The Agentic Shift-Business in the AI Era

The Agentic Shift – Business in the AI Era

Running a business today feels like everything is moving faster than you can plan for. Markets change, tools evolve, and what worked yesterday doesn’t always work tomorrow.

In this episode, Jeremy and Nick talk about how AI is changing the way business actually runs. Not in theory—but in real, practical ways. From simple tools that save hours of work to new “agentic AI” systems that can plan, think, and complete tasks on their own, this shift is already happening inside everyday businesses.

They break down what this means for business owners:

•  How AI can help you work faster and smarter 
•  Why ignoring it could slow your growth 
•  How small actions today can give you a big advantage tomorrow 
•  And how to use these tools without needing to be “techy” 

This is a real conversation about opportunity, fear, and the future of work and how entrepreneurs can stay ahead instead of getting left behind.

You can’t stop the shift but you can use it to your advantage.

Your Brand, Your Back Yard with Jeremy & Nick

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hello listeners, thank you for tuning in to Your Brand, Your Backyard Podcast. I'm Jeremy Rentz, and I'm next. This podcast is centered around being a business owner, removing chaos, and replacing it with strategy, vision, and clarity. How to build a business, but more importantly, how to build your brand in your backyard.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

So if you're just starting a business, rebranding or expanding, or you're a marketing professional, or maybe even a business major, or all of the above, this podcast is created for you. So let's dive in.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Well, welcome back. Hello, listeners. Hello, Nick. It's great to see you. Here we are with another episode, some more uh more content coming out to our listeners. This is gonna be a fun one today.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Yeah, this is a topic uh that I've been kind of looking forward to. And it went heavily on my mind about AI and the interaction and kind of the daily life as the world is changing in front of us.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Yeah, and I feel like this is really hitting us like a ton of bricks. Like it is just progressing so quickly. It's so intelligent, so many ways to implement AI in in our day-to-day lives and of course business. And we're gonna get more into that. But aside from that, before we really dive in here, looks like you're home.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

I am so yeah, I've I've made uh made some shifts, and I'm now uh starting my own consulting firm that I've done kind of part-time for the last 12 years, but really shifting into taking uh you know run at running that uh full time. So it's been way less travel. So I think that's a good thing. My wife, you know, she's gonna adjust it to me being around the house more often. So um the kids are like, wait, aren't you going on a trip somewhere? What's going on?

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Yeah, it's been it's been good. Yeah, that's great. Well, in our world here in Colorado, man, we feels like we've been burning the candle at both ends, you know, with with all the businesses and you know, with our marketing and and consulting. We've got over a hundred clients bringing on new clients every single week. Then we've got our new painting company, and we're we're really growing, expanding, really focused on building that brand in our backyard, and uh it's going well. And then my my wife's got an interior designing business. Uh, no, no shortage of things to do, just shortage of time. So, speaking of time, let's dive right in.

SPEAKER_02 2:25

Yeah, let's get after it. I'm feeling the same way with kids' sports and everything else going on. It seems like it's uh it's a never ending carousel. It's uh every once in a while we get a like, hey, wait, there's nothing going on tonight. This is wild. What what do we do? It's uh you know, it's six o'clock and there's nothing else to do for the night. It's it's a very strange feeling some days.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Yeah, it is for sure. Well, Nick, the title of this episode is The Agentic Shift Business in the AI Era. Some of our listeners might be saying, hey, wait a second. What the heck does agentic mean? Well, I've got it right here for you. Agentic AI refers to autonomous, goal-oriented systems capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex but multi-step tasks independently, shifting from mere content generation to proactive action. Unlike traditional prompted AI, agentic systems use tools and adapting to changing conditions to achieve outcomes with minimal human oversight. And we're gonna get deeper into that, deeper into what did what that means. But Nick, with this topic, you mentioned this is something that you were really excited about. And for me, quite frankly, I was a little overwhelmed because I'm just really getting into it. And how ironic is it that today I utilized AI to help create our show notes to talk about AI. Yeah, it is it is surreal.

SPEAKER_02 3:47

It's almost like when you're you're living experience, but you get to see it from a slow motion different angle. And um, you know, it's a very strange time, I could say. You know, I was talking to somebody, Jeremy, the other the other day, a very, very successful realtor that's got a great team. And we were talking about things, and he said, you know, I kind of built my own executive board using AI. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he goes, I literally went and input in the five or six or seven different kind of speakers that I like that I kind of attune with a line up and I tune them well with. And I said, basically to AI, read everything about this person and look at how they think and operate and make a profile for them. And then what happened? He said, AI worked for like an hour and it literally read every book, every show, every podcast that that person had done. And now he goes, I can plug in and that's kind of my board, it's my sounding board. So I can go ahead and go, okay, here's a topic I'm thinking about. What do you think? And it's got these these the AI learned. And I was like, holy cow, that's a that's again a game changer of things. He's like, you know, yeah, it's been kind of interesting. Um, so that that was an interesting insight, and it led to a fast conversation.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

Absolutely. What do you think the common perception behind AI and the AI evolution is right now, Nick? I think a lot of people are scared.

SPEAKER_02 5:05

I think there's a lot of anytime there's change in an environment, whether that's political, economic, resources, it doesn't matter what it is. Anytime there's a change and people don't know what's the outcome is going to be, there tends to be fear. It tends to be unknown. And so I think there's a lot of people afraid, like, well, am I gonna lose my job? Is this career gonna go away? How is this gonna affect me? And I I think, Jeremy, if you look back at the history of innovation technology, it's always been one man and their tools against another man and their tools. And the people that are the smartest, hardest working that use the tools most effectively win. And the people that are not as effective are not as hard working, don't use the tools. They don't. And that goes all the way back to building the you know automated lines when you're building auto, you know, cars to using electricity to the transportation systems. Gosh, it goes back to using the internet and things like cell phones. So AI is just a it's the newest tool that's changing our society.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Yeah, I mean, you and I grew up and we watched the uh evolvement and enhancement of a PC and then the development into a laptop, and then it turned into, you know, smartphones and tablets. And I remember early on with computers, right? So many people, very similar mindset. Now, I was a young boy, thought it was super cool, didn't really know any different. But my folks and certainly my grandparents are like overwhelmed. What's this world coming to? Right. And it took over and replaced so many things for good or for bad, right? Like we can go now go into Google and we can get into Wikipedia. We don't need the the hard copy encyclopedias on our bookshelf anymore. Right. I remember as a student needing to actually read something to pull a book out and find the answers for my reports. Well, now the kids can just ask AI, you know, what is this or what does this mean? Or tell me about the Civil War and what were the dates and where was it? And it's just crazy, right?

SPEAKER_02 7:08

Yeah, I mean, information is at the tip of our fingertips, literally anything. In fact, I we were sitting at the table the other day, and my my seven-year-old, he's almost gonna be eight here in a couple weeks. He jumped on and said, Hey, Alexa, give me a story. And they, what do you want a story about? And he literally gave some ideas, and Alexa was like, Okay, and then created a story of who the character was and what they wanted to happen. And within seconds, it created kind of a story, and it was fascinating to watch to him. He doesn't know any different. He's like, Yeah, this is normal. And I'm sitting there going, Are you kidding me? That is that is like wizardry compared to when I was a kid. And so the challenge, Jeremy, is that if we're not careful, it could take away creativity, it could take away daydreaming, it could take away the imagination. So, in some ways, it's helped to the imagination of kids, in some ways it's taken a lot of that away. And as parents, it's it's a it's a new thing for us to manage and to think about. And and we didn't have that always before, and there'll be other things in the future as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, personally, we've got to adapt, we've got to utilize these tools. But let's talk about and let's shift on the business aspect and what could this mean for our business, for our systems. I do want to I want to lean into this a little bit. So key carrier excuse me, characteristics of agentic AI is autonomy. It operates independently to achieve a goal rather than waiting step by step for instructions. Reasoning and planning breaks down complex high-level goals into actionable sub-tasks. Tool usage interacts with external software, browsers, APIs, databases to accomplish those tasks proactively. Adaptability adjusts its approach dynamically based off of intermediate outcomes and environmental changes. That was a lot that we can unpack with how we can utilize and really position this AI tool to strengthen us, to delegate in some ways, to create standard operating practices, right? The SOPs that we talk about.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

It's funny, I think as you as you kind of explain that, it almost is like corporate speak, isn't it? If you think about how you we're just talking normally, and then you get somebody that's in corporate world and they answer something like, Why did you use so many words? Why was that so complex, right? It's a simple answer. And that's different sometimes between an entrepreneur versus a corporate person, right? They're like the language is different. And I think as we get into this topic, we just have to understand the language that we use and the way that we see things is evolving at a very, very rapid pace. Um, and and again, that is can be a good thing or it can be a very, very scary thing. You know, just on a on a note, I've seen some areas of AI that are working extremely well. We've seen some areas of AI that's still awkward and clunky, right? When you get a phone call and it's an automated thing, and it just you you can tell, right? It's getting better all the time, but you can just tell. So I think there's some things that people are aware of and some things that are not. So we're trying to dive in a little bit deeper and analyze and unpack some of these things to maybe get our listeners a little bit more up to speed on things that are in front of them that they can use now versus just, you know, editing a paper. How do you say this more effectively? Those are the those are the baseline things that we can do.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Yeah. So when when you think about, and you've got your own business, when you think about structuring a business, integrating I into your systems or your software, let's break this down and let's give some of our listeners some real content. Like, what would they do? How do they start? What are they gonna um what are they gonna lean into? You know, maybe we've got listeners on here that are that are probably scared. You know, you you fear the unknown. You don't know what you don't know. So how do they get involved? How do they get educated? Let's start from the very, very simplest.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the most basic things people can do is just go to Google and click on the, you know, the function for AI and just type something in. You know, I I I found this is one that I was talking to my wife about things. I said, you know, the only thing I wish I would have had growing up as a kid is a tree house. That's one thing that I I mean, I had a great childhood, a lot of fun things, but we never really had a tree house. So I said, I, you know, I want to build the tree house in our backyard in one of our big trees. And she was like, Well, why don't you search on Google how to do that? I'm like, what do you mean? And she was like, Well, use the AI function. And so I actually typed in a couple pictures of the trees, snapped a couple pictures, plugged it into AI on Google, and it said, How would you build a tree house with this tree? And it was crazy because it came back and said, Well, it's this kind of tree, and here's different methods, and it went through all of this detail, which just led me to like typing in something different. So I think to start there with a simple Google AI search of how would you do this? And that I think will open up people's eyes to like the power of commonplace AI stuff.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

Yeah, that's right. Um, as you were saying that, I was thinking about my wife's design business. And Nick, you and I talked about this before we we hopped on here. But you know, you've got CAD programs, 3D renderings, and expensive software systems and certifications and classes to be able to operate that software in those systems. You think about architects, think about designers and remodeling, and the list goes on and on and on. But for my wife, she's simply just enrolled into this specific AI platform, and she has the ability to upload very general picture of, say, a living room. And then she will speak to AI saying, please replace current couch with an L-shaped tan leather couch, put a small indoor plant on both sides of the couch with a big painting or a big mirror above the couch, right? And it spits out this crazy rendering. And if it's not exactly what she wants, she can say, please make the couch a little larger, make the plants a little larger. And so as she continues to speak at it, it learns more and it gets better with that rendering that it's creating for her. It is very fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 13:13

Yeah, I mean, and and really when we think about it, that can blow your mind on what's capable. But it's no different than if you go back 20 years ago. If you own a business and you've got a lead receptionist, you know, he or she gets to know your pattern. They know what you like, they know who you want to talk to, and they don't just by experience. And so they would naturally start to filter calls, they would naturally start to think ahead, going, okay, when you do this, you like to stay at this type, you know, this hotel chain. So let me book something there. They would pick up those same patterns. So, really, this is no different than having a really in-depth person that's your right-hand person that knows how you operate. Yeah, it's just not taking years to develop that. It's picking up instantaneously. And so the speed at which we move is going faster. And and really what I think has happening, Jeremy, is that it's allowing people to start going, okay, some of the barriers or some of the limitations that I've had in my business, right? Because I didn't have the resources, I didn't have the manpower, I didn't have the finances to do it. Well, now we can sometimes have those things so it can accelerate the plans for the people, again, that have vision, that are creative, are willing to go after it. It's creating more and more opportunities.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

I'm writing down as you're talking, I'm thinking about AI integration into like your business QuickBooks or your accounting software, generating real-time statements and PL cash flow analysis. I'm thinking about AI and integrating that maybe into your workflow systems and your calendar and reminders and scheduling, right? That's been around for a little while. Just simple note-taking tasks that need to get done, you know, for day-to-day operations. Obviously, we know about AI and analyzing resumes. You you mentioned that on the previous episode on how all of that's turning into AI, right? Yeah, it's really crazy.

SPEAKER_02 15:05

Of, you know, I was just reading an article and it's talking about how, especially for people that are senior, right? And they've had a lot of experience. So a lot of the AI stuff in the recruitment world is based on mid-level jobs. We're not basing on entry-level jobs, they're not replacing on the senior jobs, it requires a lot more nuance. They're replacing on or they're placing all of their systems around mid-level people. And so it's kind of the corporate America, pick the middle and kind of go with it. And so what happens is a lot of the AI is built around that, you know, that mindset. So it's looking for certain things. And what's happened is in the past, you know, if you're applying for a job, a human was looking at it, and then they were making, they were setting up a phone call, and they kind of get to know. Well, now, because the number of applications and how easy it is to apply things and everything's multiplied, they're using AI to scrub that. And if you don't know how to beat the system, so to speak, then it it kind of chews you up, right? And there is a different, different mindset. So that's one of the adjustments that people have to make. And that's just one example. But the same thing is happening in day-to-day competition.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

Yeah. The one thing that really stands out that you mentioned earlier for me is the information at our fingertips. Now, one of the things that we can't do as a business owner and as an entrepreneur, as a marketer, is we can't be naive. We can't be blind to what's in front of us. You mentioned tools earlier. This is a tool that is available whether you like it or not. And for the business owners that can open up their mind to the possibilities, the pressure that it can ease. I think about something as simple as hey, as a business owner, I need to generate a full page ad that I'm gonna place. And I spit it into an AI platform, and what does it do? It generates a full page ad for my painting company. I'm not a graphic designer, and I have zero desire to learn the software systems and tools to do so. I don't have the time, hours to be a graphic designer just to build one ad, but AI can relieve that stress, headache, and pressure in one ask.

SPEAKER_02 17:09

Yeah, I think AI is great at getting a functional option in front of you immediately. Now, it may not give you it's not the same experience as going to somebody's been designing things for 15 years and they can come up with a, you know, a perfect looking ad and they can really take it to that next level. But I think AI at a basic level can at least get something functional in front of you almost immediately. And where that comes in in business is just understanding. I think some business owners are going to fight technology. They're gonna be like, this is how we've always done it. We're not changing no matter what. There's gonna be other business owners are like, okay, I'm not gonna fight, I don't like it, but I'm gonna try to at least go with the flow a little bit. And then there's some business owners like, okay, I'm gonna dive in and really embrace this. So uh what do you think? What's what are your take on it? That's that's my viewpoint on it.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

I agree. And and and I was in one of those categories, you know, for a while. I was kind of in denial, in denial for a while. You didn't want, like, I don't want this. No, stop. And then as it progresses and as people adopt it, get used to it, utilize it, and then I'm seeing firsthand how much easier it's making people's lives in some areas, certainly not all. And then I kind of went in with let's let's put a toe in the water, all right? And then from there, really starting to have fun with it and being creative with again, what is possible. And I plan to integrate AI into automating. I can get AI software for estimating houses where I can literally just take a picture or um video walkthrough, insert some dimensions uh and measurements, and it's gonna do like this is what you should do. Here's what you should cost, here's the hours, right? Some of that software, although manual plug and play already exists, but AI is gonna take it to a whole nother level and make my job even easier, right? Yeah. And it's a change.

SPEAKER_02 19:05

Like you said, if you if people are dragging their feet, they're going to get chewed up. And the the equivalent to me, Jeremy, I'm a big college football fan. And so when that came out a few years ago with the you know, NIL deals and stuff, and I was kind of like, okay, it's kind of cool, but what is this doing? Well, now if you look at it, you know, if you're not using the transfer portal and you're not willing to pay players to come to your college and play, you get left behind. We see teams that historically have been really strong. I think of you know, Clemson to football is one example. Clemson had a very long track ride of success, but their head coach has been kind of digging his heels in them in the mud, so to speak, and like, I'm not going down this road. I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that. And it's it's you know, when you see the results, it's their classes have gone from top five recruiting classes to top 40 classes. You just can't compete when everybody else is doing that and you're not. It really is a an unnecessary roadblock.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting that you you open the door to the sports conversation. We always find a way to get into that topic. But you're right. If you don't use it and utilize it, if you don't learn it and if you don't adapt, there is a high likeliness that you are just simply gonna get left behind. And it's like, why? I think about a shovel versus a tractor or a backhoe. Sure, you like a shovel, I get it, but then comes a tractor. That now I don't have to literally sweat, I can push some buttons, dig a bigger hole in a matter of seconds. That's where we are with business.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

Yeah, for sure. And I think half of the battle is just like you said, opening up your mind as a business owner that this technology is changing the way we do business. See, I'm old enough to remember when people, every company had somebody answering the phone live all the time. That was normal. You called somewhere and they answered the phone. And then it started changing to the automation and the phone trees and all those type of things. And it's funny has now some companies are going back more to getting a live person. Technology always has a way of balancing itself. If we get to the point where it's no longer man plus tools against man plus tools, we get to the point where it's man versus tools, yeah, then that's a different story. I think we're all in trouble when that happens, right? But uh, I think it really is just the changing of technology and we have to embrace it. That's the first step. So you start with, let's just dabble, let's just play a little bit. And I found myself the same way. I found myself becoming more excited about using it as I saw some of the results, which I was not expecting. And I wasn't begrudging, like, I'm not doing this. I was like, okay, what? I don't even know where to start. My wife showed me a couple of things. I'm like, okay, and then it led to me just spending a little more time utilizing the platforms.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Yeah. So for Mother's Day, by the way, for our listeners, we're just a couple of days outside of Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day for any of our listeners that are mothers. But for Mother's Day, I got my wife one of those robotic AI vacuum, vacuums, and mops. The interesting part behind that is the way that it's got a Self-programming mapping system that gets better and better every single time it runs a route through the house. It knows where the kitchen island is. It knows where the rugs are. So it lifts the mops up and then gets into vacuum mode, right? And so you want to talk about AI. That is something that is constantly cleaning my house. So I don't have to. And we no longer have a house cleaner because it's doing it for us. Now, we still have parts of the house that we have to clean, right? The mirrors and counters and things like that. But the bulk of the heavy lifting is now done by our robot AI house cleaner. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:35

As long as it doesn't hit a snag, it's good, right? That's the thing that I think where people are like, but what happens if somebody leaves a marker out and it picks that up and it's marking all over the floors, right? I mean, and it that's that's an option that that there are mistakes. In fact, you're talking about that. Take it one step further. I just met somebody recently. They do the same thing, but with lawn mowers. It literally maps out your yard and it just constantly is mowing your yard and keeping it like it's a fresh cut yard. And I'm like, I don't know if that's awesome or just terrifying to have a blade that's running around that's chopping stuff up all the time, right? But I was like, it's very it's an interesting thing, and and uh it's just a world we live in that the things that we never imagined are starting to come through.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Yeah, I actually saw that lawn mower that you're referencing in work. Uh like it was unbelievable to watch this thing, the way it maps, the lines that it does. It was like a golf course, and it's constantly just keeping it at the exact height that that uh homeowner wants. And it was crazy. The downside is you got to make sure that you you scoop the dog poop out of the yard. Or what if you leave your dog inside for too long and you've got a mess of something, and your little robot vacuum cleaner starts spreading that all around the house? That actually happened to my brother-in-law. Lovely story.

SPEAKER_02 23:52

Yeah. Well, that's the thing. That's the thing, Jeremy, is there's always trade-offs. And I think as business owners, it's really easy to get locked into like, well, I've got a problem, here's a solution. And it's kind of like one-dimensional, like problem solution, straight line. But honestly, every problem that's out there, we have to look at three-dimensional. Well, if I make this change, what other consequences do I have from that? Right. And so it might fix this problem but create four other problems. So we have to look at things kind of three-dimensionally of all there's always a trade-off, right? If I do this, it's maybe save me time, but it's gonna cost me money. If I do this, it's gonna cost me this. If I do this, so then it's balancing out those trade-offs. And so AI is just now one of those tools that we can say, hey, this can maybe leverage and save me some time, but it might create some other issues. Let's be aware of those issues. And I think that's what you're kind of talking about is that's why it's not like, oh, everything's perfect. There's always going to be downsides and drawbacks to everything you choose. It's managing those risks more effectively. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

Let's get into some of the case studies. We've got some data, we've got some stats in here. The one that really stands out here is so Amazon, Netflix, their model using real-time behavioral data to drive 35% increase in total revenue. Um, then we go into the retail, the retail utilizing AI and AI software and systems, the ability to reduce returns by 64% in the retail space using AR and virtual try-ons. My soon-to-be new stepmother, my my dad, is gonna get married later this summer. And she was showing me she just took a photo of herself and was able to try on wedding dresses online. And when she ordered it, she tried it on, it looked exactly like that AI virtual try-on. It was crazy.

SPEAKER_02 25:46

Yeah, you know, it's like now you go into a store, you go into a big box store, like you know, Lowe's or Minards or wherever, and they could pop up on the scanner, like, yeah, we have eight of this on aisle text, section this. There should be eight of this item, right? And because all this inventory, it's all this complex mathematical formulas. I remember my parents owned a hardware store, and I remember we would literally go around and count how many saws there were on the shelf or how many, you know, whatever it was. Hey, how many light bulbs do we have there? And it was all a manual process. So, what it's done is it just is leverage time in a way that we've really not seen before. It's leveraged our ability to do things faster.

SPEAKER_00 26:26

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 26:27

And that's the basic starting point of where we want to go with AI. People that their functions and jobs are not that important, they're easily replaced. And that's where we see. It's easy to put in a machine that will dump the fries in the grease or you know, fill a co, you know, fill the Coca-Cola at McDonald's. That's a one-time investment that they can save a lot of money. It's harder to do that on some industries for sure.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Yeah. And when one door closes, one door opens. So when you think about, and a bit, and again, one of the things that people are thinking about with AI and AI integration is the number of jobs that are going to be lost. Actually, they are projecting 70 new jobs in the tech industry, AI industry by 2030. Yeah, nobody talks about that.

unknown 27:12

Right.

SPEAKER_02 27:13

Everybody talks about, oh, it's going to replace this, it's going to replace that, and this group are going to lose their industry or this industry might go away. But nobody's talking about all the other things it's going to create and what it's going to look like. So I think ultimately there will be some shifting in some industries. There'll be jobs that maybe were really popular in the past that may no longer exist, may not have a need for them. But that doesn't mean that those people, there's a net loss to society. It's just going to change how that looks. So the skills necessary are starting to change.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Yeah. I think about just less hands-on and more controlling the joysticks, right? The sorcery that we can sit down and run a business and have these tools and this technology and these systems. And, you know, that they're smarter than we are. And they're only going to get better and smarter and more efficient and quicker. And if we can position ourselves and our business, if we can open up our minds to what is possible. And really, Nick, that's the point of this show today is what is possible. Don't run from it. Adapt. Utilize it. We're in a position of power, right? As a business owner, we can make these decisions. That's not going to replace us. It can never replace the entrepreneur. It can never replace the painter. But we got to utilize these tools and be open to it. I think about ways of utilizing AI to monitor our competition.

SPEAKER_02 28:35

Yeah, it's a lot of people. Our stock portfolio really is important because it's not only understanding what we want as business owners, it's understanding the consumers. What do they want? Because that's what drives everything. This is where I think some businesses are really doing well and some are really falling behind. Again, I remember you didn't used to be able to just plug something in and your phone would tell you where to go. You had to like get out maps and print things off and get lost, and you had no idea how long things are going to take. And now we're just taking that for granted. Well, same thing. Now the idea of if you're traveling somewhere, how easy it just pull up and get the ratings on restaurants and feedback, right? Well, it's catching up now to the rest of society. So it's not only just about finding how to get to somewhere or finding out if a restaurant has good reviews. Now it's able to find out what are the gas prices at all the gas stations, right? And if you're not monitoring your competition, you get left behind. What are the other people doing? How are they, like you said, paying business? How long is it taking to get a quote out? And what do businesses expect? If a business expects you to get something done in two hours and you take two days, they're going to go somewhere else. If they expect it to take two days and you get it done in two minutes, they're like, holy cow, how is that possible? And you kind of set yourself apart. So it can go either way. Yeah, it makes you look like a rock star for sure. I think that the sometimes it's it's like anything else. I've always told you know I've worked with salespeople my whole life. And sometimes salespeople get too good and they're too polished and they lose credibility. And I'm like, you gotta you need to actually screw up a couple times on purpose. You need to, even though you've got all the perfect answers, you need to kind of come back and be a little more relatable to them. I think technology could have that same impact. I think there's gonna be some people that are like, wait a minute, you got that way too fast. I don't trust that. And so we have to judge the market costly of what are the consumers, what's their speed, and what are their expectations. Yeah. And as long as we match that well, then we can really have a lot of success with it.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Absolutely. That was a very good point. Well, really good stuff, Nick. I've enjoyed this, I've enjoyed the research, I've enjoyed integrating AI. Although I'm in the infancy of it, my head is spinning with possibilities. Now, as soon as we close out this episode, I'm gonna go execute some more AI into my business. Any final thoughts as we wrap up here?

SPEAKER_02 30:56

Yeah, again, I I think I would just remind everyone the reality of artificial intelligence and technology being part of our daily lives is here. Trying to fight it isn't gonna do any good. Ignoring it, put your head in the sand doesn't do you any good. But also it doesn't, you don't have to be the, you know, the smartest person in the room. You don't have to be understand how all the coding works and how the process works. You just have to understand in a real way how do I take the tools that are available to me and utilize them in my business to create more awareness, more brand loyalty, more connection to my customers. That's all that matters. Now, if I can do that, I'm going to have a lot of success. And I'm going to see levels of success that I could never have achieved without using these tools.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Efficiency. How can we get better? How can we build something bigger, more profit, right? More efficient, be more effective. At the end of the day, isn't that what we're all looking for inside of our business and inside our lives? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:52

And this is the part, I guess my final thoughts are I'm excited about the days where I could save so much time that I have more time not to run my business, but I have more time to enjoy the business that I've created and enjoy the time with the things I want to spend time on. My family and travel and doing all those things. So that's what I'm excited about. Instead of having to take, you know, four hours and wrap stuff up and look up all the details. Let AI do some of that work so you can get done working earlier, have a great running business, and enjoy your life.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

That's ultimately the goal of technology. Absolutely. Speaking of that, this has been fun, but getting back to my family, it is uh time to cook some tacos, feed the animals. Nick, this has been fun. Another great episode. That is a wrap. Thanks for listening to the Your Brand Your Backyard Podcast. I'm Jeremy Rentz. And I'm Nick Mathee. Be sure to like, follow, and subscribe. And tune into the next episode. More great content coming soon.