What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
AI-Driven Business Transformation: Unleashing Innovation
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Unlock the secrets of AI-driven business transformation with visionary entrepreneur Brandon, as he shares his remarkable journey from pioneering a social networking platform for sport fishermen in the '90s to leading innovations in business operations at Third Brain Digital Operations. Discover how Brandon leverages AI to enhance efficiencies and automate processes, making advanced technology accessible to businesses of all sizes. Through vivid storytelling and practical analogies, such as the simple yet profound exercise of detailing instructions for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Brandon illustrates the critical importance of clear operational procedures in the digital age.
Join us for an insightful exploration into the evolution of AI and automation within business infrastructures. From the pivotal shift from analog systems to the integration of AI-driven solutions, we unravel the transformative potential of cloud-based technologies and unified data layers. Learn how AI acts as a formidable force multiplier, empowering even small businesses to harness sophisticated technologies once out of reach. As Brandon delves into strategies for selecting the right technology stack and shares inspiring success stories, you'll gain a compelling vision of the future of enterprise software and the immense benefits of mapping and automating business operations.
Crossing Borders is a podcast by Neema, a cross border payments platform that...
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Hey everybody, Fascinating discussion today. I've always wanted to put my business on autopilot, and Third Brain Digital Operations is doing just that. Brandon, how are you?
Speaker 2:Hey Evan, thanks for having me on man.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here, Really intrigued by your mission and vision at Third Brain. Maybe start with introductions to yourself, a little bit about your biography and what's the big idea at Third Brain. Maybe start with introductions to yourself a little bit about your biography and what's the big idea at Third Brain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well thanks, I started. My career probably ages me a little bit, but in the 90s, having built what became the largest social networking and e-commerce site for sport, fishermen, of all things on the internet. Yeah, wild time started in 1996 with this crazy thought leadership idea that I was going to put a magazine on the internet which to everyone listening and watching sounds like a joke. But back then it was not a joke, it was actually sort of innovative. So I did that. I've had a really interesting and lucky career. I eventually sold that company to a large public media company. But I've been a venture capitalist.
Speaker 2:I worked at America Online in the early 2000s, which was really fun, and then I've run a software company, a software engineering company, and I'm working on third brain, which is really bringing AI to businesses to help create efficiency that ultimately falls to the bottom line. I think AI is you know it's all the rage now, but AI quote unquote for those not watching you know AI has been around a long time automation and things. I think it's just gotten easier and I think we're heading into phase two of what it. I feel like we're like back in 1999 in the internet, you know like this is the advent of a new era for the internet enterprise software software that any of your listeners use, whether you're a small business or big business and how this all really shapes up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the most exciting time in my career and in the industry I find. So what inspired the creation of ThirdBrain? And you know what were the specific challenges, problems you're solving or want to solve?
Speaker 2:Well, I had. I mean throughout my career, whether building my own companies or investing in companies or working in companies have always tried and I think all your listeners and viewers will. I've always tried to create automations, to scale your business to basically become a force multiplier for whoever is in a position or a business unit. And I was exiting another company. I've had a few exits luckily, thank the guardian angel that's around here somewhere and I was speaking on AI at conferences and automation, on basically what was coming, because ChatGPT the company where I had worked previously that I was running, where I was a partner we had early access to ChatGPT. So we saw what was coming and I just started.
Speaker 2:Some people asked me like, hey, look, you're a tech nerd, can you come and speak at this conference? And I started speaking and afterwards people would come up to me, evan, and they'd say, hey, can you help me come into my business? And at the time I really didn't have infrastructure and I knew Michael, who had started ThirdBrain, and I was like, hey, and we were in a group together that met every few months and we got to talking and he's like, hey, why don't you just come on board on ThirdBrain? And you know we have the infrastructure and that's how I got to be a partner over and helping at ThirdBrain.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So automation has been around a while. We've, you know, talked about RPA, and a lot of companies are getting benefits from that. But now you layer on AI and, you know, talk about the operational efficiencies you're driving here. What are some of the benefits you're bringing to those businesses?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that originally we were just trying to help the individual worker in their job and teach them how to use chat GPT. And then you know it wasn't just chat GPT, obviously, it's Gemini, and now you know Lambda and six other ones or maybe a hundred that you can use. But then it started to get focused and said okay, in your operations, how can we automate things that are currently people are doing manually or just taking a lot of manpower? And that really started out saying hey, we're going to go into a company and we're going to look at what your SOPs are and what your operations are, and what we found was was that even in some big companies, not everybody has their operations mapped out Like.
Speaker 2:This goes back to a homework assignment I had in third grade which the teacher, I think Miss Davis, sent us home and said hey can go home and write the directions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And we all thought we were going to get A's. And we came in the next day and she put out all the directions in a box and all the things that you needed to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich up front and she said okay, you have to randomly pick one out and you have to read it and you have to do exactly what the directions say. And you know my A went to probably a C because I said I forgot to spread the peanut butter and I thought I had aced it, and I think you know. I use that analogy because that's a lot of what happens in businesses either in individual capacity, in small businesses, medium-sized business and even in large businesses. A lot of this stuff people think they have in their head, they do it every day, they think they know it, but there's no way on the turnover to sort of ramp that up. So one we found that we have to go into companies and basically say, hey, look, let's get your op. If you have an SOP book, standard operating procedures or all of the things mapped out, let's see that. If you don't, let's create that. And then we've said, hey, let's, can we create some automations to help that? We've done that in finance. So we have a franchise, a person who owns, I think, 60 franchises, and you need to aggregate all of that financial data on a daily basis from multiple different. You have your point of sale system, you have things like Grubhub, you have Instacart, you have all these things. You have chargebacks and you have to reconcile that every day to make sure that what the receipts say they are, they are and are in the account. And we I'm using that as a finance example We've automated things where some mainstream businesses I would call them, where they're manufacturing metal buildings and their people on the front lines never had anything to really be able to one do their sales efficiently.
Speaker 2:So we moved them from paper to a tablet and then automated populating all the things behind the scenes and the operations that need to be populated from that. So if you map out a 30 by 40 pole building, what does that mean? Well, this company has been in business a long time. They actually know what it means. So now you can create a quote unquote AI agent or integrate that into the software. Integrate that into the software and then it can go into say, okay, well, now we need to order 50 things of this and 20 of this and things like this. And now you've started to automate that where that used to be put in by a person in the office. So you're starting to see those types of efficiencies.
Speaker 1:That's a great example, and you talk about a human-centered approach to workflow design. What does that mean exactly? What are some of the benefits and values behind your thinking there?
Speaker 2:Well, I think what we believe is that you're not going to and I hope I answered your question correctly here is that you're not going to automate someone at a job right away.
Speaker 2:Here, I think that is coming. I think it's probably a little bit further away than the aggressive things that you hear on a daily basis, because I think we're ending AI 1.0, which was, oh my God, we've got an interface now, because that's really what the LLMs have allowed is a human-centered interface that you can type English language and it does it for you, right. But I think we're moving into 2.0, where we're saying, okay, practically, how can we really use AI? But I would say that we are talking about really putting the human in the loop. So how far can AI get you? And then what's the max we can get for some sort of AI agent or automation or whatever you want to call it, and then put the human in the loop and that's just going to make that human better and more efficient and allow a person to get more done and probably more accurately in some cases, just because humans make errors. But it's really leveraging. It's like riding a bike, right, you use the least amount of energy to go the furthest.
Speaker 1:I love that and I loved your example earlier. And businesses are so different from each other and, of course, different industries are so unique and have their own challenges and opportunities. Are there sort of common denominators on different operational challenges these high growth businesses have and how do you serve different industries without being, you know, an expert in in every one?
Speaker 2:well, I think at the end of the day most, um, evan, I had a mentor who taught me, very successful guy who sold his company to brookshire hathaway and served on the border with warren buffett and he was a customer of mine at the fishing site and I used to fish with him every friday and we drive all over and we traveled and I learned more in that truck, I think, than I did in business school, although I wouldn't tell my business school that.
Speaker 2:But he said you know, brandon, businesses are really, they are pretty simple. You have a product or service you sell for, hopefully, a profit, and then you have to fulfill that service or product and there's operations in that and some operations are more complicated than others. But fundamentally I think, evan and I don't you know this if you're doing a healthcare company where you're taking a drug to market and you're doing trials, that's obviously much different than building a metal building. But it's really not if you operationalize it and just break it down into first principle like steps and say, okay, here's what we have to do and here's the process, and mapping it out. So, um, I hope that answered the question a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's certainly a learning experience as well, as you go into different industries and, of course, big tech is intensely focused on this space. As you know, this week you have Amazon reInvent and they're rolling out agents and all kinds of new technologies. How do you see yourself in this world of you know tech giants going after this space and how do you think about scaling when everyone's chasing some of the same opportunities? I guess the pie is big enough for many, many different approaches here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that the industry you know we're at the beginning here, so sort of like when in 19, I remember 1998, 1999, everybody said, like the internet's here and it's here. Well, you know, the internet really wasn't here for 10 years. If you look back, I think now I'm not. I think you're going to see a much faster acceleration here with this, with the advent of AI. But I think what's happening is is that companies really just need some outside expertise in some cases to come in and say, hey, here is what's happening because things are moving so fast every day.
Speaker 2:I do think that software companies are going to start to integrate AI. You see that, especially with AWS right now, because they realize that those agents, they probably can partner or buy companies faster and integrate them into the AWS or even in Salesforce, for instance. That's a big company that you're seeing, where I just use them as an example because they're an older company per se that has, I think they have 10 million businesses or something. They have a huge install base, so they're not going to go away. They're going to partner with these companies initially and then they're going to figure out how to integrate it into it, and I think there's always going to be a need for some sort of outside people who are completely focused on that until you can build your internal team. You know you can't. It's not like you can just hire these people right away and integrate them into your business if you haven't started building some beachhead of that. Digital operations, if you will. Team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes sense. Speaking of teams, you seem to have a unique approach on leveraging global talent as part of your different optimizations and workflows. How does that work and what sort of outcomes are you looking for there?
Speaker 2:Well, I think our thesis originally was that you know there's global talent out there that's really talented and has expertise that you can get for a lower cost. So can you introduce AI and then layer on global talent? I think with the new administration coming in in 2024, it'll be interesting to see if that actually will work as easily as maybe people had planned, mainly because I think you see a focus coming back into the United States. So I think global talent definitely has its place. I'll also say that there's places in the United States where you just don't have as high a cost of living. So maybe you hire people out of Nashville or Tampa, florida or these other places where you get the same sort of talent that here in Silicon Valley we have. But it's just a factor of things are expensive, especially on the coast, and whereas if you can go to the middle of the country or even these other countries, you're going to get a lower cost of people, if you will, to integrate into your business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes sense and we're seeing that already play out in areas like the contact center, call centers a ton of optimization and opportunities being deployed there to superpower give agents superpowers and skills as well. So really interesting. Maybe talk a little bit about go ahead.
Speaker 2:And the day a division that I was a part of really three of us built a model that was running a lifetime value analysis on a customer to figure out if we were going to send them to the US call center or into another global call center because of the cost. So I think what's happened is that these and this was early 2000s when I worked at America Online no-transcript. That just makes it so much easier and at the end of the day, it's really about ease of use and lower cost by having these things integrated into the existing systems that are going to allow even small to medium sized businesses to be able to do that. If I had said that 15 years ago, a small, medium sized business would say we don't have the resources or we can't hire the person who knows how to run 110 variable regression analysis and automate it into the call center right, whereas now you're going to have small to medium sized business where you know.
Speaker 2:I really I heard someone the other day say that they thought that you'd be able to have a one person business worth a billion dollars. I think that might be aggressive, but in 20 years that actually might be possible, just because you have these force multiplier of AI and processing power that we just didn't have, and bandwidth. I would say bandwidth was obviously a big issue and if you're going to leverage the cloud until they can do AI on bare metal like a Tesla car, bare metal like your phone, I think that's going to be a challenge. So you're going to rely on the cloud to do that processing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think people would be amazed if they knew the amount of technology that goes into your average Pizza Hut or Domino's behind the scenes. It's pretty amazing actually, and it's a huge opportunity for businesses like that. Let's talk about infrastructure. I have a lot of CIOs and CTOs listening. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your tech stack and what it comprises, as well as how do you assist in integrating customers into your tech and how does that process look.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we have frameworks and we're familiar with them, but what we try to do is not make huge changes unless they need to be made in a company, mainly because of costs. So we're always looking at that ROI. But I want to go through just real quick and this might help answer the question, because we look at AI, or a company's evolution into AI and automation, on six levels. So I'll just run through and maybe that'll help answer the question a little bit. One is you're at analog, so that means that you have nothing in the cloud like almost nothing so you're basically running on-prem whatever. Number one is you have cloud-based silos. That means you're running cloud-based applications in your business, but you don't have a central repository. So that would bring you to level three, where you have cloud-based tools that are able to integrate. So that would bring you to level four, which means you have a unified data layer. So one of the first things that we really do is we try to get people to at least a unified data layer, because once you're at a unified data layer, then you can move into five and six, which is automated workflows with the human in the loop, and then AI driven automation.
Speaker 2:We used to talk about this. That analog was level zero. We thought that that might be not as good, so we sort of renamed that into the level. But so we think about these as levels and we go into a company and we say, hey, where are you? If a company is at some cloud provider currently and there's a better solution at another place because, say, at AW, it could be anybody right, it could be Amazon, azure, it could be Google, it could be six other ones, it could be Oracle or wherever it is, maybe you say, hey, look, if you move to RDS and we get you into a central database, if you move to RDS and we get you into a central database, you know now you're going to have one repository for all your data.
Speaker 2:There are some least like some least common denominator use cases where, like, a lot of people have used AI to put their to create an internal knowledge platform and maybe an external one. We did an external one for a company recently where we took all their videos and all of their media and allowed an agent for their paid membership to go in there and search across that. But we don't we have opinions on what would be good solutions based on the company's needs. Going back to what you said earlier, evan, is that not all companies are the same. So to go in and say Azure is good for everybody really isn't true, you know, especially if they're on Google Workspace, like maybe Google, maybe AWS, maybe Oracle, maybe another provider that's just cheaper and maybe they don't need that much horsepower. So I think we we definitely look at it on a case by case basis.
Speaker 1:I love that. Do you care to share any success stories or anecdotes or other stories where you're helping clients you know improve their operations?
Speaker 2:I don't want to name any customers because I don't have the permission.
Speaker 2:I certainly can provide references, but we've done everything from finance, like I had mentioned, to operations integration to just general knowledge tools, basically at some level.
Speaker 2:And this isn't even AI or automation-based in the sense that some companies have just been grateful that we've come in and mapped their operations, because they didn't have that, they didn't take the time to do that, and now the irony of it is is that, yes, you can apply AI to it, but even before you go to AI, you've allowed yourself to scale better, because if you have a position, a person in a position, and you have their operations mapped out, now when someone backfills that or replaces that or someone leaves, you can even ramp up quicker. So they're like all these efficiencies even at day one. So I don't want to mesmerize people with the AI and automations that can be done as much as to say it's really the whole thing and an opportunity where, if you don't map out your operations, you can't map out any AI implementation or automation, because you, effectively, you have to write the code. The automation has to know what to do. So if the automation doesn't know what to do, then you're back to level zero.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well said, any particular trends that you're excited about as we head into 2025? What's sort of on your mind and what are you excited about as we, you know, kick off the new year?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm excited about AI and I think this year is going to be the year of software. I think last year, and maybe the year before, people started to say software was going to be replaced and that the SAS model is dead. I think the SAS model is changing. I think per seat model will change for sure, but I think what people are realizing is that AI as a whole has great capabilities, but limited capabilities, and it's still not going to replace the software.
Speaker 2:What's going to happen is that AI is going to be integrated into these software applications and it's just going to allow you to do more. Now the challenge will still be how are you going to get all these applications to talk to one another? How are you going to get a unified data layer? And I'm also pretty excited about supercomputers and how that's going to work, because I think we're running into a timeline where I mean you see the ability to build these large data centers in an instant. I mean Elon Musk stood up that XAI in what they said would take three years, in like six months or something right. I mean that's crazy. So what's going to be possible is going to be amazing. And I'm pretty excited about robotics. I mean, I have a Tesla, I have full self-driving. The ability to apply AI to a robot that you could buy for your house and make the Jetsons real is really wild to think about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll be heading to CES in January and robotics will be a huge part of the show, and not just for huge industrial applications but for smaller businesses, almost personal use cases, and it's really the price points are coming down really going to make a big difference. You're also a podcaster. Tell us about your podcast and what's it all about.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for that. Yeah, I have a podcast called the Brandon White Show and we have a digital operations podcast. On my show I really have people that are just interesting everyone from business leaders to tea readers. On the Digital Operations podcast. We talk about digital operations and we use use cases, we talk about trends that are happening and really try to make sure that every listener leaves with something, that they learned something from that show and maybe they could apply it to their business.
Speaker 1:Well then, we'll have a look and I'm sure folks will check it out. Thanks so much for joining and sharing the insights. Can't wait to meet you in person sometime. You're in, I think, Half Moon Bay in California, so lots of excuses to come visit and have a beer. Thanks, Brandon, Appreciate your time.
Speaker 2:Thanks a lot, Evan. This was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:And thanks everyone for listening and watching and sharing. Take care.