Expanded by the step of the sponsor by chief amoffos.com. Offering training and certification through the International Association of Chief AM officers. Interested in a new career or live one in the marketplace. Chief AM officer Dummy. Let's get started. Hey everybody, welcome to the episode. I'm really excited to have Carl as our guest today because he's doing uh he's doing AI at a level that most individuals out there aren't. And we were just having this conversation before um we went live with this. Like the the information and the perspective that Carl is sharing, and particularly in LinkedIn where I follow him, it's priceless stuff because it's not coming from opinion. It's coming from, hey, I'm in the trenches, I'm dealing with clients all the time. Here's what's really happening. Here's discoveries I've made by being put into challenging situations with clients. So I'm really looking forward to uh sharing Carl's perspective with everybody today. So, Carl, as we get started, why don't you just let everybody know who you are, where you're at, what like what does a day look like in the life of um an AI expert?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, I I I never ever consider myself necessarily an expert, more of like on the same journey as everybody else, and maybe just been there a little bit longer and you know had some really interesting engagements with clients and people, and I just want to bring that back. So I'm the chief AI officer and co-founder of a company called zero to sixe.ai, and really our focus is to help businesses get the benefits of artificial intelligence and cut kind of through the hype, and we do it through strategy, education, and implementation. And really for us, like we were a little bit unique in that our target is more medium-sized businesses, so anywhere between under 500, ideally. We do deal with enterprises, but um very, very more focused on the medium-sized businesses, also traditional businesses, uh, oil and gas, construction, manufacturing, um, flooring, uh, real estate, any of the the industries that most people would think those people are like the laggards, the last ones who are going to adopt some of these tech. And I think like it's a space that I feel there's an opportunity because not very many people go there. Everyone's trying to target the enterprise and tech companies and and so on. And so kind of the day in the life of if we're either prospecting, meeting different uh businesses, min municipalities, different organizations, or actually doing the implementation. So AI automations, digital assistance, training, um, doing strategy work, building roadmaps, and really doing what we're finding is AI is very personalized, personalized to the individual, personalized to the team, personalized to maybe the company, and personalized to the industry. Uh and what I mean by that is the same two people in an organization, same role in the same industry, could be using AI very differently because it helps them in a very specific way. Where you can't just drag and drop this type of process and this type of tool exactly the same way, it's very personalized, very tailored. And that's what we're finding in these industries. You can't just drop the same automation. Like, I I see a lot of like posts about this automation is gonna get you five thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars. We're like, well, no, because that necessarily automation doesn't fit with how this business, how this unit operates. You can't just drop that, which means it's a brand new engagement. So I and taking that into account, especially in our target industry, yeah, it it's it's very hands-on with the with the with the clients, especially those in those industries who don't have who aren't in the AI bubble, who at times don't even care that whatever the latest AI tool is like, hey, can you help me meet my margin? Yeah, I don't care about voice, canvas, I don't care about that. Like, could AI help me improve this? And that's really the day in the life of in our focus.
SPEAKER_01Before we go on, uh like how did you arrive here? What were you doing prior to November of 2022 when GPT 3.5 was released?
SPEAKER_00So a little bit of history. I don't know if you remember 2018, Sunder Pichai, Google I.O. I remember I was seated to, I was uh at a company called Brookfield, and they he did a demo on stage where he reserved I don't know, uh party of 10, I think, and used AI to call a restaurant. Do you remember that? Yes, yes. I remember where I was, and I was like, that is gonna change the world, and it's mind-blowing before everybody's ex post is mind blowing, and here's 10 ways it's just changed the world, or whatever that is. Yeah, so I remember that, and I was like, wow, this is amazing. I gotta really dig deep into this. So dig deep, uh, learn about um uh deep mind, learned about all the different players, and at the time it was more of just slowly doing it, kind of testing some tools, GPT-2, yeah, um, the first version of stable diffusion. And don't be wrong, you knew right away the none of this is usable. This is I was like, oh, we're still a decade away, yeah. And so you kind of played with it, and you're like, uh, this looks like all claymation, yeah, very funny stuff. Then obviously, November 22, November 30th, like just happened, and it got me thinking, wait a minute, this is this has opportunities to really change. So I started creating some content around it, but then businesses asked me, Hey, could you come and speak to some of this? Sure. And then businesses started saying, Hey, could you build some of what you're talking about? And at that time, I I took my first um rag course um from a guy named Mayo, and he was one of the very first ones to actually, you know, uh build Python. Like, it's like, oh, this is interesting. So we built some of that for some clients, and it started snowballing to the point I think my business part I met my business partner, uh, we've been working together since like I don't know, 2013, 14, but really made it official because he sold his company and he said, Okay, we got to go all in. And that was like last November because we were on a roadshow since July or June last year doing bits and pieces. And even I was like, uh, I'm not even sure, but he he kind of saw it. He's been an entrepreneur entrepreneur for I don't know, 35-40 years, multiple businesses, and he wanted to go. But I so I said, Okay, let me give a date, let me target a date that let's go all in and let's kind of build it towards there. And yeah, that date passed and we're full go and we've been busy ever since.
SPEAKER_01So what what were you if I would have talked to you in 2018 and said, What do you do? What would that answer have been?
SPEAKER_00So at that time, I just we just sold or just sold a SaaS company, and I was actually um working with uh I made a kind of a deal with the vice president of marketing at the time at Brookfield, where I'm like, hey, I'll work on your mostly marketing operations, like really into the digital, and we were working on that. Um, because I really didn't know what I was wanting to do. I was like, well, do I start a new company? Do I because I'm you know I have a background in history and marketing, so like do I go do there? So yeah, and and that's where I was in 2018.
SPEAKER_01So now though, the work that you do with your clients isn't marketing specific.
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_01So you're doing full enterprise evaluation of AI application and yes. And one of the things that that you mentioned um when we were getting uh before we turned on the recorder was that most, if not all, of your clients, you see them in person. You're they're regionally specific, which is kind of unique.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, it actually turned out because so my business partner has been a so I'm in Calgary, Alberta, and he has been in the business. So he owned a video agency that has worked the that's his target market, the mid-sized, um non-traditional market, uh heavily in in the Calgary area, and then just all the connections that I've made, like for example, Brookfield Residential, local builder in Alberta, um, even the tech company I worked for, Benevity, headquartered in Calgary, even though it's more of a global company. But then we thought one of the easiest ways we to get the message out there or wanted to showcase ourselves is the local chambers, the local industry associations, the rotary clubs. My business partner just opened the doors like, hey, present here, let's let's present here, let's present here. So yeah, it just ended up that what we found is when we go local, it's awesome just meeting, going to these businesses, learning what they do, or you know, whether you we you've known them or not, and just sitting in real life is just I don't know, there's something a little bit to it than doing a virtual meeting. And what we found is we close much higher in person than virtually. It's not even close. Like sitting down with people and talking about AI, um, there's just something about it and just works for us.
SPEAKER_01You know, that that's a uh a path that has been mimicked by several of our chief AI officers. They started in the local environment, Better Business Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, Economic Development Councils in their areas, and that turned into honestly more business than they would ever generate from LinkedIn ads or being a thought leader and all that stuff. So I I find it fascinating because coming from I've come from a marketing background as well, and with marketing, you think scale. Yeah, right. And this is not scalable, right? Like Calgary's only so big. Yeah, but it keeps you busy. Now, one of the things, it's this concept that I've been um kind of noodling on for a few months now, and I see it like in generative AI right now, uh, for lack of a better analogy, it's kind of like everybody who is like a you or like a me, we're holding a lottery ticket. There's gonna be a lot of money made in this space by being the person who is bringing the knowledge, bringing the implementation to these companies. However, um, what I see is that a lot of people who are good at this, the natural path for them is to go and do consulting. Now, the challenge with consulting is scale, right? There's only so many carls that can go out there and do this. Um, and what ends up happening, and right now it's it's awesome because there's not a lot of people like you out there. Every day that changes. Six months from now, there'll be more. A year from now, there'll be even more, right? It's a very inefficient market, and people like you and some of our chief AI officers are able to take advantage of that because um, like people don't know where to go. Oh, he's local. Let's talk to him, right? So, how are you going to, I guess, get the most juice out of the squeeze here from this fact that you're early in a lot of blue ocean, but that it won't be that case forever. How are you going to get the most out of your business result or rewards from your business?
SPEAKER_00Um, I think there's there's that because of that history in in in in marketing, right? So you kind of understand that if you are top of mind whenever companies are ready to buy or ready to engage, ready to have a conversation, everything that you've done to that point they'll remember. So whether we this podcast, whether our own podcast, our own show or YouTube show, creating the content, and what because we're trying to do this locally, all the presentations we do, all even our webinars are very local. I I don't really care about reach outside of Alberta. It's like let's target these specific companies. And what we find is a lot of them do like there's people in them that do engage in LinkedIn a lot, but most of them there's no way we would have reached them through any of the markets outside of talking and referrals and being part of those commerce. Like, for example, like, oh, the tourism head, uh head of the hotel association. Well, the only reason we knew him was because we presented at a rotary and he's part of the rotary, like yeah, no way LinkedIn would hit that, no way none of this would have would have worked. And and so to us from a blue ocean perspective, I think we have a little bit of time because of our target industries, because of we're focused on local, and we know that there may I haven't seen very many consultants, and not that there won't be, but I feel a lot of them the consulting is I don't know if you've noticed this, a lot of marketing agencies, and even people are targeting marketing agencies to add in AI um components to them, but we're like that's fine because that's just still marketing. Yeah, this is why we hit every single piece of the every single thing, every single operation department in in companies. And the second thing, too, is what we find is a lot of companies say they do AI. They're just like, oh yeah, we have this taken care of. Like, what do you mean? It's like, oh, we bought this company that's helping us with AI. I'm like, oh, that's amazing. And that's what we're finding is like cut like products are reaching them. Yeah, so it's like, oh, the home builder product, here's a product to help AI-specific product to help home builders. I'm like, that's cool, do that. Here's more of a broad operation that you can use, and we can I think what we're trying to position ourselves to is being that AI advisor to these companies, not necessarily a Salesforce or HubSpot implementer, because we know that too, I don't know what the tools will be in three months. So, what our goal is, hey, let's give you a foundation of what we call like the call the 10 to 40 percent. Could we increase your efficiency of productivity by 10 to 40 percent? Because we know that's reliable and that is scalable, that's not automating everything, that's not taking over anybody's jobs, that's more of hey, making your business use AI really efficiently. Could we do that and then maybe test some of the new crazy stuff if it works for your company? But it's still grounded in hey, how is AI actually helping your business meet your revenue targets, pipeline targets, customer service targets? And it's still grounded on that because the presidents, the CEOs, the executives we talk to, that's still their focus. They're like, yeah, oh, this is because on unless you ground it in that, then you're just testing a bunch of AI tools, which is fun, but doesn't do anything.
SPEAKER_01So this is interesting. So you're not necessarily coming in with AI being the message, it's more 10 to 40 percent optimization, enhancement, efficiency. That's more of the message with uh AI being the vehicle that supports the 10 to 40 percent, as compared to companies thinking, hey, I don't know what it's gonna do, but we need AI, right? Like two different stories.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. But and we've run into companies that have thought AI could solve their problem, and we said two things. One, no, because your expectation of what we can deliver, yes, we could take your money and take the contract, but it won't help you because you have more of a strategy problem, you have a marketing problem, you have a business operation problem, you have an HR problem. AI can't AI is not good enough now. I think unless we have AGI, that's not gonna help you. So today, we recommend you go with this marketing company, or I would suggest you do this and bring us in maybe later, because that's more important. The other thing we can we do is hey, we have this business problem. Here's a we think can AI do this, and we're like, well, that custom build-wise, we could, and then we ask our devs, what do you think it'll take to build this thing? Not 200k, 500k today, and then so we bring that number back and we say, You could build this, but but because AI is moving so fast, uh, don't build anything. We recommend you wait three months, six months, because then most likely something's gonna be there. Uh like for example, uh Cohere's new multimodal AI search. There was one company we worked with, they have a problem just like anybody with uh trying to find certain image files in a directory that's been there for 20 years and folders. And the problem with building or moving it to a dam system is you kind of still have to tag it. So, but I'm like this thing just solves that because it can recognize your images, maybe not a hundred percent, but sixty percent, forty percent gets you enough of the way that you don't have to dig for an hour trying to find the specific thing to recreate. So that's what I mean. Like, you may just want to hold off just a little bit. That makes perfect sense, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So let's say you you you present at the the the business luncheon. Um where are you starting? Is do you have kind of like a standard, like, hey guys, this is the 101 stuff, or do you uh tailor it to the industry, or where where do you start when you're doing a a broad group?
SPEAKER_00A broad group. So I've seen so many presentations that do the 101, and that's cool. Like they show a bit of use cases, a bit of like, here's where it is. I was actually at a um we got invited to a major brand conference in Banff, and there was one session I just wanted to attend. It was it was called AI and AI powered advertising. I was like, oh, I want to see what the but that whole session was, I think 15 minutes of that session was talking about how AI is like the car and electricity and you know, Ford and all that stuff. I'm like, that's cool, but I need to know how this is actually useful to the business. So that's what we do. Our presentation is hey, uh, we're gonna show you today actual business use cases. I want you to think about it from the lens of your business. Is there data involved? You know, is there repetition involved? Is prediction involved? But look at it from the lens of And then we show them a variety of use cases from our clients. So it's like here's this use case, here's AI research, here's some digital assistance, here's some, here's a custom build, here's voice and video that our clients are actually using. I want you, and then what happens is those president CEO operations people start thinking of oh, could you do this? Could you do this? Could you do this? And that's literally just a check mark of all the things that we could potentially pilot with that company. And that's it. That is a majority of our presentation is demoing business use cases instead of trying to 101 it because the people that we talk to don't really care. Sorry, yeah, don't care.
SPEAKER_01They don't makes perfect sense.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they just want the result. Yeah. So it's like, how can this thing help me uh launch a new product? And for example, so we were at a meeting yesterday. It's like, oh, so you're telling me that through voice and video, I don't need to travel to Lethbridge, Edmonton, you know, Brooks. I can just have an AI avatar and use Notebook LM to dis you know talk about this new product launch and just send it and then use a digital assistant to have people ask questions and train people up. Yes, that is a legit business use case for the tools, right? That's straight oh, and then oh, we can make it fun. You and then we showed them a little bit about act one. Oh, we can make it fun because our mascot is this, and we can just upload them like, yeah, sure. And that's what the tra that's what it means by actually like business use case.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So when you you've done the presentation, the the CEO or the decision maker comes up to you afterwards and says, Hey, can I get a minute? How do those conversations typically go?
SPEAKER_00They typically go, hey, could you present to our team, our executive team? Could you present to our leaders? Could you and we wanna, you know, can you tailor it a little bit to our business? And it's really kind of the same presentation. We do add some tailored bits to depends on what industry. Yeah. And then they start asking us the exact questions that you said, like, could it do this? Could we do this? Could we do this? And then from there, we the one thing we try to avoid is trying to build things out right away because everyone wants to get to that. Yeah, yeah, but you still have to have the strategy bit. So our really focuses hey, let's deep dive into your departments. We'll just press record, whether it's virtual or in person. We'd like to do in person. Uh we'd like to meet the people. We just sit there, ask all these questions about how their process works, they tell us it's all recorded. And once we have that, we actually want to build the company a strategy, a roadmap of what we think, plus in agreement with everybody. Let's start with three to five pilots. And we say pilot specifically because we don't want to scare anybody, and we want to ensure that if it doesn't work, it's super simple to fold up. But if it does work, then we have another conversation. How would you like to scale this? Do you scale it in phases? So we aren't overwhelmed, the company isn't overwhelmed, and they get some people to actually work on it. That's for most people lower risk, yeah, but has high potential, and that's usually where we start.
SPEAKER_01So, how much of what they ask of you is upskilling their own staff as compared to you coming in and black boxing it?
SPEAKER_00It depends on the business, and we always ask this too what is your level of AI use? Because it varies from company to company. And then what we want to do is enable the the champions or the advocates in their business because we want to work closely with them. Um, because none of this will work if there isn't a subject matter expert and there's someone who's constantly on people talking about AI in that company. So once we once we connect with that person or you know, build those people, then it's more of does the company actually want us? We recommend this. Part of the our strategy doc is hey, we'll include one or two training sessions with your team. We can definitely talk about more just to level up. Um, whether it's a simple prompting, maybe advanced prompting, maybe it's understanding different use cases, how to think about using AI in in the business, or showcasing them different different tools, different processes other than probably what they're just using, which is most of the time just Chat GPT free, too, by the way.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. If you're enjoying this episode and want to learn more about how to start using AI at work, we've made it easy for you. For just one dollar, you can have full access to the chief AI officer community, which will give you additional training, custom software, daily training calls on AI tools, using AI automations, getting more from your chat GPT sessions, and the business of being an AI consultant. Simply go to chiefaiofficer.com forward slash insiders to accelerate your AI journey. Now, back to the episode. So you you come into the companies, you start with strategy. What does and I know that we talked about like some process mining to identify some pilot projects, but do you do a sit-down with the company just to make sure that they're clear on where they want to go with or without AI?
SPEAKER_00Of course, because we we sit down with their presidents and the business heads or the department heads. And really it's more of hey, what is your what's your business goals? What are your quarterly, what's your QBRs? What's your annual goals? What what are the things that from a business perspective you are focused on? Where do you think AI can help? And let's kind of bridge that and have that conversation because sometimes the expect a big thing for us is managing expectations because we have run into sometimes where the client think like has this grand expectation of what AI could do, probably fed by the hype, yeah, probably fed by watching a lot of movies in the past, too. And thinking that certain tools can do this stuff, and it's like, no, it actually can't do what you're just saying. We're still a little bit away. We can piecemeal that entire process that you just described, but again, let's just start with a 10 to 40 percent and kind of incrementally work our way up rather than try to promise the entire thing. And at the same time, we all have to realize these tools are changing, and most companies are at the front end of a implementation. So obviously, they're not you're gonna have the good with the bad, and just as long as they know that they're more acceptable to taking the risk rather than trying to promise them that this is gonna be the outcome. It's like, no, you this is why there's extensive testing internally. If we deploy tools or automations, then we also extensive monitoring at the very least for the first month to make sure those it's stable enough to do that 10 to 40 percent.
SPEAKER_01You know, and that the first time I saw that 10 to 40 percent was actually from a post that you did, and I like that a lot because what we what we teach our chief AI officers is that when you go into um that that sit-down, um, arithmetic's not an opinion. If you've got skeptical individuals in there and you and you give them the hype, they can be like, uh, but if I can show you data that says in the oil and gas industry and our examples, this is what's happened. In real estate, this is what's happened. It's not my opinion anymore, right? So we always encourage them to go in with some sort of a forecasted ROI. The number that we tell them is 20%, because any process KPI that gets AI fied, it's gonna have like 20, 20% is safe. This 10 to 40 range, I like that a lot. Um, do you do you feel that you're underselling it when you come in at 10 to 40%? Or do you think that that's because if I said look, 100% improvement, they're gonna say bullshit.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_01Of course. Yeah. So do you feel that that 10 to 40 is like a no-brainer or that you're gonna blow that out of the water?
SPEAKER_00Or no, because we've consistent every single one of our clients, it's been consistent. The program, there are been outliers. There's certain things that oh, that's 80%. That's pretty good. There's certain things that clients are like, well, it's only five percent, but it's actually it works out. But we're consistently in that range, and where I actually got that is um when I was still working at a SaaS company, we we were actually talking with the open AI product team, and I was I I was talking about this 10 to 40. It's like, hey, what's the is it 10 to 40 percent? Is that consistent? And they're like, that's exactly the spot where we like to tell our enterprise clients, like, this is where AI actually works today, that 10 to 40, because sometimes there's those out, there's really big expectations, yeah. And when you get there, you get in trouble because that's where oh, this doesn't work, this sucks, it doesn't do what I want it to do because you're trying to automate more than what the tool can reliably do. It may be able to do it once, yeah, but you have to can you repeat it so many times and scale it at that level? That's what I mean.
SPEAKER_01So that 10 to 40 percent, when you present that to the decision makers, is their reaction skeptical? Is their reaction like, are they underwhelmed by that number because they think that AI is going to come in and do, you know, uh backflips? Or what is the what is that interaction like when you share that with them?
SPEAKER_00I provide the 10 to 40 percent, one as setting the context, but really back to our presentation when we showcase all the business use cases, in their mind, they've already kind of done that. That's why I set the context, and then when they see it, they could either it falls perfectly within that 10 to 40, or they have bigger expectations we want to bring right back. They're like, no, we can't do that, come back. And we always say, hey, this is why we start with the pilot. Can we start there? Can we start slow first and kind of build on top of whatever we're doing? Because again, AI is moving so fast, but your company is not is not open AI, so that's not your goal. And that's usually where we we begin.
SPEAKER_01The decision making, like you know, when you the the bigger the business, the longer the sales cycle, typically for something like a a consulting package or introducing new software or whatever. Are you finding, and with your background and software, I'm sure you've got plenty of experience with that. Are you finding that the AI conversation does it move faster, like the decision making, or is it still one of those things we need to evaluate this? Thank you for your time.
SPEAKER_00That depends on if they have a legal team, that depends on if they have an IT team. Yeah, and but this is why we want to play in the 500 employee or less. That's why we want to play in medium size because whenever we work with enterprise, there's a lot more people involved, even if the CEO is like, hey, I want this execute, I want this, it doesn't matter. There's so many things that have to go into it. And then security-wise, you have to have a conversation about hey, data privacy security, but for custom builds, um do you want to build local? Do you or are you how comfortable are you using the APIs? How comfortable are you using the use case? And this is so new for a lot of companies that it'll always default to um, oh, the typical IT buying process is this, right? How come you're only charging this? Because we we charge maintenance, but it's like that seems a little too low. We're like, yeah, but we're only on three month cycles, and we want you to we actually want you to re review what happened because I don't know what's gonna happen in three months, and the solution we agreed upon to implement that could potentially change. And I want to make sure you as a company have the flexibility to move rather than we've signed a deal like a Microsoft deal, yeah, we're stuck, and now we've stuck with the tool, and now we're handcuffed and we can't do what we want to do. So we try to be as we try to get the companies as flexible as possible, and we find that people like it because they're not bound to it. Isn't like a typical product where like let's say a Hub Spot, you have to sign and you're stuck with it for at least a year, like maybe two. Well, we're not we don't want to do that. We want to be super like, oh, we'll switch, we'll switch, we'll switch, because that's where AI is, but that's very, very different process that a lot of companies are it's very new to them in this entire and we we're trying to help them guide it, but we find that is we're not trying to st to um handcuff a company and ensure uh revenue for our company, that's really not how we work, um and I think it's it's a new business model too, because if you think about agencies, what better way you know, you want that stability, hence you want your retainer. Yeah, we're like yeah, but AI doesn't work like that, so why would we do that? And so we have to adapt to the new world, how the you know, this industry works too.
SPEAKER_01You know, that brings up an interesting point, especially you know, for the AI consultants out there, how do you bill for this stuff? Because right, because like as a when I was doing strategy consulting, I would spend X number of hours for X number of dollars, right? But with this, I can go in with the right prompts and get the same result in maybe a 30-minute session instead of an eight-hour session. Um, how are you guys first off, what is that conversation looking like when you're introducing your pricing? And how are you justifying your pricing and yet still feeling like you're being compensated for the value that you've got, not the hours you spent?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And we've had that a couple of times too. We've we've met a couple of businesses that again back to the who are like, hey, this solution is gonna be this many thousands. And the person's like, oh, could we do that in H? I'm like, what is H? Hundreds. And I was like, I kind of laughed. I was like, no, because and I think it with the audience of chief AI officers, right? They're not just necessarily paying for you to develop a strategy using Chat GPT or a custom GPT that you've developed. No, it's everything that you've learned that you're ideally continuing to learn, yeah, all the knowledge that's what they're paying for. Yeah. Yes, they could go out and build their own AI chatbot, no problems. But can they do it in a way that understands the custom instructions, that understands your privacy, understands vector database, which one's better for this specific use case, custom build, and can they maintain it at the level that again reliably works from a 10 to 40 percent range? That's what they're paying for. And we try to make that known based on the conversation and just how you know the business use cases and making sure we connect it back to to the businesses. So from a from a charge perspective, we usually charge, we obviously charge for the strategy component, the roadmap, and the training, but that also entails us physically going to the company, the departments, and having these two, three-hour discussions and then building the plan, but also recommending the pilots and having that roadmap because sure we will use AI to develop, like you know, that first draft or whatever drafts, but it but what you're paying us for is everything that we've learned or continuing to learn added to as context to that, tailored to that business, and then from there, because again, back to position, we want to be that company's AI advisor, not necessarily just here's a bunch of tools in a transaction, yeah.
SPEAKER_01One of the things that we talked about early on was you were sharing kind of some perspective on people internally, their expectations when and you mentioned managing expectations with a leadership team, but what are some of the things that you're seeing when you go into the companies and you're working? You've already had the conversation with with the decision makers, and they're like, okay, let me introduce you to the department heads, and department heads get their teams together and you start talking. What are you are what are you what are you being most surprised about, I guess, as far as how those conversations are going and people's aptitude and understanding of what's possible?
SPEAKER_00Usually those meetings are less about, and we will get asked this because we we preface the meeting by saying, um, we're not here necessarily to talk about AI solutions. We just want to know your process, and we want to know any. Let's talk about your the boring, the mundane, and the things that you really hate doing, but you'd have to do it week in, week out, month in month out, quarter quarter. Like, let's talk about that. And that usually gets people going. They're like, I hate doing this, I hate doing this. We have to do this, we have to do this. And then it's it's a lot of like just a lot of frustration about what and sometimes it's not even in our scope, and this is where we start finding, hey, you actually don't have an AI, like yeah, this is this is more of a strategy. This is not well, how about what and sometimes we get kind of we try to get away from that. Uh we don't want to be part of that frustration and the venting, we just want to sit there and listen and see what are their top processes that we can alleviate 10 to 40 percent on. That's what we're really listening for, but it's a good way to understand what is what are the issues, and then even we've even solved issues where oh, when we met with the next group, we just said, Hey, did you know this group has this issue? And they're like, Oh, we didn't know that. And we're like, okay, maybe you we should just talk and have that conversation that has nothing AI related, that's just you two talking to each other. So that's and most of the time, the processes are exactly what you would think of any company. So there was one company that we met with, it's an adult-themed entertainment company. So, and they were like, they were asking us if we could enable AI to do the craziest things. There's one request where he's like, So you take our president, and the president is like this older gentleman, right? And he's like, Yeah, could you make AI take his clothes off? And everyone just looked and were like, What? And then I was like, uh, I'm not sure. And they're like, We want to do research on these specific keywords. And I'm like, I don't know if you're gonna pass the guardrails for those keywords. But when we actually started digging deep, they're like every single company. I hate this email that I have to do, I have I hate this reporting that I have to do every week. I don't even know where these numbers are coming. Like any other business, the exact same. So we always hear the exact same, and it's like, oh, but back to the they do it differently, so you can't just apply the same solution. It's like, but our our process is this, this, this, this. This, this, oh, okay. So that's what we're listening for, right? And that's a surprise. Is the it's not surprising. Some of the processes are are definitely head scratches, like, oh, that's but just like any business, you've had these processes for years, decades.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they're not gonna quick question. I'm like, nobody says why do we do it this way? They're just like, Oh, that's that's how I got all the yeah. Interesting, it's got nothing to do with AI, it's got to do with the process.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we just talk about that, and they get there's any business will have these frustrations, it's yeah, it's like part of it, so it's kind of a fun conversation to have because sometimes they work it themselves out too because uh they kind of talk and talk and talk to the questions, yeah. And we just sit there and press record and listen to this stuff.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. So you're what I'm hearing is that there are universal activities that occur in business, HR, finance, marketing, sales, operations, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That every company does those things, but they do them a little differently. Um, do you guys have you have you identified patterns to where you know, hey, when we walk into a company, we should probably start with this department first and then have the conversation here because that's going to inform the rest of the conversations we have.
SPEAKER_00Sometimes in the same industry, but not all the time, because sometimes the like the CEO or the president has already something in mind. Like, hey, we have this really big issue with accounting because we keep doing this and we really hate it. And if you could just solve that, that would solve so many, and then uh you see a bunch of accountants do this, you're like, we really hate this, and it's like, oh, okay, has nothing to do with any other thing we talked about in another company, but right, it's just a big issue for them. And we're like, if we could solve it 10 to 40 percent, you they're like 10 that would help us a and that's enough to okay, let's dig in and let's see if there's a solution that we can try. And most of the time, there usually is an AI opportunity to help them, uh and that's where we want to start, because then once you scale it, then it's like, oh sometimes in my mind I have like, hey, this is really cool use case, yeah, but I never bring it out until we've been the foundation of oh, that's a cool use case. Now that you kind of know how AI works, you're kind of understanding what do you think of this? And it has a bigger impact because they're like they connect the dots much better. Right.
SPEAKER_01What is that that learning curve? How long is that normally? Are you seeing it's taking the executive teams or the decision makers for them to go, AI can do everything? To then they have this understanding, they're witnessing what's happening in their own company because of what you're doing with their employees and their process, and then they're starting to like when they walk the dog, make their own connections, or when they're you know driving the car thinking about this stuff. How long is that usually taking for people?
SPEAKER_00It varies and it depends on the role. Because sometimes we get an email or a or I don't know, a Slack message. Hey, I had a really cool idea. Yeah, this, this, this, this. And sometimes it's like we would have never thought about it because we're not in the space, like, hey, let's take a look. Or yeah, that's not happening for like 20 years. Yeah, that's that's a really I don't even know what that even is, but you will never know. But what's really neat is they're actually thinking about it and they've seen it, but they need to see the actual business use case, they can't just see a bunch of tools that they're using, it has to come back because they have to see the easiest return on investment is the hours. Oh, I noticed that um Kim uh our EA has fifth 10 more hours this month because of this. That might be so small, but because the CEO sees that EA has 10 more hours and can do 10 more hours of work, that is that direct impact that they wish whenever they have marketing agencies or other agencies, they can see that direct connection. That's what we're looking for right away.
SPEAKER_01And then they also start saying, Well, if she can do that, then he can and they can and they can't. And they start running those numbers and go, Yes, oh yeah, get Carl in my office ASAP.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so like this is where, like, hey, we need can you save us more hours on this and this and this?
SPEAKER_01Right. So, Carl, for those who are listening, and again, this the theme of this podcast really was about the the art and craft of being an AI consultant. And um, if you need somebody to tell you you're an expert, I'm telling you you're an expert. So embrace the mantle, please. Um, but what would you tell somebody who has learned this stuff, they've they've had their career, and they're starting to see opportunities that come from being that recognized AI expert in either their business or their industry. Where would you tell them to start as, you know, if they're launching that AI consultancy or AI practice?
SPEAKER_00I was listening to, I don't know if you ever heard of his, um, he's actually starting his own AI course, and I I love all his content. His name is Gianluca Damaro. Uh he's from, I think he lives in Barcelona. Um, he has his own AI course, he's training a bunch of people. But what he said is, and it resonated too, hey, if you're starting and if you you know you're in deep into this stuff, one go out and build something. It could be an automation, could be you know, a free chatbot, go out and build a custom GPT. And once you have that, now go out to I'm sure most people would know a friend, a neighbor, a ne someone, uh a family member who has some sort of business, and ah go out and hey, could we try do exactly what we talked about, but on a very, very smaller scale, single problem, one pilot, mini and try to build that or try to strategize around that. Don't do it for charge because this is something that then will get you thinking in that way, and then you'll you'll start to learn about business and and so on. This is a very this isn't a new technique. This is what I would have recommended to anybody who let's say wanted to start a delivering Google ads maybe a decade ago. Go find that small business, help that person do it for free and get the reference, get the referral. Because once you get the referral, yeah, then you can do a lot more. But you've got to actually do and and go in there, and that's to me the easiest way to start. Love it.
SPEAKER_01Now, you mentioned you know that that you do a lot of local presentations for business groups and that sort of thing. How did you did you just reach out to them and say, hey, does your audience want to know more about using AI in their business?
SPEAKER_00Uh, you won't believe how many industry associations, chambers, rotaries are starving for someone to present to their group that's not them. Because it's always hard to find different people, and it's easy because when you say AI, it's in the sphere enough that's like, oh and usually, especially for rotaries and industry associations, because they're usually talking to themselves, and maybe it's a little bit different now, they may have one or two speakers, they still love to have more of a conversation and you being part of that because if they're always looking for speakers and they're always kind of talking about the exact same thing, then this is a little bit of fresh air, and so that's one. Um definitely look at that, but also something simple as yeah, just sending notes out. So um I know a couple people in like another a couple people who who are kind of doing the same thing we do in like Vancouver and stuff, and they would just they just reached out to I think like this uh what Calgary Tran, I mean uh BC Transit or Translink, and they just got a meeting. So I was like, there's so many businesses, but don't try to go with the most obvious. There's a bunch of like dental offices, there's a bunch of and dental associations, college of physicians, uh places where you would think they're the most why would I actually go reach them? It's like, yeah, because there's a whole bunch of doctors and dentists and college and surgeons and people there. Like what are those places that don't really come to mind when you think of AI? Yeah, even like rec associations. Sure. Because just like any any business still has a business, they're still a business, they have those issues, and AI is so prevalent, they'd love someone to help them out. And don't lead with AI, just lead with, hey, 10 to 40, can we make your business more efficient and and productive? I love it. I have yet to see a business that says no.
SPEAKER_01Carl, this has been fantastic. And man, I I am excited about you being more involved in kind of the the message and the chief AI officer community. Um like just in general. For those, and everybody, I want to tell you like I was telling Carl before we got on here how much I appreciate his perspective that he shares in LinkedIn. I don't know where else you might share, but I see you primarily on LinkedIn. It's it's pure wisdom when it comes to AI's uh participation and impact in business, non-technical, right? Like he's not getting into the weeds on the technical stuff. And if you're looking for um, I'll just say thought leadership on AI and business, if you're not following Carl, I would say that you're you're missing out on a huge free education just from your posts. So outside of LinkedIn, is there any other place where if people want to plug into um your brilliance where they can find you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, I think more so, hey, follow along in our journey. And I think so, uh I do a lot of the the same content on on TikTok, so you can find me there. And we actually just launched our show. It's called the AI Accelerator for Business Show. Nice because we wanted to really give that me and my co-founder just have those conversations about taking AI and actually providing value to business and how they can reach their goals using AI. And we and if you're trying to who it's not for is if you want to get the latest news, probably we won't be talking about it. Yeah, same here. But what we will talk about is maybe a week or two or month or three later, we're like, oh, how has this tool, let's say Canvas? And we all haven't even talked about that. How applicable could this be for business? How could this new thing? Because there is no way we'd know how the impact of whatever new thing that comes out on day one takes time. Yeah, we it's ridiculous. You can have these takes of it, we'll change this industry, we'll do this. And it was like, you don't know, I you don't know how businesses will adopt this. We all thought copilot, everybody thought co-pilot was the greatest thing on earth, yeah, but it's not, and companies are like, Why did we buy this? Yeah, marketing you've got mark Microsoft's got to pay their marketing team or whoever because they're just lining up contract after contract, but like you gotta think about do you really, really want to have an AI tool for a year? Didn't you want to test it out first to see what your adoption is before signing the lucrative deal? And I guarantee you Microsoft wants you to sign the deal, they're not gonna give you a trial, but like they want they need you to sign that deal to and then what's crazy is they make you send the deal, then they send you a survey, and then it's like, oh, here's a report from Microsoft that 77% of companies are using AI. Like, I might have we talked about that, and we're like really because the companies we talk to I'm seeing, yeah, just and we're talking to these businesses every day, so I was like, there's something there, it doesn't it doesn't match.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm excited to subscribe to your show. You you've already their episodes are being released now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so we've we you know for um on the podcast side, we you know, whatever podcast you uh platform you listen to, Spotify, Amazon Music. Um, we've got our first three episodes there on YouTube. We've got our first um we published our first episode, the other two. I'm trying to stagger them out, but we we've done we've recorded six. Uh we're gonna record another three to five more. We're really trying to keep this weekly and trying to just focus on on the business element and and how that can help um business.
SPEAKER_01I can guarantee our audience will be big consumers of that. Carl, thank you so much, man. I I'm looking forward to continuing to support what you guys are doing. And um, again, I appreciate you sharing your perspective and your time with the audience here. I um have a mad respect for what you're doing, man. Oh, thank you very much, Chris. Thank you so much, everybody. We'll see you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in to using AI at work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy. Help you get started using AI work. Chief AI Officer. Link is the producer of this money for making this episode. Come on, free resources, among the work.