In March 2026, AI Speaker, Michelle Cullison led two hands-on workshops at the LSU-A Artificial Intelligence Summit in Alexandria, Louisiana. This post summarizes the core takeaways from both sessions: building a reliable marketing copywriting assistant, and navigating today’s AI media creation tools for small business.
The summit was a full-day, practical event built for people who learn by doing. My goal in both rooms was the same: to send everyone home with a plan to put AI to work for themselves today, not someday.
Workshop 1 Takeaways: Building Your Marketing Copywriting Assistant
This session was for anyone who has been experimenting with AI but hasn’t yet turned those scattered experiments into repeatable results. We built a working marketing copywriting assistant together, step by step. Here’s what we covered:
A framework that travels: The Universal Assistant Framework works across every major platform — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot — so you’re never locked into a single tool.
We built it live: Rather than talk in theory, we constructed a marketing copywriting assistant on screen, step by step, so participants could see exactly how the pieces fit together.
From five hours to thirty minutes: A properly configured assistant turns a copywriting marathon into a quick power session. Same quality, a fraction of the time.
Templates you can reuse: Everyone left with the steps needed to build their own assistant in whatever AI tool they use.
The session is about: moving from “I’m experimenting with AI” to “I have a system that saves time, works consistently, and produces great results.”
Workshop 2 Takeaways: AI Media Creation Toolkit for Small Business
The second session was a guided tour of what’s possible right now with AI media tools. For a small business owner or a lean marketing team, these tools change what’s realistic to produce in-house. We explored five categories:
- AI video generation and editing: Text-to-video tools that change how small businesses create marketing content without a production crew.
- AI image creation: Turning a sentence into a professional visual in moments.
- AI translation and localization: Reaching multilingual audiences with real-time translation.
- AI avatars and spokesperson tools: Creating polished video content without ever being on camera.
- AI presentation tools: Slide decks that essentially design themselves.
Participants left with a curated reference guide of these tool categories, paired with a simple way to decide which type to explore first based on their own business priorities.
AI Questions & Answers
Q: There are so many AI tools. How do I pick one without wasting weeks testing different LLMs?
A: Start with the job, then follow your data. Name the task that eats your week, then look at where the data for that task already lives. If your files are in Google Workspace, Gemini sits right next to them. If the work happens in your CRM, the AI built into that CRM has the context already. Picking the tool closest to your data usually beats picking the one with the best reviews — and the core skills carry over when you switch later anyway.
Q: I’ve tried AI for writing and the results felt generic. What am I doing wrong?
A: With any task, work is rarely one and done the first time around. A one-off prompt gives you one-off results. When you build a reusable assistant with your voice, your audience, your data, clear instructions, and your guardrails baked in, the quality jumps and stays consistent.
Q: I want to reach Spanish-speaking customers, but I don’t have video skills or budget for a production crew. What’s realistic?
A: More than you’d think. In the workshop I used an AI avatar — not myself on camera — to deliver a message, then translated it from English to Spanish with a tool like HeyGen. No filming, no reshoot, no second take in another language. For a small business serving a multilingual community, that means you can produce polished, on-brand video in more than one language from your desk, in the time it used to take to schedule a shoot.
Q: Can AI actually build a presentation, or does it just give me an outline I still have to design myself?
A: It builds the real thing now. In the workshop we ran the same slide content through Gemini, Claude, and Gamma. Gemini and Claude both produced decks that were good enough to use, especially for a quick internal draft. But once you feed in your brand assets — colors, fonts, logo — Gamma is the pro in 2026. It turns your content into a polished, on-brand deck without you opening a design tool. The trick is matching the tool to the moment: fast and functional, or branded and presentation-ready.
About the LSUA AI Summit 2026
The LSUA Artificial Intelligence Summit was a full-day, hands-on event held March 20, 2026, at Louisiana State University of Alexandria. It brought together small business owners, educators, nonprofit leaders, and public service professionals to explore real-world AI tools, work through guided exercises, and leave with templates, strategies, and ready-to-use resources for their field.
The day featured a keynote on the state of AI in Louisiana, panel discussions, and breakout workshops across marketing, automation, leadership, and AI fundamentals.
Both of these workshops were built on the same belief that guides all my training: people should leave with something done, not just something to think about. If your association, company, or event wants AI sessions that cut through the hype and give your people working systems they can use right away, let’s talk.
For Event Organizers & Conferences
Looking for a dynamic keynote speaker or a high-impact breakout session leader who gives your audience working systems they can use right away? Let’s connect. 👉 View My Speaking Page
For Professionals & Corporate Teams
If you want to bring these exact frameworks and custom assistant workflows into your business, we offer deep-dive training programs:
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For Individual Professionals: Our signature AI Bootcamp for Busy Professionals walks you through putting AI to work from prompting and building custom assistants through automation and agents.
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For Companies & Organizations: Looking to upskill your entire staff? We offer tailored Team Training that mirrors our bootcamp curriculum but is designed specifically around your company’s private workflows, software stack, and operational goals.