When AI Stops Being a Tool and Starts Becoming a Teammate with Daniel Hindi

Imagine a teammate who never sleeps, never burns out, and never forgets a playbook. That’s the promise of modern AI agents, and we brought on Daniel Hindi, founder and CEO of Noem.ai, to unpack how teams move beyond clunky chatbots and into human-like, action-taking systems that actually sell, support, and scale.

We start with the pain: SDR and CS turnover, endless retraining, and leaders dragged into low-leverage work. Daniel explains how agents flip the script—acting like a concierge that understands intent, personalizes paths, and executes tasks. Not just “here’s a link,” but real actions: adding a lead to your CRM, sending a password reset, booking a call, or escalating a VIP with crisp context. The result is a smoother customer journey, faster resolutions, and humans freed up for deep work—discovery, expansion, and relationships.

From there, we get tactical. Daniel breaks down the difference between chatbots and agents (autonomy and tooling), why build-vs-buy matters when AI changes weekly, and where ROI shows up first: conversion lifts from existing traffic, multilingual reach, and instant responses across web, SMS, WhatsApp, and social. We cover the hidden metric most teams miss—executive time—and how weekly sentiment and “state of the union” reports turn raw conversations into clear moves. Plus, a candid look at rollout failure modes, eliminating ambiguity in your briefs, and using training gaps to permanently strengthen SOPs.

Getting started is fast: ingest your site, set clear goals and guardrails, integrate with your stack, and let the agent cook. Pricing scales with usage, not hype, so you can test without breaking the bank and expand as results compound. If you’re ready to replace IVR-style friction with hospitality at scale—and give your team the headspace to grow—this conversation is your roadmap.

If this episode hits a nerve, share it with a founder or operator who’s stuck in the weeds, subscribe for more brand-building plays, and leave a review with the one task you’d offload to an AI agent first.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates, visit 5starbdm.com
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And don’t miss Grant McGaugh’s new book, First Light — a powerful guide to igniting your purpose and building a BRAVE brand that stands out in a changing world. - https://5starbdm.com/brave-masterclass/

See you next time on Follow The Brand!

Transcript

Setting The Stage: AI As Teammate

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome everybody to the PowerBan Podcast. This is your host, Grant McGall, and this is the show where we explore the people, the principles, and the plays behind the brand that breakthrough. So we're gonna talk about something about every founder, every operator, every growth leader is feeling right now. And that is the shift from AI as a tool to AI as a teammate, the kind of teammate that can sell, support, and scale your customer experience while you sleep. So our guest today is Daniel Hindi. He is the founder and CEO of Gnome.ai. You might want to look that up. N-O-E-M.ai. It is a platform built around the idea that you should be able to stand up a human-like AI chatbot agent in seconds, deploy it across channels like web, messaging, and turn everyday conversations into action, insights, footings, conversations, and growth strategies. So this is not something new, but something that we're gonna get into as a principle about what is real, what is true, how to implement AI agents without losing trust, and how to use automation to amplify your brand, not to dilute it. So, Daniel, welcome to the Plow Brand Podcast. Let's get right into it.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Thank you for having me. Excited.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Well, let's go into your origin story first. You know, what problem did you feel that you personally hit hard enough that it pushed you to build gnome.ai?

SPEAKER_01 1:48

So my previous company, I've I've uh built and sold five uh successful companies in my past. And uh I won't tell you about the graveyard of mistakes that I've made and failures. I have I have my share of those, but uh my previous company, uh two major uh uh departments that and all companies sort of feel like they're the stepchild of the company. One of its CS. The other part is a sub-department in sales, which is the SDR team. The the team that's taking the first line of defense when leads come in, let's make sure that they're they're qualified. They come in as an MQL marketing qualified lead. We try to see if there's a sales qualified lead and send them off to the AEs. The biggest problems we have there. Nobody in those positions wants to remain in those positions, right? So I have an SDR. I will I will, you know, pay my dues for the next two years, but I don't want to stay here. Some of them say, if I could do this six months and become an AE, an accounting executive, so I can close deals, make some good commissions. You know, I want to do that as soon as possible. So what ends up happening is you hire, you hire these kids with either you know, fresh out of college or just a nominal amount of experience. So let me train them. Let me really get them to know my product, our mission, our vision. What do we do? Six months later, half of the people you hired are probably no longer there. The other half, you know, you have your A's and B's, your A guys, they're great, they're amazing SDRs, and they're telling you every week, I want to be an AE, I want to be an AE. I just spent all this time training you to be an SDR, and I appreciate the latter. But the second you go up to be an AE, I have to go back and start all over again. Same thing with CS. CS says, you know, I I will be in customer support, I'll be in customer success, but at a certain point, I want to be account manager, I want to be in management. I don't want to be here my entire time. So as a company, we can't afford to have 50 people in CS. We can't afford to have 50 SDRs. Well, you know, it's a law of numbers, it's okay, you know, you as long as you have these cohorts. Most of us don't have that many people on staff. So I said, okay, let's let's take a look into AI. I'm a software engineer by trade. I've built these systems. I just sold my my uh uh my uh previous company, Build Fire in the mobile app space. I said, okay, after this, my fifth company, what have I learned? And what are the tools available today that I didn't have in the past? So I cracked open uh you know what's going on with with LLMs. It was a great time. I started a company called GNOME AI, and a GNOME meaning that little GNOME that goes and works while you're asleep, right? Spelled differently, but uh no e-m.ai. Uh, but the genesis of that was a pain I genuinely had, and in all our companies, and even even you know, all business owners try to try to chat with each other, and they they all have similar problems, right? Even if you're in a different space. And so we sought out to solve that, and I believe we have.

Defining Human-Like Agents Vs Old Chatbots

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Wow, this this and we gotta unpack that. Love the the origin story, the the why behind what you're doing. Now, you kind of hit this pretty hard about I can't back I the human element at that level of SDR and and customer support high turnover, right? High turnover. So, no AI, you talk about human like AI chatbot agents. I want you to explain to us first what does human like mean operation? How is that is that something that a person would gravitate to that they try to trick them, or that it's okay that they know they're talking to a bot?

SPEAKER_01 5:28

Uh absolutely. And that's a very important question because AI is a tool just like anything else. And you can use a tool poorly, or you could use a tool, you know, accurately and and lean on its strengths versus its weaknesses. With the advent of LLMs, you have listen, we've all been to websites, your your let's say your phone carrier, your insurance company, they have a chatbot. Yeah, that's been there since you know 20 years, they've had this chatbot, right? So you're on this chatbot and let me let me see uh your experience. I'm gonna guess your experience. The first thing it asks you is is this a technical question? Is this a billing question, or are you a new customer? Billing, go to this web this website, this this URL that we have for billing. I was just there. That's why I am chatting with you. Oh, here's our phone number. You're not a chatbot. I didn't want to call and be on hold for an hour. I wanted to, you know, just get this solved, right? So it's a very poor experience. That is technically a chatbot. That's not an intelligent chatbot. Then you have the intelligent chatbot that says, I'm gonna tell you everything that you happened in the past. I'm just gonna write it down in front of you instead of, you know, a workflow that's that's popping up. Still like, okay, maybe a little bit better. I get to navigate the conversation a little bit better, but it's not really addressing my needs. It's not equating itself to my experience if I jumped on a call or walked into your store, your your retail store, let's assume, or your clinic or whatever it may be. It's not the same experience. Why are we optimizing for an IVR-like experience? You know, when you call, please listen while while I uh while I tell you our options, our options have changed recently. Press one for press two four. Like nobody likes that experience. Why are you making AI mimic that? It's because we have muscle memory. What we do at Gnome AI is we change SDRs to more like concierge. Understand what they want, what they need. We have many services and products. And let me better understand who you are and what you need and fine-tune your experience, knowing my end goal is to sell you. My end goal is to capture the lead, my end goal is to keep you as a customer and not uh and have you not churned. For sure. We we know what the song and dance is, but how about you just cut optimize it and personalize it to me? And so what GNOME AI does really well is it acts like a like you would as a human. We say, hey, if if you're you're telling your AI to follow this rigid flow, like is that is that what happens when I walk into your clinic, when I walk into your retail store, when I walk into uh your seminar? Is that what no, no, I don't I don't act like that. That's poor user experience. Then why are you having your AI do the same thing? Right? And you know, I say this all the time in terms of uh the hu the humanity from our employees, because we're all business owners and we care about our employees as much as sometimes we're we're tarred and feathered with a wide brush that business owners don't care. Of course we care about our employees, but it needs to be a good relationship and it needs to be a healthy relationship. When we look at CS, when we look at SDRs, are we talking about Monday morning, 9 a.m., first cup of coffee? I'm getting the same person, the same Daniel, as 5 p.m. on a Friday on his fifth cup of coffee? Probably not. Because my daughter's recital is about to begin. I'm tired, I'm not as sharp. I'm gonna maybe be a little bit shorter, maybe not be as sh as sharp uh as I would be 9 a.m. on my first cup of coffee, right? So what we try to do is we say, okay, if AI can take your job, if AI can take your job, I'm gonna say something that's not popular. It should take your job. Am I gonna lose my job? Well, it depends. Is that what you think you do? You think you are fingers on keyboard? Is that what you think I hired you for? Well, what do you mean? Well, what do you if you're asking me that question? That means as business owners, we've gotten used to measuring the wrong things. I love that. Is is the value of my CS rep telling people how to reset their password? If if we're GDPR compliant, are we open on Saturday? Is that really why you hired this person? No, it's on the website, but nobody reads and they end up asking anyway. Let AI take care of that. Business owners, management, and ICs, individual computer cum uh contributors have been burdened with the shallow thought of task-oriented processes that makes us hate the job that we once loved. If AI can take that task or checking off those boxes for you and said, okay, AI can help me write a blog. Great. Why am I writing this blog? Oh, for STO, is that is that really? No, it's to send a message to a customer. Who's that customer? Who are we we talking to here? You know, our customers have have a very particular niche and we offer very particular services. Understand the why. The who. Who are we talking to? How do I really measure the impact of why I'm here eight hours a day? Spend time in deep thought and let the shallow task-oriented thought let AI do that. Now, when I come back to my CS team, they find meaning. You know what? I used to be able to spend 15, 20 minutes with a customer before, like I have to jump off. I have another book meeting, I have more tickets piling up on me. No, I can sit there and the customer doesn't feel rushed. The customer feels like, hey, I showed up on this guy, they're not burnt out. They're talking to me and really trying to understand who I am and what my problem is and saying, Yeah, I'm here for you. When the AI took the punches of the, sorry to say it this way, this is not going to be popular, but the cairns that show up to every business threatening to sue over the smallest things, right? Because I don't feel like you're going to help me unless I bring in my lawyers. You you got charged twice for this item. I'm sorry, I would have helped you. There was no need for you to threaten me, right? But we've all we've all been in business. We all had that, you know, the phone calls that were unpleasant. If AI can be that punching bag to say, throw the throw your punches, throw your punches, throw your punches. I'm sorry you had that experience, but I can help you. You need to talk to a rep. Hey, rep, no need to know all the yelling and screaming that just happened, right? They got charged twice. Can you help them out? Sure, no problem. It gets escalated to a human without that emotional roller coaster. You go to your team, like, oh man, this is so much easier to work with. This is yeah, we we're still a company, we still have the same issues, but all the run-of-the-mill questions are all taken care of, and I can actually be more less customer support and more customer success.

Let AI Remove Busywork And Burnout

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Does that make sense? It makes a hundred percent. Uh, if we like you said, first of all, if the common experience, I think this is what gives people some pause. And because I come from that world of uh communications when I worked at uh Via ATT Lucent World, you brought it up, IVR, interactive voice response, right? Natural language uh um NLPs is what they call natural language processing. And those first voicemails, I mean, when he first came out, they're like kind of revolutionary. Everybody's sick of that stuff now, you know, so dial one, two, three, all that type of thing. So they're like, wow, can this do this better? And then can you do, can you triage that tier one, tier two support that really is just informational? So I always feel like, especially in this uh AI world, artificial intelligence world, data, information, but then you get into context and experience. So if that agent can sit in between context, experience, data, and information, speed up the process of a solution. I'm on board with that. Like, what does that look like? And I always go back to this bad AI, and it's good AI. What I mean by bad, to me, bad AI is you're trying to trick somebody and thinking they're talking to a human. That's bad AI. You don't why do you need you don't need to do that? It's okay that you know it's a bot. It's fine, but then it can converse with you to get you to you want, where you want to go. That's great. I that's what I call bad A bad AI when people are just utilizing it to check somebody or something to that effect. Good AI is to your point, you're you're now speeding up the business process to get to enough uh a solution, and you're taking valuable human assets, which I call the HI, the human intelligence, and getting the most out of it. You brought that up. Like, you know what? I could train you to either do STR or CS, but I can really maybe now I can start training for what you really want to do if you're ready to be an AE, to be an account executive, to really get to that next level where I need you and I'm willing to pay, you know, for that kind of employee to do that. Now, here's the here's the question adoption and adoption rate. We know that is the graveyard of good technology. The question comes down to what are the most common failure modes that you see when companies roll out AI checkbots, and what are your rules for avoiding them?

Failure Modes And Build Vs Buy

SPEAKER_01 14:40

So the first the first issue people deal with is if you're a mid-size, larger company and you may have your web guy that deals with your WordPress, you know, website and maybe some tech, you say, Let's build this in-house. The biggest mistake with AI is when you try to start building it in-house, AI changes every week, not every six months, not every year. Every week, there's something new going on. So your investment is non-ending. It just keeps on going and it keeps changing and and the goalpost keeps moving. What was acceptable last week is not acceptable this week. So it's a um insatiable pit the of finance going in. Now, there are certain cases where you probably want, if this is your intellectual property, this is the value of my company, yes, you should build that in-house. Just understand the burden and take that. But that is the value, that's the equity I am building in in my company. When it comes to a chat bot and you're you're ready to exit, you've been building this company for 10 years, you're ready to retire. Are you selling it based on the chatbot technology you've built? Are you a chatbot company? Yes, then yes. If you're not a chatbot company, then that tech is valued at zero. Right? As the equity you're building in your company. So that's the first failure. The second failure is either not taking advantage of the AI that exists today or assuming I'm gonna take on AI, I'm gonna fire everybody. The reality is somewhere in between, right? You may not fire as much as now. Listen, if you have fat in the company every now and then, we know this is very difficult for uh business owners to deal with, but we have to cut the fat every now and then. That's just the nature of the game. And I hate even using that term cutting the fat. These are humans. I understand. Believe me, it's painful for every owner to to make cuts, even when it's a bad hire. It's never a pleasant experience. But understanding, here are my stars. Let me replicate those stars. Let me let me download their information in a way to sit there and how can I replicate you and train the AI once? And I don't have to remind them. Remember last week when I said, hey, we should be doing that. No, no, you don't have to remind it. It knows. You just have to train it once, and that's it. Then say, how am I underutilizing my your term HI, my human intelligence? Well, they're busy all day telling people how to reset their password. That you're overspending for that. They're they're educating people on why we're better than our competitors. You're overspending for that. They're qualifying, you know, MQLs, like you're overspending. This human that's here, that's been with you two, three years, and I don't want to let go, how am I underutilizing them? Sometimes ask them, they'll tell you. Sometimes I used to have customer support, customer success, and account managers and technical account managers. Do you really need all four? Can one serve for all? Well, there it's sort of this gradient. Okay, well, if I told you the lowest hanging fruit is taken care of, and the ultra-technical is going to be a human, where on that continuum can we say, hey guys, are you ready for that next move? You are now account managers. You handle a book of business, you measure now less on NPS and CSAT scores and more on MRR, NRR, and revenue that you can generate from our existing customers. Well, how do I do that? Well, AI is going to help you and you're ready for your next move. Why should the next person when they leave me and go to another company because that's their next jump? Why? Why? We've had this problem because we we we have a value, uh vacuum, sorry. When I promote you from CS to an account manager, there's a void. There's a vacuum that happens. And sometimes you are ready. I'm just not ready because I haven't hired the next person. I'm not ready to hire this next person, it's not working. Well, if AI can fill that gap, right, and then allow you to make that promotion without having a void. Right? It's easier for our upward mobility for our existing team. It's actually saving us money because it's still one head. When I gave you a raise, I didn't double your salary. But if I hire two people, that's two salaries. Yeah, right, right. So, yeah, but but you know, coming in from fear to say, oh shoot, did I just lose my job? No, you may actually get a promotion from AI. You may be able to say, okay, well, can I just dabble a little bit as an AE now? Yeah, play 50, but I still need you 50% of your time as an SDR, but hey, you can take a couple of AE calls and try to, and so I can have this gradient until the AI is where I need it to be, until you're ready, until I have that vacancy there. You could play a little bit of a gradient there. And the humanity coming back to again, I'm pressure when you talk to me. I'm not burnt out by the same run-of-the-mill questions over and over again. And even us as communicators, this is the thing, and and sorry to jump off to another topic, but as business owners, yeah, when you're dealing with AI, it'll expose how poorly you've been communicating. Now let me explain.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

No, that right, that that is a that is a statement, drop the mic statement, communication and how your differentiation strategy, your communication strategy, either it's helping you or it's hurting you. And to your point, if you don't need an assessment of that, and really understand how you're maybe you know leaving money on the table because of your current model and how it's happening, and then you didn't realize, oh wow, this is going on. This is why we can we can instead of closing you know one in ten, we're we can close five in ten or something of that thing. You gotta know your numbers to your point earlier. You gotta know where you're at. Now, here it comes down to like people like, all right, here's what they're saying. How easy is it to implement? You know, you go to your website now, it mainly says, hey, I can I can you know ingest your your your URL to your website to put an AI chat bot right on top of that. I know that's just your beginning demo of what you're doing, because you're talking web, SMS, voice, social. In your opinion, and you could do this while where do you see the highest ROI for companies? There's small business owners out there, they're doing six, seven, going to 10 figures, or I shouldn't say 10 figures, but they're going to seven or eight figures. Uh, and they're looking for ROI. Where do you think the market is underestimating what's coming next when it comes to uh against an AI agents?

Measuring ROI Beyond Headcount

SPEAKER_01 21:28

So uh it's it's one, you need to understand what's uh what's just a a chatbot versus an agent. So that's very important because it'll help help you define how you measure success. Then when you're measuring success, let's uh let's say we're we're measuring hours saved. What especially you know 50, 100 employee and less uh companies fail to measure is when you are looking at measuring the AI uh savings that you get with man hours, you grab the Lowest person on the totem pole and measured against that. When the truth is, how much of your time, Mr. CEO, is wasted on this? Well, they're constantly dragging me into these account management meetings, they're always dragging me into this customer who has an upset. Like that's how you should really measure it. It's your time being saved. But but their calculation is slightly again. When you're when you're at the upper echelons of business, there's so so much in between that uh between you and the actual customer, uh, you're shielded. But there's a big in between. And you ask yourself, how much am I spending unnecessary time there? Right? Where I'm not allowing my new generation of leaders to ramp up and take ownership because they're stuck in the weeds. So that's how you that's how you measure it. You look at conversion rates. I spend a massive amount of money on Google and Meta to try to get leads in. They click on your ad, they show up, and you get a bounce rate. We optimize some text. They're not reading the text because you put three, you know, it's either buried three pages in or it's so much so much text they don't actually read it. Say, okay, so where am I losing? You spent all this money to get a lead in. Make sure you convert them. Make sure you get them on a call, you book them, something. If they're not buying, at least get them to sign up, get them to book. So we see a 34% minimum increase in conversion rates when you implement your AI correct on uh on uh uh on your site. And you say, okay, well, that's just one. You know how many people reach out to me on Facebook, on Instagram, and on social media? Yeah, my my CS team are supposed to go in there. They they carve out you know an hour a day or once a week, they'll go in and reply. You waited a week to respond to a user? That guy is way gone, bought bought from your competitor, way gone. Right? So there's there's that part to say, okay, does it reply to social? Does it reply to SMS? That's a new new option, depending on your business. If you're international, WhatsApp is big. Is it reply back on WhatsApp? When they call us Saturday morning and we're closed, somebody answer? Well, your AI will answer now. Yeah, but you know what? We're in in uh we we hug the Mexico border, and I'm in San Diego, right? If you don't speak Spanish, you're you're losing a lot of your customers, right? Well, everybody speaks English, yeah, but maybe they're not comfortable communicating their needs as well in English. Does my AI speaking uh Spanish? Yes. When it speaks Spanish, does it translate back to me that's going to take over the conversation or take over the listening? Yes, it translates it back. Is it high fidelity? We all know Google Translate. Anybody who speaks another language, go to Google Translate, translate it back to English, to that language, back to English, to that language. It's completely different. AI has a higher fidelity rate to understand what your meaning behind it is. So uh when you look at uh uh chatbots versus agents, so chatbots will regurgitate text and and all of them will do that. Agents will do that as well. The difference with agents is autonomy, being able to work on its own without you asking it something, and tooling. Can it actually add the lead to my CRM? Can it actually pull the account and tell me, like, hey, this is a high-value customer, bring in an AE closeup, right? Or bring in the account manager. Hey, this this guy pays us, you know, a third of our income this year. Like, make sure somebody jumps on a call with them. To be able to make that uh differentiator, to be able to pull information, push information, to actually render artifacts from images to PDFs to documents, things of that nature. So our AI agents, well, you can use them as chatbots and just chatbots, that's fine, but they can actually take action. Our agents, for example, uh, if uh a great chatbot will say, Oh, I see you're having a problem resetting your password, let me help you with that. Right? How do I help you? You go, you know, click on this link, click on this link, enter in your your uh your email, right? And it'll send you a reset password link, right? Yeah. And are they happy? They're happy. Our AI chatbots can actually call back an API that says, What was your email? You don't need to do anything. Check your check your email. It's in your inbox now. Well, you did it for me? Yeah. I didn't need to navigate you to to a page and get that done. If you tie it in with your back end, we the chatbot can actually go and reset your password for you, right? Or or send you an email that that says, here's a link to reset your password. But I didn't have to navigate you through here's how you navigate to do it. Like, no, the chatbot did it for you.

unknown 26:28

Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

So that's that's the difference between the agent and just a plain vanilla chatbot.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Big, big difference, big difference. That you talk about saving time, friction with the customer experience uh dramatically reduces. You talked about the misinterpretation of language. I think that's huge, especially in more international markets that we're operating in, or you know, the different communities that we we come in and out of, and just having that context understanding, I think is is huge. That's what I think some of the biggest changes in these AI models are in understanding context, understanding the human experience as we all tool up and even get better and better. So, how hard is it? Number two questions, two last questions. Number one, how you know what I love what Daniel's talking about. I want to bring this into my organization. How hard is it to bring it in? You gotta integrate it, maybe you got a CRM, maybe, like you said, you're using WhatsApp, whatever it may be. Zapier, make there's other, all kinds of different tooling. How hard is it to get uh uh set up and then pricing? Because I've seen a lot different pricing models on your on your site. Take us through those models.

Agents With Autonomy And Tooling

Fast Setup, Better Communication, Integrations

SPEAKER_01 27:46

Sure. So uh setup. We are the first and uh up until recently the only um platform that allows you to just put in your website and we'll scour the internet and try to build a chatbot for you. Like you said, it's not gonna be perfect. We're not trying to aim for perfect. If it was that if it was that easy, it should concern you, right? But it eliminates 80% of the work that you needed to do. You put in your website, it scours the internet of all the public information that's that's available, what's on your website, and it creates the instructions for your website, for your chatbot. The instructions are basically what is your goal? Is my goal to be an SDR? Is it you know what is my role? Is it to be a CS rep? Um, what's my brand? What's the company information? It grabs all that. Now you just proofread it to make sure it's all it's all accurate. And you say, Here are your guidelines, here's how you measure success. I want you to to um gather enough information from this user, support them, address their concerns, but gather enough information to add it to our CRM. Or this is a self-provisioning model. You you just select small, medium, large, here's your monthly payments, get them, get them to click on that button. Or this is internal. This is after you log in. Let's say we're a SaaS company, we we sell software, right? If you're inside the product, you're a paid customer, keep them. You the way you measure success is through churn. You make sure churn is as low as possible. You upsell them, you you explain to them, hey, you've been with us for two years, you haven't uh uh added any new features. Did you know we also offer this feature, this new product? So you cut you can come in and get set up with no code, you're up, you're up, and you have a chatbot in seconds. Should you deploy that live? No, but if you take 30 minutes, maybe right now AI is as good as you communicate with it. So, what what do I mean? I touched upon this previously. If I said just a random statement like my wife and I went to a new restaurant yesterday, uh we had this a new amazing dish. I've never had it before, it was super hot. What was hot? The dish? And when you said hot, do you mean spicy or do you mean temperature? Or was it the restaurant that was hot or the day was hot? If I said it was red, well, I guess the dish could be red. Was the restaurant red? What what do you what do you mean? So it ai tries to understand your meaning, but really just it it's it the only thing that has to work off of is what you told it. Now remember, it doesn't have the inflection in your voice, it doesn't have the context of building a relationship with you, and it doesn't have that. So whatever you said, it's gonna try to make best with what you told it to do to do, right? So what what you do is you you spin up your chatbot, you uh uh what we have tools that help you um eliminate ambiguity. This is the part that I was saying. We realize how bad how poor of a communicator we've been with our team. Yeah, say, well, I told them to go make more sales. What's more? One dollar? What's more? Make these designs better. What's better? I thought it was better. What does this better mean? Right? So we realize when we're dealing with AI how poor poorly we've been communicating with our team. So we make our AI better because it forces you to make it better, and we have that we have tools to help you get there. But it also exposes like maybe I should be a better communicator with my team too. So now it's out, it's out, it's live on on social, on your website, WhatsApp, SMS, Slack. Uh ties in with your Shopify store if you have a Shopify store. Uh it ties in with your backend system if you have it, make Zapier. Uh so you can integrate with thousands of uh uh uh backend systems that you have, whether it's your CRM or booking system calendar or anything like that. You put it out in the wild and you say, okay, how do I measure success? Is it conversion rate? Is it uh churn rate? What is it? You know what? I just needed to eliminate you know 80% of the noise that my CS team is getting because they're slammed. It's Black Friday, and we just have our our best rep. She she got pregnant, and you know, it's just the way the way it is. We all had moms, we all have wives that that you know get pregnant. Okay, fine, she's she's out. Bad timing. You don't get to pick the timing, life happens, right? So you put the chatbot out there, and then you what you do is you tell the CS team, stop answering questions. Wait, what? Stop answering questions, let the AI do its job, let it cook. You get two things out of that. You get much better documentation because every time the AI didn't know how to answer, you go and stop answering for the chatbot, train the chatbot so you answer it once and never again it's answered. You never have to say it again. So your documentation starts being so much better, your SOPs become so much better, the documentation of your products, your services, your policies is so much better because I'm trying to tell the AI, and we inherit it internally as a team as well. The other thing that we excel at is the AI sentiment analysis that you get. As an executive, as a business owner, you walk into the CS team and you say, Hey guys, how are things going? Oh, excellent, boss, everything's going great. Really? The people who call you generally have problems. You're telling me, well, great means we know how to answer the questions and people are here. So you're not getting what you need to hear. So the answer to your question is, hey, do you guys ship to Mexico? No, we don't ship to Mexico. And they answer correctly. But as a business owner, how many of those questions do we get a week? Oh man, we get like eight of those a day. Why didn't you tell me? We know the answer. We don't ship to Mexico, but that's a business opportunity. Why didn't you tell me? I need to know this. I didn't know we had that much demand, right? Or you walk into the CS team and they say, Oh, things are horrible. Karen, she's back again. She wants to sue us. Okay, that's important. I need to know that, but that's not indicative of the health of the company. That's just one customer. That's the squeakiest wheel. So, what we do at Gnome AI is because we're AI first, and because we're telling your team, guys, focus on documentation to train the AI so you don't have to answer every question you answer once, and that's it. You never have to answer it again. Your documentation is getting better. When things uh uh escalate to a human, a human is primed to give the best user experience. But on the on the back end, once a week, you get an executive report that tells you here's the state of the union. Here's here's the conversations that are happening, here's the quantity, here's the quality, your NPS score is this, your CSAT score is this, this is how you improve it. This is how you get your customers to sing your praises. I'm telling you, here's your 30, 60, 90 day plan. By the way, I went and scoured the internet on Yelp, on G2 Crowd, on Trustpilot. You had some reviews there, and some of them may not have been great. Go jump on. Oh, I didn't even check. Did you know somebody on Reddit said XYZ about you? What's Reddit again? I'm so busy, I don't even I know what Reddit is. I'm never in there. It goes and scours the internet for you and tells you, hey, here's some reviews that's going on. By the way, here's product opportunities for you, your customers, your uh you're an Italian restaurant. I mean, this is a very bad example, but you're an Italian restaurant. There's a difference when uh people coming in and say, hey, you know what? My kid doesn't eat pizza or whatever. Do you guys can you guys do a meatball sub, no cheese? Oh, we don't do subs, we just do pizza. Can you guys do you guys offer sushi? Both are food, and both both times my front-end team said, No, we don't. Well, we're an Italian restaurant. Meatball sub is very different than sushi. Yeah. You get at the executive level reporting to know what's good feedback, what's bad feedback.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

Right.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

Right? And you can make that decision. And you think I have time to go through all the threads? No, just give me the net net, man. Give me the net net. Our executive report that gets to you every week is set it and forget it. You don't have to log into the system to look at the report. You get an email. It's a three-pager that tells you exactly what's going on with an action plan. Now it's up to you to take that action or not. But when your director of CS shows up, when your director of sales shows up, and we say, Okay, guys, tell me the state of the union. What you're telling me does not match this report. Why? Oh, well, boss, you know, we didn't want to bother you with it. No, no, no. There's certain things I need to know. I don't need to necessarily know all the details, but I need to know if this is a problem or not. That's where we really accept at Nome AI, you get top of the line uh sentiment analysis and action plans, all built off of real conversations that your team is having.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

Well, no, so now you've led to that last question, which I asked about pricing. The reason I bring that up, plus about what you just described, A plus. People need to understand what you're getting out of the AI. That the being able decision support, being able to make great decisions based on actual real-time data is huge. You don't need data from last month, last year. What's happening right now in my business that I need to make pivots in, and I can see what's working and what's not is is huge. A lot of times right now, and I know a ton of different executors okay. Every time I get the report, it's so far in my rearview mirror, it's obsolete. So that is a big, big deal. Now, I've seen in the AI market, usually everything from free to hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars per month, and people can't discern the value. Like, well, what's the difference? Is this person just trying to undercut the market and it's a great bond or is it not doing anything at all? How do you see this market when it comes from a pricing perspective?

Executive Insights, Sentiment, Action Plans

SPEAKER_01 37:06

So, what we tend to do at Gnome AI is we want to offer you enterprise level solutions at startup prices. So I'm not an enterprise just yet. I want to get there. So, am I uh being out competed by my competitors because they can afford high-end AI? So, what we do is we we grow with you. We have free plans. Free plans means you probably don't get a whole lot of traffic to your website, but I want to get there one day. Sure, you don't have to break the bank right now. Come in, you can start for free. Then you get the 20, 50, 100 plans. Okay, those are one-of-the-middle middle plans. And you know what? I'm a successful coach. I don't get that much traffic on my website. That's okay. You don't I don't just because you make a lot of money doesn't mean we're gonna charge you a lot of money. We charge you for the value we bring. But let's say you're a Shopify store and you make three, four, five sales a minute. You grow into those plans. But as you grow into those plans, we're we tell we are trying to be. Remember back in the day when you used to go to a restaurant and you weren't happy, they'd actually take care of you. They'd comp you that drink, they'd comp you your food. They they really cared about, you know, just I'm old enough to remember that. I promise you, that used to be a thing. The hospitality, the gratuity of the business. We try to treat our uh customers that way and say, okay, listen, we'll grow with you. You've grown up, we're not gonna be greedy and try to gouge you. Actually, our prices go up, not down. We actually lower our prices. You end us end up paying us more because you're using more, but we actually lower, we give you volume pricing. And so that we don't have to renegotiate every few months as you're growing. Great, we love that you grow. We want to grow with you, but we we sit down with you and we say, okay, what's your projected growth for the year? Let's pad that by 5% so we don't have to have a discussion. And we'll we'll honor that for a year. And as long as it doesn't deviate too far off, if you go over, don't worry, we'll take care of you. Right. And here's volume pricing. But you know, you never hit there until you need to. We have, for example, agencies, people, coaches, uh, educators, agencies uh for marketing, uh, branding, things of that nature. Um, you know, they they look at us and say, well, I'm sort of supplying this for my customers. My customers are other businesses and I want to supply this for them. Can you help me with an agency model? Yeah, we can help you with an agency model. Can you sort of build it for us to say, like, yes, the fine-tuning and the the expert level, I don't have the staff for that, but I can sell it. Can you, until I have the staff for that, can you take care of that for me and I can make some margins on the back end? Yeah, we we have those uh we have those relationships as well. But basically, we try to meet you where you're at and at all levels give you enterprise level solutions at startup prices. Wherever you're at, we will make sure that uh we only uh get we only charge a fraction of the value we gave you.

SPEAKER_00 39:56

I think that what you said is very important. Everybody's on a different journey and they're seeing where they're at, and they have to test these things out. And you don't want a large upfront capital expense, or you know, now I got the uh I've signed up for a whole year, and I've got this monthly reoccurring, and I'm I don't know if it's gonna be good or bad because I haven't even I don't know enough yet uh uh to get the value out of it. I think you've explained a lot of what value you can get out of it, and now you just explain us the adoption to maybe the adoption technology is not gonna break your bank. You can try it, utilize it.

SPEAKER_01 40:32

You're not gonna sit six months trying to build something, you'll be up and ready in a day, give it the next day for good measure. But you can you can if you're going to fail, fail quickly, right? And if you're gonna if you're going to succeed, let's get there quickly because time is money.

SPEAKER_00 40:47

Time is money. There's there's a lot of personalization that goes into this, a lot of customization that goes into it. You need a good partner with you that's willing to walk the walk with you because you you have a goal in mind to your point. Do you need to convert? Are you starting to see where you're leaving money on the table? Like, look, we we could have converted that, we're not doing it. And I love what you just said. I mean, that one it just stands out with me, you're getting real-time uh information about the health of your business and why you're succeeding and why you're not succeeding. And to your point, when you when you when you've owned and sold or lost businesses, a lot of times it comes down to you just didn't have the right uh um amount of capital and money deployed in the right way, and then that when it went left. The audience went left, I went right, I miscalculated, boom. So the more they can get real-time information in, I think it's it's golden. We're gonna conclude here, but before I do, you gotta make sure A, people know how to get a hold of you, and then B, because I always like a real-time report. This is your real-time, your first time being on the Follow Brand Podcast, and you've been on probably a lot of different shows. You've been on a lot of different podcasts, you did a lot of presentations. How did you like your experience on my show?

SPEAKER_01 42:06

You know, bar none, the best. No, honestly, it's it's great being on a show where it's just a natural conversation, uh, where both of us are just looking to provide value to people. If you if you buy from our products and services, great, but really the idea is just to provide value and real, you know, information that you can take with you anywhere you go. And if you choose us, thank you. And we appreciate that. But really, we just want to provide value to our listeners.

SPEAKER_00 42:31

That's beautiful. I really like that. Again, you got to tell us how to get in touch with you, Daniel. I know em.ai.

SPEAKER_01 42:38

Go in, sign up. You don't even need to sign up to give it a try. You can just put in your your uh your website and it'll give you a demo without even your email. So we're not gonna spam you or or jump on a call immediately with you. And then if you want to call us, there's a booking link right there. We'll jump on a call with you and and help you through your journey. Uh again, we uh we are trying to go back to the way business used to be run, to say just give value to your customers before you charge them anything. And that's what we try to do is go back to fundamentals and say, you know what, do right for your customers. Bring value, the revenue will come afterwards, and hopefully our customers do that to their customers.

SPEAKER_00 43:14

Absolutely, absolutely. So definitely you got to check out Daniel Daniel Hindi. We got no AI N O E M dot AI. I encourage our entire audience to check out all the episodes of Follow Brand. You can do so at the number five, that's five star BDM. That's B for brand, D for Development, and for Masters.com. I want to thank you again for sharing your story with my audience.

SPEAKER_01 43:38

I love it. Thank you for having me. You're welcome.