AI - Real Business Owners Reveal How They Actually Use It, and What Scares Them

Episode 20: Real AI Use Cases – The Promise and Perils of AI in Business

What happens when AI becomes your assistant, your creative partner, and potentially your replacement?

In this episode of Real AI Use Cases, hosts Elizabeth Gearhart and Richard Gearhart are joined by etiquette expert Thomas Farley (Mr. Manners), business strategist Lauren Paxton, and skincare educator Eva Kerschbaumer to discuss how they're using AI in their businesses today—and the concerns that come with it.

From AI-generated visuals and automated presentations to diagnostic tools and digital clones, this conversation explores practical applications of AI alongside important questions about privacy, intellectual property, employment, authenticity, and human creativity.

Key Takeaways

• AI can dramatically expand creative possibilities. Thomas uses AI image generation to create custom visual backdrops that would be impossible to find in stock photography.
• AI can streamline business workflows. Lauren transforms dictated ideas into presentations, worksheets, agendas, and other business assets, saving significant time.
• AI is enhancing education and diagnostics. Eva uses AI tools to help educate clients and support skin health assessments.
• AI clones are becoming more realistic. Elizabeth discusses her experiment with creating a HeyGen video clone for content creation and marketing.
• Privacy and ownership concerns are growing. The group explores how employee interactions with AI systems may become corporate intellectual property.
• Human creativity still matters. Prompts, questions, and original thinking remain valuable differentiators in an AI-powered world.

Featured AI Use Cases Thomas Farley: AI-Powered Visual Storytelling

Thomas uses Midjourney to create highly customized visual backgrounds for his weekly "Mr. Manners Mondays" segments. AI allows him to generate scenes that perfectly match his content, helping audiences better visualize his message.

Lauren Paxton: Turning Ideas into Deliverables

Lauren uses AI to convert dictated thoughts and presentation outlines into polished business materials, including PowerPoint presentations, worksheets, agendas, and supporting resources.

Eva Kerschbaumer: AI in Skincare Education

Eva leverages AI as an educational tool for clients and uses emerging diagnostic technologies to help identify skin concerns and facilitate communication with healthcare professionals.

Elizabeth Gearhart: Creating an AI Video Clone

Elizabeth shares her plans to create a digital version of herself using HeyGen. The goal is to produce educational short-form videos more efficiently while exploring the future of AI-generated personal branding.

Discussion Highlights Are We Training Our Own Replacements?

Thomas raises concerns that employees may unknowingly be teaching AI systems how they perform their jobs. As AI learns workflows, decision-making processes, and prompts, organizations could potentially use that knowledge to automate roles or train future employees.

Who Owns Your Prompts?

The panel discusses whether prompts and AI workflows constitute intellectual property. Elizabeth argues that the questions people ask—and how they ask them—may become one of the most valuable forms of human creativity in the AI era.

Protecting Privacy in the Age of AI

Lauren explains why she invested in a closed, encrypted AI environment that keeps her information local rather than contributing to public AI training models.

The Impact on Beauty Standards

Eva highlights concerns about AI-generated images creating unr...

Chapters

• (00:00:00) - Intro
• (00:06:40) - Are we building our own replacements?
• (00:08:20) - Thomas Farley
• (00:09:00) - Elizabeth Gearhart
• (00:09:16) - Richard Gearhart
• (00:09:54) - Lauren Paxton
• (00:10:50) - Eva Kerschbaumer
• (00:12:18) - Pendulum Swing?