Repurposing over Replacing: Navigating the Business Automation Mindset with Heinoux Roux

In this episode of the podcast, host Bryan Hattingh and co-host Jonathan Shaw sit down with Heinoux Roux, the CEO and founder of NexBDM Venture Studio, to dissect the practical realities of automation for modern business owners. Moving past the massive "sci-fi fear" and hype surrounding artificial intelligence, Heinoux shares how his company builds bespoke solutions, electronic systems, and language models to streamline tasks and eliminate repetitive workflow chokepoints. The conversation emphasizes that true digital integration is less about replacing workers and more about repurposing human capital—freeing up time from mundane administrative data entry so teams can return to the highly valued, face-to-face personal relationships that drive authentic commercial success.

Find more at https://riskybusiness6.wordpress.com/ or https://www.cycan.co.za/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

And you tuned to risky business. I'm your host, Brian Hutting. So welcome, John O'Shaw, my co-host and engineer. How are you, John O?

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello, Brian. I'm very, very good. And you glad to be back and looking forward to this amazing show.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Exceptional. And tell me, did you hand in your PhD?

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Sadly, I have decided to extend for another six months, given university processes and things. But I've spent a lot of time getting it to a final draft, and then we'll we'll take it there. So, yes, that's that's the story at this point in time.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Okay, well, we'll we'll hold back on opening that champagne, and um we'll do that at a later stage. Sure, sure. More importantly, uh not more importantly than your PhD. Sorry, forgive me. Bad language there. Importantly, uh I want to greet our guest this afternoon in the form of Hainu Ru, uh, who is the CEO and founder of Next BDM Venture Studio. Evening, Hainu.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

Evening. Thanks, Brian. I really do appreciate it. And Johnna there in the back uh working his magic. Uh, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's such a privilege. I've actually did a bit of reading up about you and all that you've accomplished. So it's really an honor to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Uh, it's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for that. And uh we're gonna have some fun this afternoon because it's such a uh such an imperative, not important, it's an imperative subject that we've got to talk about. And there's so many awakenings, I think, for people as they listen in and tune in and and hopefully we can allay some of their fears, maybe invoke a couple of important ones that'll get them into right action. But we can see how that goes. Tell us all about firstly, tell us about uh the next BDM and uh how it came about.

SPEAKER_02 1:53

So it's a very interesting story. I've uh I've had to tell it quite a few times, and every time I tell it, it kind of changes. But at the end of the day, um I've been in business for the last 16 years. So even at school, I started working doing marketing and promotions and all of that. But for the better part of the 16 years, I was in business development and sales and corporates and all of that. So I've got quite a lot of uh business experience behind me, and I reached a point at the end of last year where I felt stuck. I felt like I was going in this loop and it just wasn't stopping. So it was a bit frustrating. Um, at that point in time, I was retrenched by the previous company that I was at, and they gave me two months off, so gave me a bit of time to think. I went to the beach, thank goodness, and we spent some quality time with the family there. And in Jan, I actually started another job at a corporate thinking I just need to get a job, that's what I have to do, and it lasted four months. Um after after the four, or actually two months in, I thought to myself, what am I doing with my life? Why am I torturing myself consistently? And started to think about what is there to do in this world. And the wonderful thing of AI is here, and I've been playing with it like Google for the past few years, and now all of a sudden I'm busy in deep side of AI. Um, so really did a very big crash course in terms of upskilling myself, every single course I could do, even um anthropic courses as well, uh was very intense, very high-paced learning. And at in March, I registered my business to kind of test the waters and see what's happening in the world, um, specifically in South Africa. And I got to a point where I realized that there's a lot of need and a lot of um uneducated people. And by that I don't mean that people don't want to know, they just don't have the time. So if you look at the corporate person's schedule, you find that they typically work till six, seven o'clock, um, or they're stuck in traffic till seven o'clock, depending on which side of the corporate ladder you're on. And the whole idea of next BDM is actually to kind of streamline the processes to reduce that time, to not have you working all those late hours when I realized like I'm stuck in a place I shouldn't be right now. Um, so I jump ship without any clients, without knowing what's the what the future holds.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

But I love that story. So, I mean, as a as a program, you know, we talk about being the heart of business, the solar rock and roll. We're a good news business talk show. And over the years, we've hosted a whole array of different people, and we continue to do that. And they range from people like yourself, which are young emerging entrepreneurs, um, very often first-time entrepreneurs uh with great ideas, and also very seasoned global business leaders and it's and and genres in between. So it's always lovely to start talking fresh. And I as an entrepreneur myself and knowing what it's like to start out and just take a leap of faith, um, it's it's encouraging to have people on the show to talk about that and what they're experiencing, you know, in in the hopes that we can also encourage some of the listeners to realize that if they're not in a place where they are being fulfilled and finding meaning and purpose, or even if they're in a place where they're financially challenged because they're unemployed and out of work, that it's not about despair. It's actually about realizing that there's so much hidden potential in all of us. And it's around aligning that with uh a pursuit that you can be passionate about, uh, that has relevance and meaning, and that can be most importantly a value transfer and uh a positive impact to the world and to people around them, you know. So I think you know, you're taking that leap of faith and and putting in the hard yards, that's also important. It's not just that it just comes because you you think it's a good idea, you know. It's it's important to get the the capability and the depth and breadth under the belt.

SPEAKER_02 6:28

Yeah. There's a lot of key things you said, um, and I and I want to touch specifically on the audience and people that feel like they're stuck in the same rut. Jumping the ship is not for everyone. You have to have a whole different breed of a person. Um there are very few of them in this world, but you need to be sure. And I think that's one thing that I was pretty clear on in the two-month or month and a half run-up to me resigning is I was 1000% convinced that this is what I have to do, not want to do or need to do or forced to do, but this is my passion, this is what I love doing. And that is the defining factor for me where I am today, to say that, geez, you know, uh if I made this decision in a different way or through a different method or in a different direction, it would not be as I would not be as joyful and probably wouldn't have done this podcast.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

I like that. Uh, I think what's what's what's really important for for the listeners to sort of reflect on is that going into own business and being an entrepreneur, it it's not sufficient to simply have a good idea. It's important to have a good idea. You know, in fact, if you're if what you want to take to the market's not a good idea, then you know you're probably going to be doomed from the start. So that's one of those things that is a is a price of admission, but it's not the catalyst for your success. The catalyst for your success is being able to endure the disappointments, the frustrations, the possible uh elements of failure that might happen in the journey, and the fact that it for most people, in most instances, takes longer than you thought it would, or cost more money than you thought it would, and uh isn't necessarily just going to be an overnight sensation. You know, there's there are very few, very few things that actually qualify as being overnight sensations. And so uh in that journey, it's it's around having that uh courage based on the conviction of the value of what it is that you bring wrapped around uh or wrapped with passion and excitement uh for that, because that's the contagious stuff. The conviction and the passion are the contagious stuff. And obviously, you've got to back it up with quality delivery and excellence in what you do and a heart to serve, not just a heart to sell.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

Yeah, and I think that what that is what definitely defines a good business from an average business is not just selling, but providing a service, even if you're selling products. Um, and that's what I learned through a lot of the corporates that I was in at the at a stage, is that you are here to serve people, and that's what I live my life by. There's many people that can attest to that. And if you are positioning yourself as someone who just wants to sell something because you need to get some money to get out of the rut that you're in, you sound like a desperate salesperson, and that's the fastest way to lose a client. Um, so no, it it's it's actually very interesting. I've got a theory in terms of how it should be structured when someone does want to make a leap of faith, but we can jump into that a bit later.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

So tell me what it is that NextBDM actually offers.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

We offer bespoke solutions to clients to solve their problems. For example, a lot of people think oh, AI agency, you're just gonna throw in an AI, it's not that at all. There's three levels to automation or streamlining processes. Uh, the first one is programming. So one thing can be solved by giving you a good program that solves that problem. Then there's a second level, which is automation. So connecting multiple programs together. For example, if you have a zero account and you want to draw reports and put it into a nice presentation, there's three different automations that need to happen for that process to be streamlined. And then finally, you've got AI input where we say, let's make this presentation nice. Let's put some cool graphics and visuals and animations on it. And a lot of people think AI is, oh, it's going to take over my job and I'm not going to be able to do anything. But actually, it's it's just become a tool that we need to manage to get the outputs that we need.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

And I think that there's another thing that people perhaps miss or don't have sight of yet is that it's not simply about learning to use AI tools. It's actually about rethinking and reframing your perspective on how you work and how you show up and how you operate. And it it translates into a much deeper behavioral issue around recognizing that there are potentially massive time savers using AI in the appropriate ways and the various ways that you can, and consciously redirecting your time into those more strategic and more impactful elements of human-to-human contact and more time with your clients and more time with your staff if you have staff, and and then on a personal side, more time with your family and yourself. And being able to therefore live a much more engaged, much more rich uh life than being caught up in the iterative, mundane, repetitive stuff that so often I just get to do it because I'm I'm the best to do it, and it's quicker than delegating it, and it's quicker than trying to, you know, do get something to do it for me. You know, I'll just do it because I've always done it, you know, without thinking about it. When in fact that's the completely wrong approach to take.

SPEAKER_02 12:22

So I want to tell you a story about my first client. Um, they signed up and they thought, oh no, it's going to be easy, quick plug and play. We're just going to streamline a process for them. But when we went to the drawing board, they had to review their SOPs to such an extent because they realized they were creating more work for themselves than they ever could have thought. They were repeating processes and copy and pasting things three or four or five times. And I thought to myself, my goodness, this is this is not a good way to do it. But what it what AI effectively does is it helps you think. It cannot think for you in terms of your business. It's a good strategist, but you, as the person, still needs to implement and take the risk of what it is suggesting or what it is trying to point you towards. And you can get very bad outputs with AI. And a lot of people have heard the term hallucination. It does hallucinate because it's not based on your realistic situation, it's based on information, and it's got way too much information to give you specific niche cases unless you program it to. And that is where with this client specifically, where we came in and we actually helped them design their system around automating certain tasks. And this is most likely going to reduce each person's week by eight hours of manual labor.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

That's fantastic. And and the thing is, I think part of that journey is to coach people into what they need to look for and what the upside and opportunities are.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

Yeah. So at NextBDM, we actually say we don't replace people, we repurpose them. The whole idea for us is to allow you to have more time, as you said earlier, with your family. For me, that's a very big moral value. And uh I can tell you a very rough story of the last four years, if we if we have time for that in the podcast. But we lost four years in our lives between me and my wife and my son. Um, and that really brought this whole reason for Next BDM and why I started it to create more time and the time that I need for clients as well. Um, if you think of any person in this world, I cannot think of someone that says, I don't want more time with my wife, I don't want more time with my kids. I would rather just sit behind a computer and do the work that an automation or system or an AI can do for me, and I can just fact-check it in the morning when I get to the office.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Yeah. And and and just touching on the this concept of um the invisible drain, the reality of the invisible drain. And many South African business owners believing that their biggest risks are purely external, you know, macroeconomics and infrastructure and things and and and market plays. Uh, in reality, uh a lot of the risk is the internal efficiency bleed, you know, revenue and human hours evaporating into copying data across spreadsheets, hunting down things, you know, physical signatures, manually following up on leads. You know, how does what you do uh help address that and and educate people?

SPEAKER_02 16:33

So there's a few things that I've actually put in place. So there's free tools on my website that anyone can use, um, a CRM, an electronic signature database where you can upload your documents and send for signing. There's certain guardrails, for example, we have a thing of if you have if you need three signatures on a document, it's a corporate document. So then you should be paying 150 bucks a month for the software. Um, so but at the end of the day, for any startups and any entrepreneurs, there's a lot of free tools that they can use on the system. And in terms of integrations and automations, we've got a software called Next1, which is where all of these tools that I've created are actually automated to when you mark a deal as one, it actually sends the SLA and template based on the products that you select and set up. And then it also actually requests their signature on the system, which is then automatically, whenever they send it back, captured and then invoiced immediately. So it removes so much of that. Oh, I need to send this for signature, I need to send the contract, get it back, send the invoice, wait for them to respond. It it's it's a nightmare, that whole process being in sales for a long while. That I didn't like that a lot. Um, but we also do specific training. Uh, it's actually launched this week on Monday, where we do business training specifically to a business case. For example, you and I can speak about the CRM or the sales cycle for hours, but that might not be the business person who's listening, it might not be their problem. So we do training based on AI language models, whether it's Enthropic, ChatGPT, Gemini, whichever one you're using. We use basic training and safety training to help people understand what they are doing and what are they sending through and who's actually seeing that information, uh, which is also a very big thing currently because the I don't know if you've heard the story of the guy that uploaded his banking details because he couldn't process a payment and the AI used his money.

SPEAKER_01 18:37

Oh, I I can't. That that's outrageous.

SPEAKER_02 18:41

But but then on the other side, you've got people that want to run away and don't want to use AI. So we've got this very big fear factor. So this training is aimed at really helping people to understand what they can do and what they can do safely within a business environment.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

Yes. And and you talk about things which I find really interesting around the the sort of uh you know, mitigating uh the issue of of disconnected applications and and having you know too many software subscriptions, um, and you know, buying tools without an architecture to connect them, uh you know, and and and where you can look at what you call a unified sort of business OS or business operating system. Yes, and and and the whole thing is is is around the demystifying of AI for pragmatic business owners, you know, moving past the hype cycle, uh, you know, and thinking that, you know, being overwhelmed by AI. And it's not that there aren't very valid reasons for a bit of sci-fi fear of, you know, will we become they will they become more intelligent than us and will they ultimately lead to our our uh extinction? But um I think let's get past that and and look at what we can do with it and the importance of of what I think one would call AI integrity, and that's not the integrity of the AI itself, it's the integrity of the usage and the behavior of it by the human beings.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

Yeah, that is something that I find very interesting. Um, to backtrack a slight bit in terms of the sci-fi of AI. There's a lot going on in AI, but I really believe that it is one of the best times to be alive for opportunities. You can start a website, start a business in no time. You've got capabilities to speed up processes exponentially. So, yes, we are in a very weird and strange time with AI, but if you look at the agricultural to the industrial age, it happened, the exact same thing happened. People were afraid of moving to the industrial age and using the tractors and the tools and the mechanisms that were created. And at the end of the day, more jobs were created because now you had to have mechanics, you had to have people that had specific tires that they produce, et cetera, et cetera. And it's the exact same thing with AI. If you position yourself to be a user of AI, you'll be far above the people who decided that, oh no, I'm not touching this, it's from the devil, yeah, and really just not want to use it because at the end of the day, it's just another tool, it's vastly smarter than us currently. So about a month and a half ago, the statistics came out to say that AI is officially smarter than a human, and they predict within the next year or two it will be smarter than all of the humans in on the planet combined.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

Is that a good thing, Anu? Is that a good thing? Do we want it to be to be smarter than us to some degree? I mean, let me jump in here um uh just with a question for you and and talk about like the the value of AI. Um because I mean if it's creating more jobs, how do we? Have more time, so to speak? Or do you think there will be sort of more uh distributed working, uh, something along those lines? Um, where's the value do you think at the end of the day that AI will bring?

SPEAKER_02 22:12

Okay, so I'm gonna pop it back with another question. What do you think is required for AI to run at the scale it's running and for the infrastructure capabilities that we need in South Africa, specifically, or Africa?

SPEAKER_00 22:25

Well, it's immense, absolutely immense. And, you know, if the the the total sum of having to implement AI outweighs, you know, the value it's going to bring to humans. This this is just, you know, I know this there's ecological issues and and so on. But you know, what's your feeling there? So there's two things.

SPEAKER_02 22:45

One, I do think AI could be a problem if not regulated. So uh a lot of people made a big fuss about GPT 5.6 and Fable 5 that was discontinued or stopped by the government. I believe it's great because at the end of the day, if we have systems that train themselves and do pose an existential risk to humanity, that should be monitored. Um, and Elon Musk has said it quite a few times. He said that what we're building now with AI and the models that we are working on is vastly more dangerous than a nuke. So there is risk, yes. I'm not going to go into the darker side of things because I can we can do talk a lot, but there is risk to where it's going, but it needs to be regulated. And one of the things that upset me as a person and as a business quite a lot was with regards to the legislation that was supposed to be passed in South Africa that didn't end up being very good. Um, that to me is sad because at the end of the day, as a person or as individuals and businesses, we want to feel protected by our governments, by by the powers that be. And we need infrastructure in terms of legislation in place to guard us against certain things. Then, in terms of the job aspect, I believe there's going to be substantially more jobs created. And by that I don't mean manual work, I mean managers or operators of AI. So instead of having a person sit behind a computer and typing out a bunch of documents, all that they need to do is check those documents. So that they still have a job. They are responsible for the output of the AI because it needs to be checked, even if it is fully functioning. Um, but at the end of the day, you give that person more time to focus on the human element. So if you have a business that has customers, this would far supersede a customer's expectation if you start calling them on a monthly basis, asking them how they are doing. And I think that's what businesses have lost during this digital transformation that we started in. I remember 15 years ago when I started working, it was all about the customer. I had to go see customers every single day for weeks on end. And we hit a period of time where the digital transformation kind of stepped in, and then I had to call clients, and then I had to just email clients. So we've moved further and further away from actually dealing with the people aspect. And the one very positive thing that AI has done for me, it has brought me closer to people because I can have deeper conversations and longer conversations. And I mean, like this podcast, we've got interesting conversations that we're doing, but if I still worked eight to five, I wouldn't have this opportunity. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

Absolutely. Just on the one point, which for me is very interesting, is how is the world going to cater for this accelerated demand for power to drive the AI engine? Because what what we've seen happen is already the the availability of silicon wafers um has become really sketchy. And in fact, what's happened as a result of that is that prices, for example, on STD external drives, hard drives for you know keeping your photographs or your music or whatever on has almost doubled in the last six to nine months, you know. And um, you know, that's gonna obviously extrapolate outwards. And so, you know, what is being done to to create contingency for that or to obviate that problem?

SPEAKER_02 26:35

I I'm gonna refer to Elon Musk. So he actually asked a bunch of people, uh, NVIDIA being one of them to supply him with the amount of chips he needs to build his robot. Uh I forget his name, but they said no, they can't supply him with that amount of chips. Now he's repurposing a whole massive section in his warehouse to supply those chips himself. Okay. So once again, we've got a problem that can be solved by a solution, but someone needs to be behind that. So it's creating opportunities for people. And I was I had the amazing opportunity of being at the Google Cloud Summit yesterday. Brilliant. Uh, President Cyril spoke, and the one thing he said is South or Africa, specifically South Africa, needs to stop importing things from overseas. We need to stop importing products, stop importing raw materials that we have available, and we should actually be builders in South Africa. We need to develop our own LLMs, we need to develop our own infrastructure because we're such a rich nation. And he posed this as a directive to say instead of being users, let's take action. And this blew my mind. It literally sat with me for the whole day yesterday, even through today while I was working. We need to really take action, and there's a lot of problems that are going to surface, like hard drive capabilities. And I mean, last year was the RAM. We had RAM skyrocketing. I wanted to upgrade my RAM in my computer and almost died when I saw the prices. So there's there's potential for people to enter into markets like the tech space, like hardware. And I think that is one of the reasons why I'm so positive about AI and what it's doing, is because with that, there needs to be extreme infrastructure. And one of the questions that you ask is in terms of power, that's a brilliant question. What is one thing if we look at the free state, the northern cape, that we have that doesn't stop? It's the sub okay. So I'm currently working on a project, and I don't know if I should share a lot of details, but it's gonna be a full green data center.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 29:01

Yeah, not reliant on ESCOM, not reliant on any water sources, fully self-sustaining on its own. Um, I've got a few people that I'm having discussions with in terms of infrastructure of that sort, and the idea is then to duplicate that wherever it is needed. So the idea is going to be patented in terms of how the structure is actually built, because there's a very key thing that we have in there. But at the end of the day, that's what we're going to do. We're going to need to have creative solutions. And we've got that. We've got so much talent in South Africa and up in Africa. And I feel like we're really squandering our opportunities if we're just letting it be and just using GPT for Google. I like that.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

It would be interesting if if they calculated tokens that that are used for the AI output based on the amount of sun to run them. That would be quite an interesting thing. Because I mean, being the sci-fi buff as well, I would say, what do you need? A Dyson sphere. Essentially, it cover the earth in in solar panels and allow it to tap the well, cover the sun in in solar panels and then tap into that. But that's an interesting concept to relate the amount of processing power versus the amount of uh uh generation or uh running it can get from the sun, so to speak.

SPEAKER_02 30:22

Yeah, no, that's definitely something that is interesting. I would love to see those stats as well.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

So it's it's so interesting listening to you talk about the um the free state and the northern cape. Uh I meh more years than I I'm actually gonna share on the radio, because I'm not I'm not that old, you see. This is the weird thing. There's somewhere, somewhere my chronological clock got a little bit mixed up and it's it's you know, I I haven't been able to fix it. But um I was involved in in research and design of solar heating systems a long time ago, uh, long before, you know, uh power generating uh solar systems. But um and and at the time we did extensive studies into effective radiation and where different parts of the world were best positioned. And South Africa is one of the best uh geographical spaces for probably tipped a little bit by Namibia, but uh for geographical spaces for effective radiation. So it's wonderful to see that we can actually start uh uh accessing this and using it, you know, because in the absence of not doing that, it's like lightning bolts that shoot across the sky, and those, you know, whatever the the scale of voltage is that that that goes with those lightning bolts gets wasted and never utilized or harnessed. You know, it's wonderful to be able to harness this thing called the sun, you know.

SPEAKER_02 31:47

And I mean there's there's so many things that a person can think of when you start to get creative. If you look at, for example, Cape Town and PE, what do they have more than anyone else? Wind. And there's all across PE through to Jeffreys Bay, there's those wind farms. If you're in a windy place, set up wind turbines. There's there's so much that we can actually start accessing that could help the South African and African infrastructure from a data perspective, but also from a power perspective. If you think about the capacity that you would need to run a single data center, you're looking at about one to two megawatts of power, but it's not going to be consistently used every single day all through the night, etc. So that power can then be put back into the grid. So there's there's a lot more benefits than just saying, okay, let's throw up a data center and put solar on.

SPEAKER_01 32:41

Yeah. One of the things you you you talk about is is the the cost of inaction. Uh and uh, you know, how can mid-sized business owners accurately calculate their that what their current sort of manual way of doing things is actually costing them every month? Is there a way to do that?

SPEAKER_02 33:00

Yeah, so I've got a uh basic calculator on the website, but I'm gonna put it into a simple example. If you look at how many clients you engage with over a week's period, let's call it 10 clients. Now you need to call them, you need to follow up. They engage through your website or through your marketing platform, Facebook, LinkedIn, whichever you use. But how many of those leads do you miss and forget to follow up on? And then when you get to them finally, no, they've already sorted, they're working with someone else.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:33

So we use that as a very basic calculation in terms of what could that potential be based on closing ratio, based on the value of business that a potential client has. For example, someone that does plumbing might have a thousand or two thousand or five thousand rand on the line with one client, but someone who sells a house has 60 to 100,000 Rand on the line per sale. And those are the typical industries, not that I'm specifically servicing right now, but that we see a massive problem in. And solar installations. Geez, if you look at a solar installation, what? It's 100,000, 200,000 Rand per installation, and if they miss one lead that wanted to do business with them, there's hundreds of solar companies in South Africa right now.

SPEAKER_01 34:21

I think that what you're touching on also brings an interesting human component into it, which is to get people inside of organizations, and I know this is this is not news. I mean, this has been talked about many times, but when you look at it in practice, it's not as prevalent as you'd think it should be. And that is to move people away from an activity-based mindset to an outcomes-based mindset, to an impact-based mindset. You know, what is the impact of what am I doing? Is what is what I'm doing right now the most important thing for the business? You know, what and you know, the the all sorts of nuances and other knock-ons that come from the fact of getting caught up in the iterative, mundane manual stuff that one isn't energizing, uh, two is not customer-facing or customer enabling, and in fact is very time consuming. So it becomes counterproductive on so many levels because then when you do have the customer interface, what you're taking, the energy you're taking into the room is less than what than optimal. And so much of it, you would know this as a as a salesperson, you know, uh people don't buy from companies, they buy from people. Yeah and how you show up and the authenticity and the integrity of how you show up, and the the the the power of the inner place from whence you come, when you do show up, i.e. that conviction in the merits of what you do, the value of what you do, excitement for what you do, is such an important thing. But when people get caught up in noise, and which of course in turn and and and churn, which affects outputs and affects in turn revenue streams and and and opportunity costs, it all becomes you know pretty counterproductive.

SPEAKER_02 36:12

Yeah. So just going back to the the scenario I used with regards to leads, the typical thing that we do is we automate the initial response. So, for example, Brian, you send me a message saying, Hey, I want to do business with you, come install a solar um system on my roof. I then have to manually respond within X amount of hours according to my contract. But by that time, you could have gone to three other companies. One of those companies might have had an automated assistant which says, Hi Brian Hutung, thank you so much for uh coming to our website and asking for a quotation. Please let me know how many what is your desired product, and then they can pre-qualify you, but you already engaged, you already bought in because you're engaging with that tool. And then what happens is once you've got the qualification criteria, a salesperson will reach out to them with pre-qualified details, which shortens the amount of time you waste on clients that don't have the budget, they want a 16-panel solar roof, but they live in a one-bedroom flat. It's not gonna work. So that's just a typical example in terms of the streamlining capabilities and using your time for the right thing, actually closing the client who has the budget, who has the qualification criteria that you need met.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

What if I ask you about because something for me that's quite important is oftentimes clients will want to interface with somebody human. You know, and I've often considered whether it's ethical to do the AI clone thing and have them have it pretend to be you. I mean, I can see that starting to happen, you know. Hi, you've reached so-and-so, and and you're pretty much talking to an AI until some point in in the conversation, a human being or the human being can actually step in. What do you think that how that how is that personal touch going to be affected by AI?

SPEAKER_02 38:16

So, my honest opinion is South Africa doesn't like it. If you think about banking systems that have these automated systems that you need to speak to to get an answer and get through to someone, I'm not gonna swear on radio, so I really get mad when these things answer me, and I'm like, that's not what I said. So at the end of the day, there's a big problem in terms of language capabilities of the language models because it's not African accent understanding, I want to call it. Um, but I don't like that. I would rather have it say I am Hainu's assistant and he's not able to come to the call right now. If you give me the details, I can either give you some information or ask him to call you back. And that then just gives that interaction once again, but doesn't remove the human element. And that's why we always say we repurpose a human. So, yes, we've got tools that we use to make our lives easier, but we really just want to make your life easier, not replace you as a person. And there, if we look at America and Canada, they've got these systems where people are replacing or AI is replacing people because they put a face there and say now it's ABC business and I'm the owner, so you only directly deal with me, and my whole brain is in this AI. So whatever you ask, it it can answer you based on my knowledge. Um, but I don't think that South Africa is anywhere close to that yet. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 39:48

Yeah, look, I I I must say uh I'm very open to change, to learning new things. I'm super curious, I'm super pro the whole gen AI fluency and and workplace activation approach and and where it can go. Uh having said that, I and and and I even I liken it to to the use of of uh platforms like Zoom and Teams. And you know, the world of business has become super efficient in in using that thanks to COVID. I mean, COVID was one of the benefits of COVID. We're able to change so much of how we do things. But I can tell you unequivocally that if I can get in a room face to face with a client, I am going to come away with a much richer understanding. Uh, in many instances, a much more uh consequential uh scale of deal and accuracy of deal and getting it over the line. Because there's just that those very definite elements of human-to-human contact and being able to generate that that the those those the oxytocins and all the rest of it, those chemicals that that form the foundation of trust. And it's so much easier to do that in person, and yet it's becoming less and less possible to do that, which I find rather sad. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:14

Yeah. No, it's it's a very interesting conversation that we can go down for hours and hours in terms of are people actually still going to be needed in the future, etc. At the end of the day, we've got extroverts on this planet like myself. I want to be in front of a person. I would still rather drive to a place than sit behind the computer. But that being said, what happened with COVID and with AI now, it has completely globalized any business. Any business model in terms of providing a service can be globalized now because it can be done over Zoom. AI can have a leg in there, and it really just increases the capabilities and the economic value that a person and new entrepreneurs can have within South Africa.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

And can you believe it? We have come to the end of our show. The time has just gone in a flash. It and it so often happens like this. And there's so much more that we could talk about. So let's make sure that we definitely get you back online here. Any parting shot or or suggestion to listeners out there, regardless of whether they're AI phobes or whether they AI embracers, what what was your what's your advice to the people out there to to just get that next level up?

SPEAKER_02 42:40

Play. Play as much as you possibly can for those that are not afraid of AI. For those that are afraid of AI, give me a call, I'll talk you out of it. At the end of the day, AI is.bdm.co.za, or they can give me a call on 079-607-5372.

SPEAKER_01 43:15

Wishing you every success moving forward. May you impact many businesses and lives positively in the world of AI and beyond. And look forward to having you back on the show.

SPEAKER_02 43:26

Awesome. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, John O.

SPEAKER_00 43:28

Thanks, Hanu. Very nice to have uh met you and chatted to you.

SPEAKER_02 43:31

Yeah, no, thanks. It was a great pleasure. We had a lack of chat, and I will definitely be back if I'm invited.

SPEAKER_01 43:37

You will be. So thank you, listeners. And uh signing off for your host, my co host Jonathan Shaw. Cheers, John O. Thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_00 43:46

Cheers, cheers. Until next time.

SPEAKER_01 43:48

And of course, reminding you, listeners, that if you're not with the ones you love, love the ones you're with and take time to show and tell the ones you love just how much you do. Don't let any of my get in the way of that. Keep that human to human loving and contact going strong. Have a great week.