The Human-AI Partnership: Barry Rosen Discusses Digital Evolution

AI for Small Business: Policies, Training, and ROI-Driven Automation

In this podcast episode, Barry introduces his full-service digital marketing agency and AI-focused consultancy, drawing on a background that includes a film degree, about 20 years at IBM as a product manager, and business consulting. He recaps his expo session on ChatGPT and AI for small business owners, emphasizing why businesses should care about AI and warning that employees may already be using it without guardrails, creating risk around PII and proprietary data; he offers a free internal AI usage policy template. Barry explains “AI-enabled” as using AI to improve daily work, sharing a workflow using Read.ai transcripts and ChatGPT as a sales coach and to generate meeting decks, while keeping humans in the loop. He outlines his methodology: baseline assessment, customized training, mapping tasks step-by-step, identifying automation opportunities, selecting off-the-shelf vs custom tools, and estimating ROI, plus establishing an internal AI council for ongoing strategy, adoption, customer communication, and talent attraction. He closes by urging businesses to use AI not only for cost savings but also to create new revenue-generating offerings from customer data insights.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Barry, thank you so much for swinging by and participating in our little podcast sessions. Thank you. Um, super excited to chat with you today about a lot of things. But first and foremost, would love you to just introduce to our audience who you are and a little bit about what you do, and then we'll talk about the expo and and all that good stuff.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Yesterday was great, had a lot of amazing conversations. Good. I had a speaking session. So I have a full-service digital marketing agency. Fantastic. And my approach is more like a business consultant. That's my background. Love it. I have a background in IT. I actually studied film. So I got a film degree at University of Texas. This is my third career. I worked at IBM for about 20 years as a product manager. So working with marketing and sales in the enterprise space and got to travel all over the world and meet different kinds of customers and all different industries. Yeah. So what I'm doing today is I have a digital marketing agency and we're really leaning into AI. So everything that we do is AI enabled and helps me do my job. And then we also have an AI consultancy. So focused around education and training as well as coming in and solving your problems using using AI or automation. And because we're agnostic, we're not vendor specific, we are doing what's best for the customer. We're looking at what is the outcome that you're trying to achieve and then assessing the tools that are available and telling you here's the best tools, here's the ROI that you can expect, or here's something that needs to be custom built.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

That's fantastic. I have so many questions. We are going to come back to all of that because you just said like seven things that I want to probe into.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Excellent.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Tell me a little bit about what you spoke about at the expo and sort of what your big takeaway for folks was.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Yeah, so I had a very general session about Chat GPT and AI for small business owners. Okay. And so it is a little bit of a learning and an educational type of session, starting with why do you need to care about AI? What is AI? How you can use it in your business. But what I really also focus it on is that if you're not using AI, your employees probably are. If you do not have an internal usage policy on what is permissible for your organization, then you're probably exposing yourself to risk. And so I have a free template in my session as a starting point. Awesome. So you just have to be careful. You don't want to put PII in there. And you don't know what people are putting if they're using their personal Chat GPT accounts, if they're putting customer information, if they're putting company information in there that's proprietary, that could then be used by your competitors against you. So even if you're not using it, you've got to make sure that the people around you who are understand the guardwells on how to use it correctly.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Yeah. I love that I love that foundation setting approach that you seem to be taking because especially in small business, I do think there's this big sense of overwhelm. Because they they don't have the same kind of resources, they don't have the same kind of access. There's probably a lot of confusion, a lot of fear.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Yes. And that's kind of what I'm trying to do is do a little bit of education. Yeah. And then explain some things. And then the other thing is tell them about our approach. And we start with education. We talk about why things fail, why projects fail, and we really focus on training and upskilling and then customer management and in-user management and change management to make sure that whatever you implement is then successful.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Yeah, it's a whole ecosystem of approach.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

It's not like you go out and you pay $29.99 for a tool and boom, it's all everyone uses it and it's great and everyone understands it and they use it properly.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

Yeah, that is such a great model. You said something earlier that I wanted to revisit and see if you could help unpack a little bit because we hear it a lot. I mean, AI is it's an elephant in the room and it's the buzzword, and everybody's talking about it, and everybody's trying to do it. You mentioned you mentioned AI enabled. Yep. And then yesterday I heard AI first, and I, you know, there's all of these sort of AI fill in the blank. What do you think small businesses should really be thinking about when they hear those those terms? What does it mean when they say first enabled?

SPEAKER_01 4:24

So, you know, that's a great question, and that's part of what we do as we come in and help people. We're like the Sherpas. There, you come to this conference, everything is AI. Right. And so, and that doesn't mean it's good or bad, but we do is we kind of break through the hype and we'll tell you what is going to help you and what is not going to help you. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what it's called. Is it a solution that's right for your business? And so that's kind of what we're doing. So, but for you know, for me, what AI enable means is we're using AI ourselves in the agency to do our daily tasks. So I use AI in multiple forms and during the day. For example, I think of it as an expert sales coach in my pocket. So I use a tool called Read AI, which is a meeting recording tool. And that way I can really pay attention to the customer and I don't have to take notes. And I also have a transcript afterwards of the call. Yeah. And I'll take the transcript and I'll put it in a chat GPT and say, You are the world's best sales coach. I just had a call with this customer. Here is the industry that they're in. Here's what we were talking about. Give me an evaluation, tell me what I did very well, tell me what I did wrong, tell me how I can improve and give me actionable steps to move this deal forward. And then I've done this over time, and then I can say, hey, look, over the last three months, what are some blind spots that I have that I'm missing going into these calls that if I work on, I can up my game because you've got all these transcripts over time. So it'll give me details. And one of the things that it told me was, hey, empathy, you're very technical. You jump into the technical, but like talk to the customer about the pain, go through that pain funnel, identify the pain, and then make sure that you help them understand how you can solve that pain as well.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

So, and I was really insightful to have, I'm like, wow, I never would have known that if I didn't have a coach looking at my transcripts and telling me that feedback. So now I have notes going in my call saying, like, find the pain, you know, so I can I can go in, so I have my blind spots identified and I can work on those as well. That's awesome. And then it helps me with outputs as well. So then I take the transcript from that first discovery call and I have a format for the next call. And I say, here's what the topics, here's the you know, the d agenda for the deck. Build the deck for the next meeting based on this call where I've asked the questions, what are your pain points? What are your goals? What are you trying to achieve? And then I just put that in the next meeting. Here were your pain points, here were your goals. Are these correct? Did I miss anything? And so it just helps me with that process and speed up that process.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Yeah, I love what you were saying about it being it's it's essentially your supportive agent, right? It is there to 100% make sure that all of the wonderful things you're doing are at their peak.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

It's a delegation, yeah. It's not it's to supplement what I'm doing and help me improve and do it quicker and more efficiently and save that time so I can focus on doing it. And well, the other thing that we say is embrace human. You've got to be the human in the loop as well. You can't just take the output and put it out there. So, you know, it's 80% there, but you take it and then you make it your own. But that 80% is so huge that saves you hours or however much time that can get you to that point, and then you customize it for that customer, for that task, or for whatever you're doing. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

I have had I work with a lot of small businesses that i they they have that misconception that this is not intended to remove your human resources. Yes, this is intended to supplement and support so that they can continue to be their best and focused, frankly, in the things that they are really, really good at. Yes. Where they're maybe wasting time on things that they now can offload elsewhere.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

And I think the easiest way to think about that is Microsoft put a study about the enterprise of the future. And if you think about an enterprise organization where you have a director and then you've got reports, and what do they do? He's delegating tasks to his reports so they can go and do it. They flow the information back, he makes the decisions that he can go and go to the board or whoever and come with the right data so that he can go and present that. So what you're gonna be doing is delegating those types of tasks to agents, to AI agents. They'll be your workers. So you'll be a director or a manager of a team, but instead of humans, it will be agents who are maybe answering email or booking your calendar or qualifying leads or you know, whatever your repetitive tasks are, so that you can focus on what is the quality that you bring to your customer, what is the value that you bring to your customer, creating new offerings based on the feedback that you're getting, giving them the value, giving them the one-on-one that that they deserve. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

Yeah. You talked about the the education piece that's so important, and we're all learning all at the same time right now, oh yeah, as we go. Oh yeah. Once you get to sort of that critical, at least tip of the spear education piece completed, how do you go through that process of sort of helping organizations identify the the problem, right? They've expressed their pain, but then it's like, what do you do next to decide how to approach the problem?

SPEAKER_01 9:59

That's a great question. So we have a methodology that we use, and so the first thing that we do on the training is we'll do a baseline, then we'll train them, and then so we want to make sure that we understand where they're at, so then we can set the goals of where we want them to be. Yeah. So it's customized. And then what we'll do is say, what are your biggest pain points? And say, you know, what is a repetitive task that are taking you a lot of time? Is it something that's in operations? Is it something that's in marketing? Is it something in sales? And then what we'll do is we will literally take that task and break it down step by step on a Miro board where we're literally documenting each step, and then we'll go back and evaluate that and say, all right, which of these steps can be automated, which are repetitive, which have an outcome that is always if X plus Y equals Z every time, we can do that. It's predictive, it's creating content. What are the things that we can automate? And then is there something off the shelf that we can use that exists, or is this a custom solution? And then based on that, we would then make a recommendation, and then the customer can then make a decision based on that. And we would tell them, this is what we would estimate your ROI if you implemented this solution, because right now it takes you this long to do this. If you do this and we automate that, we compress that timeline to this X that times X many employees. This is the salary you're paying them. This is your ROI for that solution. Yeah, and then they can make a decision does it make sense to automate it or have an AI solution? Because a lot of times there is confusion over automation and AI.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Right. Oh my gosh, yeah, absolutely. And that's the thing that I hear a lot is sort of this word soup, yeah, right, and creates confusion and creates friction and makes it really difficult when you're trying to actually make progress.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Yes. And AI can be added to automation, right? 100%. So it's kind of but they are separate entities.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

Yeah, absolutely. And that is, I think it's I I just I love the ethos that you have around the educating first to really pick out here's what we're here's what we're really talking about, and the clarity.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

And what we find is that helps make the solution stickier.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Because then people feel empowered to then use the solution rather than being told, go use this tool without being understanding what is the value, how do I use it, how does it fit into my routine, you know, how does it help me save time?

SPEAKER_00 12:28

Yeah. It's an interesting love the the human AI partnership and collaboration. I think that that that's only going to continue to become more important. I heard a fascinating conversation about the you know, the digital doppelgangers and where your professional resume is now going to include, you know, what are you bringing with you that you've crafted that's based on your expertise and your knowledge and your years of ex of experience doing something. And so I'm really fascinated to see where that goes, where you start to get asked, well, what are you who are you bringing with you uh to support the work we're doing?

SPEAKER_01 13:08

Absolutely. Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. And I think the other the other thing that we do that we want to do is we establish uh uh an AI council in the organization. So and we because it starts at the top. If you want your employees to adopt this, the leadership has to embrace it as well. Absolutely. And so, and because this is changing, this is not we come in once and set it and forget it. This is a living thing that is happening so quickly. They need to have people in the organization whose eyes are on that and then are thinking about that, and then they can set both the internal AI policies and then they can communicate externally to their customers. This is how we're embracing AI, this is what we're doing with your data with AI, so that they can clarify both their internal and external AI visions and strategies to their employees and to their customers as well.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

Yeah, and that's a great point you were talking about earlier around if you as an organization aren't using it, your employees probably are, and that can create all kinds of chaos if it's not managed correctly. And I think that's a really interesting thing. I I'm trying to remember, I want to say it was from a report that the Marketing AI Institute did, and they said something like So in the banking, 65% or something of marketing employees expressed that they weren't getting in-house training, they weren't give be get being given access, they weren't it wasn't, it was like we all want to do it, but we're not being shown the path.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Right. And so So that shows that they want it, yeah, but they just need the organization to make that clear to them. Yeah. Because if they don't have that, they're gonna fill that gap on their own and they're gonna do things to help themselves that absolutely may not be right for the organization, but they feel in the moment will be helpful to them to do things quicker or faster, which is fine as long as they're following the rules that you've and parameters that you've set for them, your guardrails.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Yeah, I think that's a a really forward-thinking approach for a lot of small businesses too. And it's and not just small businesses, but in B2B as well. Because I feel like we historically, at least in this industry space, we move slower. We're gonna we've got so much bureaucracy in our way, and right now those are gonna crush that speed element is really gonna be a big problem when we're so busy negotiating compliance and legal and all of those hoops that have their importance. Yeah, not saying they don't matter, but we have from a B2B perspective, those in those businesses that can be forward thinking with the council and with a policy to even just raise their hand and say we're having the conversation.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

And the other thing that this does is that when you're trying to hire and attract talent, that message goes to that talent that you're forward thinking as well. Absolutely. Because you have to think about that, you're trying to attract the best talent as a business owner, and you want to retain that talent as well. And so you want to make sure that they see that you're forward thinking because if you don't, they'll go to a competitor who is using AI, and that if they want to use AI, they'll go in to that competitor who is where they feel like they can advance their career. So that's another kind of side benefit to doing that as well, is you're now presenting your organization to potential employees as an AI forward thinking organization, which is attractive to them as well.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think I just thank you so much for sharing your your approach and your framework. I think it is it's the right way to do it from the sick from the seat that I'm in, especially in what I hear with with clients and and in the B2B space, I think you've nailed it.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

And I would leave you with one last nugget. I'll leave you with one last nugget. So, this is one thing that I'm kind of explaining to businesses as well, is I think the opportunity with AI. I think people are looking at how do we save money from an operational perspective? The reverse side of that, to kind of switch your mindset, is how can I create products based on the data that I have, knowing my customers, knowing their habits, knowing their preferences, knowing their pain points? How can I take that and create offerings catered towards them, which is now increasing my bottom line because I'm bringing in more revenue rather than just saving revenue on operations? So as a business owner, you want to be thinking both sides of that coin. How do I save money with AI from an operational perspective? But how can I get new streams of revenue? Because now I have all this data about my customers that I can either upsell, add new features, add new functions, or brand new offerings to the market based on the knowledge that I have about my customers, their pain points, how they like to buy things, how they, you know, what what they're willing to spend, price, all of this you now know as a business owner, and you can use AI to give you insights on your customers and help them solve their problems.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Yeah, that's such a good thing. That's like that's the mic drop moment. That was the last golden nugget right there. So great. Oh my gosh. I could we're gonna have to do this again because I'm here for so I want to ask more questions. Well, you know where to find me. Thank you so much.