On October 3, 2026, I ran a free live session for our community called American Bhau’s AI Content Playbook. I walked through exactly how we use AI at American Bhau to plan, create and publish content every single day. This article covers the key ideas from that session.
Want to watch the full session? Grab the free replay and the step-by-step guide at americanbhau.com/AI
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- For the last 3 months, we’ve posted 3 to 5 times a day (sometimes up to 10) across our Instagram, Facebook and YouTube handles.
- Before AI, posting took me about 10 hours a week. Now it takes about 1 hour.
- Our system runs on 7 AI agents. Claude is our main AI platform, Buffer is our scheduler, and a small Raspberry Pi computer runs everything 24/7.
- About 95% of what I showed can be done with free tools.
- The single most important step: turn every recording into a transcript before you do anything else with AI.
A LITTLE ABOUT US
American Bhau is a US-based boutique media house. We create content in Marathi and help businesses and professionals grow with social media. My wife Pallavi and I have run American Bhau full-time since 2023. Before that, I spent about 20 years as a software engineer, after studying computers at BITS Pilani in India.
We produce The American Bhau Podcast, the #1 Marathi podcast in America, and we post on more than 6 social platforms. Video is our main format, both long-form and short-form. We also publish audio podcasts on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, posts on LinkedIn, and blogs on our website. So far we’ve generated more than 10 million views and 100 million impressions for our customers, and we’ve worked with around 25 brand partners.
My engineering background is a big reason we can use AI so heavily, in our content and in our business.
WHY DO SMALL BUSINESSES STOP POSTING ON SOCIAL MEDIA?
We work with a lot of small business owners, and I keep hearing the same problems:
- No time. Running the business comes first. There is always a fire going on, and social media keeps sliding down the priority list.
- No ideas. If you post every day, you have to figure out what to post every day.
- Two languages. If you post in Marathi and English (or Hindi), it feels like doing the work twice.
- One person doing everything. Most owners are fighting on every front at once.
And honestly, it’s not their fault. We have the same problem. Our business is content, but when we focus on content, the business suffers. When we focus on the business, the content suffers. That tension never goes away. AI is how we manage it.
WHAT TOOLS DO WE USE?
Our playbook has 4 parts:
1. AI platform: we use Claude by Anthropic on a paid plan. Free option: the free plans of Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini.
2. Workspace: we use Google Antigravity, which is free. It’s optional. The regular AI chat apps work too.
3. Scheduler: we use Buffer. Free option: Buffer’s free plan.
4. Hardware: I write everything on a MacBook Air, and our agents run on a Raspberry Pi 24/7. Free option: any laptop you already have.
We’ve tried ChatGPT and Gemini too. I prefer Claude because it’s better for creative writing, especially creative Marathi scripts and ideas. But you can use whatever you already use. The playbook is not married to the platform.
We pay for our tools because we post a lot, on many handles. You don’t have to. Almost everything I showed works on free plans.
PROMPTS, SKILLS, AGENTS AND SUB-AGENTS: THE 4 LEVELS OF AI
I think about AI use in 4 levels:
1. Prompts. One instruction to the AI for a one-time task. Perfect for anything you only do once.
2. Skills. If you keep typing the same prompt again and again, save it as a skill. A skill is a written set of instructions the AI can reuse whenever a short prompt asks for it. We built a reel publisher skill that schedules any video to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Now I just say “schedule this reel” and the skill does the rest.
3. Agents. An agent is like a worker. It waits for a trigger (a time of day, a new email, a new file) and then runs one or more skills on its own. Every morning at 9 AM, a Navalai reel goes out on our handles. It’s a series based on the ideas of Naval Ravikant. Our Navalai recycle agent wakes up every morning and uses the reel publisher skill to post it. Nobody touches it.
4. Sub-agents. A “manager” agent that gives work to a team of agents, checks it and gives feedback, just like departments in a company.
Right now we’re at level 3, and we’re working toward level 4.
OUR CONTENT SYSTEM MAP
Our whole system has 4 stages:
1. Capture (no AI here). We record podcasts, reels, community calls and customer testimonials with real faces and real voices. My advice: avoid AI-generated video for your business. People are tired of it. Show your own face, a customer, or someone from your team.
2. Create. AI turns each recording into a transcript, then into captions, blog posts, carousels, LinkedIn articles and images. This is called content repurposing. You make one core piece of content, and it becomes many pieces for different platforms and languages.
3. Distribute. Our 7 AI agents push new content to social media through Buffer. Each day of the week has its own agent and its own topic. On weekends, our agents promote our own products and services, because people are relaxed and more in the mood to buy.
4. Run the business. AI handles business tasks too. Every morning at 7 AM, an agent sends me a briefing on Telegram: the emails I need to answer, the day’s meetings, and any new customers or payments from Stripe. The WhatsApp button on our website goes to a bot that answers questions with context. And AI bots reply to our Instagram DMs and comments, because with this many pages and followers, answering everything by hand just doesn’t scale.
WHY THE TRANSCRIPT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP
If you take only one thing from my session, take this: every time you record something, make a transcript of it. Ideally an SRT file (a subtitle file), which shows what was said at each moment of the video.
Why not just give the AI your video? Because a video file is huge compared to text. An AI can analyze video, but it burns through a lot of tokens. On a free plan you’ll hit the limit fast, and on a paid plan you’re literally burning money. A transcript is tiny, and it gives the AI everything it needs to write captions, posts and articles about your video.
We use a transcription service called Soniox, because it handles our mix of Marathi and English really well. If you’re just starting, ask Gemini or ChatGPT to transcribe your file for free.
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE LIVE DEMO
During the session, I typed one short prompt. I asked the AI to take a vertical video from my Downloads folder and publish it on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube for our American Bhau Club handles. I didn’t write a caption.
The AI loaded our reel publisher skill, made a transcript of the video, and wrote a caption based on what I said. My phone video was in 4K, so it converted it to 1080p to upload smoothly, and then scheduled it in Buffer. A minute later, the reel was live on the Club’s pages with this caption: “Fun fact: we never opened Instagram, Facebook or YouTube to post this video.”
HOW CAN YOU START USING AI FOR YOUR CONTENT?
Here are 3 simple things you can try this week, all with free tools:
1. Record one short video and copy it to your computer.
2. Ask your AI for a transcript, then ask it to write a caption from that transcript.
3. Sign up for Buffer’s free plan, connect your 2 most important social accounts, and link Buffer to your AI so you can schedule posts with one prompt. Do your batch on the weekend, and the whole week runs on its own.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Do you use AI to make your videos?
No. We record our content with real people. We use AI for everything after the recording: transcripts, captions, repurposing, scheduling and business tasks.
Which AI do you use?
Claude by Anthropic is our main platform. We’ve also tried ChatGPT and Gemini, and the same playbook works with any of them.
Can I do this with free tools?
Yes, about 95% of it. The free plans of Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google Antigravity and Buffer cover most of the workflow.
What computer runs your AI agents?
A Raspberry Pi, a small low-cost computer that runs 24/7 so our agents keep working when my laptop is closed. A regular laptop is enough to start.
Where can I watch the full session?
The full replay and a step-by-step PDF guide are free at americanbhau.com/AI
GRAB THE FULL SESSION, FREE
Everything above is the short version. In the full session I show the whole system live, including the demo, and the step-by-step PDF guide walks you through setting up your own version with free tools.
Get the replay and the guide free at americanbhau.com/AI
Want help setting this up for your own business? Book 1 Hour with Bhau at americanbhau.com/consulting, or join the Bhau Club at americanbhau.com/club, our community for business owners and professionals in the US and Canada, with a weekly live call.
Rahul “American Bhau” Patil
