VIDEOS

Table of Contents

1. Two Brothers, One Topic

2. AI as Enhancer, Not Replacement

3. The Morning Workflow: Sleep, Brain Dump, Refine

4. Creating Space for Creativity

5. Standing Out in a Saturated Market

6. Feeding AI What Makes You, You

7. Design That Doesn't Look Like Everyone Else's

8. Turning Yourself Into a Superhuman

9. Why Human Experience Still Wins

10. Choosing Tools Without Chasing Every Shiny Object

11. What to Do Next

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1. Two Brothers, One Topic

For the first time, Bernard is joined on a LinkedIn Live by his brother, Francis Ablola. Francis is a four-time Inc. 5000 honoree and co-founder of AI for Business, a training community with close to 3,000 members and a Facebook group of more than 60,000. Bernard had been asking Francis to co-host for months, and this session is the result: a conversation between two people who've spent decades in copywriting, branding, and marketing, on how to stay creative and original in a feed increasingly full of AI-generated sameness.

Bernard opens by naming the problem directly: LinkedIn, and every other platform, is filling up with AI slop, generic text and imagery that all starts to look and sound the same. The session is framed around one question: how do you stand out when everyone has access to the same tools?

2. AI as Enhancer, Not Replacement

Francis, a direct response copywriter for over 20 years, addresses the fear head-on. When AI first hit the market, he assumed it couldn't touch what he'd spent decades learning about writing and creativity. He uses it constantly now, but strictly as an enhancer, not a replacement.

"If you don't know what you're talking about and you don't know what you're doing, if you don't have a good eye, AI's gonna create some cool things, but you're not gonna be able to refine and understand that nuance and zero in on something that stands out in the market." — Francis

His read on why so much AI content looks the same: people recognize patterns quickly. The second, third, and fifth time you see the same AI-generated style, you clock it immediately. That recognizability is exactly what makes content forgettable.

3. The Morning Workflow: Sleep, Brain Dump, Refine

Francis shares a workflow rooted in something he learned early in his copywriting career: let your subconscious mind solve problems overnight. Before bed, he intentionally names the problem he wants solved, the hook he needs, or the angle he's stuck on. By morning, his head is full of ideas.

"The best creativity tool is actually getting more rest." — Francis

From there, he opens a voice recorder, walks around the house, and talks through his priorities and ideas out loud, then feeds that recording into whichever LLM he's using that month (Claude, ChatGPT, or Groq) to generate a list of priorities and drafts. That process alone gets him through emails, landing page copy, and content angles before 9:00 AM. His role, as he describes it, becomes the refiner: the person who reviews and sharpens what the AI produces rather than starting from a blank page.

He also points to a subtler benefit: AI can remove the self-imposed filters people put on their own work, especially when the work is about themselves. Francis had built hundreds of websites for other companies but never one for his own name, until he used AI to get past the self-consciousness that had stopped him for years.

4. Creating Space for Creativity

Bernard raises a point Francis had made before the session: creativity needs space. When a day is packed with meetings, to-do lists, and school drop-offs, there's no room left to create.

Bernard describes a practice he picked up about a year and a half ago from Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way: writing three longhand pages every morning, whatever is bouncing around in your head, no matter how unstructured. He didn't finish the full 8 to 12 week program, but revisits the practice every year, and says it's what frees up the mental clutter that gets in the way of original thinking.

Francis adds a second dimension: presence. With four kids and multiple businesses, he says it's easy to be at work thinking about family and at home thinking about work. His anchor phrase is one he keeps returning to:

"Be where your feet are." — Francis

He credits Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, and a weekly private jiu-jitsu lesson, for the same effect: total presence, even briefly, clears space for creativity and innovation to actually happen.

5. Standing Out in a Saturated Market

Bernard asks Francis directly how he grew AI for Business into a seven-, eight-figure company in a space where everyone is now talking about AI. Francis's answer centers on positioning: find the audience that hasn't heard your message yet, and reframe the offer so it doesn't sound like the fifty other people saying the same thing.

He illustrates with an older example from his real estate training business. Real estate wholesaling, buying and selling the contract on a property rather than the property itself, was already a crowded topic among investors. Francis and his team repositioned it for a completely different audience and renamed it 'paper flipping,' since the mechanism is really about flipping the paper, the contract, rather than the property.

"If you're looking to enter a market, look for the audience that hasn't heard about your product or service, and reframe the positioning so it has a little bit of pizzazz and excitement behind it." — Francis

He connects this to today's AI landscape: the technical barrier to launching a website or funnel has essentially disappeared, so the differentiator has shifted entirely to messaging, audience understanding, and creative quality.

6. Feeding AI What Makes You, You

Bernard walks through his own system for making AI output sound like him instead of generic web content. It starts with his own writing: years of journal entries and notes, uploaded directly into Claude or ChatGPT. He layers in Whisper Flow and Granola recordings of his livestreams, client calls, and cohort sessions, and Fathom recordings of video calls, all piped into the AI through MCP.

"Only use my words to create a post. Look at what I've said in the past." — Bernard

He frames the underlying philosophy simply, quoting a line he returns to often:

"People don't remember what you said. They remember how you made them feel." — Maya Angelou, quoted by Bernard

Both brothers also feed personality assessments into their AI tools, referencing Myers-Briggs, Kolbe, Wealth Dynamics, DISC, StrengthsFinders, Culture Index, and Dan Sullivan's Unique Ability 2.0. The logic: once an AI understands not just your words but how you think and communicate, its output starts to reflect you instead of the internet at large.

7. Design That Doesn't Look Like Everyone Else's

On the visual side, Bernard's rule is to actively avoid whatever AI defaults to. When he noticed the same emoji-heavy, over-polished look showing up everywhere, he took the opposite approach.

"Dan Kennedy said it best. If you see the crowd going that way, go the opposite way." — Bernard

His method for building a distinct visual identity: find the intersection of two things you genuinely love. For his own brand, that meant combining the cinematic look of Shogun on Hulu with the design elements of his son's show, Samurai Rabbit, then feeding that combination into Claude Design to generate fonts, colors, and the swish patterns that now run through his content.

He also emphasizes original photography over stock imagery, his own handwriting, his own photos of everyday objects, as a simple way to look different in a feed full of AI-generated visuals.

8. Turning Yourself Into a Superhuman

Francis extends the personality-data idea into something he calls turning yourself into a superhuman: using AI as a coach and sounding board that has access to your full personality profile, so it can flag blind spots and hold you accountable in a way you can't always do for yourself.

"What if you had a database of everything great about you, all of your strengths, all the things that made you powerful, and you were able to access that at any time? Now you do." — Francis

As one concrete example, Francis has a daily routine that generates a personalized ten-minute podcast about his own priorities and blind spots, which he has read back to him in a Snoop Dogg voice through Speechify. He's careful to note the AI's read on him should be treated with discernment, not taken as gospel, since it can skew flattering.

He also raises a sharper question about dependency: if you're using AI purely to get the end result, are you actually growing, or are you quietly becoming less capable without it?

9. Why Human Experience Still Wins

Francis argues that the one thing AI cannot reproduce, no matter how good it gets, is lived experience.

"What AI cannot reproduce is your own experience. Simple as that." — Francis

He points to a recent example: Bernard ran a Facebook ad campaign using AI to help generate the direction. By the textbook, and by what the AI had pulled together, the setup looked correct. But Francis, a longtime media buyer, could tell from experience it wouldn't perform. They made adjustments based on that experience, and the cost per lead improved.

Bernard connects this to a story from earlier in his career, when he was mentored by a legendary direct mail marketer named Ted Thomas. Thomas designed every piece of marketing to match the typography and readability standards of USA Today, reasoning that his audience already trusted and was comfortable with that specific visual language. Bernard credits a related idea to Jay Abraham: creativity often isn't about inventing something new, it's about finding what already works in one market and adapting it to another, as long as the audience feels safe with something that's new but not unfamiliar.

10. Choosing Tools Without Chasing Every Shiny Object

Both brothers address the temptation to constantly chase the newest AI tool. Bernard's approach is to stick with a single primary tool at a time rather than splitting his personality and training data across multiple platforms.

Francis takes a different but related approach: he built what he calls a second brain in Google Drive, using Claude Code to organize years of his podcasts, teaching materials, and recordings into a structured directory with its own instructions for how to reference and add to it. Because that source material lives outside any single AI tool, he can move between Claude, ChatGPT, and Groq and have all three draw from the same foundation, rather than losing context every time a new model comes out.

He also described a habit of running the same prompt through multiple models, ChatGPT and Gemini, back and forth, until they converge on a recommendation, then applying his own judgment (and, in one example, Bernard's eye for lighting) before finalizing anything. The AI outputs are inputs to a decision. The final call is still human.

What to Do Next

The session closes on a note about community: even in the age of AI, people still need it, and AI can't replace it. Bernard and Francis point viewers to a QR code linking to an event page for anyone who wants to connect further.

Upcoming events mentioned include AI Creator Day in LA, Contractor Closers and Connections in Beverly Hills the same evening, and the next AI for Business Summit (the exact October dates were corrected live during the session, so check the event page for the confirmed schedule). Bernard also polled the audience on whether they'd want to see more sessions with Francis as a recurring co-host, and the response was strongly positive.

Bernard closes with the line he returns to at the end of every session:

"Fight for creativity like it's a fight for the knife in the mud. Because when you grab that knife and you wipe it off, you cut through all the noise. Your presence is your strategy. Find your voice, be memorable, and share it at scale." — Bernard