A custom GPT – I call it a BrandAI – is a really cool tool.
You can train it on your business. Your voice. Your offers. Your buyer personas. Your marketing plan. It can write like you, think in your frameworks, and stay on-brand without you hovering over every output.
That alone is powerful.
But I think we can sell ourselves short if we stop there.
Because when I sit with a business owner on a discovery call, I am not really thinking about tools. I am thinking about people.
More specifically, I always ask this question:
If you could hire one person to help you administratively in your business, who would that be?
Their answer is key to figuring out what kind of BrandAI we can build.
Stop Designing Tools. Start Hiring Teammates.
Most people approach custom GPTs like software.
I prefer to think of them as teammates.
Not replacements. Not autonomous agents running wild in the background. Assistants. Specialists. People you wish you could afford or find or train.
When you frame it that way, the conversation shifts from what can this tool do to who do I actually need help from.
That is where Brand AIs start to click.
Personas You Can Actually Build
Once you ask the hiring question, the personas tend to surface pretty quickly.
You might realize you need:
- A social media maven who understands your tone and knows what to post and when
- A business analyst who can look at your ideas, offers, or numbers and help you think them through
- A marketing strategist who understands your full funnel, not just content
- A word-of-mouth marketing brain that helps you spot stories worth sharing
- An operations-minded assistant who helps document processes and clean up workflows
Each one of those can be its own custom GPT.
Each one can be trained with a clear role, clear expectations, and clear boundaries.
That is very different from one giant, do-everything AI that kind of understands you and kind of does not.
Build One. Use It. Then Build the Next.
Here is the part most people miss.
You do not need to design the entire team upfront.
You start with one.
You build the Brand AI for the role you feel most acutely right now. The thing that drains your energy. The thing you keep putting off. The thing that slows everything else down.
You work with it.
You refine it.
Then you ask the question again.
Who is the next hire?
And you build that one.
Over time, you end up with a small team of Brand AIs that actually reflects how your business works, not how a software company thinks it should work.
Let Them Work Together With You in the Loop
Earlier this week, I wrote about the @ symbol and how you can call one custom GPT into another conversation.
This is where things get really interesting.
Your Brand AIs are not fully agentic. They are not making decisions on their own.
But with your direction, they can collaborate.
You can pull your marketing strategist into a conversation with your content writer. You can loop your analyst into a planning session. You can ask one to critique the output of another.
You stay in charge.
They bring perspective.
That combination is where the real leverage lives.
Brand AIs Are About Support, Not Hype
This is about building support systems around real humans running real businesses.
When you stop thinking of custom GPTs as a cool technical feature and start thinking of them as teammates, everything gets simpler.
Clear roles. Clear value. Clear outcomes. And a lot less mental load.
That is the point.
Helping businesses that do good do even good-er.
If you are curious what your first Brand AI hire might look like, start with this question.
If you could hire one person to help you administratively with your business, who would that be?
Then build that GPT.