Erica Rooney on AI search and visibility for HER Collective
Erica Rooney is the founder of HER Collective, a career and leadership community that combines AI training with weekly coaching and a network for women in corporate roles and entrepreneurship. The conversation covers which tasks Erica has handed to AI, why social media remains a human task, and early signs that people are finding the business through ChatGPT.
Erica uses AI for routine cleanup but returned to doing social media herself. For the year ahead, the practical priority is improving SEO and visibility in AI search, while recognizing it is still too early to know how much ChatGPT discovery will grow.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I spent more than 15 years in corporate HR and rose to Chief People Officer, including leading a company through its $125M merger with Infosys. Over and over, I watched excellent women do great work and wait for someone to notice, and I believed that rule too until a reorg and a new boss showed me how fast your track record can stop counting. So I built the room I couldn’t find. HER Collective sits outside your company, so the women around you are not competing with you for the same seat, and they will tell you what they asked for and what they got paid. We pair AI training that shows up in your numbers with live weekly coaching on the job, the business, and the life underneath both.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
I get a lot of my visibility from CHIEF, and most of my new business comes from speaking events. I wish more of it came in organically through different marketing initiatives.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I’ve handed over a lot of my cleanup work to AI: cleaning up my emails, my files, and all the things that pile up. I tried using AI for social media and went back to doing it myself. Any kind of social media work is just not the same.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes. I have had people tell me they found me in ChatGPT, but it is still too early to tell how big of a shift it is.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I would tell them they really need to beef up their SEO, AEO, and GEO. Make sure you are seen, heard, and cited so AI can find you. The rules of the game are changing, and if you’re not discoverable by AI, you are invisible.
Thank you to Erica Rooney and the team at HER Collective for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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