Aranda & Co. / Who we work with

AI for coaches, course creators and online education

This page is for people who run a coaching practice, a course business, a membership or a small online school, with a team of somewhere between ten and a couple hundred people. If that's you, you've probably been pitched an AI version of yourself that answers students and prospects in your voice, a DM setter that fills your calendar, or a phone agent that calls every lead within seconds of the form. The offer usually comes with a short setup window, a price set against what a human setter costs, screenshots of booked calls as proof, and a guarantee or a trial in place of evidence.

What we do instead is sit with your people for two to three weeks and learn where your team's week goes and what each part of it costs. Then, if you want us to, we run the plan as your part-time head of AI and report to you every week.

Book 20 minutes How it runs here

What owners ask us for

A student assistant trained on your own material

We'd begin with an assistant that answers only from your course content and says that it's an assistant. When it can't find an answer, it hands the question to a person. Students ask the same questions about modules, assignments, logins and schedules, and today someone answers each one by hand, or you do. We'd count the questions it closes without help and how often it hands off, and we'd time how long students wait for an answer.

Replies to DMs and inbox leads

Prospects write in through Instagram, email and your site, and the reply usually waits until someone has a free minute between everything else. First we'd have AI draft each reply from your own templates and tone, through the platform's own tools on an account you control. A person reads the draft and hits send. We'd watch time to first reply and the number of conversations that turn into booked calls.

Follow-up after webinars and lead magnets

A webinar or a free download produces a list, and the follow-up sequence for that list is the part that gets skipped when the week fills up. We'd draft it from your own past emails and calls. It goes out by text or email only to people who gave written consent, and that consent record stays in your systems. The scorecard covers reply rate, the show rate on booked calls, and complaints and unsubscribes.

Turning recordings into posts, emails and lesson notes

Every coaching call, workshop and live session is raw material for emails, posts, lesson summaries and quizzes. Most of it never gets reused, because someone has to sit with the transcript. We'd produce drafts from your transcripts for you or an editor to finish in your voice, then track the hours per finished piece and how much editing each draft needs. Nothing is published until a person has read it.

Onboarding, refunds and support admin

We'd judge the support work by the size of the backlog on Monday morning and by time to resolution. Behind the course sits a queue of access problems, payment failures, refund requests, cohort scheduling and certificate requests. AI can tag each ticket and pull up the relevant student record, then draft the standard reply. Anything that involves money goes to a person to decide. The third number is how much of the queue those standard replies cover.

Enrollment call notes into your CRM

Enrollment calls end, and the notes, the next step and the follow-up email get written later or never. As long as the prospect has been told the call is recorded, the recording can come back as a summary and a next step, with the follow-up already drafted. The salesperson checks all of it before anything goes into the CRM or out to the prospect. We'd know it's working when more calls have complete notes and the follow-up goes out faster.

How it runs here

AI assessment

In a coaching or course business the assessment means sitting with you, whoever runs your inbox and DMs, the person who handles student support and onboarding, whoever edits and publishes your content, and the person who takes enrollment calls, if that isn't also you. We follow a few flows end to end: a lead from first message to booked call to enrollment, a student from purchase to first support question to completion, and a piece of content from recording to published. The data we ask for is what you already have: your course platform's reports, inbox and DM volumes, the support and refund queue, booking and show-rate data, ad and email reports, and a plain accounting of where each person's week goes. Out of that comes your top five uses for AI ranked by payback and the 90-day plan, and the plan is yours whether or not we keep working together.

Weeks 1 to 3

The 90-day plan

In this vertical the first 90 days usually hold the work the audience never sees: the student assistant that answers only from your material, drafted replies to DMs and email that a person sends, the support queue tagged and templated, and transcripts turned into drafts an editor finishes. Each item gets an owner, a due date and a thing we'll measure. What usually waits is anything that speaks as you to a prospect without a disclosure line and a review log, phone agents that call leads, and the full clone sold on the agency pages, because those need the consent records, the platform's permission and the error rate that the first phase produces. We won't put a number on what the plan will save until your own data gives us one.

Yours to keep

Fractional Chief AI Officer

Week to week the retainer is the scorecard: each priority, who owns it, when it's due and whether it's on track, with a leadership review once a month where we look at the measurements and decide what moves next. The vendor work in this vertical is mostly about DM setters, voice agents and clone platforms. We ask whether the tool uses the platform's official API, where the consent comes from for text and phone, what you keep if your account is banned or the vendor closes, and what the vendor retains and trains on, and we write the answers into the scope before you sign. The policy work is a plain-English AI-use policy for your team: when a student or prospect must be told they're talking to a tool, what may be pasted into which tool (student records and payment details usually may not), who reviews anything that goes out in your voice, and how long consent records are kept. We train the support and inbox people on the tools they'll use every day.

Monthly

What you get

Your top five uses for AI, ranked by payback
A 90-day plan with a shortlist of tools and builders
A plain-English AI-use policy for your team
Training for the people who will use the tools
A one-page weekly scorecard with owner, due date and status
A monthly leadership review

Tools we'd look at first: HighLevel, Sendblue, Calendly, Loom, Meta Ads.

Fixed fee for the assessment, agreed before we start. Monthly retainer after, if it fits.

Where it goes wrong

Income claims dressed as AI, and AI-written testimonials, draw the FTC

In Operation AI Comply (September 25, 2024) the FTC sued business-opportunity sellers who dressed earnings claims in AI language; one took at least $25 million promising its AI tools would help consumers quickly earn thousands a month. The same sweep announced a proposed settlement with an AI writing tool whose review feature could generate unlimited consumer reviews.

Source: FTC Announces Crackdown on Deceptive AI Claims and Schemes (Operation AI Comply)

An AI voice that calls leads is a robocall

On February 8, 2024 the FCC ruled, effective immediately, that calls made with AI-generated voices are artificial voices under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, so telemarketing with them needs the prior express written consent FCC rules already require. The release does not say who holds the consent record; we would want it to be you.

Source: FCC Makes AI-Generated Voices in Robocalls Illegal (FCC press release, February 8, 2024)

A DM setter lives on an account the platform can close by mistake

TechCrunch reported on June 16, 2025 that Instagram users were complaining of mass bans for violations they say they never committed, with appeals unanswered. A gym owner said the ban had directly affected his business; another user relied on Instagram for leads. Users suspected AI moderation without direct evidence; Meta had offered no on-record statement.

Source: Instagram users complain of mass bans, pointing finger at AI (TechCrunch)

Questions to ask any vendor, including us

Show us the substantiation behind every number on your site and in the copy you will write for us, and let us call three clients.
For phone, SMS, email and Instagram DM, where does the consent come from, is it recorded, and does your tool use the platform's official API?
If our account is banned, our domain is flagged or you close, what do we keep: the trained model, the conversations, the list?

Questions owners ask

how much does a fractional chief ai officer cost for a coaching business

The assessment is a fixed fee, agreed in writing before we start, and the retainer is a monthly fee that begins only after the assessment, if you want to keep going. We don't publish a rate card because the scope depends on how many people and flows are involved; you get a written number before any work begins. On the twenty-minute call Erick will tell you whether an assessment makes sense for you and, if it does, send a scope and a fee first.

can ai answer my students questions in my voice

For questions with a clear answer in your own material, a first version can do that with a disclosure line and a review log, and it hands off whatever it can't find. For coaching judgment, where the answer depends on the person asking, we wouldn't put a tool in front of a student as you. We'd measure how often it hands off and whether students find the answers useful before deciding whether it earns a bigger role.

do i need an ai consultant or just an ai dm setter tool

If one tool would fix your one problem, buy the tool, and Erick will say so on the call. The retainer is for when there are several things worth doing, nobody on the team has time to own them, and the vendors need someone to write the scope and hold the date. The assessment is where we find out which of those you are.

is it legal to use ai calling and texting to follow up with coaching leads

We're not lawyers and this isn't legal advice. What the public record says is that the FCC treats AI-generated voices as artificial voices under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, so marketing calls with them need prior express written consent, and text follow-up has its own consent rules. On the plan, that means consent is collected and recorded in your systems before any automated outreach runs, and anything that can't show a consent record waits.

is my business too small for a fractional chief ai officer

We work with owner-led companies of ten to two hundred people. A solo coach with a couple of contractors is usually better served by a tool and an afternoon of setup, and we'll say that on the call. A team with a support person, an editor and someone taking enrollment calls is where a plan with owners and dates makes sense.

what happens to my course content and student data if i use ai tools

It depends on each tool's terms, which is why reading them is part of the assessment. We ask every vendor what they retain, for how long, whether any of it trains their models, and what you get back if you leave, and the answers go into the scope. Your AI-use policy then says what your team may paste where, and student records and payment details are normally on the do-not-paste list.

Start with twenty minutes.

If you run a coaching or course business and your week is going to DMs, support tickets and follow-up, book twenty minutes with Erick. Bring the thing your team spends too much time on, and you'll leave with the one thing he'd look at first.

Book 20 minutes