I just thought, 'There has to be a workaround.'" While she already had help from an amazing virtual assistant (VA), she noticed the VA struggled to understand the technical side of what she does to effectively pitch the right podcasts. (For instance, Jasz doesn't do any work with ecommerce or B2C, and found her VA couldn't always recognize shows that targeted those audiences.) "You have to be able to read the podcast description and then really understand: What does Jasz bring to the table that makes sense for this audience? You just tell it exactly what you want it to do, and it does it." "When I first heard about custom GPTs, I thought I was going to have to be coding in the backend, but it's super simple." Step 3: Test and tweak to get the right workflow While the initial setup only took an hour or two, Jasz then had to try the GPT herself to make sure it worked well before passing it off to her VA. She realized the GPT didn't have enough information, so Jasz trained the GPT to ask her VA a few questions to fill in those gaps before it generated the final pitch. After some trial and error, she landed on the following workflow: Her VA researches podcast opportunities (Jasz shares some of her research methods below) and pastes a podcast's description into the GPT, and it decides whether it's a fit or not, explaining its reasoning so the VA can override it if necessary. Jasz also realized she needed to add a final step to help them track pitches going out, having the GPT generate a summary of the pitch, which they manually paste in a shared doc. Step 5: Keep the GPT current While Jasz has reached the point where she doesn't have any major improvements she wants to make to her custom GPT, it isn't static either. "I tell my custom GPT details on the project, the benefits, what the client saw, and then it does a great job of bringing that up whenever it would be a good client example." She also shares lessons from past podcast appearances and refinements to her speaking topics. Outside of being the final review to make sure everything looks aligned, he flags any form questions the GPT doesn't have the information to answer - like "Who are your three biggest mentors?" - so Jasz can respond personally. Using AI to help with podcast research While the GPT focuses on vetting and pitching shows that her VA has found, Jasz has also used AI to improve the searching process. For example, when she was ready to invest in a tool to help with podcast research, she used ChatGPT to help compare different options, asking questions like: What are your thoughts on this tool? She also used it to help create process documents for her VA to use when doing podcast research, and found that it was able to share tips that she wasn't aware of, like how to do an advanced Google search to more quickly find promising podcast leads. But you could also train a custom GPT like this to support any process that you're hoping to hand off to another team member but that requires deep personal or company knowledge: having your new intern help pitch you for PR, having a new employee ghostwrite content in your voice, getting an outside consultant to support with customer research.