“Moms are the operating system for a household. They are the core even when there is a calendar, even with AI technology, it still centrally lives with moms. So, the way I’ve been talking about AI to moms is not, ‘hey use AI for it to do more things so you can do even more where you are the sole person.’ I’ve been teaching how to use AI to activate the village around you,” said Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey, Entrepreneur, Engineer, AI Expert.
The mental energy to uproot plans, weigh tradeoffs and monitor outcomes, is exhausting. Artificial Intelligence (AI) certainly can’t do that thinking for us. In most cases, it hasn’t realized the promise of greater ease in our personal or professional lives. But it’s emerging quickly and no longer optional to engage with.
However, AI does certain things really well and you can become fluent in ways that serve you. I spoke with Stephanie about how to harness AI to streamline manual work more often, for those time-consuming tasks we all deal with.
Look at Where AI Intersects with Your Family
Although Stephanie is an engineer and former Google exec, she didn’t plan to focus her career on AI resources for parents. “My kids were coming home saying, ‘hey have you heard of ChatGPT? My friends are using it for school’ or ‘my teacher is banning it’ and I was like, hold on I’m still trying to figure out what social media you should or shouldn’t be on.”
Stephanie has three kids, at three different developmental stages and decided to dig deeper into what AI meant for her family. “At first, it felt like yet another thing I needed to figure out how to process through the eyes of my kids.”
Don’t Focus on What Platform is “Best”
AI is a lot of things, including AI-enabled web search along with specific tools that use AI. When gathering answers from the internet, which is where most of us start, Stephanie said don’t worry about the specific product.
She said, “Whether it’s Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT what’s true today, in terms of the feature sets wasn’t true last week and won’t be true next week. But that’s actually a good thing. They’re vying for world domination. So, if one of them has a cool new feature, you are guaranteed that in the next week or two other tool is going to have the same functionality. I tell parents, if you’re already working within Google Workspace then use Gemini. If you started with ChatGPT because that became the household name, go there.”
Put AI To Work for You
The magic is in the prompts and connecting multiple processes you would normally handle manually in intuitive ways. Stephanie explained, “I have a Claude project that is dedicated to my family. It connects to my family calendar and e-mail address, so all the kid stuff goes there. If I need to schedule a dentist appointment, I will tell Claude, ‘take a look over the next three weeks tell me what’s available for my son’s dentist appointment.’ Then it will look at all the things, like his basketball schedule, our meetings and then give options for what’s available.”
Have it Ping Your Village
Having AI scan the various calendars to find time for appointments is magical but it’s only the first step. Stephanie said, “Then I do my ‘mom cursory overview’ and have it e-mail calendar invites for my husband and my mom, because she’s also part of our village. So, whether that’s a partner, friend, grandparent, nanny, or au pair that’s one way to activate them.”
There are real challenges to finding or curating a village. If you have one, becoming intentional about communication and sharing the workload is key. “Use the calendar, which is always the big thing parent’s grapple with and push that information over to someone in your village so they can take it over the line. Setting these prompts to find space for the dentist appointment is very quick. Then I can have AI pass it on to my husband or mother to call and make that appointment and take my son.”
Let it Highlight What You Need to React To
Stephanie said, “Gemini now has a really cool daily digest e-mail. I have a family e-mail account, as I mentioned so every day now on my phone, I get a message that my daily digest is ready. It recaps emails I may have missed. Like, ‘hey this summer camp form is due on this date.’ Or ‘there’s a parent teacher meeting next week.’ And right from there I can have it added to a calendar for me or someone in my village.”
Beautiful! She added, “I’m sure many parents have their work, personal, and family e-mail addresses and if you’ve got a side hustle or business, there’s another one and you’re just in e-mail purgatory all the time. So, Gemini has this really cool feature that brings to life those family situations and allows me to take action right there from my phone.”
And Process Information From Photos
When I met Stephanie, during the New York City stop on my book tour she shared this incredible prompt I’ve given to as many friends as possible. She explains, “Well, after a certain age, there are just a lot of vitamins!” I laughed and nodded.
She explains, “We take a lot of supplements, liquids and pills to just keep the engines going. I went from just the multivitamin to 10 to 15 different things, and I didn’t know what to take when, or which ones conflicted with each other! I was actually doing myself an injustice by taking all of these pills at the same time. So, I literally lined up all of the vitamins and took a picture. Then I asked ChatGPT, ‘give me a schedule for taking these, give me the reason why you’re giving me this schedule. and what are the times I should take these, to maximize absorption?’ Not only did it give me, ‘hey here’s what you take on an empty stomach’ it gave me the reasoning.”
Validate AI Generated Advice
There are pitfalls to using AI based tools for information gathering because it can reproduce inaccurate or biased information. Stephanie said “You have to ‘trust but verify,’ we cannot blindly believe everything AI tells us. It’s built, by design to sound confident so, it is our job as the humans using it, to verify the information.”
Her vitamin hack is a brilliant shortcut. However, as Stephanie wisely states, when you are information gathering about health, ChatGPT does not replace the wisdom of a doctor or healthcare professional. “I then went down the rabbit hole of reading articles about what it shared and sent a screenshot to my doctor to confirm the advice. Through our healthcare portal, she wrote back within a day and gave the thumbs up. Instead of being in my head around what to do, or whether to wait until my next appointment, I was able to come up with a plan and course correct where it was needed. That collapsed time for me to start doing the things that I wanted to do, health wise.”
Repurpose Your Time Wisely
We discussed how moms often feel compelled to keep doing more versus pausing to rest. When time is saved on one activity, there’s always a longer list to go through. But AI has the potential to help repurpose certain types of manual tasks in ways that free up self-care space or time for your personal growth. After all, as a community that’s where we need to apply a lot more time. Creating and experiencing more spaciousness on our calendars, is key!
Stephanie’s passion and expertise for technology has allowed her to streamline home and work operations. It’s also changed her career path. When she was still in corporate, she started with a newsletter. “I was just sharing tips like, ‘hey here are the prompts I’m using for travel, meal planning and taking pictures that help me organize things.’ Those early days where I was figuring out what’s possible and since then, it’s snowballed into a formal company.”
Many thanks to the talented Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey!
Take her 5-minute quiz for a read out on your Family’s AI needs! Follow her great adventure on LinkedIn and check out the Mother AI newsletter for parenting and family AI resources.
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About Stephanie:
Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey is the founder and CEO of Mother AI. An electrical engineer by training, she spent 25 years in corporate America, including more than 11 years at Google. Today, she focuses on what happens when AI moves beyond the workplace and begins shaping our homes, schools, institutions, and everyday decisions.
Stephanie brings her expertise into rooms where decisions about AI, education, literacy, and policy are made. She serves on the NYC Public Schools AI Advisory Council, Common Sense Media’s NYC Council, and the board of the Stevens School of Engineering. In those rooms, she shapes the questions, challenges assumptions, and influences the standards that schools, institutions, and communities will inherit.
