Beyond Content Creation: The Impact of AI on Small Businesses

About the Guest:

Brett Barnes is an expert in information technology from CentraComm, located in Findlay.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of Chamber Amplified from the Findlay-Hancock County Chamber of Commerce, Doug Jenkins discusses the world of artificial intelligence (AI) in the small business ecosystem with Brett Barnes of CentraComm. The podcast sheds light on how AI can go beyond content creation to revolutionize operations.

Doug reflects on the growing prevalence of AI in industries, emphasizing its role in simplifying operations and enhancing productivity, especially for smaller enterprises with limited resources. Brett introduces listeners to various AI applications beyond marketing, such as inventory and staffing management, demonstrating their potential to tackle common operational inefficiencies. Importantly, both agree that AI doesn’t simply replace human resources but rather supports small businesses by performing tasks that might otherwise be beyond their financial reach.

Brett also delves into specific AI tools like chatbots for customer service and inventory management systems, demonstrating their use in real-world scenarios, such as restaurants optimizing supply chains or organizing shift schedules. The discussion also explores AI’s pivotal role in strengthening cybersecurity measures for small businesses, a vital aspect considering the increasing vulnerability to cyber threats.

Key Takeaways:

• AI can empower small businesses by automating repetitive tasks, thereby increasing operational efficiency and enabling more focus on strategic growth.
• Customer service chatbots enhance user interaction while handling complex orders and frequently asked questions outside of normal business hours.
• AI-driven tools in inventory management and scheduling present opportunities for cost savings and optimized resource allocation, critical for small businesses with limited employees.
• Cybersecurity advancements using AI, such as those from Juniper Networks and CrowdStrike, can proactively identify and respond to threats, reducing risks associated with data breaches.
• For businesses considering AI integration, a thorough assessment of needs and potential return on investment is essential to ensure effective application.

Music and sound effects obtained from https://www.zapsplat.com

Transcript

0:00:02 - (Doug Jenkins): Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Doug Jenkins from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce. On each episode of Chamber Amplified, we're examining issues impacting the local business community. From employee recruitment and retention, marketing, IT issues. It's really anything that can be impacting your business. Our goal is to give our members tips each week on at least one way they can improve operations and thrive in the current business environment.

0:00:23 - (Doug Jenkins): All right, so you might have noticed a little bit of a change to the intro. There was no coming up next at the beginning of the podcast. I had an epiphany over the last few weeks. You don't really actually need that in a podcast. You're already tuned in, you're subscribed to the podcast or you had it sent to you, whatever. You don't really need the preview. It's not radio, it's a podcast. You already know what you're here for. The title's right there on it. So it also saves some time on putting the podcast together by taking that little part out. And sometimes it confuses the AI. More on that in a second and what we use the AI for.

0:00:55 - (Doug Jenkins): Also want to let you know a little bit of a less scripted intro and outro coming up. We're going to try that here in 20. I personally hate talking from a script. You heard the script at the very beginning. Gotta have something like that. But if you know me, you know I don't talk off of a script very well. So a little bit more of a freeform type of intro. Had fun doing that when we did our Best of episodes and thought, well, let's just try it with our regular episodes as well. Hey, good news, we're past the Best of Episodes. Appreciate you listening to those.

0:01:24 - (Doug Jenkins): A lot of great content there. But we're back and have plenty of information coming up all throughout the year here on Chamber Amplified. So I mentioned AI. That's actually what we're talking about today. We've talked about it a little bit in the past here on the podcast. More from a content creation focus, which is important, but I want to focus on the other applications of AI and small businesses now because I think we're just scratching the surface when we talk about, well, you can do your social media posts, you can do your email, we all kind of do that or use it to some way shape or form like that. But there are so many different ways you can be utilizing AI in your business right now in ethical ways that can really take a load off. And so that's what we're gonna focus on today. Our guest is Brett Barnes of CentraComm here in Findlay. He's gonna talk about some different applications he's been seeing businesses use, whether it's cybersecurity on down to creating your schedule, if you run a restaurant, and inventory management.

0:02:21 - (Doug Jenkins): It can do all of this and it can really help out in a lot of different ways. So we're gonna get into that in a moment. Again, thanks for. Remember, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, you can rate and review the show there. It really does help spread the word. And of course, we want more people listening each and every week. Now let's get into it. So Brett has talked about this subject at Fresh Brewed Business.

0:02:44 - (Doug Jenkins): I don't know how long ago it's been. So everything has changed in AI since then, Brett, I would imagine.

0:02:49 - (Bret Barnes): Absolutely.

0:02:51 - (Doug Jenkins): So one of the things that we focused on then was, and we've talked about with our members is content creation, how you use it for marketing things, which are all very important. But what we want to do today is look at some of the different aspects outside of that, that people can be using AI and leveraging the technology for and why they might want to do that. So let's just kind of start off with how AI is empowering small businesses already when it comes to things that aren't content creation.

0:03:20 - (Bret Barnes): Yeah, absolutely. So as we did talk about in Fresh Fruit Business, you know, there's all the ChatGPT and those marketing aspects that, you know, marketing people in the marketing field have been using those kind of pioneering that. So definitely what small businesses can do outside of that is they can leverage AI to automate repetitive tasks, improve the efficiency of their own operations. And this allows smaller businesses now to compete with these larger companies without actually having the overhead, you know, to actually be able to have the employees to compete with them. Just on a labor level, you're now able to automate different tasks so that that way your employees can focus on the other important tasks within your company that allow you to make those decisions, to be able to still be in that pool as far as the larger businesses go, but not have to have that manpower behind it.

0:04:14 - (Doug Jenkins): And I know that's always one of the ethical questions about AI is is it replacing a human? I think for small businesses, it's doing a job that you were never going to have the budget to hire someone for anyway. Are you going to commit how many thousands of dollars to payroll, to benefits, to training, to things like that for something that you pro for somebody who probably wouldn't hire full time, right?

0:04:37 - (Bret Barnes): Absolutely. And one of the things that comes to to mind first is really going to be the chatbots, different chatbots that they have for customer service. So I know we've talked about Chat GBT in the aspect of using it for maybe, you know, compiling a list of any kind of inspiration for different marketing projects, things like that. I always do say with Chat GPT or any other of the generative AI platforms, please, please, please remember that as much as they try to make sure that they are pulling from, you know, verified and good sources, that's never always going to be the case.

0:05:10 - (Bret Barnes): So if you ever do anything and you start seeing statistics, numbers, things like that pop up, please, please, please double check them, because we don't want to. You know, the worst thing would be to put something out there that you put all of your time and energy to and then find out that there's misinformation in it and you know, obviously unintentional, you know, but then you're gonna have to go back, redraft it and that'll completely defeat the purpose of having things like this, to be able to, you know, cut down on these other tasks and these other man hours.

0:05:38 - (Bret Barnes): So we do know that there are different chat bots out there. ChatGPT is one of the ones that I usually reference because it's something that I utilize. But there are other versions out there. That's not the only platform that you have to use. But the important thing is chat bots can now be used for customer service. So even beyond marketing now you can, let's say, perfect example, let's say you're a small bakery.

0:06:01 - (Bret Barnes): What you can do with these chat bots is if you want to take orders in outside of hours, but the orders involve more complex instructions and things like that, like maybe cake design, you know, just for example, you can have AI so that your chatbot is going to help your clients be able to complete any of those more complex orders and get you all the information that you're going to need as well as answer, you know, pre done frequently asked questions.

0:06:31 - (Bret Barnes): So instead of just having a frequently asked questions section on your site, they can now talk to not a live person. And I know that's still, you know, you have to think about demographics, you have to think about your audience, who's your target client, because you want to make sure that it's something that they're going to utilize and something that's going to be beneficial. But that's a relatively inexpensive way to be Able to handle customer support 24. 7. Take issues or take issues. Excuse me, take orders and resolve issues 24.

0:07:00 - (Bret Barnes): 7.

0:07:01 - (Doug Jenkins): And I think even if it's not, maybe your target market isn't the type of person who's going to use a chat pot. It's important to be forward thinking that maybe it's not something that you need to roll out immediately. But if you're thinking about the future and the type of clients that you're going to need down the road, this is maybe something you want to be putting on your website Again, maybe not right away, but you want to at least have that knowledge base to know that, okay, it's there. I need to start, you know, my customers are aging out. How do I get the next wave of the next generation of customers?

0:07:33 - (Bret Barnes): Right? Absolutely. It's definitely important to plan for the future. And AI is something that I know it can seem scary at first, but it's definitely not going away. And as I mentioned in my fresh brew business, and I make sure I mentioned this every time I talk about AI, we still are not at the level where you're going to have to worry about Terminators running around coming from in the past or in the future to get us.

0:07:56 - (Bret Barnes): The days of the robots taking over are still far from us. We have not reached that third level of AI. We're still stuck on the second level, which is where it is able to operate like a human. It's able to solve problems like a human and is able to adapt, but it's not able to have that complete separate consciousness that would classify it as, you know, an actual artificial life form. Like people are thinking, you know, it's going to happen.

0:08:25 - (Bret Barnes): Yeah. And I can definitely say, I don't know, will it happen in the future? I hope I'm not around for it. But you know, right now, for anyone who's worried about it, you know, just know that we are, we are far from there.

0:08:36 - (Doug Jenkins): Yeah, I'm not too worried about that just yet. I. And I, I like the idea of, again, it's not plug and play yet either. Maybe I don't like the idea of it. I would like it to be a little bit more plug and play, but it's not there. There is a learning curve up front, especially with the chatbot. I know we've been playing around with one to potentially put on our website sometime in the future. And it's not something that you're just like, chatbot, drop the code in, it's ready to go.

0:09:02 - (Doug Jenkins): You have to train it, then you have to go back and test it like you said, to make sure it's giving out quality information. I'll give an example we put in the chamber of commerce schedule. I'm like, when is the next fresh brew business? It's like the next fresh brew business is February 4, 2025. Now this was back in October of last year when we were testing it. And I'm like, are you sure there isn't one in November?

0:09:22 - (Doug Jenkins): And then it comes back, oh, yes, there's one in November on the first Tuesday of the month. So there's some back and forth to get it trained. But the potential, and especially like the bakery example you gave, to just be there and getting orders and just getting information when people come to your website, that's huge. And not something to look past.

0:09:44 - (Bret Barnes): Yes, absolutely. And you can even move beyond that. And if you want to maybe not focus on that customer service aspect and the 247 aspect that it can bring to you. As far as chatbots, you can also use it to automate inventory management. So let's say that, you know, I am running a restaurant and I need to know, okay, what food should I order? What should I have on hand? What's popular? What are the days that it's popular?

0:10:11 - (Bret Barnes): You can use AI based forecasting tools to avoid not only running out of the popular items, but to avoid overstocking as well. And then even beyond that, you can take that and you can take that the analytics and the data that it's processing for your different peak times and peak hours. And there's actually programs there that'll do staffing for you. So it will make sure that it looks into who you have, who usually works what shifts. Maybe someone can only do mornings, right, because maybe they have to pick their kids up from school or maybe they have other prior engagements where that day specifically it doesn't work out for them to work in the afternoon.

0:10:52 - (Bret Barnes): The AI programs can also give you a list pretty quickly of who would be available in the event that someone got sick. I mean, we're in the wintry seasons right now. I see a lot of my friends getting sick repeatedly. I ended up getting sick right after the holiday. It's just that time it's going around. So this can help take that stress away and make sure that your business is staffed properly. But then also you're going to see a savings when you're, you know, any time you're not wasting money on different materials or resources or items like food that are going to go bad no matter what certain things you can't freeze or else, you know, the client can, can tell the taste, you know, and tell it, it's different.

0:11:36 - (Bret Barnes): So you have such a limited shelf life. This can actually help you to maximize on your inventory.

0:11:43 - (Doug Jenkins): I think this is where it gets real exciting because this is a practical application that I can just ask the question to the program. Hey, what sells well on a Wednesday night? If I'm a restaurant or if I we always go to the Doug's widget company is the default company that we use on the podcast. What would you sell more in February so that I know to stock up what I need for that to manufacture this. So I mean it scales up from your smallest business to midsize and to large size beyond that.

0:12:13 - (Doug Jenkins): Let's walk through that process a little bit more though. What are the types of tools? Because I, I, a lot of times we talk AI, people default to that chat. It's chat GPT. Well, chat GPT doesn't necessarily do this. You need to be using specific tools. Are there, are there any specific tools that I don't know that you want to recommend but that you've seen in action that have piqued your interest?

0:12:35 - (Bret Barnes): So as far as inventory management, you know, being that I do, I'm involved in marketing for my organization, I have not had the actual firsthand experience with that. So I'm not really familiar with too many different programs that they have for that where, where we are focused more so is yes, there's a chat GPT. Use it for marketing. You know, we can talk about that until we're blue in the face. But for me, mostly it is utilizing AI and for center, just in general utilizing AI for cybersecurity.

0:13:10 - (Bret Barnes): So there's different platforms there that I could absolutely talk to you about. For the restaurant ones, what I would recommend that you do is your current. If, if you do have a current IT provider, please, please, please reach out to them because they're going to be your best contact. And the reason why I say that is they're going to have all sorts of different organizations that might have been inquiring about AI and they might have gotten set up for using it, not only for those chatbots that do customer support, but for this inventory management software.

0:13:40 - (Bret Barnes): And what I can do, Doug, is I can definitely get a list of preferred ones from some of my colleagues and include that for you to send out as well.

0:13:50 - (Doug Jenkins): We can add those into the show notes at any time. So that's not a problem there. And again, it doesn't have to be Specific, I think it's more just knowing that you can't just drop a spreadsheet into chat GPT and it knows it. You're going to at least want to do a Google search to be like, hey, what's some AI based scheduling software or AI based inventory management? Chances are there are going to be some packages that work together on those types of things and that's going to set you on the right path where you're able to get your own AI, train it to, here's my staff, here's when they're available and start to figure that out. And especially for businesses that, where flexibility remains a big concern for employees, having a program that is pretty good at figuring out when everybody is available, when they might be available and helping you schedule like that is going to make your life a lot easier in dealing with employee flexibility.

0:14:44 - (Bret Barnes): Absolutely. And then what you can do is beyond just the looking at your inventory and looking at employees, you know, there's data, any data driven analytics that you use, maybe you use those to decide what new items, maybe you should be putting out new items on the market, things like that. Or maybe you took one of your new recipes, right. And said, okay, I'm going to try this recipe out for, let's say we'll try this menu item out for six months and take a look.

0:15:19 - (Bret Barnes): Instead of going through and just manually figuring out who got what, or even using systems that track that, this is actually going to help look at the times they were ordered and help you project, you know, for if it's actually going to be a good dinner item. You know, sometimes the restaurants try something out for breakfast, but it might be a little unconventional, might be something that you have for more of a lunch or a dinner. And maybe if it doesn't work well, maybe you see that people were ordering it more around that time and you focus it more. You know, for restaurants that have these separate menus where only certain things are going to be available at certain times because you know, there's always the prepping that goes into the, you know, restaurants before they're even opening.

0:15:58 - (Bret Barnes): So they can actually take that and say, okay, this is going to be a better item for this. Let's focus on what actually sells for breakfast. And in turn, obviously more sales is going to increase profit. And the most important thing with any AI driven program or any, I mean, honestly, any additional software that you're adding to your organization is going to be what's your return on investment? Is it worth however much the subscription is per month?

0:16:26 - (Bret Barnes): So like And I'll say chatgpt. So just chatgpt for the basic, you know, chat function, the basic generative AI functions that it has, whether it's actual text or images. It's $20 a month currently. So if you can even save maybe an employee that's. Let's just say you have an employee that makes $20 an hour and you were able to, in a month's time, save them even an hour of doing that work. Now, that's paid for what you're using.

0:16:56 - (Bret Barnes): But obviously it's not going to stop there, it's going to keep going. So then what you want to do is you want to factor in how much time. So another important thing, I guess I should say is in the beginning, like you said, there's no one drop Excel spreadsheet solution. You're also going to need to use some, you know, older tactics to tracking, project tracking, things like that. And so what you could do is you could go back to, you know, using the spreadsheets and everything for project tracking.

0:17:23 - (Bret Barnes): Or there are softwares out there. One that I've used before is called Motion, that actually sets your calendar up. Not for you. You go in, you set your projects, you set your tasks, your soft deadlines, hard deadlines. It sounds like a lot of data input. It's really not. It's super easy. The user interface is amazing. And what happens is it will sync with your Outlook calendar. And so let's just say, let's say, Doug, we have a meeting tomorrow at 3 o'clock and unfortunately I'm stuck on my 2 o'clock meeting and it's just running over and we're not able to get to what we need to get to. So I message you, say, hey, can we reschedule? Yeah, that's fine.

0:18:02 - (Bret Barnes): What'll happen is if there's any tasks that were associated with that meeting, for me, after, you know, get, get this draft done, get this sent over, it is going to automatically, if I'm not going, if I'm not marking that I've completed it, it's going to reorganize my entire schedule to fit that half an hour of working on, you know, this marketing collateral piece, or maybe it's an hour to work on a presentation.

0:18:27 - (Bret Barnes): It is going to take that. It is going to look at all your other things based on priority. It's going to sync with all your meetings that you have, and it's going to reschedule your calendar. I know one of the things Motion says is, I believe, you know, save up to 20% of your time utilizing the calendar. And, well, I can't verify, you know, how much the percentage is, but I can definitely tell you, having used it myself, it is a great tool and it did save a lot of time because I don't have to go in and replan what tomorrow looks like. If there's three things I didn't get to today, and I have a couple items tomorrow that aren't due until next week, that's okay. It's going to push them back. It's going to adjust to what I need to do.

0:19:08 - (Bret Barnes): Almost. Think about it as having your own personal assistant.

0:19:12 - (Doug Jenkins): I've seen it. I've seen demonstrations of it, and it's very interesting. It's cool to hear your experience with it. And again, like we said up front, there's. You have to put the information in up front. Probably in this case, this task takes me 30 minutes. This task takes me about 60 minutes. Things like that. So that it knows when it's trying to. When it's adjusting your schedule. All right, this fits in this block and things like that. But once you have that in there to have that dynamic schedule and just be able to open up Outlook, whatever it is, and say, all right, this is what I'm doing right now without having to sit down and think and all right, what do I have to have this opened up? What can I work on right now?

0:19:49 - (Doug Jenkins): That's huge. It's just taking that little plate that you're keeping spinning, taking that away, and now you can just focus on what's on your calendar, knock things out that way. That's. That's a really interesting application of it. You mentioned cyber security a little bit ago, too. Obviously that's a big thing for centric comm. How is AI being applied in cybersecurity, especially for small businesses? We've had conversations on this podcast before about small businesses needing to make sure that they're up to date on cybersecurity, because the people who are out trying to steal data, information aren't just targeting the big dogs. They're out there just trying to hit the path of least resistance, which oftentimes. Or our small businesses.

0:20:30 - (Bret Barnes): Right. And that's the thing. So now if you know what we refer to them as, these malicious actors, right. That and those are the ones who are trying to get your information. They're trying to get whatever information they can take. I mean, whether it's financial, whether it's proprietary information and use it to, most times leverage for financial gain for themselves. So some of the really cool things they've been doing with AI is for instance, one of our partners in our services is CrowdStrike.

0:21:02 - (Bret Barnes): And CrowdStrike is very famous for monitoring network activity for suspicious patterns. And what it does is it uses AI to assess what employees do on a day to day. Now this isn't AI to spy on your employees. This isn't. Okay, he clicked on this link at this time. This is to make sure that if someone is getting into your network and accessing information or there's a pattern that is just out of the norm, right?

0:21:29 - (Bret Barnes): Say you're accessing certain information at 4:00 in the afternoon, but you always access it at 10am and on the off chance you do it, it's things like that that will be able to help you prevent cyber attacks in real time. And then it goes even beyond cybersecurity and it can extend your network. So another wonderful partner that we work with is Juniper Networks that we've been working with for quite a long time.

0:21:52 - (Bret Barnes): And what they do is they have different wireless access points, switches, routers. I can definitely say all the tech words that I've learned since I started working with centercon, but it has not been too long. I've only been there for almost two years, so I know that I still remember when they didn't mean a whole lot, you know, when I was saying them. But the thing is, what it does is it's essentially it's monitoring your network health.

0:22:14 - (Bret Barnes): So it's going to take large, large amounts of data from all different access points, wireless access points and in switches and it's going to proactively identify any potential issues. Now these issues go beyond just an issue of someone trying to come into your system. You know, so the things like, you know, or CrowdStrike, looking at your regular behavior, it's going to help you monitor it for issues like congestion, service interruptions or, you know, different degraded user experiences that are happening because of an issue in your network that can be fixed.

0:22:48 - (Bret Barnes): And one of their services that they have is called MIST AI and we had a, we had a demo on it and it was, it was absolutely wonderful. This thing just, or program, I should say, was able to assess what potential issues were going to happen with certain wireless access points around a huge office center. So let's say even if you're a large company or even if you're a small company to be able to have that to where it's not just going to be.

0:23:19 - (Bret Barnes): Let's say I open up my coffee shop business where we're ready to go and my network goes down. I can't take credit cards, I can't take anything like that, you know, or if you run into the gas station to grab one of those quick little Starbucks drinks, right, because you don't want to sit in the 20 minute line. I definitely do that often. And the thing with that is I've gone into the gas station before and it's, oh, we only take cash. And it's like, oh, shoot.

0:23:44 - (Bret Barnes): And then your first thing you think of is, do you have an atm? And then they look at you and go, our network. You know, and you're just like, oh, right, right, right. But it's things like that where it can identify because I mean, if you think about the potential loss of revenue, you know, even for being down for a couple hours, and especially for small businesses who are competing with these larger companies who might have more expendable revenue to where, okay, that one hour didn't really affect them, but it could have been prime lunchtime, you know, for one of our beautiful restaurants on Main street, you know, so to be able to identify those issues and stop them before they happen would be, I mean, an absolute advantage to compete with some of these larger businesses.

0:24:27 - (Bret Barnes): And then what it can do too is it can automatically respond to the threat that's happening. So it doesn't always need human intervention. So it can respond and isolate whatever systems are affected or block this malicious activity in real time. And as you know, perfect example, the ransomware attack that happened, mgm, I mean, the millions and millions that they paid out from it, their data had already been taken, everyone's credit cards, all their proprietary information, personal information of their guests staying there, it had already been taken.

0:25:02 - (Bret Barnes): So when you pay, I mean, you can't guarantee even that you're going to get it back. But when you get it back, most of that data is not going to be useful to you anymore. So the amount of money it's going to cost to make up for what happened, I mean, that can be, that can be catastrophic to a small business. Absolutely catastrophic. So any of these tools that are able to help businesses that, you know, aren't necessarily always going to break the bank. I mean, some of these AI tools are very expensive, I'm not going to lie.

0:25:34 - (Doug Jenkins): Right.

0:25:34 - (Bret Barnes): But there usually is always a way to find a solution. You know, so one of the things we do at CentraComm is, I'm sure, you know, a lot of businesses will say, this is the day and age that we're in right now. No client is the Same. So we need to be able to come up with unique solutions with our skill set and with the, you know, platforms and the technology that we use to be able to help businesses in a way where, okay, if you're, you know, 5,000 employees or whether you're five or maybe you're a one man show or, you know, a lot of different people have also started, you know, different online e commerce businesses, you know, after Covid, that became very successful.

0:26:17 - (Bret Barnes): So things like that are going to help for your return on investment. Because I'll say it again, the most important thing is return on investment. If you are paying more and still having to employ people, then we need to just stop, put everything on hold and reassess. And one of the best ways to, you know, think about that is assess your needs. What are your pain points? Do you have a lack of customer engagement and you're trying to think of how to improve that or are you dealing with operational inefficiencies? And would something, we'll go back to the restaurant example, would something like inventory management help you or staff management be able to help you get back to the things that matter and even if it's not things that for the business, you know, a lot of these small business owners, they have families, they have lives outside, you know, that we all want to get to. Right.

0:27:06 - (Bret Barnes): So things like this can also help, you know, not necessarily in terms of just increasing your revenue, but if you want to have, maybe you want to have more of a work life balance and that's just not possible because of, you know, that the overhead you're able to financially support, I think that's a.

0:27:25 - (Doug Jenkins): Good place to end it for that. We could go on for hours about try and do it in bite size. We're going to come back and talk more about AI. I'm sure it's not going anywhere and certainly we'll come back at some point and talk a little bit more about the content generation part of it, because that's big for marketing and everything too. But I just really wanted to start looking at other ways that businesses can be leveraging AI right now.

0:27:49 - (Doug Jenkins): Brett, like it's important to have a conversation with somebody who's knowledgeable in this arena. If you're not sure what you're getting into, if somebody would want to talk to you or someone at Centricom, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

0:28:00 - (Bret Barnes): Yeah, what they can definitely do is reach out to it's B centric or, excuse me, B Centricon. It's Be secure. We hope you come to center. No, it's be secure. It's B E S E C U r e@centricom.net and Centricom is. You can see it. I think it's up here. Up here. Not sure what the mirroring is doing right now or if it's not. But please feel free to reach out and I will definitely, you know, be able to get a response out to you and see, you know, whether it's cybersecurity needs or it's wireless access needs or you just have a quick question about AI.

0:28:36 - (Bret Barnes): Feel free to reach out.

0:28:37 - (Doug Jenkins): All right, Brett, thanks again for joining us on Chamber Amplified.

0:28:41 - (Bret Barnes): Thank you so much for having me, Doug.

0:28:43 - (Doug Jenkins): Big thanks to Brett for joining us on the podcast Once again. It is really interesting to look at the different applications of AI. And I know I talked about how we weren't really talking about content creation in this podcast, and we're not. Although that is one of the ways that we do this podcast. We use a service called Decipher. It gives us the transcript for it. It'll write a script for us. Again, these are things that we either don't have staff time to do or we just don't. We're not gonna hire anybody to do the podcast. We're not taking on extra people to do it. But we wouldn't be able to provide this service if it weren't for some of the AI tools that we're able to use. And that's really where I want to focus some efforts and some discussion in 2025 about ethical use of AI in your business and how it can really make you more efficient.

0:29:31 - (Doug Jenkins): We keep hearing the slogan, there are going to be businesses that use AI and succeed. Or if you hold out, you may not be as successful, but everybody's going to be using it to a certain degree. It's just how do you want to leverage it? We'll continue to follow up on that throughout the year. Again, Chamber Amplified is a free podcast for the community. Thanks to the investment of members in the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce.

0:29:53 - (Doug Jenkins): Because of our robust membership, we're able to focus on providing timely information to the Findlay and Hancock county business community. But not only that, we can run leadership programs for adults and teenagers like Hancock Leadership and Hancock Youth Leadership. We can be an advocate for the area and provide tools for to help local businesses succeed. If that sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, just let me know and we can talk about how an investment in the Chamber not only helps strengthen your business, but the community as a whole.

0:30:18 - (Doug Jenkins): That'll do it for this week's episode. If you have ideas on topics you'd like to hear us cover in future episodes, please send me an email. Djenkinsindleyhancockchamber.com, always like to hear your suggestions. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time on Chamber Amplified from the Findlay Hancock County Church Chamber of Commerce.