Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

 Is Artificial Intelligence, The Lever You Need To Save Your Business With Amos Schwartzfarb

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Episode 376

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this episode, we delve into the practical application of AI in business with our insightful guest, Amos Schwartzfarb, a seasoned entrepreneur with a knack for methodical business acceleration.

Amos shares his perspective on integrating AI into business processes, underscoring a strategic approach over a wholesale AI takeover. He emphasizes the importance of identifying bottlenecks and opportunities within your business before selecting the right AI tools to address those specific needs. By doing so, businesses can avoid the common pitfall of using AI as a one-size-fits-all solution and instead, leverage it to enhance existing processes.

Notable Quotes:

  • "AI is still new and nascent enough that it is, people are still forming their opinions and that includes me." - [Amos Schwartzfarb]
  • "When you're passionate about solving the problem, the 'I only work well under pressure' doesn't even exist." - [Amos Schwartzfarb]
  • "AI can fill in that gap. But I'd love to get your perspective on that is like how, before we jump into AI, how can someone identify the parts of their business that they can accelerate, automate, or focus on first before they choose the tool?" - [Jonathan Green]

Amos emphasizes that true success lies in focusing on one or two critical aspects of your business at a time, rather than spreading efforts too thin across multiple fronts. He advocates for a disciplined approach to business strategy, akin to the methodology presented in his book, *Levers*, which helps entrepreneurs prioritize and measure impactful actions.

Connect with Amos Schwartzfarb:

Amos introduces his concept of "Vibe Coding," a brainstorming method that allows for quick ideation and evaluation of potential business innovations. He underscores the importance of human decision-making in the AI landscape, where technology serves to support, rather than replace, strategic business thinking.

If you're intrigued by how AI can strategically enhance your business processes and wish to avoid the common traps of misapplication, this episode is a must-listen!

Connect with Jonathan Green

Is artificial intelligence, the lever you need to save your business? Let's find out today with our very special guest, Amos Schwartzfarb. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, where we make AI simple, practical, and accessible for small business owners and leaders. Forget the complicated T talk or expensive consultants. This is where you'll learn how to implement AI strategies that are easy to understand and can make a big impact for your business. The Artificial Intelligence Podcast is brought to you by fraction aio. The trusted partner for AI Digital Transformation at fraction A IO, we help small and medium sized businesses boost revenue by eliminating time wasting non-revenue generating tasks that frustrate your team. With our custom AI bots, tools and automations, we make it easy to shift your team's focus to the tasks that matter most. Driving growth and results, we guide you through a smooth. Seamless transition to ai ensuring you avoid costly mistakes and invest in the tools that truly deliver value. Don't get left behind. Let fraction aio o help you stay ahead in today's AI driven world. Learn more. Get started. Fraction aio.com. Now Amos, before we dive into our conversation, I always like to give our listeners like a clear roadmap of the incredible value they're about to receive. For those people turning in right now, who are, what are they gonna learn over the next 20 minutes or so and why are they absolutely need to listen to this episode? I think that there, aI is still new and nascent enough that it is, people are still forming their opinions and that includes me. I think things are evolving fairly rapidly. That being said I feel fortunate that I was very early on in being able to interact with founders. With people that were involved with the creation of some of the early products that we're all using now. And just exposed to a lot of things really early in, in the birth of this. And I've had a lot of these deep conversations for. Honestly, close to 10 years already. So while I don't, I still think that there's lots and lots to learn and lots of opinions that will evolve. I do think I have a long history of perspective and talking people off of different ledges through that perspective. Yeah, a lot of people kind of approach AI holistically, either my whole business is ai. I need to replace every employee with ai, I need every AI tool. And you have this approach that's more methodical of which is very intriguing to me, which is look at your business and look at where are the bottlenecks or where are the pieces that you can accelerate, where are the opportunities? Because what can often happen, especially when you're like working as a solepreneur yourself, is you work on the wrong thing. So you always work on a website. You don't have any visitors or work on traffic, you don't have an offer. And it's that different components of a business and figuring out what is, if I could accelerate one component, what would make the biggest difference? And that's where I see AI is useful. You go, okay, this is where. AI can accelerate this part the way in the past, an employee could, but I don't, the challenge of hiring employee is sometimes I need the employee to accelerate, but I don't have the money to pay the employee until after I do the acceleration. It's like a chicken and egg thing. And now AI can fill in that gap. But I'd love to get your perspective on that is like how, before we jump into ai, how can someone identify the parts of their business that they can accelerate, automate, or focus on first before they choose the tool? I love, I love that question. And what I find really interesting about that question is it, I think it starts with I'll say like basic human, basic humanity, which is, or basic human nature. Think about every founder or almost every founder out there, I won't say every, but almost every founder out there, every CEO or every visionary. They want to do a lot of things. They're usually really high capacity people, high output people, trying to accomplish a lot of things. And just like separately from ai, one of the things that I believe philosophically is that. Really maniacal focus on one or two things in your business are critical to being successful over time. Getting things to repeatability and then moving to the next critical thing, and not trying to tackle more than one or two things at a time ever. So like just understand philosophically that's where I'm coming from. And I think basic human nature is mine too, even though it's, my philosophy is there's eight things in front of me. Let me go do them all. So to answer your question, what I think I, I think there's a human step. That comes before it, perhaps AI can be helpful with, but ultimately the human has to make the decision, which is what are the, what is either the most critical thing in my business that I need to solve, or what is the thing that is not critical, but taking up a lot of my time and let me see how I can use this technology to help me do that better. Rather than saying oh, I'm gonna get AI in my business and it's gonna do everything for me. It's gonna do my marketing, it's gonna do my sales. Like even saying it's gonna do my marketing is way too broad. Say, okay, what about marketing? Do you think AI can help you do better? And breaking it down to the most specific granular thing and say, great. Can we find a way to use a technology to speed up and or enhance the thing that we're doing or want to do better than we're doing it now? I think that we are so excited by new tools and every time there's a new chat GPT version or clawed version, everyone gets excited goes, why haven't you tested and switched everything over to this new tool? I'm like I, when there's an update to the OS for my computer, I'll wait at least six months because. I've done that before where you update it first and it tells you, and then it goes, oh, by the way, half the software, everything here doesn't work yet.'cause it's not updated. And it's then there's no benefit to me because I don't care if my windows are slightly rounder. I don't use any of those new features ever because I don't have time for that. And it's the same thing. It's yeah, it's new, but that just means we haven't figured out where the weaknesses are. And every model and every tool is good and bad at different things. And I haven't talked about if I buy a hammer that I'm looking for something to nail. So once you buy. A tool, then you wanna justify that I purchased and start using it. And it is this important thing to look at each part of your business and say what do I wanna accelerate? Or where am I caught in a gap? And it's taking that problem solving first, which is like first, which is the problem then, which is the type of tool. Because if you go to the store to buy a hammer, there's 50 different types of hammers. There's sledge hammers and mallets and nail hammers and ball pen hammers and all, I'm sure 50 other kinds. I don't know the names of that. All do different things and solve different purposes. If you get the wrong kind of hammer, it won't solve your problem, and I see that. It's really exciting and people always like if you're using the AI from two weeks ago, you're living in the past. And I see this a lot in startups as well, where they do something really cool but they don't solve a problem or accelerate process that is do something really cool. And the problem with that is that's a first expense to go out the window when a company is doing their audit of their expenses. And that means as soon as the startup money goes out, you'll go outta business. And this is the same thing that. It's very important is to have a process, and most people are familiar with kind of the negative processes which keep removing the things that don't work, which is the 80 20 rule. Look what you did this week. 80% of waste time, wasted time, 20% of it generated revenue, just stick to that 20%, and then the next week you do the same thing and eventually you find those parts of your business that are the most important. But is there a way to do it faster than trial and error and just keep eliminating the bad steps? I. I think that, to me, the answer to that question and I think this is like for me, stepping back and how I think about what AI will do for us, not just in the short term, but in the long term, is I think greater. Artificial intelligence, and I use ChatGPT this way, which is help me understand the landscape of decisions that I have to make. Help me understand the details. Let me ask you questions that will allow me to research things faster and get to some options that perhaps I might not have thought of on my own. However, the human still is the one. One, making the decision, what am I gonna ask about? What am I trying to solve? And the human can take the recommendation, but the human still has to take that recommendation and then make that recommendation and then do it. And so I think the answer to your question comes back to the human recognizing the, that I can't actually do everything. I might be able to do more faster. I might be able to do more, faster, better, but I still can't do everything. And using a, different frameworks and we can talk about, the frameworks that I use, but like different frameworks to say, what is the thing that I'm actually trying to solve today? What is the 20% that matters? Or why am I stuck in the 80% and does it actually make sense to see if some of the 80% can go away so that I can focus more on the 20% that actually matters? Yeah. What I find, and one of the things that's interesting to me is like the phases of entrepreneurship. There's the entrepreneurship who still has their full-time jobs. You have two hours a day to work so you're so efficient 'cause you only got those two hours after work before you go to bed. And as soon as you make enough money to stop working, now you've got eight hours a day and suddenly you go, oh, I've got all day. And like your efficiency plummets. And this is the challenge of working from home and the challenge of working in a non-restricted environment. There's so many people that say oh, I only thrive under pressure. And they like do nothing until there's a pressure moment, and it is hard. It's the same thing of, like you said, a financial goal. Whatever your goal is, if you hit it for that month on the first day, then you like slack for the next 29 days until the next month starts. So let's talk a little bit about your system or how you approach it. How do you overcome these challenges to where you can look at yourself objectively, which is one of the hardest things to do. Yeah. If you don't mind, I'll step back to what you just said.'cause I find it fascinating and largely true and like when I hear people say, I only work well under pressure, to me it signals, it could signal a couple of different things, but to to bundle, what it signals to me is what do you actually care about? Do you care about solving the problem? Do you really, are you passionate about the thing you're doing or are you. Chasing something else. And the reason I say that is because I believe when you're passionate about solving the problem, the I only work well under pressure is doesn't even exist. It's you're passionate about what you're doing. You're jumping in and like you can't think of doing anything else. It's you're obsessed with. And so I, I don't know that, I don't know that AI solves that ever. To answer your question, and I, it's a little bit of a plug, but I wrote a book called Levers. And the intention of levers is to identify the things that are most important in your business at any given moment. Help prioritize those things and help understand how you measure them. And so for me. It is always the same. Now, I've been using this framework for a decade, for more than a decade. It's, taking the time. And I do this for myself. I do this for my business, and I do this for my music business, literally monthly, which is, I'm going through some light form of the process because I can run through it very quickly after a decade and saying what actually matters right now and if it and if it isn't one of the top two or three things, I literally put it on a different list and I don't look at it until I'm done with those two or three things. And then I'll say, okay. What do I have time for now? And going back to like my previous statement, which is. The things that I feel fortunate, but the things that I work on, I am so obsessed with that. It is really easy for me to go and say yeah, this is one thing on a list, but this one thing might take me a month to figure out. Maybe it'll be faster now, thanks to being able to do, more rapid research and get more optionality through some of the systems that, the programs that are out there. But to me that's the trick, which is like, founders, you, I don't care if you're. A hundred million dollar company. Although if you're a hundred million dollar company, you've learned this lesson already. You can only do a couple of things. Once pick the one that matters. Yeah. I see this in a lot of small business, especially if you start off consulting or trying to your revenue. If someone goes, what do you do? And you go whatever you want. You go broad because there's this feeling that I don't wanna leave. And you hear this phrase, don't leave money on the table. And as you go further outside of your expertise, maybe that client pays you a little bit more money, but then as you get into stuff you're not as good at, then you have losing the entire project anyways. Or you aren't the specialist. Like the specialist always gets paid more. The surgeon gets paid more than the general practitioner end. The same thing. I see these companies that have so many services or so many these tools that do everything, everyone wants to make the everything tool, and it's that's boring then, right? When I was a kid, yeah. All the internet meant AOL. Nobody wants to go back to that with another everything. Like we don't wanna go back to the past. That was back in the days when every time you got an email, the computer made a noise. Can you imagine? If you heard you got mail, every time you got a message you would go insane. Email used to be exciting. Now it's not. So it is this, challenge for people to narrow their focus. And I think you're exactly right, which is that we make these massive lists of all the things we have to do and it's which things matter? And what I see this is say myself when I started out 15 years ago, is that I would get emotionally invested in non-revenue generating tasks. And this is a thing I think AI can help with is like instead of spending forever making a sales page or forever putting the button in the perfect spot, you can get good enough. To move past that before you become emotion investing. Because I remember back when I started, I was HTML and I was bad at it. You'd spend an entire day just to make an opt-in page or a landing page. Now you can do it with AI in 30 seconds. So there is one of the values there, but you get stuck doing things that. Matter to you, and then you ask your customers. I've done so many things that like, I think improve my customer experience and then nobody cares. You add a feature like I added where all of my coaching calls were searchable by keywords. You could see when I'd answer a certain question. No one ever used it. No one cared, ever. It's been like. So much time processing all the videos and uploading them and yeah. This is a, it's a little bit tangential, but you're stumbling onto something that a, belief that I, I hold really strongly now having vibe coded a whole bunch. And I'm not a product person. I know just enough to like, be able to sit down and take what's in my head and get there is that there, there are certain roles that have always been important that I think are going to become more important. And the one that you're just describing, which is the great. Product person. So this isn't the person that can come up with the idea. That person is still needs to exist. But the pers like vibe coding is such a good example of this because I'm not a product person. I'm a salesperson and an operator. I've been around enough product people to understand the kinds of things that need to happen, but I don't know how to actually do it. So when I'm vibe coding, I'm like, I'm not a great product person. Like it's taking me 10 times. As long as it would take a great product person to say what you're describing, what actually matters. How do I do the research and talk to a person that is actually gonna be a user to see yeah, that we can come up. AI can come up with a thousand cool ideas. It doesn't mean any of them are actually gonna be something your client cares about. Yeah, and I think that this is a step a lot of people actually try to bypass now where they want AI to do all their social media and all their comments and handle their email. Yeah. If you don't talk to anybody, you create a room of one person where you have ideas and there's no one to tell you that's a bad idea and we don't have any extra influences, that's when you can end up locking into a bad idea. I've certainly done that and I think that we are, we let go of that critical element, which is ask your customers what they want and then give it to them. And when we bypass that, when we, that's when we start to go down these rabbit holes. And unfortunately AI will let us go all the way down because the AI will always tell you, you have a good idea. It will never say, John, that's a terrible idea. Don't do that.'cause it's not allowed to. It's got this guardrail on it. So I think that's a really critical element and I'd love the creativity that Vibe coding gets you to like brainstorm your ideas and see what they look like on paper and then experience them. And it's it's true because the AI doesn't understand the customer experience or when a button can be confusing or when it puts a button in the wrong place, which happens all the time.'cause it's logical to a computer. It's not logical to a person. And the one of the things I find fascinating is like economists always. Plan everything as though everyone makes the most logical decisions. So it's have you ever been to a mall? Are you kidding me? Nobody makes logical financial or monetary decisions. That's why their models are always wrong. And it's the same problem with AI is it doesn't factor in that people don't always do the smartest or most logical or most strategic thing. They do what they feel like there's an emotional element that they don't capture, and it is so critical to think about. What does my customer want? Which is often more important than what do they need? Yeah, totally agree. So when you're thinking about. Planning out a process and if someone wants to start implementing this process and going, you know what, let me look at what's a waste of time. It's very hard to be self-reflective in the same way Harvey to write a sales page about myself. It's easy to write it for someone else because I could be objective. Whereas it's talk about how good you are is really strange. How do you, or how can someone develop the skill of being self-reflective objectively to say, this is something that I wanna do, but that's not useful for my business. Yeah. I think, the question you're asking is, I think it's both a, an operationally tactical question, but also a little bit of a psychological question. And I really think it starts with the person being honest with themselves that they want to learn how to be open-minded. And, there's an expression that I'm sure you've heard before, but it's, have strong convictions held loosely. I am a firm believer in that philosophy, which is take the time to develop a strong opinion, understand why you have that strong opinion, and hold onto it just loosely enough so that Jonathan has something else that's different. I can hear. What you're saying, I can ask you questions to understand your why, and then I can collect all of that information to form potentially a new and ideally better point of view. So I think it's, I think it's a combination of a couple of things. So that's a psychological point of it, which is first you gotta be open-minded. Like people can say they're open-minded, but actually be open-minded. And then I think it, there's a, there, there, there's, probably 10,000 or maybe thousand, a hundred different ways to do this. But I think the way that I think about it is I, particularly when it comes to a businesses, I'm like, okay, let's identify. And the less is there should be more than one person in the room. Let's identify what we collectively agree are the most important things to drive the business forward and agree what needs to happen in order to drive the business forward. Do doing one of those things and hit one level down from that, what is actually gonna happen and who's gonna do it. Because usually it's oh, we have to do a better job at, acquisition through marketing channels. That's a really broad statement, so it's a great start. Great. We're gonna focus on, digital acquisition through marketing channels. Fantastic. What does that actually mean? Let's break it down to something very specific or multiple specific things. Let's define who is gonna do what by when. And then let's put some measures against it to say, are we making any progress? And I think this is a really important element that a lot of people miss, which is, if you've got a list of, say 10 things that you believe can all be impactful, pick one, do it. Learn, then do the second one. And people are that's gonna slow me down. I'm gonna move much slower. Yeah. But you're gonna know what's working. You're gonna know what's not working. You're not gonna get false positives or negatives 'cause you're doing competing things. You're gonna be able to be maniacally focused and ultimately you're gonna get through the entire list and learn a whole bunch. And maybe you won't make it through the entire list because you're gonna learn a whole bunch of things along the way that are gonna give you better ideas or you're gonna learn more quickly. This isn't the way to go. Yeah. I think that. Focus is so critical and the other challenge, a lot of people, especially like entrepreneurs or working from home, have this idea that your passions, your business, or if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life and it's yeah, I love my job. I still do a lot of stuff. I don't wanna do the component that's the most valuable I get in my business. The thing that generates the most revenue is when I go through my entire business and just check every step in the flow, every piece of automation, and I optimize everything. It's not a fun week, it's my, it used to be optimization day, but now it takes a week to find all the problems. I do it about every three or four months, three or four times a year, and I look. Is there somewhere where people get a series of emails and then they end up like in a cul-de-sac, they don't move to the next sequence. Is there an email that has a broken link in it? All these different parts of the business? Is there somewhere where the phone number's broken or is there a step that's broken in? Everything you think you fixed three months ago, you always find something and optimization is the least fun. No one's excited by it. No one's excited. Hey, today we're gonna analyze everything and look at every piece of code and look for every mistake we've had, but it always boosts the revenue. It ends up long-term making a huge difference in the business more than anything else. There's almost a correlation between the more boring something is and the more impact it has on your business, like the more time you spend strategizing. It's funny, we say measure twice, cut once, but now we, nobody makes business plans anymore. No one strategizes and we skip those steps because you don't have to, because you don't have to go to a bank to get a loan to start a business. Now you can start it on your own and we. It's even amazing. I know a lot of people that like do the fundraising angle and they go through that and then there's no due diligence if you don't ask for too much money. They just don't check. So you just don't have a plan then it's wild. So it is this, I think it's a really important step no matter what phase your business is in small business, large business, to look at it and go, we need to be strategic with what we're doing.'cause that, what I've seen is sometimes people, I've seen this small big business where they go, we need to diversify. And it's and you launch seven new projects at the same time, and like all of them fail because none of 'em get enough attention. Yes. And in those cases, often what happens too is that not only do they not get enough attention, but because they haven't gone through the rigor of saying, what in my business actually works? And let's take that and put a casing around it so that continues to go and carve out. Resources, whether it's people or money or both to test these other things. They're commingling the things and you end up hurting often end up hurting the core businesses along the way too, instead of saying we've got this thing we need to preserve and we need to be additive to it, and let's pick, and to your point, let's pick the thing. And if the thing doesn't work, we have the next thing on the list. And I think a lot of people operate from fear. If I don't do all seven, I don't have optionality, I'm not gonna move fast enough. I might miss something. And the reality is like to what you said, if you've got 10 hours in a day and there's 10 things, you're giving each an hour, don't fool yourself. If you've got 10 hours in a day and you've got one thing, you can give it 10 hours. Yeah. It's this. One of the lessons I learned re a couple years ago was really good is that you only have so much focus. If you learn one thing, it's gonna take you three months. Great. We try to learn two things that each take three months. You're not gonna master either for at least six months. It'll probably take eight. It'll probably take totally longer. And we see people trying to do this, their businesses trying to do this we're adding this and this and this. And I'm like, I'm gonna learn Facebook ads and I'm gonna launch a podcast, and I'm gonna start a blog and I'm gonna learn SEO. And it's you won't be good at any of them for three years because you're trying to learn too many things. And so it is this necessary step of. Doing something until you master it, then doing the next thing until you master it. Linear learning, which is a challenge for a lot of people because it's not as exciting, but yeah. In 10 years. Totally. And that's why, and that's why I say what I usually say is like two to three things is okay. Never more than three because I think you're right. I think there, I think that there's a, it's one, it is hard to stay maniacally focused on a single thing. And also there needs to be some space given to that thing. So that it's just like you're, when you go lift weights, you shouldn't go lift the same muscle group every single day. You've gotta give your muscles time to literally learn and rebuild. Like you've gotta give your spa your brain space to say okay, let me process this. Let me learn. Let me ingrain it into who I am. I'll do one thing else and that might inform this other thing that I'm doing and then I can do it better. But I a hundred percent agree with you. Yeah. That's amazing. I think this is could be helpful for a lot of people who are tempted to think, use AI to solve every problem. It's like you have to choose what you wanna focus on and then add other tools to implement it. And for people who wanna see more about what you're doing, maybe wanna learn more about your book. Where are the best places to find you online and kinda see the projects you're working on. Yeah, probably the best place places LinkedIn these days. Yeah I post pretty much everything I'm doing on there. Perfect. We'll put the link right below the video and in the show notes and that's where we met as well. So thank you so much for being here for another amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Monday with more tips and strategies on how to leverage AI to grow your business and achieve better results. In the meantime, if you're curious about how AI can boost your business' revenue, head over to artificial intelligence pod.com. Slash calculator, use our AI revenue calculator to discover the potential impact AI can have on your bottom line. It's quick, easy, and might just change the way. 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