Q1: When you have to prevent your auto replies from engaging in email warfare

Welcome aboard the Business Lifejacket Podcast, where we dive into the choppy waters of business with plenty of nautical puns and laughs along the way! Sponsored by the award-winning Anderton Centre, this episode features Darren Bentham from Interact IT, who shares his insights on AI, digital marketing, and cutting-edge software solutions for business efficiency.

Darren breaks down the practical applications of AI, debunks common misconceptions (no, it's not Terminator-level yet), and reveals game-changing tech trends for the future. From automating tedious data entry to predicting machine failures, there's plenty of inspiration for businesses looking to integrate new technologies.

Plus, Dave shares a hilariously chaotic tale of an auto-reply disaster that became a cautionary tech tale at the Anderton Centre. Think endless email loops, confused clients, and valuable lessons learned.

Whether you're tech-savvy or just curious, this episode has something for everyone looking to stay afloat in today's fast-paced business world. Don't miss it!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/darren-bentham/

interact-digital.co.uk

01257 429217 

Interact IT Chestnut House 46 Halliwell Street Chorley Lancashire PR7 2AL

darren@interact-it.com 

If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with others who might need a little extra support in their business journey.

Until next time, keep learning, laughing, and making waves!

Credits:
Host: David Germain
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcgermain/
david.germain@andertoncentre.co.uk

Produced by: OneZeroCreative
www.OneZeroCreative.co.uk

Sponsored by The Anderton Centre
www.andertoncentre.co.uk
New Road, Anderton, Chorley, Lancashire, PR6 9HG reception@andertoncentre.co.uk 01257 484220 www.andertoncentre.co.uk

Learn more about the Anderton Centre by visiting the website, or contact David Germain for a personal tour.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Business Life Jacket Podcast. The podcast that doesn't take itself too seriously and shoe horns as many nautical puns into the world of business. The Business Life Jacket Podcast is sponsored by the Anderton Centre, an award-winning education, training and conference venue in the northwest between Bolton and Chorley. The views and opinions discussed on the Business Life Jacket Podcast are based on the personal experience of the individuals involved and are not intended to be taken as official business advice. Always seek professional guidance when making decisions for your business. 

Now let's dive in. Today we're joined by Darren Bentham from Interact it. Darren, good morning. 

Good morning, Dave, why don't you start by telling us a little bit about Interact IT?

I guess in essence we're a digital marketing agency and software development company. So we build website people promote the websites to get them customs and sales and also we build custom software.

Fantastic.

Whereabouts are you based?  Chorley town Centre near the bus station and train stations. Very ideal for transport network. 

You do, and you first started working with the Anderton Centre a couple of years ago didn’t you on one of our animation projects if I remember right?

Yes, that's part of the additional digital marketing remit. One of the things we do is animation and illustration. So yeah, we've put together a training exercise video for you.

It was, it was, for anybody who's been to the Anderton Centre it was our check-in video which has been an absolute success throughout. I'm really interested Darren on a bit of a buzzword topic at the moment. Which is, which is AI. So, AI is a big buzzword in tech right now. What are your thoughts on it?

It's one of those technologies that have been around in the backgrounds. I was doing it myself to Bolton Institute. That's my first used AI.

Wow.

, as Bolton University as it is and that was 32 years ago so it's been around some time. It's bloomed in size based on the functionality can now provide over what it used to do and it's finally getting the recognition it deserves. But on the back of that, you've got a lot of risks and challenges, coming in.

So, what do you think are the sort of common misconceptions, people have about AI technologies?

There are a few common misconceptions. Starting from it's going to kill everybody, which I’ve heard, like the Terminator movies for those kinds of arguments, too it's going to lose a lot of jobs and then that one I think there's a lot of truth in that based on the fact that it's going to automate a lot of the processes. There are a lot of challenges for employees at the moment with the rise in national insurance and HR changes and unfortunately, if you need to make your business work by cutting costs, that's one area that's going to see a big growth I believe.

How are they Interact IT using AI at the moment?

We've been doing some time now developing a software product for the engineering sector.  So, what we're doing is looking at machinery to see when we can spot the point of failure. Traditionally an engineer goes around, and does periodic inspections maybe once a month, two months, three months, or twelve months. But the machine can fail straight afterwards. So that machinery could be an air vent, it could be a middling machine, CNC machine, you name it. Anything which's got a pattern of heat, light, power, vibrations, you name it. We can use AI to create a digital twin from the data we extract from the launching of the device and then when it starts to change then we can alert the operators that something is going wrong with this machine which could generally be more heat and more vibration.

So, there's some quite cutting-edge stuff going on there I suppose. I'm really interested from a relatively kind of small business point of view from a charity, not-for-profit point of view with let's be frank, very very limited budgets. What kind of advice would you give to an origination like myself about starting to integrate some of these new technologies?

I'd start off with using the likes of Co-Pilot and Chat GPT. It's a fantastic tool for helping you to do your job not as a replacement. I strongly believe that at least for the time being it shouldn't ever be fully automated but it can help as a tool and speed your work up. We use all the time with digital marketing we never use it to create content for websites but what it does do is give us a guide and you can write three-quarters of the content that we then put a human in to go and correct the grammar, correct the misconceptions or any inaccuracies in the data.

It is interesting I've started to notice more and more especially sort of on LinkedIn when you can sort of spot an AI-generated post a mile off. I always think that if it's got the Americanisms with the zeds and the sort of standard bullet point format you almost have a negative view that oh somebody's used AI for that and I just wonder whether it loses some of its impact and I think we've got to be conscious of that. It's a great way to get some standard information out but for me that personal approach is still really important.

It is but it's also very costly and time-consuming. Right. For writing content, yourself and one of the biggest reasons why clients mention is I can see that contents been written by AI.  it's because it's too good o they know that the person writing is younger, not capable writing that quality of work.

Interesting. What do you think the sort of biggest opportunity for organisations than is in the use of AI?

Automation and data entry. It's very time-consuming, its very mind-numbing for the person doing the job. We often from a software point of view we work with clients who may be working on three, four different software systems and that to replicate the data entry across all the systems. For example, in that area you potentially have an email come in with a new order for a new for a product. It can take that day to recognise what the proper is or recognise who the client is and then it could pass it automatically into a third system second third system to go into production and sales.

What trends do you see shaping the future of IT and business technology kind of over the next kind of five years. You're a man at the forefront of this. What little secrets can you let us and the listeners into?

Office automation businesses around to cut costs cost a wide range of areas and staffing cost is one of the areas that we're looking at. Also looking at the likes of humanoid robots. You don't see them these days other than in movies but in China particularly in Boston Dynamics in America leaps and bounds with a machine getting quite cheaper and cheaper all the time that can carry your box and that stack shelves which may not seem much but if you're working in an endangered environment it's not always a cost factor. It's health and safety of it.

I somebody said to me well AI don't take holidays, they don't have sick days, don't need to work a 9 to 5. It's certainly an interesting time. We also have a little feature on the Business Life Jacket podcast called Dave's Story Time. So what we try and do is I reflect on a situation of my own kind of career and this one we're going to talk about today is the great auto-reply disaster. 

So let me take you back to time when I thought I was being clever with technology. Spoiler alert, I wasn't. 

A while ago I decided, sorry, step up our game at the Anderson Centre. By improving our email system. We wanted to seem super professional and responsive, so we set up an auto-reply system for inquiries. 

The idea was simple. Anyone who emailed us would get a polite, friendly message letting them know we'd received their inquiry and would respond within 24 hours. Sounds Failproof, right? Well, it was until it wasn't. 

So the setup, our IT guy, we'll call him Bob, asked if we wanted to auto-reply for all emails. I was distracted by 10 other things that day, waved him off and said, yep, sure, all emails, go for it. And that, my friend, was mistake number one. 

The chaos is unleashed. About an hour after the system went live, I noticed something odd. My inbox was filling up at an alarming rate. Like I'm talking 100 emails, then 200 emails, then 500 emails. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Had we suddenly become the most popular outdoor centre in the UK, where schools across the nation desperate to book team building trips? Not quite. What I failed to consider was that our email account was subscribed to several newsletters, supplier updates, and here's the kicker, spam. Every single email that hit our inbox triggered the auto-reply. And here's where it gets better. Some of those spam accounts also had their own auto replays. 

So our auto-reply replied to their auto-reply which then replied back to ours. It was like watching two chatty robots get to an never-ending conversation. By lunchtime, the system had gone rogue. It sent out thousands of emails to suppliers, partners, and even the nice lady from Bolton Council who emailed us that morning. Her reply, David, I think your email system might have had one too many coffees. 

The fallout.

The worst part was we realised it wasn't just spam that got caught in the loop. A few of our key clients received multiple auto-replies. One Post School got 47 identical emails in under an hour. They called to check if we were okay, assuming I'd fallen asleep on the send button. 

It took Bob the IT guy and me two hours to shut the system down. By the end of the day, we sent out more emails than a Nigerian Prince in the early 2000s. 

Lessons learned. 

Well, test before you launch. It turns out there's a big difference between saying, yeah, sure, all emails and actually thinking about what that means. 

Test the system first on a very small scale. 

So that was our challenge. That was the result of that. And that's definitely what we learned. Setting rules to prevent your auto replies from engaging in email warfare, with bots and junk mail. 

Otherwise, you'll end up in an affinitive loop of technological nonsense. Communicate the chaos, which I thought was really interesting to reflect on. 

When things go wrong, be honest. I had to personally call our clients and partners to explain the situation. Thankfully most of them found it hilarious, especially the school who received 47 reasons to choose the Anderson Centre. 

There was definitely an element of laughing off. Technology is there to make life easier but sometimes it turns life into a sitcom. You have to roll with it, fix the problem and laugh at yourself along the way.

I hate to admit this part, but I've done the same thing. Oh, yeah, I was using some software back in the 90s, working with doctors and professors from medical backgrounds and instead of sending it as blind carbon copy to everyone send it a carbon copy. The next thing we had was a doctoral professor from around the world saying please take me off your mailing list copying every single person on. Then another person saying please stop replying to this email you're making it worse. And this went on and on and on. And then a few hours later on we just pulled the plug on the server in the end.

Oh really?

Because it was sending out that many to other people.

So how do you kind of feel about my reflections in terms of those lessons learned? Would you agree? Sort of the test before you learn and actually things go wrong.

Just be honest and communicate.

Yeah, think it's exactly that. We're all human, we all make mistakes. Unfortunately, with automation, once it's going, it's going. It's very hard to put the plug in it.

If a company could focus on one area for either AI or an IT improvement for 2025, what do you think it should be and why?

I think to get a free account with chat GPT, yeh, and just get a feel for what it is and how it works and look at something called prompt engineering. So, the prompt is the instructions you give it.

Yeah.

And the more detailed the instruction, the better the job coming at the end of it. So you could tell the type of tone, the type of language you want to be using, whether you want it bulleted or summarised, many pages, so on and so off., because chat, you see from the outside it looks like a really fantastic intelligent tool and it is, it's very, very useful. Yeah, but it's pretty much a Very, elaborative version of your text prediction. So rather than predicting the next word it predicts an entire paragraph or entire book, or whenever it is or a picture. It's just got a very very large dictionary. 

So we've got a ledged language model which starts and ends but it's very useful. So as a tool don't let it run by itself but play around with it, give it some tests, ask it to do some stupid things and then try it from your business point, ask it to email to summarise what a document already says to but what you can do upload a document into it and ask it to give you a summary of what it's about. Pay around with technology, don't be afraid of it, no one's going to die and you might find that become more productive to the back of it.

I remember the presentation that I saw you deliver a couple of weeks ago. You explained AI in the most simplest format I've ever had it before where you're essentially saying that on one side you've got all your different shapes and all, all that's happening is you're asking a question and all that AI is doing is producing those shapes in a slightly different order. 

Yeah, and I thought that was a really way of kind of simplifying it because like say programmes like Co-Pilot, ChatGPT they do seem as though they're super, super intelligent and but they’re only as intelligent there as the information you're feeding it which is I guess when the prompts come.

Yeah, it seems because it's got such a larger library of, inputs and outputs that it can use. So because it's so wider range things that you never expected to understand it can make a, good guess of what you're trying to ask it on the back of it you also need to be aware of it. You don't know what sources it's using to come to those conclusions. So you can enter with biases in the data that you're not aware of which is why human intervention, the human supervision is always required, using.AI.

 I suppose just to kind, kind of summarise them in terms of Interact IT and your business if there are organisations out there that are looking for kind of help and support how they're best getting in contact with you?

Via their website, telephone, or just popping in. So if you are in Chorley, come in for a cup of coffee, and a chat. So, we're always an open door policy. Happy to have a chat and learn about your problems and your ideas and then give advice. We don't charge for free advice so come in, have a chat and get to know us.

I think that's very commendable. A lot of organisations now, unless you're prepared to pick up or speak to a chatbot first, but it's nice to be able to speak to an actual person. 

So, thank you very much, Darren. I think that's been really, really interesting and hopefully interesting for some of the listeners and as well, um, a very new and ever-evolving topic to feature on the Business Life Jacket podcast.

So thanks for joining us on this episode and we hope you're leaving with a few new ideas, some lessons from our missteps, and maybe even a chuckle or two. 

Remember, business doesn't have to be all storms and stress. Sometimes you just need the right Life Jacket to keep things afloat. If you've enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share it with others who might need a little extra support in their business journey. 

Until next time, keep learning, keep laughing and keep making waves.