gets from it . Number one is the insights are more interesting . So he's been in the industry for a while and all of his insights are , through his lens , right , his expertise , experience , and they're fantastic and highly valuable , but he doesn't know what he doesn know . And so having a partner that's thinking different , that's challenging him differently , allows him to get insights that are more interesting . And when he gets more interesting insights , he then gets to spend more time coaching to the things that actually matter . So instead of spending hours and hours trying to find themes so that he can then coach , he gets to offset that task and then instead actually spend time coaching . Because if I spend all of my time looking at the performance gaps and the themes which , by the way .

Austin Hopkins

I had a boss that did that all day . That's what he did , but he never once coached us . He never once had a conversation with us about the things that he was finding . Well , what value did that provide ? It didn't provide any value . He had a whole bunch of information and thoughts , but he never did anything with those . That's the amazing thing with these artificial intelligence tools it allows us to move faster , to scale our coaching . Again , remember , it's all about how can we scale , how can we get more of us out into the world with the use of AI . So I think artificial intelligence as one of the coolest things that we have at our fingertips , but it can't replace real world experience .

Austin Hopkins

So if you're in a career situation at work where you feel stuck , things aren't going well , you're not paid enough , you're not moving up fast enough , you want to get promoted , you want to get selected to do bigger projects , you want to be a better leader , if you're faced with one of those situations , I know I can help . I've made a career out of helping people be the best version of themselves and I want to help you do that too . So click the link in the description . I'd be happy to have a chat . To wrap things up , I want to give you a challenge . So here's your challenge for the week .

Challenge For Listeners

Austin Hopkins

I want you to pick one career related task this week . It could be writing a resume , updating your LinkedIn profile , preparing for a big meeting I don't care what it is , and I want you to run it through AI . I want you to compare what you had before you used AI and then compare what your output was . Did it make it easier ? Did it improve your efficiency ? Did it allow you to free up some space and focus on the things that actually matter , the stuff you actually enjoy doing at work ? If you're not using AI to spend more time in your strength zone , you are missing out . So I hope this was helpful . I had a blast preparing for this and sharing everything that I'm using AI for in my life . I wanna say thank you so much for listening . Make it a great day . To say thank you so much for listening . Make it a great day . This has been the Introvert Leader Podcast . Subscribe for new episodes every other Wednesday .

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Austin Hopkins

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