Introducing The Shift: The live show that translates AI into something small business owners can actually use.
In our first episode, Jesse and Chris showed how to build social media graphics in minutes with Claude and Canva, use AI to analyze your email subscribers, and show up in AI-powered search results. No technical background needed for any of it.
What did you think? What questions do you have about AI that you’d like us to cover in a future episode? Drop them below.
Sign up to catch future episodes of The Shift
Episodes air weekly Tuesdays and Fridays at 12pm ET! Recording will be posted in this thread.
Here is the recording for episode 2 of The Shift: Did Claude Design just replace us or did it unlock a superpower?
Jesse and Chris put Claude Design to the test to find out if AI is replacing them or just the next tool to learn.
Their verdict: AI is handling more of the production work. Creative direction, taste, and knowing your audience are still yours!
They also walked through a four-part framework for getting better results from any AI tool: define the role, give context, write clear instructions, set voice guidelines. Then showed how to use it to build a brand voice document and train a custom AI copywriter.
Here’s the recording for episode 3 of The Shift: Is ChatGPT Images 2.0 better than Gemini for your business?
Jesse and Chris put both tools to the test with real prompts and live results to find out which one actually holds up for small business use.
Their verdict: ChatGPT Images 2.0 is a serious upgrade. Better text, collages, ultra-wide formats, stronger photorealism. But Gemini still has its moments. They show you exactly where each one wins and where each one falls short.
They also answered a viewer question about using AI to analyze email marketing performance data, including a practical tip for working around context window limits when you’re dealing with large datasets.
One more thing: AWeber is now available as an app inside ChatGPT.
Got a question for a future episode? Submit it at aweber.com/shift.
Here’s the recording for episode 4 of The Shift: Which AI voice cloning tool actually sounds like you?
Jesse and Chris cloned their voices in ElevenLabs and Noiz.ai, head to head, on the same script. You hear both results live and see exactly how each tool performs.
Their verdict: one sounds like you. One sounds like a robot. They show you which is which, and what to do with a cloned voice once you have one. Videos you didn’t have to record. Course narration without a studio. Content that sounds like you without you having to show up every time.
They also answered questions straight from viewers and small business owners.
Got a question for a future episode? Submit it at aweber.com/shift.
New episodes every Tuesday & Friday at 12 PM ET. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one!
Here’s the recording for Episode 5 of The Shift: Claude Design + Claude Code: Redesign and Deploy a Real Website Live
Your website needs work. You know it. But hiring a designer feels expensive, doing it yourself feels overwhelming, and so it just sits there.
In this episode of The Shift, Chris and Jesse redesign a real personal website live on stream using Claude Design and Claude Code. No Figma. No developer. No waiting.
Here’s what you’ll see in this episode:
How to prompt Claude Design to generate high-fidelity mockups from a screenshot of your existing site. How to let it ask clarifying questions, then tell it to just decide. How to use Claude Code to read your actual codebase and push the design changes directly. Why AI turns every small business owner into an art director. And a live demo of a new conversational form builder coming soon.
Plus the mailbag: should you automate your Google review responses? How to keep a human in the loop without adding work.
Here’s the recording for Episode 6 of The Shift: 3 AI Video Tools Worth Paying For (And What to Use Each One For)
You’ve seen the AI video demos. This is the one where we actually build on screen.
Three tools. Three price points. One episode to find your starting place.
We used each tool live to create:
- A product ad built around an AI-generated energy drink can
- A real estate listing photo turned into a spring walkthrough video
- A lifestyle scene with AI models holding your product
- A Spanish-language voiceover generated in seconds
- A character built from a headshot and dropped into a video scene
We also cover when to start in ChatGPT Images 2.0 before you ever open a video tool, how credits work across each platform, and why the cheapest option might be exactly where you should begin.
Tools covered: Video AI, Artlist.io, AI Studio, and Luma AI.
Ready to try one?
Video AI
Artlist.io
Luma AI
Here’s the recording for Episode 7 of The Shift: Stop Hiring a Designer for Your Email. Use ChatGPT or Claude Instead
You want emails that look like a designer made them, but you don’t have a designer. This episode fixes that!
Chris and Jesse build the same promotional email three ways: in ChatGPT, in Claude, and inside AWeber’s new in-product email builder. Same prompt. Same product. Three very different results.
You’ll see:
- How to write a prompt that gets a usable first draft, not generic filler
- Why screenshots and product page links beat copy-pasted text every time
- How to connect ChatGPT or Claude directly to your email platform so you can ship in minutes
- The fixes that turn an 80% AI draft into something you’d actually send
- A live mailbag walkthrough: how to use a Claude project to rewrite press releases for your audience and pull SEO-ready excerpts
Watch it. Pick one workflow. Run it today!
Here’s the recording for Episode 8 of The Shift: Build and Publish a Website with Lovable and Replit (Step-by-Step)
Hiring a developer takes weeks. Wrestling with a page builder eats your Saturday. Both end with something that looks like everyone else’s.
There’s a faster way now!
Jesse and Chris build a real landing page and a working web app live in this episode. Using Lovable and Replit. You see the prompts, the publish flow, the custom domain setup, and the moments when things go sideways and how to recover.
You’ll walk away knowing:
- How to prompt Lovable so your page actually converts, not just looks pretty
- How to spin up a small web app in Replit. The kind of internal tool you’ve always wanted but never knew how to build
- How to publish to a real, shareable URL today. Not “almost ready”
- Why Lovable and Replit are built differently, and which one fits your project
- What to do when AI builds something almost right but one section is broken
Plus the mailbag: where to start when you have ten landing page ideas, how to connect a custom domain in two clicks, and how to fix things without knowing how to code.
Watch it. Pick one tool. Build something today!
Here’s the recording for episode 9 of The Shift: HeyGen vs. Synthesia: Building an AI Presenter for Your Course
You know video sells. You also hate being on camera.
Or you have twelve lesson scripts sitting in a folder because filming day keeps getting pushed. Or you’re a solopreneur whose whole brand is you, and the thought of producing a course in front of a lens has stalled the launch.
Episode 9 of The Shift AI Show has a way out!
Jesse and Chris build an AI presenter from scratch in two of the biggest avatar tools available right now: HeyGen and Synthesia. Same script. Same prompt. Two very different results.
No cloning. No faking real people. You pick the look, pick the voice, give them a name, and put them to work on course lessons, reels, welcome videos, and sales pages.
Here’s the recording for episode 10 of The Shift: Create Email Opt-In Forms By Describing Them
A few years ago, a decent sign-up form meant a template that didn’t fit your brand, a developer you couldn’t afford, or a WordPress plugin you hoped wouldn’t break your site. Then you styled it. Then you prayed it worked on mobile.
In this episode, Jesse and Chris demo our new AI sign-up form builder, live in open beta. You type what you want. It builds it. You embed it.
You’ll also see the publishing flow (install the code snippet once, then never touch it again), how to target specific pages and visitors, and a live A/B test showing a pop-up variation pulling 40% more sign-ups than the standard inline form.
Plus: image generation is built into the builder. Yes, we made dogs doing yoga.
Mailbag this week: Michelle from Frisbee Financial Coaching asked how to repurpose an AI podcast video featuring her and her dog Webster. Jesse breaks down the AI-assisted repurposing stack.
Here’s Episode 11 of The Shift: We Made a Video Inside Google (Google I/O 2026 Recap)
Half your customers find you through Google. Now Google is changing what “finding you” even means. This week at Google I/O 2026, they announced Universal Cart (shoppers buy from your store without ever visiting it), Ask YouTube (which surfaces individual chapters from your videos as search results), Gemini Omni (a new video generation model), and Gemini 3.5 Flash with interactive UI built right into chat. We watched the keynote so you don’t have to. In this episode, we walk through what’s actually here today, what’s coming this summer, and what you should be doing about it as a small business owner.
You’ll see:
- A side-by-side test of Gemini Omni against VEO 3.1, using a real dog and a real toaster. Spoiler: one of them understands physics.
- How Universal Cart works under the hood, the two protocols it relies on, and why your e-commerce platform choice now matters more.
- A live Ask YouTube demo and what it means for how you should be chaptering your videos. (Hint: even three-minute videos.)
- A handyman’s mailbag question about whether any of this changes his SEO strategy this week. (Short answer: mostly no, but here’s what does.)
Here’s Episode 12 of The Shift: Lovable and AWeber AI: Build a Complete Email Starter Kit Fast
You want to start collecting emails. You don’t have a landing page, a form, or a welcome series. By the end of this episode, you’ll have all three. Built with Lovable and AWeber AI. Ready to send.
In Episode 12 of The Shift, we build a complete starter email system from scratch:
→ A landing page in Lovable
→ An AI-generated signup form in AWeber
→ The form installed on the live page
→ A welcome series that engages
→ A workflow that triggers the series from a single tag
You’ll see every click. No slides. No theory. Just the build.
If you’ve been waiting to “figure out email” before you start, this is the episode that gets you off zero.
Here’s Episode 13 of The Shift: Claude AI Beyond the Basics: 3 Power Moves (Small Business Edition)
Most people use Claude to write an email or fix a subject line. That’s table stakes.
This episode goes further. Jesse and Chris walk through three things you can run this afternoon to get real business value out of Claude.
Demo 1: Feed Claude your testimonials and website copy. It builds your ideal customer profile and rewrites your hero section to match.
Demo 2: Run a competitive teardown. Give Claude a competitor’s site and get back a positioning breakdown with specific gaps you can own.
Demo 3: Build a Claude project that knows your business. Give it your brand voice doc, FAQs, and persona. It gets smarter every time you use it.
Plus Chris shows a Claude Cowork build that turned a local networking problem into a filterable event calendar.
Here’s episode 14 of The Shift: Run Notion, Canva & AWeber From One ChatGPT Prompt
You’ve used ChatGPT to write things. This is the next level.
In this episode, we show you how to connect ChatGPT and Claude directly to the tools you’re already using, like Notion, AWeber, and Canva, so a single prompt can build your content calendar, draft your emails, and kick off your social assets without you switching tabs once.
We call the technology MCPs (Model Context Protocol). You don’t need to know what that means to use it. We’ll explain it in plain language and show you exactly how it works.
What you’ll get from this episode:
A clear explanation of what MCPs are and how they work inside ChatGPT and Claude. A live workflow demo: ChatGPT builds a content calendar in Notion, then creates ready-to-send emails in AWeber from that calendar. An honest look at what worked, what didn’t (Canva gave us a tough time), and what that actually tells you about where this technology is right now. A breakdown of Claude Cowork and OpenClaw for anyone curious about fully autonomous AI agents.
This one surprised us. We think it’ll surprise you too.
I’m one of those people who is rather picky about what I use AI for. The episode covering the new AI form builder just kinda blew me away. There is nothing else on the market like this right now and I think AWeber is doing AI right.
Here’s Episode 15 of The Shift: Show Up in AI Search: Optimize Your Website with Claude
70% of searches end without a click. AI picks a website, answers the question, and moves on. Yours might not be the one it picks.
In this episode, Jesse and Chris take a real small business website (Dinki, a pickleball paddle brand), score it against four competitors using Claude, and rewrite the homepage copy live on camera. By the end, you’ll know exactly what AI looks for and how to fix your site before your next potential customer searches.
What you’ll learn:
- The 3 rules that determine whether AI cites your website
- How to run a competitor audit with Claude in under 10 minutes
- What makes copy “extractable” for AI search results
- Why human voice and taste still matter (even after the AI draft)
Here’s Episode 16 of The Shift: ChatGPT Small Business Finances: Expenses, P&L, and Invoice Emails
43% of small business owners are acting as their own bookkeeper every day. And accounting is the number one task they most want to hand off but can’t afford to.
This episode shows you three ways AI can take the most painful parts of your finances off your plate: expense categorization, P&L variance analysis, and a past-due invoice email that doesn’t sound like it came from QuickBooks auto-send.
Jesse walks through each demo live in ChatGPT, including the exact prompts. You’ll also get a real conversation about what financial data you should never put into an AI model.
Here’s Episode 17 of The Shift: Make Lovable and Claude Design Look Custom, Not Generic
You can spot an AI-built site from across the room. The purple gradient, the rounded cards, the off-white background that’s always the same shade of off-white. These tools let you build in an afternoon what used to take weeks. But every one of them has a design personality. And once you see it, you see it everywhere.
Chris walks through a live demo of how to break out of that default aesthetic using Lovable, Claude, ChatGPT, and AWeber’s landing page builder. Plus a mailbag answer on what actually makes a landing page convert.
What you’ll learn:
- Why AI tools create the “beige-ification of the internet” and how to fight it
- Side-by-side comparison of Claude, Lovable, ChatGPT, and AWeber defaults
- The mega marketing prompt for generating multiple design directions
- How to use screenshot critique to clean up visual bugs fast
- The landing page conversion framework (hero, scroll signals, bottom CTA)
- Live demo: AWeber’s new landing page builder in action
Here’s Episode 18 of The Shift: Give Your Emails a Redesign Boost with AI (Live Demo)
You’ve opened that old email template a dozen times, meaning to redesign it. Then closed it again.
Today we rebuild a real email from scratch, twice, using AWeber’s new AI email builder. You describe what you want. It builds it. No designer, no code, no spacing-and-color rules to memorize.
Watch every prompt happen on screen:
- Recreate an existing email from a single archive link
- Use Claude to write a stronger builder prompt
- Match your brand from a screenshot
- Generate an on-brand hero image
- Swap in a brand-new story
- Drop in an accent-color callout box
All in less time than it took us to talk about it.
We also unpack the news: why Anthropic pulled its new Fable 5 model after a U.S. government restriction, and what that signals for the next wave of AI.
Try the builder yourself: https://www.aweber.com/forms
Get the extra tips that don’t make the show: https://www.aweber.com/shift
