MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers

From Fix-and-Flip to AI: How Going Mile-Deep Beats Mile-Wide in the Agent Era with John Long

• Hosted by Joseph Itaya & Anika Jackson • Episode 79

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Want to win premium customers and sleep better at night? We dig into how going an inch wide and a mile deep beats boiling the ocean—especially when you pair focused strategy with agentic AI that does real work. Our guest, John Long of thynk.ai, traces an unexpected journey from real estate and HVAC to machine learning and sales orchestration, showing how clarity of purpose turns scattered efforts into compounding momentum. Along the way, we break down the anatomy of a working AI agent: natural conversation on calls and text, fast persona tuning, clean handoffs, and tight integrations that check inventory, quote prices, schedule appointments, and follow up for reviews.

The story gets concrete inside a single vertical: autoglass. John explains why answering first is everything in service businesses, and how replacing IVR mazes with an always‑on, brand‑voiced agent changes conversion math for solo operators and multi‑location teams alike. We talk about the real wins—hours returned to evenings with family, CSRs freed to greet customers and handle edge cases, owners who stop chasing missed calls—and the leadership discipline that enables them: pick a niche with enough mass, say no to distractions, and build so deeply that customers feel understood before they speak. That’s how you earn loyalty and command premium pricing without apology.

We also tackle adoption pitfalls. Off‑the‑shelf tools can be a great demo and a painful implementation. The difference is orchestration and outcomes: define the endpoint, map the journey, and integrate the stack so conversations translate into booked work. Think “Iron Man suit” for your team—technology that multiplies strengths while it takes on the repetitive, time‑sensitive tasks that fragment attention. Don’t fear the future; run at it with intent. If this conversation helps you rethink your ICP or your front office, share it with a friend, subscribe for more candid playbooks, and leave a review to tell us what you’d automate first.

This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.

SPEAKER_02:

If you can go deep on a problem and you can go to a customer and say, look, we understand your world so well that we can solve problems that you didn't even know you had. And let me show you. And if you can, if you can then take that customer on a journey through your product and they go, Oh my gosh, you really do know my world so well. You've solved everything that I could possibly think of and more, then you could have a premium product. You can charge a premium price, and they're going to be very, very happy with you. They're not going to go somewhere else. And the competition is gone.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Media Escape Insights from Digital Changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.

SPEAKER_00:

John Long of Think AI. Welcome to the Mediascape podcast. I'm thrilled today to unlock a little bit about AI, but also talk about your background. This is we're at this really interesting time in our lives and in our businesses.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, no, excited to be with you. Thank you so much for having me on, and thank you for uh for putting this together for all of your listeners. So it's it's wonderful.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, let's let's talk about your background first before you started to think, and that's T H-Y-N-K, which is a brilliant name, easy to remember, and it's what we want to do, right, when we're using AI tools. You you started out, you have an MBA, and you your bachelor's was in business management and entrepreneurship. Did you want to be an entrepreneur? Did you think you were going to work for a corporation?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so I've I've done both, but definitely started off on an entrepreneurial path right out of college. Um, and I've got kind of a funny background for a guy running an AI company, but I'll share it with you quickly. Uh, right out of college, I started a real estate investing company. And uh, we were doing fix and flips and all sorts of things in the real estate space. Did that for a number of years. And then uh in 2008, when the economy really kind of took a nosedive, I started a heating and air conditioning company, which uh again, a little bit unique background for an AI guy, but uh was an entrepreneur, right, and loved business and and uh knew that there was opportunities in those areas. Um, did that for a couple of years and then made a shift away from entrepreneurship a little bit and into the tech sector as an employee, uh not running the company, um, but kind of a an entrepreneurial pursuit within a business. And so I worked with a company where they were starting up a brand new division, uh attacking a brand new vertical, and was able to help them build out uh some software and uh and attack this new vertical. Um eventually ended up in a machine learning leadership role uh within that organization. Uh we had a and for those that aren't familiar with machine learning, it's a form of AI. Um, but we were essentially teaching computers to look at aerial imagery and then create three-dimensional drawings of the buildings. And so we were teaching the computers to do this work that it would take humans hours to do, and they were able to do it in minutes. So that was my first introduction into AI. That was about, oh gosh, six or eight years ago now. And then um for the most part, I've been in sales-related roles. And so a couple of years ago, my business partner and I were starting a new business, and we said, gosh, wouldn't it be great if we could find a tool? We weren't thinking of developing it, but find a tool that was an AI tool that could help with some of the sales process stuff, you know, making phone calls, sending text and emails and the communication pieces. And we looked and looked and looked, couldn't find anything, and developed something internally. And after we developed that, we said, gosh, what we made is actually really good. Maybe others would be interested in this. And long story short, hard pivot towards AI. And we've been doing AI for the last uh year and a half or so now, and you know, sharing great tools with companies that are making big differences for them.

SPEAKER_00:

Isn't that interesting that oftentimes, especially with these new technologies, we use them to solve an issue for our own business and then realize, well, that is the product.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, we literally completely moved away from the product and the the path and even the industry that we were in and moved full into AI. And it's been a wonderful, wonderful path. It's an exciting time to be involved with AI. There's so much going on. And it's interesting. We use AI as if it's a thing. And the reality is AI is about a million things. And so we paint with a very broad brush, but it's been an exciting time in technology in general to see what computers and systems are able to do, how they're able to help humans do more than we ever thought we'd be able to do.

SPEAKER_00:

That's one of the discussions I try to have with people, particularly students or people who don't aren't as familiar with the AI landscape and generative AI, certainly, but machine learning, computer vision, all of those things as well. Is we as humans have goals for our businesses, for our lives that AI doesn't have, but the technology can help us reach those goals by helping with streamline our workflows, you know, help be a thought partner and do some things. So I'd love to hear you talked a little bit about trying to figure out the sales cycle and have AI help you with that. So, what did you end up developing in that? And where's were you doing the technical side? Was your business partner a little bit of both?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So let me share a little bit of background on all of that. So our mission uh as a company is to help save humanity billions of hours by helping people do better work and less busy work. Um, that's what we're really focused on. As an entrepreneur, I have spent far too many, you know, nights, weekends, dinners on the phone trying to do my business. And I haven't been able to spend as much time as I should with my family or actually working on the business instead of working in the business. And there's just so many demands on business leaders, business owners, but but really employees of all level uh levels within a business that that if we can give them tools that help them to do less of the busy work, that repetitive, monotonous work that tends to be the tasks within a job that make it a job, right? Nobody loves having a job. It's like this downer, like, oh, I have a job, right? But they do love parts of what they do, right? And so our goal and our focus is to help people do the things they love and allow technology to do the things that they don't love, and you will turn mediocre employees into superstars, right? Into superheroes. And so what we developed was essentially a tool that helps with prospecting and early stage selling. Okay, so it will help identify and find uh opportunities. Then as those opportunities come in, and as those people start reaching out and saying, hey, I might be interested in what you're doing. Our AI tool can handle voice calls, it can handle texts, emails, back and forth communication, it can hold meetings, answer questions, ask questions, gather information, and eventually it will work towards some sort of endpoint. So our customers are able to say, this is what we want our endpoint to be. We want our AI tools to schedule a sales meeting with qualified, vetted, potential customers with our sales reps, because our sales reps really they get paid for talking to customers and helping sell customers our stuff, right? And so let them do that as much as we possibly can. Let them have those conversations and don't have them sending 50 emails a day or making phone call after phone call after phone call, getting no, no, no, no, no. Let AI handle the that that drudgery part. And so that's what we've developed is a tool that that can customize, you know, large portions of that early stage sales cycle. And we go, we go fairly deep. There are a lot of tools now. A year and a half ago, there weren't very many tools that did that. There are a lot of tools out there now that do those same sorts of things. And so what we do is we go into our customers' businesses and we go very deep, very, very customized, very integrated with what they're doing. Um, and so we're, you know, looking up inventory, we're quoting prices, we're we're doing things that this the off-the-shelf AI is not able to do. Um but because we're able to customize it, we can do that. And so you asked about the development of it. My business partner did a lot of the developing along with some some technical partners that we've worked with. And it's a it's interesting to put a tool together that does all of the things of a uh usually they're called an SDR, a sales development representative. We had to step back and say, okay, what does this job really entail? What are the tasks that they do and the skills that the AI needs to be able to have in order to do these things? And it's a lot more than just a knowledge base, right? It needs to be able to talk on the phone in a conversational manner, needs to be able to send and receive texts and emails, it needs to be able to understand information about our business, it needs to understand our processes, needs to be integrated with our systems, needs to understand, you know, all of these different things. And so our our solutions are actually a compilation of a multitude of underlying systems that do all of those little pieces. And our job is helping to orchestrate those in a way that it feels very natural and fluid. And so that's that's where we spend a lot of our time is building out those workflows and and automations within the system.

SPEAKER_00:

Amazing. And how long did it take you to train the models to sound human, to use the right language for your business or for the client's business?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, initially it took us months. Now it takes us minutes, right? We have a client in Southern California who wanted their agent to have a little bit more of a Southern California kind of beachy vibe, right? And we built this agent for them, and they said, ah, it still is too stiff, it's too like, you know, too not California-ish, right? They said, Can you make it a little bit more like a surfer dude? And so a couple of changes, and we completely changed the personality of the agent. And now they have this surfer dude that knows their business really well, has been trained on how to interact with customers in just the right way, and it's producing fantastic results for them, right? So now we are able to do it much faster. Um, but yeah, initially it took a lot of time and understanding and you know, getting the right pieces put together.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And how do people respond? Because we do hear on the consumer side of the market, right? We're talking B2B primarily, but when we think about consumer products, we've seen if you say you have an AI-powered TV, people aren't going to respond as well as if you just say you have a smart TV, even though you know it's all about semantics. But people, if they know that they're speaking to an AI, sometimes that's a positive, but sometimes they are like, oh, I don't want to deal with this. I want to talk to a human.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I want to talk to a human. We get a little bit of that. The reality is that our AI is so good, a lot of people don't realize they're talking to AI sometimes at all. But if they do realize, it's usually a little ways into the conversation. And I had an experience the other day. We we do some work in the uh in the autoglass space, and uh I called a local company to get some work done on my windshield, um, some rock chips repaired. And I I won't say who I called, but I called and it was push one for this, push two for that. And it was like death by a thousand button pushes because it was like four or five minutes into the call before they finally said, Okay, we'll now connect you with an agent to talk to you, not an AI agent, but a telephone agent, right? A human. And the human agent was busy, so then they put me on hold. And I was like, Oh my goodness, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? I've been pushing buttons for minutes, listening to like all the different choices. And of course, the choices I needed were at the end of the list, right? When you have an AI agent answer the phone, it's immediate action, right? And that's what people want. They want to solve their problem. They want to get the information that they're needing to gather, right? And we are able to deliver that instantly, where it is as real as having an expert answer the phone every time. Hey, thanks for calling ABC Company. How can I help you? And they are able to do whatever is needed. Occasionally, people will ask things that the agent doesn't know about, or they'll they'll realize, I'm talking to an AI agent. I want to talk to a human, and we can do a live transfer to a human. Not a problem. We can handle that easily. But 95% of the time, 98% of the time, high 90s, people are really happy to just be taken care of immediately. And they don't mind because it is such a human-like interaction.

SPEAKER_00:

Nice. Going from different businesses to working for somebody else to going out on your own again, what were those transitions like for you?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, how real can I be?

SPEAKER_00:

You can be very real.

SPEAKER_02:

So I will tell you this working for yourself, being an entrepreneur, your life is filled with goals, milestones, things that you are working towards. For me, my experience is I went and worked for others. Their goals became my goals, and a lot of the passion and energy was like sucked out of life. Yeah. Right. It was wonderful. And I had great opportunities and learning, and it was a fantastic experience. But I realized that I was a different person. I was not as driven, as goal-oriented, nor as passionate about what I was doing when I was working for somebody else. And so coming back onto my own, you know, into my own business and running a business has been incredibly energizing. It's been enjoyable. But there are also stresses that you deal with as an entrepreneur and as a business owner that you don't have to think about typically as an employee, right? You're not thinking about, you know, payroll or what insurance should we offer for people or you know, all the other things that businesses have to deal with because for the most part, someone else is handling that for you when you work for a large enterprise. So there were definitely pros and cons. But for me, for my personality type, I love being on my own.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And it is hard to go back to working for somebody else when you have that entrepreneurship spirit within you.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And it was a very intentional choice for me to go and work for someone else. I'll tell it quickly because I think it's good for people to understand that pivots in life are okay. So I was, I was running a heating and air conditioning company. We were very successful and doing well, but we were successful enough that uh we had a lot of business, but still growing to the point where at nights and weekends the phones came to me, right? They they were transferred. I I needed an AI agent, is what I needed. Um and so it was it was hard because I was working like 24-7, it felt like. And so I, in talking with my wife and my family, was just like, we I've got to make a change. This is too much. I I need to see you guys again. And I had some friends that were in the tech space and I saw that they were doing extremely well. They had a good balance, you know, work-life balance. And I said, that's what I want. And so I went and talked to them and they said, You've got to try and break into the to the tech industry, but it's hard to do. And I applied at a number of different places and just got like not just turned down, like just no response, like, oh, you don't have any tech background. I'm not interested. Finally, I had a friend, a mentor that said, Hey, I'll give you a chance. You can come and work for a tech company that I own, but you're gonna have to start as tech support and learn the industry, learn our software, and you can work your way up into a sales role. He says it'll probably be six to 12 months before you can move into a sales role. And so I went from owning my own businesses to a tech support job at$12 an hour. And so it was a hard pivot, but it was such a beautiful time of life because all of a sudden I had time. I was able to spend time with my family. And I've always been one that kind of digs in deep on whatever it is I'm doing. And so I was able to learn the industry, the software very, very quickly. Within about two and a half months, I moved into a sales role. So I beat their six to 12 month prediction. And within three months of that, I was top sales rep in the business. So I was fortunate that my pathway, you know, pivoted quickly. But it's not, it's not bad to pivot when you see something that you want and, you know, set that goal and go after it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Absolutely. And that's it's interesting. I have a lot of these conversations with students, they're grad students. Some of them have worked in careers, they're all ages, right? From just having left their undergrad to having, you know, being in their 50s and looking for a pivot, and sometimes even older. So it's interesting to have these conversations with them and try to relay this information that you don't have to be scared. It is can be a scary time. Your feelings are valid, but you can also know that if you really have a drive, a skill set, and a passion for something, you can get there. But you you do have to put in the work like you did.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, and I nothing, yeah, I had to put in the work. It was interesting. I went to this tech support role, and you know, I was 10 years or so older than most of the others that were there. And, you know, in between calls, we had we had time. It was the strangest thing. I've never had time before, right? And they would go and play video games or they would do, you know, you know, sitting around visiting with people, and they all thought I was a little bit, you know, snooty, but I was sitting there working. Like I was digging into the software. I was trying to understand it. I was asking questions. I I wanted to learn it as quickly as possible. And so, yeah, sometimes you have to do harder things to see that growth. But man, it was it was a beautiful time for me and it was fun, it was new, it was exciting. And so use that that energy that you get, you know, that greeny spirit, right? To go and do something. Try it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, fantastic. And then scaling up your business, as you mentioned, when you started think there weren't a lot of other people doing it. Now there are a number of people working in the agentic AI space, right? I think a year and a half ago, people were still saying, okay, I need to figure out this agentic thing. I hear it's coming, but not, I don't quite know what its implications are going to be. And now clearly the agents are here, they've been here. So what was that like? And how did you choose your ideal customer profile?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, that's a fantastic question. ICP is tricky, right? And and in any business, and particularly from a marketing background, I know you've got a wonderful marketing background. The more clear you can be on your ideal customer profile, the better it is. And we initially started, like many businesses, thinking like, well, we can work with anybody and everybody, right? Let's boil the ocean. And it's easy to do that. And when you have a tool like ours that that works for so many different use cases, it's hard to tell people no when you're young and early and you're like, yes, we can work with that and we can work with this. We can work here, we can work there, right? But you have to go through this niching down process. And the faster that you can do that, the better. It's tricky because you want to try and pick the right, you know, niche to really focus on. And we went from here to here to here to here to here to here to here. And now we're we we're getting even more and more niche down, where we are like specific industries and specific roles within that industry that we really help with. But the faster you can go through that process, the better. Um, the hard part is you don't know what you don't know. And you're worried that, hey, if I select industry A and I never I stop looking, industry B might have been my gold mind. And so I don't necessarily want to just do A. So you try to do A and B, and then you're like, well, but maybe it's C, and you find that you can get spread thin so fast. And so I think it's it's ideal to pick something that's very narrow, and the narrower the better, in my opinion. Um, you want it to have enough mass, the the the the target market that that there's something there. But you it the more narrow you can be, the easier it is to find success. Because you can build a tool that's purpose-built for that specific niche. You can learn what to say no to very quickly and say, sorry, you're outside of my my world. And so I'm gonna say no to you, and I'm not gonna spend time on things that are distracting me and pulling me away from what I really should be focusing on, and so that instead of being like a mile wide and an inch deep, you can be an inch wide and a mile deep. And for the most part, I think if you can go deep on a problem and you can go to a customer and say, look, we understand your world so well that we can solve problems that you didn't even know you had. And let me show you. And if you can, if you can then take that customer on a journey through your product and they go, Oh my gosh, you really do know my world so well. You've solved everything that I could possibly think of and more, then you could have a premium product, you can charge a premium price, and they're gonna be very, very happy with you. They're not gonna go somewhere else, and the competition is gone, right? Because there isn't anybody else that knows that that market, that problem as well as you do. And you are able to solve that problem better than anybody else in the world.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. It's so true. It's so true. Even when you have a, like you said, a lot of interests, you want to try out a lot of different areas, you might have to do that. But then once you finally find what you want to do. I mean, I I've been through that same experience. If I used to have a PR firm, now people still say, Oh, you do PR. I'm like, I don't do PR. I podcast, which it can be looked at as a form of PR, but it's very different. And I don't want to go back to doing the same thing.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, and you've you've had this experience, Annika, where people come to you, customers come to you and say, Hey, here's money. I want to pay you to do this thing and it's outside of your scope. And isn't it so powerful when you can say, No, no, I don't do that. I'm not interested. Thank you. I would love to take your money, but I don't do what you need to what you need done. And it is so empowering when you get to that point where you're able to say no. And all of a sudden the fog of business just kind of like parts and you can see your path forward and you're able to just move and move quickly and scale.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And even sometimes when you think you might want to say yes to something because the money is there, if you say no, other opportunities that are the perfect opportunity for you will appear. And I think that's one of the other interesting things about business. It's a little bit of business, a little bit of magic, perhaps. More of just being very purpose-driven and living in your purpose. And that's something that I think when people are new businesses, entrepreneurs, they have that fear of well, where's my next paycheck going to come? Where's the money to pay my team? And I've fallen prey to that. And then realized, wow, if I had just not said yes to this, look at the other opportunities that I have now, because I do say no to those things.

SPEAKER_02:

So and your team appreciates that too. When you go back to your team every day and you're like, okay, now we're gonna be this type of business, now we're gonna do this type of service, now we're gonna do that type of product. They get stretched and they're like, I don't even know what my job is anymore. I'm wearing 73 hats and I don't know what any of them are, right? But if you can go back to them and say, guys, we had someone come and ask us to do some business with them, but it's not what we do. We told them no. They go, Oh, thank you. I get to focus on what it is that I'm supposed to do.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So what is it that you decided was your perfect avatar? You said you have specific industry and specific roles within industries.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So we are laser focused now on the autoglass industry and the customer support representative within that industry. And so our agents now can essentially automate the whole front-end office for autoglass. So we can take calls, we can gather information about the customer, their insurance, their vehicle, we can look up the type of glass that their vehicle needs, we can quote them prices, we can order the glass, and we can schedule the customer and give them all the appropriate reminders, and then afterwards follow up with the customer, make sure they had a great experience. And if they did, invite them to give us a positive review online. We can do all of that with an agent now.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. See, and and that's so specific that I think most people would go, I didn't even realize that industry was so was big enough to sustain a business like yours. Yeah.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

So that's what you do. You've got to niche down, niche down, niche down, niche down. And and it's taken us time. We are like we've gotten there eventually. I wish we got there more quickly, but some of it also is it's a process of figuring out where to spend your time, where to spend your focus. But the faster you can get through that, the better for sure.

SPEAKER_00:

Certainly. And the things that you've put together are things that do apply to any business, any systems processes. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how much time you've been able to save for your clients, how much money, right? Because obviously those things make people sleep better at night if you're the business owner, because you know I'm still bringing doing everything I need to be doing to satisfy my customer, my client, get those great referrals, get more business in. But I also have removed this headache of maybe having the team member who doesn't show up, having the person who I need to train up on how to talk about our product and service in different specifics.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Well, within our focus, our ICP, you've got, you know, small operators, you know, individuals running the entire business themselves, all the way up to large operators with multiple locations and multiple employees. So it kind of varies a little bit. But um, you know, using maybe that small operator as a as an example at first, in that type of business, and this is true in a lot of service businesses, when a customer has a need, right? They we tend to go online. Used to be a phone book, right? We don't we don't use those anymore, but you and I remember those. Uh, but now we go online and we do a quick search for you know, autoglass repair in my area, right? And a list comes up and we start calling, usually the person at the top of the list and we work our way down. Maybe we look at reviews and we skip someone if they don't have good reviews, but we essentially start calling. And we call until someone answers the phone, gives us the information that we need, the cost, the time, the schedule, et cetera. And then we stop because our need has been satisfied, right? Well, what that means is for someone that's a solopreneur working in the business on their own, when their phone rings, if they don't answer it, 87% of the time, the first company to answer the call to answer a phone gets the job. So if they don't answer their phone because they're in the middle of doing the work, they've lost the opportunity for that job. And so what we are able to do for those customers is essentially give them a second employee, right? A lot of these guys aren't, they don't want employees. They they are a solopreneur, I work on my own, I I don't want to manage people, I can do it, right? But we can allow them to essentially have an employee in their pocket, their phone can ring, and they don't have to worry about it, and they simply can look at their calendar and say, Oh, the AI has scheduled three appointments for me tomorrow. I'm in good shape, right? And that can be the difference between, you know, even tens of thousands of dollars a month for these these companies. The larger the company, even the even bigger numbers there. A lot of people ask, well, aren't you eliminating jobs? In some ways, yes. Although, generally speaking, even the companies that that have CSRs, customer service representatives that they have hired, we're not completely offsetting those people. We are allowing a system to help answer the phones and book the appointments, but those CSRs are still there to great greet the customer when they come in, process paperwork, process payments, you know, interact with insurance companies and things like that that are all still needed within the industry. Um, but we're allowing them to do that in a way that they can get their job done during normal business hours. They're not taking things home, they're not answering phones in the middle of dinner with their family. And so it makes a huge difference uh at all levels uh within the business.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. What what you're talking about is really the ideal scenario for this moment in time is I feel that we still want human interaction, right? But we can should use and partner with AI in such a way that it does take care of the things that, like you said, can be automated and help us have that time to be with our families, our friends, to be able to take a step back from our businesses, which also helps us refresh and maybe think of new ideas, but also makes sure that our team members feel really equipped to do what they do best and not, like you said, get bogged down. And so this is one of the things I always try to impart on people who are who come to me and say that they're scared of what's gonna happen and thinking about Terminator or you know, those movies that we've seen that are all the doom and gloom movies and worst case scenarios. And there are people who work in the field who certainly can we can go down those rabbit holes and talk about differ different things, but the implications for how can help change our businesses right now and give us more time with the things and the people that we really want to be with, that's life changing.

SPEAKER_02:

It's huge. I I like to the analogy I like to share with people is it's kind of like Tony Stark and Iron Man, right? If we were to send Tony Stark into battle on his own, he would be in big trouble, right? He's just a guy, right? I'm just a guy. You know, you're just a woman. On our own, we're good, but we're not like superhero status good, right? But when Tony Stark puts on the Iron Man suit, all of a sudden he's a superhero. Okay. And we can help turn, you know, employees or or business owners into that superhero status by allowing them to partner with and integrate with technology in a way that allows them to do far more than they could do on their own at a higher level, faster, better, you know, all of those things, right? And it's kind of like giving them this Iron Man suit and saying, hey, go be a superhero and love what you do, right? Love what you do. Do the things that you are most passionate about in your job that you really love, that just get you excited to wake up and get out of bed in the morning and let the technology handle the stuff that's kind of like, uh, I don't hate, I don't like doing that. I hate that part of my job. And allow people to do what they are naturally drawn to and that they do best. And all of a sudden, what happens is your company, your business surges forward, right? Not just a little bit, but a lot, because your people are engaged, they're excited, they're doing what they want to do, they're getting more done in less time. And so it makes really big, impactful differences on businesses when they use technology, when they use AI in the right way, and they have someone that can partner with to really truly implement it. There's all sorts of like off-the-shelf tools like do it yourself. I've seen way too many people try using those tools. And what happens is they either give up, they have a bad experience, and it causes problems, or they get so focused on that it's like the most expensive implementation ever because they're taking themselves away from the thing that they're an expert at, and they're like putting the training wheels back on and spending all of their time doing something they know nothing about. And so that's where we come in and help, you know, businesses to really surge forward.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, you just answered my next question. So that was really perfect segue.

SPEAKER_02:

I re I read your mind around the same.

SPEAKER_00:

You did, you really did. So where do you see your business going? And what do you think that people who are entrepreneurs and small business owners, perhaps, you know, B2B or B2C, what should we be thinking of?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, so our business is continuing to grow. We are growing and we're growing at a very rapid pace, which is exciting for us. At some point, we will expand into other verticals, other ICPs. We're getting really good at what we're doing right now. Once we have it down to the point where we're like, okay, we can do that in our sleep. We will look for other industries to say, okay, where else can we have, you know, a meaningful impact on people and on processes in ways that that bless lives? That's what we want to do. But in general, I would say, you know, find ways to use technology to make your life better. It is a tool. Too many people think it it's gonna, you know, like you said earlier, it's the terminator, it's gonna take over. No, it's another tool. When cars came along, those that made horses and buggies uh were probably nervous, like, oh, it's gonna take over our lives. It became another tool. When, I don't know, when chainsaws were invented, those that made axes and and handsaws probably got nervous, but it's another tool. Learn how to use it, employ it well, and and don't be afraid of it. Put it to work and it'll do great things for you.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, fantastic. John, thank you so much for joining me on MediaScape today. We will have Thinkai uh linked in the show notes for those who want to learn more about what you do, even if you're they're not in that your specific ICP right now, they could be in the future. Or at least let us know.

SPEAKER_02:

If you've got a great idea, we'd love to hear about it.

SPEAKER_00:

So Yeah, exactly. You can still learn a lot from following John on LinkedIn and also Think AI. Um, any final thought?

SPEAKER_02:

No, I don't think so, other than uh don't don't be afraid of the future. Run at it, right? Run at it and uh and be the one that's in control. If we get scared and we think that it's happening to us, we've given up our own own control and uh we no longer have the ability to direct where things are going. And so, you know, don't be afraid. Jump in, go for it. There's lots of great things out there, incredible opportunities like we've never seen before. And so go find yours.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. I don't know how we could end it any better. So thank you to everybody who's listening to this episode or watching it on your favorite platform. I am Annika Jackson, one of your hosts of Media Escape, and I'll be back, or Justifataya will be back with another amazing guest to share some great things for you to make your life in this digital world a little easier, a little better every day.

SPEAKER_01:

To learn more about the Master of Science and Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmm.usc.edu.

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Anika Jackson

Host
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Joseph Itaya

Host