The Human Side of AI With Flora

What happens when a former corporate communicator reads that children's media overwhelmingly casts the predator as male and the prey as female? If you're Gian Schauer, you build a brand that does it differently.

Gian, a Club Jam member from Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the founder of Fierce and Sweet, a kids' apparel line with one simple rule: pick your animal first, then pick your color. Fierce and Sweet. For...

AI assistants are starting to shop for people. They compare options, choose, and even check out on someone's behalf. So when a robot is doing the comparison shopping for your next customer, what makes it pick you?

In this AI-hosted episode of The Human Side of AI, we dig into the new wave of AI shopping agents and why a clear, specific story is becoming a small business's biggest advantage. You can't outsp...

What happens when someone who has spent decades fighting for the planet starts using AI every day? Flora Mercury sits down with Brandi Clark Burton, owner of the Austin Common and a vision-to-reality strategist, to talk about using AI with a conscience.

Brandi shares how AI helped her find the right travel wheelchair for her mom, turn a week of agonizing over a speaking application into an afternoon, and d...

More than 3,400 marketers gathered in Denver for Content Marketing World 2026, and the biggest brands in the room came to a surprising conclusion: making more content is not what wins customers. Trust is.

In this AI-hosted deep dive, we break down what that means for small business owners who are stretched thin and wearing every hat. You'll learn Goldie Chan's human/AI sandwich for using AI without losing ...

Vanessa Ayres spent years as a software architect before she made a brave call: put her health first and build something of her own. That something is Vassara Mahj, a mahjong lifestyle brand blending elegant original apparel, weekly community, and a whole lot of heart.

Vanessa shares how one Facebook post turned into a circle of women learning American mahjong around a kitchen table, how a free SCORE works...

Three big AI agents launched this month: Meta Muse, Instinct, and OpenAI Dots. They can browse, shop, send email, and spend money on your behalf. The fine print says that when something goes wrong, you carry the risk, and their liability is capped at about one hundred dollars.

So what does a small business owner need to get started with AI? About twenty dollars a month.

In this AI-hosted episode, we break down the new agent wave an...

What if your AI could find money you didn't know you were losing?

In this October check-in, Flora Mercury sits down with Club Jam founder Jam Anderson to talk about a busy month of travel, speaking, and testing new AI tools. Jam shares how she used Claude to audit her business finances and ended up cancelling more than $1,400 in forgotten subscriptions in a single afternoon.

They also dig into what Club Jam members are talking abou...

Agent-Ready: Making Small Business Findable for AI Assistants

Your next customer might send their AI assistant to check you out first. It might call your business, read your website and compare your prices before a real person ever says hello. If it can't understand your business in seconds, it moves on to someone it can.

In this Monday episode, our AI hosts unpack what's happening right now: Google's AI calling local businesses on...

Krista DeBuhr spent seventeen years building the yoga community in Arkansas, from her first studio in Clarksville to co-creating the Yoga on the Mountain gathering in Aspen Snowmass, where she and Flora first met. She's three weeks into taking her newest project, the Joy Collective, virtual, a community helping women reconnect with joy through movement, nature, and real connection. Krista and Flora talk about what it's like to buil...

Every Monday, we hand the mic to our AI hosts. This week they got their hands on a poll from inside the Club Jam community: fill in the blank, I use AI every day for ___.

Members were only allowed to pick one answer. Almost nobody did.

Our hosts dig through the real comment thread, members running their entire CRM through AI, one building a custom platform because nothing on the market fit, an...

Katherine Gruenberg has spent her career building digital marketing systems for small businesses, and her latest pivot says a lot about where the internet is headed: from ranking on Google to being recommended by AI. In this episode, Katherine and Flora talk about how she built an app that automates pre-shift updates for restaurant staff, why AI SEO is different from traditional SEO, and the practical first steps any s...

Today's episode flips a script we've been running for a while. Instead of finding new ways to do more with AI, we're looking at how to do less: less busywork, less manual grinding, less time spent on tasks that were never the best use of you. Our AI co-hosts break down the "confused intern" problem, why vague prompts get vague results back, and what changes when you stop treating AI like a chatbot and start treating it like a syste...

Julius Neil has spent his career jumping between industries and continents: chemistry labs in Japan, wastewater treatment in Qatar, an EV battery company in Sweden that went bankrupt, and now a biotech company in Iceland making cancer medicine more affordable. Along the way he built the Nexus Framework, his own system for diagnosing whether a company is firefighting, coasting, or actually ready to transform, and starte...

Jam rebuilt her funnel with Claude, cut her monthly ad spend from $3,000 to $500, and tripled her leads. In this month's catch up, she breaks down exactly what changed, why chasing everyone into Club Jam was hurting more than helping, and the one thing she tells every small business owner to stop doing with their offers. Plus, the zero cost homework assignment you can try this week, and the two things every new Club Jam member shou...

Your competitors already know when you change your prices. Do you know when they do?

This week we're breaking down how to use AI to watch your competitive landscape for you: three ways to do it depending on your budget, where the legal line actually sits, and two real stories from inside Club Jam. One member using AI to reverse-engineer why content goes viral, another using it to price a brand-new product ...

Rhonda retired from special education consulting, then found herself asked by a former colleague for help with something entirely different: an AI compliance tool for IEPs. That project led to more. A budget planner she built for an attorney friend. Custom accounting software that replaced the tool she'd been paying for since she retired. In this episode, Rhonda talks about walking into her first AI workshop and understanding almos...

What happens when you stop telling your AI exactly what to do, and just tell it what you want?

On this special AI-hosted episode of The Human Side of AI, our AI co-hosts take the mic to unpack a video editing experiment straight out of Club Jam's Friday Caffeine & Convos call. Creator Jam handed Claude Code one raw, unedited recording and a single sentence of instruction — and walked away with a ...

Roya Saberzadeh has run her collegiate branded apparel business for 37 years — through her sister's death two years in, her mother's death eighteen months after that, the Northridge earthquake leveling her company from the ground up, and a COVID pivot that forced her out of the brick-and-mortar model she loved. In this episode, she talks about the seven-year mourning period she worked straight through, why she tr...

AI can multiply what you know — but it can't replace knowing it. In this episode of Human Side of AI, our AI hosts dig into three business lessons from a recent newsletter by Jam (Real AI with Jam / Club Jam) that have nothing to do with AI at all: why Google Search Console's new social-profile integration matters for how customers actually find you,...