What Can AI Do for Your Business? Here’s Everything Mine Runs
People ask me what AI can do for their business, and my answer is about everything you do over and over with the same steps. I have around twenty scheduled tasks running in Claude right now across Creator's MBA and HobbyScool. They pull my sales numbers every morning, audit my memberships every Saturday, find speakers for my events, check every sales page and email for broken links and old prices, and draft my weekly newsletter. This post is the full list, and the rest of the series walks through each one.
When someone asks me what AI can do for their business, they're usually expecting me to name a tool or a prompt. My answer is that it can do about everything, as long as it's something you do over and over with the same steps every time.
I run two businesses. Creator's MBA is where I teach digital product creators and newsletter owners how to grow, and HobbyScool runs more than a dozen virtual summits a year for people who love crafts and creative hobbies. That's a lot of emails, a lot of pages, a lot of members and a lot of events. And for a long time, a lot of my mornings went to the same small jobs.
So I started handing those jobs to Claude as scheduled tasks. I have around twenty of them running right now, and I'm building more every week. Here's what they are and how I decided what to automate.
How this started.
Through September, I was tracking my daily sales by hand every morning. I'd go into ThriveCart, pull the data, upload it to Claude, connect the tools and ask the same questions I asked the day before. It worked, but I was doing the exact same steps every single day.
If I'm asking the same questions every morning, Claude can ask them for me. So I wrote the steps down once and set it to run at 7:20 every morning, and now the report is waiting for me when I sit down.
That became my rule for everything else.
If I'm doing it over and over, daily or weekly, with the same steps every time, it becomes a scheduled task. If I could write the steps down for a new team member, I can write them down for Claude.
What a scheduled task is.
A scheduled task is a set of written instructions Claude runs on its own at a time you pick. You might set one for every weekday at 7am, every Saturday morning or the first of every month. When it runs, it reads from the tools you've connected, does the work and sends you a report on your phone.
The instructions are plain English. I write them the same way I'd explain a job to an assistant. I tell it where to look, what to check, what to put in a spreadsheet and what to send me when it's done. I even tell it to write the reports the way I talk so they're easy to read in a couple of minutes.
The tools I have connected are the ones I already use to run the business. That's Kit for email, Airtable, Google Sheets, Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar, my Meta ad account, HTML Pub for my sales pages and Shopify for the HobbyScool shop. My ThriveCart sales flow into Airtable, so the sales report can read them from there.
Everything that runs every day.
The morning sales report
At 7:20 every morning, Claude pulls yesterday's sales, my Meta ad results and my email numbers, then works out which ad each buyer originally came from. It publishes everything to one report page that updates in place, so I open the same link every day. It also checks the sales feed for missing orders before it trusts any of the numbers.
Speakers from my inbox
Every weekday, Claude reads the event emails I get from other people in my space, like summits, webinars, bundles and podcast interviews. It pulls out every host, speaker and guest and adds them to a Google Sheet my speaker recruiter works from.
Competitive data
When another business runs a summit in my niche, I register and Claude logs every email they send me into a sheet. It records what the email was for, what they were selling, the price and anything worth noting about how they wrote it.
The early morning briefing
This one covers what my latest emails did, my task list for the day, what a rotating list of people I follow have published and one content idea based on my actual numbers. It keeps a log of what it covered so it never repeats the same topic two days in a row.
Replies from HobbyScool subscribers
My HobbyScool welcome and event emails ask people to hit reply and tell me what they make. Every day, Claude reads those replies in the HobbyScool support inbox and drafts a short, warm answer in my words for me to read and send. If a reply has a question or a problem in it, it goes to the help desk instead. Once I've sent my answer, Claude clears the thread out so the inbox stays at zero.
Everything that runs every week.
Monday
- Kit growth report. New subscribers, unsubscribes, open and click rates, how each email did and which sign up the people leaving came from. If a buyer unsubscribes, that goes at the top.
- Speaker prospects from my own list. Anyone who joined my email list that week with a social following of 10,000 or more goes into a sheet, with their links and how they found me.
- Shop check. A weekly look at the HobbyScool Shopify store for signs of fake orders.
Tuesday
- Event speaker search. Claude searches the web for upcoming virtual events in crafts and in online business and adds their speakers to the same sheet as the inbox finds.
Saturday
- Member audits. One for Newsletter Profit Club and one for the Creator's MBA Mastermind. Each compares who paid, who has access and how they're marked in Kit, then updates a members dashboard and tells me who needs to lose access.
Sunday
- Sales page check. Every live Creator's MBA page, about 155 of them, gets checked for broken checkout buttons, broken opt-in forms, old dates and prices that don't match from one page to the next.
There's also my weekly newsletter draft. It pulls my promotional calendar from Google Drive and my latest blog posts and podcast episodes, then builds the week's newsletter in my template. I still edit every draft, and my edits split about evenly between what it says and how it sounds, so it gets me about halfway there.
Everything that runs every month.
- Email sequence check. Claude reads every email in every Kit sequence and compares the prices to what my sales pages and checkouts say today. It also looks for dates that already passed, dead links and offers I don't sell anymore.
- Website check. Every page on destinicopp.com, including the blog and podcast pages, gets checked for broken links and anything out of date.
- Domain watch. Claude checks every subdomain on both of my websites to make sure nobody else has taken one over, and that my email settings are still in place.
The ones that run once.
Some tasks only need to run one time, on a date I already know. My VIP Day Skills Vault sales pages list the dates of the upcoming VIP sessions. So I set a task for the morning after each session that checks my Google Calendar, updates the next session date on both pages and removes the one that just happened. It asks me before it publishes anything.
I also have a one time task set for after a competitor's summit wraps up. It reads everything that was logged during their event and writes up how they ran it compared with how HobbyScool runs summits.
What I'm building next.
I'm adding three more right now.
- Summit link checker. It runs every morning during a summit and clicks every link in that day's emails before the sessions go live. With 12 HobbyScool summits a year, there are a lot of links that have to work on the right day.
- Nightly reply tracker. It finds the replies to my marketing emails, since replies help my emails reach inboxes. It also pulls up the hostile replies so I can unsubscribe those people.
- Monthly email review. It sorts last month's sends by type and compares them to the month before. That's a different view from my weekly Kit report, which only looks at the past seven days.
"Most of these tasks only read and report. Claude does the gathering and checking, and I decide what changes."
Dr. Destini CoppClaude reports, and I decide.
Almost every task on this list is written so it can only read and report. The instructions say it never edits a page, never emails a member and never changes a setting. My sales report tells me what's working and what looks off, and then I'm the one who decides what to change.
When the sales report showed me something in my funnels that needed fixing, I made the changes, and Claude helped with that part too. It updated emails in Kit and sales pages in HTML Pub while I told it what I wanted. But the deciding was mine.
The same goes for my team. The speaker tasks fill a sheet, and a person on my team reviews every name and does all the outreach by hand. Claude never contacts anyone.
Where to start in your business.
You don't need twenty of these. You need one, and then the next one gets easier because you'll start noticing the jobs you repeat.
Here's how I'd find yours. For one week, write down every task you do more than once. Next to each one, write whether the steps are the same every time. The ones where the answer is yes are your list.
If you want my pick for a first one, it's a weekly newsletter draft that pulls from content you already made and offers you already need to promote, driven by your promotional calendar. That's what I teach inside Newsletter Profit Club. Just know that automating the draft doesn't mean handing over your voice. You'll still edit it, and that's fine.
The rest of this series.
Each post in this series takes one group of tasks and shows you exactly what it does, what it checks and what it sends me.
- The morning money report. How my daily sales report works and how it ties each sale back to the ad the buyer came from.
- Finding speakers without searching. Three tasks pulling from my inbox, the web and my own email list into one sheet.
- Member audits. Catching people who paid but don't have access, and people who still have access after they stopped paying.
- Answering subscriber replies. How Claude drafts my answers to the people who reply to my HobbyScool emails and sends the questions to the help desk.
- The website and email checks. Sales pages, the website, every email sequence, my domains and my shop.
- Pulling competitive data. Logging another business's emails during their event and getting a full comparison when it's over.
- Pages that update themselves. Sales page dates that change on their own the morning after each session.
- Your first scheduled task. The weekly newsletter draft and how to set it up.
Find out where your business needs help first.
Before you automate anything, it helps to know which part of your business is the weak spot. The free Creator Growth Flywheel Scorecard takes about two minutes.
Take the free scorecard →Frequently asked.
What can AI actually do for a small online business?
Almost any task you repeat with the same steps. In my business that includes a daily sales report, weekly member audits, finding speakers for events, checking every sales page and email for broken links and old prices, and drafting the weekly newsletter. The AI does the gathering and checking, and I make the decisions.
What is a scheduled task in Claude?
A scheduled task is a set of written instructions Claude runs on its own at a time you pick, like every weekday at 7am or the first of every month. It can read from the tools you've connected, like your email platform, Google Sheets or ad account, and send you a report when it's done.
How do I decide what to automate first?
Look for anything you do over and over, daily or weekly, with the same steps every time. If you can write the steps down for a new team member, you can write them down for AI. A weekly newsletter draft built from your promotional calendar is a good first one.
Is it safe to let AI run tasks in my business without checking?
Most of my scheduled tasks only read and report. They're written so they never edit a page, email a customer or change a setting. The few that do change something, like updating dates on a sales page, ask me before they publish.
Do I need to know how to code to set up AI automations?
No. Every task in this post was written in plain English, the same way you'd explain a job to an assistant. What you do need is your tools connected to Claude so it can read the data, like your email platform, your spreadsheets and your ad account.
Dr. Destini Copp helps digital product creators build sustainable, systems-based businesses through the Creator Growth Flywheel framework. She's the founder of Creator's MBA and HobbyScool, and has been teaching online business strategy for over a decade. Learn more →
