Only 12% of Australian small businesses are using AI effectively.*
Don’t be one of the businesses being left behind. Discover how AI can streamline your business and give you your time back — while actively building real tools every single month.
Limited to 15 businesses
A note from Suzi
Most AI is aimed at the wrong end of your business — the flashy stuff, not the stuff that’s actually eating up your time.
AI should not replace your words. It should not replace your brand. It should not replace you.
But it can replace all of those hours you and your team spend on mundane tasks — reviewing analytics, tracking what’s working, creating systems that simply don’t need your attention.
The AI Lab is dedicated to one thing: growing your business. That’s been at the core of everything we do at HerBusiness, long before AI was an abbreviation anyone used.
AI will never replace people. But it will free your people, and you, so there’s more time to do what only a human can do. That’s the whole point of The Lab. Not AI for AI’s sake. Growth, using every tool available to get there.
The AI Lab is for business owners who want more than prompts
Everyone knows how to insert a prompt. But knowing how AI can fit into your business?
You can’t learn how to build a tool that writes your SOPs from an Instagram carousel offering five prompts for better emails.
Can you use those prompts to write a caption that sounds like a hundred other people? Sure. Can you use them to draft an email that feels like a watered-down version of you? Also sure. But those are the shallow end of what AI can do for your business, and they’re not even the parts that need fixing.
The real opportunity with AI lies underneath that. It’s the systems, the processes, and the tools that run the business. The analytics. The databases. The technology. The graphics. The page builders. The things that don’t need a human touch, but take so much human time right now.
The HerBusiness twelve-month company budget used to take the better part of two weeks.
Using our AI model, it now takes four hours.
You’ll learn how to work with AI the way you’d work with your team. It needs training, coaching, briefing, and feedback.
Once you have those skills, you’ll see just how many tasks it can take off your plate.
How it works
One session to learn. One session to implement.
For two sessions each month we meet to learn, build, refine, and implement new AI skills. Each month builds on the one before, so you’re layering up a real toolkit, not just collecting tips.
The AI Lab teaches you what AI tools can do as the backbone of your business. But more importantly, it shows you exactly how to build the tools you need most — whether that’s analytics, budget forecasts, or searchable databases.
Every month for six months
The learning session
AI is almost impossible to keep up with. Most business owners are still stuck using it to write social captions. That isn’t the real power of what it can do.
We dive into one practical method you can use right away, and take a proper look at something that’s been built with AI — including exactly how it works, and what it took to make it.
- What’s changed in AI, what’s relevant to you, and what you can ignore
- One tool taught start to finish that, once set up, you can use for years
- Take a finished tool apart and see exactly how it was built
- You leave with one tool to put into practice in your business
Two hours · recorded
The building session
You bring what you want to work on most, and we work out how to build a tool that makes it actionable.
Throughout The Lab you’ll also see what other women business owners are actively creating. These are working sessions, for getting your AI projects started, created, and then implemented.
- Bring what you’re working on right now
- Get direct guidance on your specific AI project
- Build connections with other women as they build their own tools
- Leave with a completed tool
Two hours · live working sessions, recorded, though attendance is recommended
Friday 16 October
We start by setting up the infrastructure.
Session one is three hours, and it sets you up with a standard you’ll build every future AI tool against: your voice, your brand, your products and services, your offers, your processes, and your numbers.
The whole session is designed to be AI agnostic — whether you choose to use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or any of the other leading systems.
This sets you up to create any tool you want — specific to your business, and to the impact you want to make.
You’ll leave that first session with a shortlist of what to do before the first full session, and a guided system to help you work through it, so you don’t spend more time than you need getting organised. After that, everything settles into the twice-a-month rhythm.
What you’ll build
Build real tools. Don’t just listen to content.
The core of The AI Lab is practical working sessions. Over six months we identify what you actually need in your business, and build the tools you need most. That could mean building…
- A live dashboard pulling your marketing, sales, Google analytics, and social media statistics into one place
- An SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) system that writes and maintains itself
- A searchable database for testimonials and client reviews
- A sales target system that updates with actual sales results
- A twelve-month budget that connects to real-time data
- Purpose-built assistants — landing page builders, script builders, and the like
- A marketing tracking system, so you can measure and analyse every campaign
- A monthly bookkeeping pack that gives you real-time data
- A registration and landing page funnel you can build and publish yourself
- A brand voice guide that informs everything you produce with AI, so your output doesn’t sound like a chatbot and stays on brand
- Job descriptions, onboarding packs, and role scorecards for your next hire
- And pretty much any other system or tool you’d like to build for your business
Some of these will be exactly what you want to build. Others might not apply. Full disclosure: some of them need to connect to software you already use — anything to do with your numbers, for instance, will want access to Xero. During the building sessions you work on what makes sense for your business.
We will build what is useful and meaningful to you.
Here are some examples of what we’ve built in the last six months alone.
Use the arrows to move through them — tap any one to see it full size
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The company budget took the better part of two weeks.
The budget planner
We stopped treating it as a document and rebuilt it as a tool. Set the revenue goal, and every product line, month, and percentage falls out of it. The last rebuild took four hours.
Working out whether a deal stacked up meant a spreadsheet and a long evening.
The property calculator
Now it is one screen. Change a single input — the price, the rate, the yield — and six years of projections move with it while you watch.
The numbers lived in a dozen systems, and someone assembled them by hand.
The stats dashboard
One page now pulls membership, programs, campaigns, and analytics together on demand. In Suzi’s words: “I get reports now that I simply couldn’t get before.”
Years of praise sat scattered across email, LinkedIn, and group chats.
The testimonials database
We pulled 2,718 pieces of it, from 127 different sources, into one searchable place. Finding the right quote for the right page now takes seconds instead of an afternoon.
How the business ran lived in people’s heads, and left when they did.
The SOP system
There are now 164 procedures, filed by category, each one showing who last touched it and when. Writing them is the part AI does; the team keeps them honest.
A plan that lives in a forty-page document is not a plan anybody follows.
The strategic plan
This one asks for your vision, your objectives, and the projects under each — then draws itself into a single page as you type. One you could actually pin to the wall.
Your instructor
“The value isn’t in knowing AI. It’s in knowing what a business needs.”
PJ (Peter Johnston)
Director, HerBusiness
Hi. If you’re meeting me for the first time, I’m PJ — Suzi’s life and business partner. If we’ve met before, then good to ‘see’ you here.
For as long as I can remember, I have been a geek. An early adopter of tech, devices, software, and automation — you name it, I’ve loved experimenting with it. Add that to my passion for business and business processes, and this age feels like a gift.
For the last few years I have been experimenting, playing, studying, designing, and building.
AI has become the IT assistant I always wanted. The gap between imagining something and actually implementing it has narrowed massively. I am like a kid with not just one new toy, but a whole toy room.
That is all well and good on its own. But combine it with my business and investing experience, and I think I am incredibly well placed to help other people build tools and systems that don’t just buy back their time, but deliver efficiencies they had only imagined.
I am excited to be leading The AI Lab. I will teach what I know, and I will also learn alongside you. I will help you decide what is worth spending time on and what is a distraction — because this isn’t building for the sake of building. It is building to get a great return on the investment, of both time and money.
I am completely confident we will find at least one application that gives you an excellent return on the time and money you spend in this program. I hope you join me.
PJ
Head Geek!
PS. I am going to ask you to complete a questionnaire before the program starts. I promise that if I don’t believe The AI Lab is right for you, I will be straight with you, and we will refund anything you have paid.
We had a complex decision in front of our board and a lot of detail to wade through. Using AI, PJ built a simple, visual tool we could all understand in minutes. It showed us the answer, and it was exactly what I’d been thinking we needed for the team. PJ has a real gift for taking something complicated and making it simple, and he teaches you how to do it too.
What The AI Lab asks of you
Bring something real to work on.
The AI Lab will give you real tools, but only if you bring in real work rather than hypotheticals. This is a practical course, for creating systems you’ll go on using for years.
- One tool a month. One, not ten. A single tool you can use directly in your business.
- Bring the half-built version. You don’t need to be an AI expert to join.
- Say what you tried. Experiment with the work we do, outside of The Lab.
- Be ready to learn from other business owners. You’ll get inspiration from what other AI Labbers are working on.
We’ll provide more specifics for what to bring closer to the start of the program.
Before you join
Who The Lab is for, and who it isn’t.
This is for you if…
- You’re already using AI a bit, and you’re frustrated it hasn’t gone further
- You’re looking to make your business more efficient
- You want accessible, real-time data you can act on
- You’d rather build one useful thing than understand ten
- You’re willing to bring real work into The Lab
- You want to stay focused on implementing AI in your business in a consistent and systematic manner
This isn’t for you if…
- You consider yourself ‘bad’ or ‘clueless’ with technology
- You want a course on social media or email writing — that isn’t what this is
- You want to watch, not build — and there’s no one on your team who’ll do it either
- You’re looking for one-to-one consulting
There’s a short questionnaire once you register. PJ reads every one, and if he doesn’t think it’s right for you he’ll say so and we’ll refund you in full.
The dates
Six months, October to April.
All sessions run 10:00am – 12:00pm Sydney time.
The kick-off call runs 10:00am – 1:00pm.
October2026
November2026
December2026
January2027
February2027
March2027
April2027
The offer
Six months.
Add a second person — $47 a month
All prices in Australian dollars.
Each business can bring a second person for $47 a month. That can be a team member, someone who’ll do the building, or a business partner. They’re a full member of The Lab — same access, and the same ability to participate, contribute, and ask questions.
What’s included
- A three-hour kick-off, where you build the infrastructure everything else stands on
- Two sessions every month for six months
- Every session recorded
- A private space to post progress between sessions
- Fifteen businesses in The Lab, and no more
Before you ask
A few answers to your questions.
You should already be using AI a little — and feeling frustrated it hasn’t taken you further. If you’ve never opened one of these tools, The Lab may not be right for you yet. Often, though, that hesitation is really just intimidation — and that fades fast once you’re in and actually applying it. If you’re not sure which camp you’re in, say so on the questionnaire, and PJ will tell you honestly.
No. Any AI tool you choose to use is at your own cost, and you’ll need your own subscriptions. The methods taught in The Lab carry across the mainstream tools rather than depending on any single one.
We don’t recommend any one system. The one we reach for most often is Claude, and we use ChatGPT as well. What you learn in The Lab is meant to translate to whatever tools suit your business and the way you work.
Once you register you’ll get a short questionnaire. PJ reads every one. If he doesn’t think The AI Lab is right for you, he’ll tell you and refund your payment in full. He’d much rather do that at the start than have you sit through six months of the wrong thing.
Yes, and it’s encouraged. More often than not, the person who’ll actually build the thing isn’t the owner. A second place from the same business is $47 a month, and they’re a full member of The Lab. It can be a team member or a business partner.
Unfortunately not. The second person has to be from the same business — an employee or a business partner.
Every session is recorded, and there’s a private space to catch up and ask questions. The building sessions are largely working time, so there’s less to watch back — but they will be recorded nonetheless.
Neither. It isn’t consulting and it isn’t a mastermind. PJ facilitates The Lab, teaches the method, and shows you what he’s building himself. Everyone learns from and is inspired by every other business in it.
Because of what often happens in courses. You learn a lot, you leave full, and you use about ten per cent. Adults don’t learn that way — we learn by doing one thing, using it, and building the next thing on top. So The Lab is built the other way around: something to learn every month, something to build every month, and each month building on the last.
This is the first time The Lab has been run, so PJ will be seeking your feedback the whole way through and adjusting as it goes. If it’s needed and wanted, it continues.
* Intuit QuickBooks AI Impact Report Australia 2026, a survey of 3,790 Australian small and midsize business owners and operators. It found that 69% use AI regularly, while only 12% describe their use of it as extensive. Most of the rest sit somewhere in the middle — using it, but nowhere near what it can do. Read the report.
One last thing
Fifteen businesses. Starting 16 October.
If that sounds like your kind of Lab, click the button and let’s find out whether it’s a fit.