Turning customer research into personas

Michal Peled is a Technical Operations Engineer at HoneyBook who specializes in building internal tools and automations that eliminate friction for teams. In this episode, Michal demonstrates three practical AI use cases: using ChatGPT’s agent mode to automate LinkedIn recruiting, transforming customer research into interactive AI personas, and creating a custom calendar solution for a very San Francisco–specific problem—avoiding expensive parking during Giants games.

What you’ll learn:

1. How to use ChatGPT agent mode to automate LinkedIn recruiting and find high-quality candidates that manual searches missed
2. The step-by-step process for turning static customer research into interactive AI personas that product and marketing teams can actually use
3. Why NotebookLM excels at creating prompts from source material with proper citations
4. How to structure agent-mode prompts to create effective “little helpers” that follow your exact workflow
5. A practical framework for improving your prompts when AI tools aren’t giving you the results you want
6. How internal tools teams can drive massive impact by focusing on eliminating friction in everyday workflows

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Brought to you by:

Brex—The intelligent finance platform built for founders

Google Gemini—Your everyday AI assistant

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction to Michal and ChatGPT agent mode

(02:10) Using agent mode for LinkedIn recruiting automation

(05:14) Creating effective prompts for agent mode

(10:50) Demo of agent mode searching LinkedIn profiles

(16:29) Results and team reception of the recruiting automation

(19:53) The outcome of implementing on Michal’s team

(23:50) Creating custom GPT personas from customer research

(28:43) Using NotebookLM to transform research into persona prompts

(35:00) Adding guardrails to custom GPT personas

(37:20) Demo of interacting with custom-persona GPTs

(41:02) Creating a calendar automation for parking during baseball games

(48:15) Lightning round and final thoughts

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Tools referenced:

• ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/

• NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google.com/

• Claude: https://claude.ai/

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Other references:

• Google Calendar: https://calendar.google.com/

• HoneyBook: https://www.honeybook.com/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/

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Where to find Michal Peled:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michalpeled/

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Where to find Claire Vo:

ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/

Website: https://clairevo.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/

X: https://x.com/clairevo

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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.