Let’s start here: Everything that’s published on Inbox Collective is written and edited by a human. Some AI-powered tools, like Grammarly, help us catch potential typos, but if you’re reading something on our site, a person wrote it. The same is true for all of our newsletters — those are written by Dan.
When coming up with the first draft of a story, we sometimes use a tool like WisprFlow to transcribe the outline of a piece, and may ask a tool like Claude to suggest angles we might have missed or questions readers might ask after reading. (Any of the actual writing is always done by a person, though.)
One crucial use of AI: At the top of all stories, we’ve got an audio version of the story. We use a tool called Everlit to publish those audio versions, and the voice you hear in those stories is generated by AI. (At one point, Dan tried cloning a version of his own voice using AI, but it sounded like he’d recorded himself while he had the flu. We picked a generic AI voice to read our articles instead. Her name is “Alice.”)
We regularly use AI-powered tools like Otter to transcribe long interviews, but those transcriptions are always re-read and cleaned up by a member of our team.
AI tools are occasionally used to sort through survey data — we’ll hand over anonymous open-ended feedback to Claude and ask it to identify trends or key themes. (User data, like names or email addresses, are never shared with these AI tools.) When we’re publishing a piece that ends with a few next steps, we like to use NotebookLM to identify takeaways we might be forgetting. Sometimes, we’ve used AI tools to come up with the first version of marketing copy or strategies, and then we’ll adapt those and merge them with our own ideas.
We have infrequently used AI tools — particularly Canva or Gemini — to create images for posts on LinkedIn, but we haven’t used AI-generated images on this website. We tried using AI to take existing Inbox Collective content and repurpose it for LinkedIn, but we found that our typo-laden, human-written content generated a lot more engagement.
We do use AI quite a bit in our consulting work. Here are a few examples of how we do that.