All The ELEVATE Workshop Gave the Drafts to AI and the Next Step to Guests
October 6, 20266 min read
On September 23 in Beverly Hills, Maryna Slyzhuk showed ELEVATE guests how to set up an AI assistant in Claude that drafts overdue follow-up emails in its owner’s voice. As Regional Director at SapientPro, she shapes custom technology solutions for US businesses. Her partners for the workshop were Noa Schecter, founder of EQ Evolve Leadership Academy, and Gui Berenguer, an actor and speaker who advises entrepreneurs. The evening moved between the way a business operates and the way its people present themselves, and it ran almost entirely on practice.
An Assistant That Already Knows Its Owner
Maryna began by asking guests to count, privately, the emails they had promised to answer and left waiting and to estimate how many of them were worth money. The second figure is usually the uncomfortable one.
Her remedy rests on a distinction many AI users overlook. A new chat in Claude behaves like a brilliant stranger, capable yet unaware of your clients or your tone. Faced with those gaps, it offers polite guesses. A Claude project works differently. It is a dedicated workspace that stores its owner’s instructions and writing samples, which makes it closer to a colleague on their two-hundredth day.
The follow-up assistant she presented is one such project, connected to Gmail and Google Calendar. When Maryna typed four words, "Run my follow-ups," Claude reviewed the past week for meetings that ended in silence and emails still awaiting an answer. It showed the list first. Drafts for the chosen items appeared inside the original threads, ready for a person to read and send. The slide with the setup steps brought phones out across the room.
A follow-up is the last five percent of a sale, and it is the five percent everybody skips. Laziness has little to do with it. Writing a good one takes twenty minutes, and at seven in the evening nobody has them. I wanted to give those twenty minutes back to people.
Maryna Slyzhuk
Asked what eats most of their working time, many business owners described a problem familiar to SapientPro’s engineers. Their files are split between Google Drive and folders on individual laptops, which makes a phone call to a colleague the most reliable search tool.
AI can only be as good as the data beneath it. Several SapientPro projects have started from that layer, among them moving a delivery brand’s customer base into a single CRM and an analytics platform that draws CRM and accounting figures into shared dashboards. Once that foundation exists, answers can come from the company’s own records, as they do in the conversational shopping assistant we built on a retailer’s product database.
Four Responses to Fear
Noa Schecter turned the focus inward. She put two letters on the screen, B.S., and after a round of guesses explained that here they stood for Belief System, the lens through which each of us interprets events before reacting to them.
Next, participants wrote out every fear and self-doubt they could name and read the list to a partner, who answered each line with a blunt "So what?" Of the four reactions Noa described, most saw themselves in fight or flight, fewer in freeze or fawn. For the founders present, many items on those pages were business decisions on hold, a hire postponed, or a call to a potential client left unmade.
Fear rarely says no to a call. It says "later," and "later" ends with "It’s too late now; I’ve missed the train." A founder who comes from strength knows that they and their product are imperfect, gives the meeting their best, and moves on if the client says no. It’s a different mindset.
Noa Schecter
People Experience You Before Your First Sentence
Gui Berenguer’s part put everyone on their feet. Guests walked the room, meeting as many strangers as they could, introducing themselves through a hobby or a passion in place of a job title, and afterward took stock of their own eye contact and voice. Another exercise split them into two groups, one mingling inside and the other entering from outside to find a way in.
The 30-second talk gave the program’s most striking result. Given half a minute each for knowledge they consider truly useful, people spoke with faces lit up. Speakers who had arrived with visible reserve sounded far more confident once the subject became the value they could offer someone else, which happens to be the oldest rule of a good sales conversation.
Our confidence and growth depend on how well we listen to other people. When founders meet a client for the first time, they gain less by trying to impress and more by hearing them out with generosity and a sincere wish to understand how to help.
Gui Berenguer
VOICES
What made ELEVATE different was that it was interactive. Every person in the room got the chance to share their own experience, not just sit and listen. The notebook exercise was a great idea; it pushed me to look at my deepest fears instead of talking around them. And the food and the space were beautiful.
Shirley Portal
ELEVATE was an inspiring and valuable evening. The coaching session helped me rethink my fear of speaking in front of an audience, and Maryna’s talk showed how AI can become part of our daily routines. I’m already looking forward to the next ELEVATE event.
Valentyna Deineka
I have been to three ELEVATE workshops and two related events, and the mix of networking and training has paid off at all of them. Each visit has also shown me something new in AI. Maryna and Noa keep the energy high and make guests feel welcome.
Dean Clark
A Follow-Up Workshop Is in the Works
Construction professionals formed the largest group of guests at ELEVATE, and their industry is the subject Maryna has chosen for what comes next.
My next meetup, planned for the start of November, is called AI for Real Estate Developers & Construction Companies. The details are still coming together, but every update will go up on my social media. Follow me there, and you’ll be the first to know when and where we meet.
Maryna Slyzhuk
The Next Step Takes More Than Four Words
For one professional, four words and a Claude project are enough. A company whose knowledge lives in several tools and several heads needs an assistant that works from all of it, which is the kind of system our engineers build. Tell us how your records and follow-ups are kept today, and we will show where AI would bring the fastest return.
WHEN YOUR BUSINESS OUTGROWS ONE INBOX
Plan an AI assistant that knows your clients as well as your team does.
