62. ChatGPT Agent for Therapists: What Worked and What Didn’t

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ChatGPT Agent for Therapists: What Worked and What Didn’t

Are you wondering if the new ChatGPT agent can help therapists streamline their private practice? In this episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI, I’m sharing my hands-on experience with the ChatGPT agent for therapists: the good, the bad, and everything in between.

From testing GPT-5 to exploring what agents can (and can’t) do, I walk through real examples of where things worked smoothly and where they fell apart. I also dive into how I pivoted to Zapier to create an automated weekly AI newsletter workflow that’s now running on autopilot in my business. 

If you’ve been exploring ways to use the ChatGPT agent for therapists, this episode gives you a clear, honest view of what’s possible right now and what still needs work.

AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:

  • Why GPT-5 caused issues with existing GPTs in my private practice suite.
  • What ChatGPT agents are, and how they’re supposed to work.
  • Real-life failures testing ChatGPT agent workflows.
  • How Zapier’s agent succeeded where ChatGPT’s didn’t.
  • Step-by-step summary of my automated AI newsletter setup

Connect with me:

Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries: www.heyberries.com/therapists

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Hey everybody, last week I was sort of excited because there was a big, you know, announcement coming from OpenAI that they were gonna release ChatGPT five on Thursday. And the agent had just come out too. ChatGPT’s agent where they were allowing you to, you know, use the agent now inside of the pro plan, the $20 plan. So all that happened in the last couple weeks and you know, I was super excited about it, but it’s kind of like not that exciting chat GPT five.

[00:00:27] In fact, once it came out, you know, people got increasingly more upset about it and thought it was just like not that great and they took away all the old models, so couldn’t. Switch back to like four or 4.0 or anything like that. It was like literally five was the only thing you could access, and it was messing up all my GPTs, like I think I’ve mentioned before, I have an army of gpt.

[00:00:49] I’ve built out an army of GPT for my new product launch that’s coming out for therapists. It’s a. It’s a GPT hub for a therapist, but it’s also got all these web apps I’ve built out. It’s like just, it’s like a private practice suite, essentially. Anything you could ever need in your private practice. I’ve built this thing out, but the new five became live inside of all the GPTs that I’ve already built out, and they were malfunctioning.

[00:01:13] They weren’t acting correctly. In fact, they had people in this beta hub I, launched the products almost ready, but I launched it quietly to 35 clinical AI club members and they were in there going through it for me, doing beta testing and all that. And I got a couple emails that day that was like, they, these GPTs aren’t working correctly, or this app that connects to this GPT isn’t working correctly.

[00:01:34] So anyway, needless to say, five was kind of a big letdown for a lot of people. And if you’re like paying attention to AI at all, you probably saw people posting about that. So much so that there was like a big uprising on Reddit and like an AI ChatGPT, like the official ChatGPT AI threat on Reddit. And Sam Altman apparently came in there and had like a live AMA about ChatGPT, and got feedback that we wanted four back, like the 4o.

[00:02:00] At least the ability to be able to access it if you wanted to. So now if you go into a new chat thread and you kind of like scroll down under the models. There’s like a legacy model that you can access now and go back and be able to use that 4o, so anyway, it’s clearing up. It was glitching a lot. I was getting some bad output, but it seems better now ’cause mostly I’m still using the five.

[00:02:22] So you’re watching this or listening. Let me know what you think about five. I was kind of disappointed myself. But anyway, it’s out and hopefully it’s just gonna get better and better. The next thing was the agent. You know, I think I’d said last week I was kind of trying out all these different ideas I have for the agent.

[00:02:40] I was even like, oh my gosh, I can’t wait to put together like this free, like the best ways to use ChatGPT agent for, you know, therapist, the top 10 ways, and I had this whole list of all this stuff and I was talking to my friend Uriah Guilford. I don’t know if you guys know him, but he’s the productive therapist.

[00:02:56] He’s also like kinda my AI geek bestie. I talked to him about all the AI things that I’m doing and he shares the stuff he’s doing. But I was talking to him about that too, and I was like, here’s all my ideas. I wanna automate this, this, this, and this with the agent. And I think they give you 40 free agent uses.

[00:03:13] Inside of the $20 paid level of ChatGPT, if you have the $200 level level, I think it’s unlimited, but you know, I don’t wanna pay that much for it. Anyway every single idea I had failed in the agent I and I used all of my credits, my $40 credits. I don’t have any more credits until August 25th if that tells you anything.

[00:03:32] I tried to get it to do, just all these workflows I could think of, and they literally kind of crapped out halfway through. It was needing me to like, take over. It wasn’t able to log into a lot of my websites that were like two factor authentication where, you know, it, requires a code to be able to log in and that sort of thing.

[00:03:50] It couldn’t do that. Even with letting me take over, it couldn’t do that either. So it was kind of like disappointing on all levels for me, even though ChatGPT is still my favorite overall, the. You know, AI’s out there, Claude and Perplexity and Grok and all that. I still like ChatGPT the best.

[00:04:07] Now with that said, I was like, I get determined with this stuff. So I’m like, okay, now I wanna figure out what agent can do this stuff for me. And we don’t even know what an agent is. An agent is basically like a super smart aI that you give a prompt to and you tell it, you know, I want you to do these series of things in a row and cause this outcome, so I want you to be able to do this, this, and this, and cause an outcome that I don’t have to oversee or do.

[00:04:35] But I wanted to run in the background, just like if I had like a VA doing something for me or like a, data entry assistant or something like that running in the background. These agents. they’re like all the hype in all these different platforms that these agents are supposed to be able to do these amazing things.

[00:04:49] So, you know, of course I was like, all right, I’m gonna try to find something that does an agent, because almost like I’d say like five of the AI products I use on a regular basis, Zapier jotform, pickax, they’ve got agents in the background that you can start programming to do these, like small tasks for you.

[00:05:06] But I haven’t really tested ’em out that much ’cause I was really waiting to be able to use ChatGPT’s ’cause I thought that would be the best one. But it’s not. Not yet anyway. I feel like it’s gonna get better. So I went over to, to Zapier where I’ve already, I’m already using Zapier. I use 2000 Zaps a month, which is like basically an automation that connects one application to another application to another application. And it causes like a chain of events for things to happen in an automated way in the back end of your business. Your private practice, as long as it is, doesn’t involve PHI or anything like that. But anyway, so I went over to Zapier and they’ve got a whole new section over there that is like their agent

[00:05:41] options and they’ve got all these free webinars all the time. Of course I haven’t had time to watch any of ’em, but I was like, I’m just gonna go play with this agent and see what happens. So it’s really cool if you’ve used Zapier or you’ve got, you know, you’re curious about this. They’ve got this agent in there, they give you 400 what do they call ’em?

[00:05:58] Tasks, a month for free that you don’t even have to pay for. So I went in there and one of the workflows I had thought of was, you know, I’ve got all these Google alerts set in my Gmail, right? Or, or in my Google account. So, you know, I’ve got AI for therapists, I’ve got AI for mental health, I’ve got AI for just, you know, building GPTs.

[00:06:15] Like I’ve got AI alerts. I’ve got a million in my inbox probably every day it seems like in my Gmail. So I went into this Zapier like box like you don’t even have to know how to do it. I went in and basically typed in. I’m like, okay, this is what I want to happen. I wanna be automated.

[00:06:32] I don’t wanna have to mess with it. I just want this in my inbox once a week. So I basically told this agent in Zapier that I want you to go out to my Gmail inbox. It has connection to my Gmail inbox. I want you to look at all my Google alerts related to ai, mental health, AI therapist. You know, I gave it a list of all the Google alerts that I wanted to look at and I said, I want you to look over the last week and compile all the best information in these Google alerts.

[00:06:59] ’cause I’ll spend a lot of time doing that. Like I’ll go look at this alert, like, oh, what’s this? And I’ll read the article and all that. So I told this agent, I want you to go out. Pull all the Google alerts, bring them in. I want you to write it in a summary in newsletter format, the top five things that you think would be interesting to my audience.

[00:07:15] And then I said, this is my audience. You know, it’s therapists that are using AI and their private practice, that sort of thing. And gave it a lot of information that would be interested in, how we’re using AI, productivity, all that stuff. So anyway, I told her to go out. Summarize all the Google alerts that have come through in the last week.

[00:07:29] Put in some newsletter format, the top five, and then I told it to say like why it matters to therapists under the summary and then give the link to the article that the Google alerts were already, you know, talking about. And then I told it once it did that I wanted it to put a draft in my Gmail inbox

[00:07:47] for my VA to be able to go in there and look at the draft and then turn it into like a pretty newsletter and put it into Kartra. I did try, Kartra is my email hub, like where I send my email newsletters from. I did try to like then do another step where it went into Kartra and set up the newsletter for me, but that didn’t work, so I was a little disappointed in that too.

[00:08:06] So I’m always on the search to find like the perfect automation tool to make all this happen, but I couldn’t make it happen. But the newsletter. You know, it has like run, do a test run on this. So you type in what you want and then it does like this AI magic and it turns it into this perfect agent prompt and it tells this agent, like robot bot thing to do this automation, you know, every day or whatever.

[00:08:28] And I had it set to once a week. So every Sunday it’s gonna go and do that. This agent produced this whole thing. It’s like a newsletter basically.

[00:08:37] My VA can go in on Monday mornings, look at it. She can make it pretty, put it in Kartra and send it out to my email list, or I could do it myself, you know, if you don’t have a VA or something like that. So that’s just for my business, what I’m trying to do. But, you know, think of all the ways you could do that.

[00:08:50] This is free. Through Zapier. You know, if you just give it access to your Gmail or wherever your Google alerts go and you could do that for your clients. Like let’s say that you specialize in, you know, whatever like, like EMDR for current events or something like that, tragic events that are happening, I don’t know.

[00:09:09] But you could have a go out search this stuff and kind of like give an expert opinion, EMD expert opinion on the event that happened in ways that people in the world or the community could use EMDR, like butterfly hug or TAP or something to deal with this tragedy that happened, or something like, that’s just the random idea, but there’s so many different ways that you could have this like curated newsletter list come into your inbox and then, you know, if you like it, you just send it out.

[00:09:34] Now it might work if you’re using Mailer Light or MailChimp, I don’t know. That’s the email server I used to use. I don’t know if they can’t get into Kartra ’cause it’s like two factor authentication or what.

[00:09:43] but think of all the ways you could automate that for your business and make your life easier. That’s just one of the workflows that I’m trying to figure out the best agent to be able to do that for me. But now every Sunday, this thing is set up to go do that. So then of course I had to go a step further and I was like, also, now I want you to summarize the same things and I want you to give me, you know, what would be called like a viral hook for each of these things that I could use in my, Facebook group.

[00:10:09] Run your private practice with ai, a viral hook, something that would be interesting to my audience to catch their attention and then give. five or six summaries for the comments that, I could use to give them more information about this topic. And then of course, I still want the link to the article.

[00:10:23] So, you know, I hit enter on that run test and it did the same thing, so it put it into my email box and they’re good hooks. It’s like not something, I had to really program it on either, it kind of knows like what a viral hook is and what would be interesting to you all, the audience that would be listening to this or seeing this information.

[00:10:40] And it compiled in this really nice draft in my inbox. And now I’ve got content for the rest of the week in the run your private practice with ai Facebook group that I can share with you guys. It’s a bunch of great articles and really interesting takes on ai that’s happened in real time like.

[00:10:57] trending type things, not things that might have happened a year ago or something like that. It’s like super up to date and trending. So I’m excited about it. So that’s, what’s happening this week for me. The exciting stuff I’m doing with ai. I had a coworking session with the clinical AI club, which was awesome.

[00:11:11] This is 90 minute session. I do it every other month in the clinical AI club where we just like workshop, different ideas, things that the members are trying to do and trying to figure out how to do. So we talked about a ton of tools that I’m using already, like in my business and my life, and. I compiled a list after the meeting, I was like, I probably should share this.

[00:11:31] So I’m gonna be sharing that probably later this week, just in the free Facebook group. And of course with the clinical AI Club members, all the tools that I’m using, that I use pretty much every week that helps run my business. So I’m excited to share that with you all as well. And those of you in the AI club, go check out that meeting.

[00:11:49] It was awesome. Everybody was just talking about all these ideas they had. You know, different ways that we can make it happen really quickly with ai. So go watch the replay and of course, if you’re in the club, hit me up in the comments over there so I can give you more information or more ways to implement what you’re trying to do.

[00:12:04] Okay. So that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll talk to you guys next week. Bye.