EP 494: The Four Stages of AI Adoption Every Spa CEO Needs to Know

Well, hello, my dears. Daniela here, and welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. Today we are talking about the four stages of adoption with AI that every single spa CEO needs to know. Okay, and when it comes to AI, I feel like we’ve kind of got two camps, right? So we’ve got on one side we’ve got the spa CEOs who are experimenting with AI. They know that it’s important. They’re putting in real time. They’re using it, but it really it still feels like, gosh, once they get something figured out, there’s already something new. And you know, I’m sorry to say that that’s just the way that it’s going to be for probably the next three to five years is is my guess because AI is it’s advancing so quickly. You may feel like learning AI is actually taking more of your time instead of saving you time. You may feel like the output doesn’t sound like you, like you’re going back and forth for hours, like you’re just babysitting the computer for every single task, and I want to give you a map of how to move past that stage. Now, you also on the other side, when I’m looking at like you know where people are at in their kind of what stage they’re in and their level of AI adoption. We’ve got those people, and then we’ve got like, oh yeah, I know ChatGPT. I use it to write an Instagram caption, but I’m so busy. I don’t really have any time to implement it in my business. You know, like it’s it’s something I’m aware of, but not using it in the day to day, something you’ll figure out when things slow down. Okay, this episode is for you as well because I want to talk about what is actually happening in the world right now and why waiting may cost you so much more than you realize. All right, so we’re going to walk through the four stages of AI adoption and what they look like inside of a spa business. I want you to know exactly where you’re at and what it takes to move to that next level. Because when you understand the gap, then you can have a plan to move there, and that is really, really important. Right, it’s one thing to be someone who’s, you know, dropping some, getting some Instagram captions versus someone who has AI employees running entire functions in her business. All right, so let’s walk through those stages. All right, but before we get into that, I want, I want to talk about some real numbers. I want to, I want to share some real data with you about AI and why I’m so passionate about this and why I talk about this on every single podcast episode. Because I believe deeply believe that it is so important for you to learn how to use this skill. Okay, most of what we hear about AI is either like wildly optimistic that AI is going to solve all of our human problems, and you know the world is going to be this kind of blissful place, or it’s like the whole other spectrum, genuinely alarming. AI is going to take all of our jobs.

The world is going to go into turmoil, right? Well, I want to give you kind of a middle of the ground, middle of the road approach. I want to give you a grounded, honest look at what is actually happening right now, because it is something that you need to take seriously, and nobody nobody knows what is actually going to happen or how this is going to lay out. We just have people speculating, but this is brand new. This is something that is brand new, so it is something that’s extremely important to take seriously as a business owner, though. All right. So McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report surveyed nearly 2,000 organizations across 105 countries, and 88% of them now report using AI in at least one business function, okay. That is not experimental, right? This is in mainstream, right? And companies are getting real results, not using it, right? But getting integrating it so deeply into the way that work is actually Getting done, those companies they are pulling ahead at a pace that is hard to overstate.

Now Mo Godat, the former chief business officer at Google, he sat down with Stephen Bartlett on the Diary of a CEO, great podcast by the way. Some some of his guests are a little. Doom and gloom, but I do like listening to the interviews and hearing the wide variety of perspectives when it comes to AI. But on that episode, he plainly stated that upwards of 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their tasks automated, and the underlying technologies are doubling in capability every six to 12 months, compressing change that once took decades into a handful of years. Okay, so in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report from 2025, put it this way: AI and information processing technologies will be the most disruptive force shaping the labor market over the next five years, outpacing everything else.

Now, here’s what that means for your spa: the businesses that are building AI into their operations now are not just writing captions, but building actual AI spa teams. Those businesses are going to operate at a speed and efficiency that non AI powered spas simply will not be able to match. Okay, I was talking about this in 2024. I believe it even more strongly today. By 2027, there is going to be a very visible divide between the spa CEOs who have adopted AI and the ones who kept waiting for a better time. Okay, and it’s it’s something that you know. What are we actually talking about? What is AI actually doing? It’s drastically lowering your operational cost. It’s drastically increasing your productivity. I’m going to tell you a little bit later in the episode about our team. We right now have eight humans on our team, and we have 27 AI employees, and we are on track by the end of this year to have over 100 AI employees. So it’s something that AI employees do not call out sick. You can give them tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of feedback without ever hurting their feelings. It’s they have expert level skills in a variety of different aspects. They can work 24 hours a day, right? So we’re talking about the the playing field will be no longer level, and so if you’re coming into business and you’re competing against someone who has an entire team of AI employees. It’s going to be extremely challenging to do so. Okay, so don’t just wait for a better time. The better time is now, and the way that you get there is by understanding where you’re actually at. Okay, so let me walk you through the framework, and I want you to listen to all four, and then just see which one kind of identifies with you. All right. So stage one is what I call the copy paster. Okay. So this is where everybody starts. Every single person. I started here. Everybody starts here, right? You find out about Claude or ChatGPT. You open it up. You type in a prompt. Something came out. Maybe it was a social media caption. Maybe it was a blog post. You thought, okay, this is cool. This is crazy that this all can work so fast. You copied the output. Output. Maybe you tweaked it a little bit, and then you pasted it somewhere. Right? Copy paste. It’s essentially like using a search engine, but with better grammar. Okay. So every single session starts from scratch. There is no context loaded, no understanding of the business, no memory of your voice. You’re essentially asking a new hire with zero training to do a skilled job, and then being surprised that the output doesn’t sound like you.

So you get results occasionally, but they’re inconsistent, and the time it takes to get something usable is often longer than just doing it yourself. Okay, so that is the stage one frustration. Stage two is the prompter, and this is where my guess is that most of you listening right now are. So you figured out the quality of your input determines the quality of your output. You’ve gotten better at giving AI context, at specifying your tone, at asking for the the things in the way that you want them, you’re getting more consistent results. And the prompter has started to feel the power of this. Right, she can get a good output. She can move faster on certain tasks.

But here’s the limitation. Right, you still have. Be there every single time. You are re-explaining who you are working with every single conversation. You’re rewriting the context. You’re resetting the tone. You’re re-specifying the task. You are not an AI user.

You are an AI babysitter. Now, this is a stage where most people spend most of the time, and this is where they feel so frustrated because they know enough to know how it works, but they’re losing their mind in these endless loops, wondering why it is taking so long. Now, I lived here for quite a while, like in 2024. I was playing with ChatGPT. I really started diving into blogs. I started taking courses. I started hiring consultants. By the way, side note: Claude has these really great free courses that you can have yourself or your team take. They’re going to give you the basic understanding of these things, so if you’re just wanting to even learn the language, that’s a great place to start. Now, this is the place also where you can be like, man, I’m spending so much time here, and I’m just like, I I don’t think this is working for me, right? I am the bottleneck for every single output, I actually have less time because I’m spending so much time trying to get AI to work. Well, once you move out of here, you move into stage three, the trainer. Okay, now this is the shift that changes everything. The trainer has moved from asking AI to do tasks and teaching AI how she thinks, she’s built quad projects. She’s loaded her company’s voice, her values, her frameworks, her context into the system. She’s created custom instructions that every time she opens a session, AI already knows who she is, who her clients are, who she, how she communicates, what her standards are. This is the difference between hiring a temp and hiring someone you spent six months training. All right, so the output from a trainer session is recognizable. It sounds like her. It reflects her methodology and the amount of back and forth, the prompting, the correcting, the no, try that again, drops dramatically. Right, so the trainer is still running tasks, but she’s running them in a fraction of the time, and the results are substantially better. Now, stage four is the AI employer okay? And the AI employer has stopped running tasks and started deploying employees. She has specific AI tools built for specific jobs. So not one AI that does everything, but a suite of AI employees, each one trained deeply for a specific function of the business. All right, so here at Addo Esthetics, I’m updating our org chart right now, but I feel like it’s like this constant progression because, as I said, by the end of the year we’ll have 100 plus AI employees.

Now we’re going through, and it’s not as complicated or expensive as it may sound. All right, so we have currently eight humans and 27 AI employees. 27 AI employees. Okay, and those AI employees are not just like sitting in a folder somewhere that nobody opens. They are active. They have jobs. My they’re being used on a daily basis. My team knows who they are and what they handle, which is the whole point of building an AI spa team, so that your humans know how to use those AI employees to support them in their role, or to offload the administrative tasks, so that the humans have more time to interact with the humans, right? So that’s really an important piece. Our AI employees are not replacing our humans; they are offloading the tasks so that we can have more human to human connection, so we can show up. We have the time availability to show up in a bigger way with our clients and support them in a different way. Okay, so my human team knows what these employees are, so they’re kind of designated for these are our marketing employees. These are our ops employees. These are our sales employees of our AI employees. They all go in different categories, and the appropriate humans have access to those AI employees. Okay. Now we started what one really cool thing with this. I.

Ask my team every so every week my with my human employees I do a what we call a scorecard right so we check in and we’re kind of going over their scorecard and I always ask them you know what feels heavy what’s your focus for next week and share a win that happened in the past week okay and the what feels heavy question is really important. That gives me the context of where I need to build next. So if there’s something that’s taking a lot of time or is frustrating, that gives me the direction of okay, I want to I want to lighten the load. I want to support this human employee, and you know, for Christy, a lot of times it was the inbox. She handles our customer support inbox, and you know now she has a AI employee that she can go and talk to. So if a question comes into the inbox and she’s not sure how to respond? She doesn’t have to track me down. She goes to the Coach Daniela project. She asks the question, and she gets an answer that reflects exactly how I think. Now we have AI employees for staff onboarding. We’ve recreated a lot of these. Actually, in Growth Factor implementation, we have an entire AI spa team that we build for our implementation members, and one of those AI employees is an onboarding employee. Okay, so we built this at an event. We had I think 15 people there going through and building, and what every single one of them said is this is going to save me a week of time, not days, but an actual week of time of what this interactive employee does. Now this is the coolest thing.

So if you if you have team members, right, you know that when you hire somebody, you’re going through the employee handbook, all the policies and procedures, the spa booking software, the protocols, like all of this administrative stuff that you’re going through, and it’s taking so much of your time. The AI employee, I can say, hi, I’m Daniela. I’m starting at the front desk today, and it’s going to walk me through a structured onboarding process. That’s going. It’s going to be interactive. It can quiz me. I can ask it questions, but it’s going to give me a very thorough onboarding that’s going to save the spa CEO a massive a week of their time. So think about how much lighter that is going to feel when you hire someone, and you don’t have to build in all of that time to set them up for success, right? It’s massive, and we know that employees leave when they don’t feel supported, when they don’t know what’s expected of them, right? So you’re building in these kind of guardrails to give them a more professional, a better overall experience working at your company. Okay. We also built an AI employee for spas that handles home care recommendations. So it’s think about if you have multiple providers, right? And you have a patient come in, and they go to provider A and they get this, you know, $1,200 home care regimen, and then they go to provider B and provider B recommends something totally different. That is going to break the trust of your patient, right? Because they’re going to say, “Man, I just spent $1,200. Was like doing the wrong thing, right? So what this AI home care employee recommender does is built to be customized off of your brain, off of your philosophy, right? This is not generic. This is custom trained for you, and then it’s going to recommend home care based off of the skin, like the Fitzpatrick type, the condition, the products that you’re carrying, your beliefs, all of those types of things. Incredible, right? It’s incredible. So that gives think about hiring a new person that doesn’t isn’t trained on the skincare lines that you have in your spa. Think about how much more supported that provider is going to feel by having these resources as a tool. Okay, so this is what I mean when I’m talking about an AI spa team. All right, so not AI that you use, AI that works in your business, whether you are there or not. Okay, and the thing about the AI employer stage, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

You don’t have to have a tech background, right? It requires building systems. With intention. Now we and I will say there’s kind of like once you get to the employer stage, there’s kind of these additional layers where you can run things, you can schedule tasks, you can have these, you know, going automatically, right? So it’s you’re not having to be there. I mean, I get a report every single week on the performance of my coaching staff. I every single day, multiple times a day, I get a report for every single coaching call that my staff does. I’m not sitting there running that; it is running in the background automatically, and then I get the output. Right. So when you’re at the AI employer stage, then there’s all these additional levels that you can go to that are again going to free up more and more of your time. Okay, now let’s go back to stage two. Okay, let’s go back to stage two because this is a really frustrating stage, and this analogy really landed for me or helped me to understand it a little bit better. Okay, so imagine that you hired a team member, and this is a brilliant team member. And on their first day, you said, “Okay, here’s your task. Go do it. No onboarding. No context about the business, no explanation of how you communicate with clients, no standards to reference, no job description, just the task. Okay, if they’re an excellent candidate, right? They’re a good hire. The output they probably would be able to handle it, but they might be a little bit nervous. It wouldn’t be great, Right, so you would spend hours editing and correcting, and then the next day you do the exact same thing because nothing was documented, nothing was retrained. That’s stage two. All right, that’s the prompter, and the solution is not to get better at prompting. The solution is to onboard AI in the way that you would onboard a high-performing human employee. When you do that, you build the context, you load the voice, you create the instructions.

Everything changes. Okay, so AI stops feeling like a stranger that you have to manage and starts feeling like someone who actually knows your business. Okay, now I want to give you one question before we close. Spa owners who come to us, right? They’re using AI to do things faster, and that’s a fine goal. It’s a real improvement. But the owners who move into stage three and stage four, the AI employer, they’re asking a different question. Okay, they’re asking, does this task actually require me, or does it require someone who thinks like me? Those are not the same question. Okay, so the answer to the second one, that’s going to kind of expand your mind of what is possible, an AI employee who thinks like you can handle the first draft of a client email at 2p.m. while you’re in the treatment room. A trained AI project can review your social media content against your brand standards before it goes out. An onboarding AI employee can walk a new hire through your protocols, your culture, your standards, without you sitting in that room for a week. Right? You’re not being replaced. You’re being multiplied. That is a significant difference. Okay, how amazing would it be to have multiples of you in your business. Okay, so here’s where I land on all of this. The data is clear. The trajectory is clear. AI adoption is not optional for your business in 2026. Okay, I don’t know how to say that more clearly. I want to be extremely clear about this because I think that our industry has been slow to hear it. Right, the spa CEOs who are building AI spa teams right now-they’re going to run circles. Right, their cost, their operational costs will go so far down. Their standard of communication, their connection, their their time availability is going to go so up that it is going to make it so hard to compete. Okay, now don’t feel like you have to do this all at once. All right, you just need to know what stage you’re in right now and start to take baby steps to move into that next stage. Okay, if you’re in stage one, stop starting from scratch. Give AI full context every single time you open a session.

If you’re in stage two, your next move is to build a quad project. Your voice. We we use our eyes. Document we use our company bio. Our company bio encompasses so much of this. It’s a very robust document that we create. We want your standards, your frameworks, right? This is going to take one session for you to build, and then every other session after that is going to run so much faster. If you’re in stage three, I want you to ask what repetitive function of your business could you hand to a trained AI employee this quarter? And if you’re building towards stage four, you know where we are, right? The AI SPA team framework is what we build inside of Growth Factor implementation, one AI employee at a time, alongside you. Now, here’s your homework. All right, what stage are you in, and what’s the one thing that would move you forward to the next stage? That’s it. Right, action creates clarity. Don’t just listen. Do the thing, my friends. All right, so send me a DM on Instagram. Shoot us an email. Tell me what stage you’re at. Tell me. I want to know. I read everything. All right. Thank you so much, my dears. I will catch you in the next episode.