[00:00:00] Ryan Stana: We use AI to enhance our creative capabilities, not replace them, which is really important. [00:00:06] Ron Platt: If we rely on it too much, our ability to create, our ability to think, our ability to problem solve becomes lessened and it dumbs us down. [00:00:16] Elizabeth Gearhart: I'm in a constant battle with these LLMs. [00:00:19] Joey Stiver: In some cases it can come off as just disingenuous a little bit like someone took a shortcut. [00:00:24] Richard Gearhart: I didn't look at it, so how do I even know it's right? And I'm losing skills because I'm letting ChatGPT do something that maybe I should be doing. [00:00:35] Elizabeth Gearhart: This is Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable with hosts Elizabeth Gearhart, podcast consultant, marketing expert and PhD researcher using AI every day. And Richard Gearhart, entrepreneur, seasoned business owner and intellectual property attorney specializing in innovation. Here's how real companies are using AI right now. [00:00:56] Richard Gearhart: And now it's time for Real AI [00:01:01] Elizabeth Gearhart: Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable. So I'm going to ask each of our guests one way that they're using AI, or if they're not using it, they can say that too. And then we're going to have a roundtable discussion about AI and maybe its uses. [00:01:15] Richard Gearhart: So am I supposed to get up and walk around the table since it's a roundtable discussion? [00:01:21] Elizabeth Gearhart: This is a rectangular table, so no. So I am going to start with Ryan Stana with RWSGlobal.com what is your most recent way that you're using AI in your business? [00:01:34] Ryan Stana: I would say our business is based on creativity. So we use AI to enhance our creative capabilities, not replace them, which is really important. So every story we tell, every experience we design is driven by that human insight, imagination and intent. But we're really then on the streamlining side of operations. We're using AI to speed up workflows and reduce that manual lift. Then it allows our team members to be able to have higher impact, do more meaningful work and also focus on that creative outcome. [00:02:15] Ron Platt: Excellent. [00:02:15] Elizabeth Gearhart: Yes. And Joey Stiver with joinamble.com, what's one way you're using AI? [00:02:21] Joey Stiver: AI has helped us work, work harder, faster, and perhaps more efficiently on the coding side, kind of the development and workflow like Brian said. On the patient facing side though, when someone comes to our website for care or they need to ask a question, that's the last thing they want to see, right? They don't want to feel like there's a barrier between connecting with a doctor, a care member or practitioner. So AI is like a big turn off when it comes to the patient experience on the front end of the website. And then I guess the third point is through my foundation, the Dismas Accelerator, we're actually using AI and leveraging that for individuals to teach them these kind of higher value skills so that hopefully they can go out into the workplace and leverage some AI or tech background to perhaps get a better job. [00:03:07] Elizabeth Gearhart: Yeah, that's excellent. So, ron Platt with NASDF.org what's one way you're using AI? [00:03:15] Ron Platt: When you are a solo entrepreneur, you have to come up with creative ideas quickly. And as creative as I am, sometimes when you reach out to AI and said, I need to put a commercial together that does this, or I need to put an ad together that does this and it gives you possibly better ways to market the product that you're trying because it sees it from a different perspective than you do. Especially if I'm going after family law firms or if I'm going after people who are getting a divorce or single families. Each one of them is a separate category and it helps me to clarify the marketing towards that specific category. So it has been helpful in that regard. My co founder absolutely hates it. I have to make sure she's not looking over my shoulder because then she gives me a whole lecture about it. But it has been helpful. [00:03:59] Richard Gearhart: What does she say? [00:04:00] Ron Platt: You could Google it or you could. There's other ways to research it. Do you know how much resources AI takes? And she's right. The amount of resources it does take, the amount of water it takes, the electricity, all the stuff I get it. And I do use it on a limited basis because I also don't want my own brain to rot. I like to know that I can still come up with creative ideas. But it does give me a different perspective that I might not see or that I might not have thought of and that I appreciate. [00:04:23] Richard Gearhart: Yeah, I think there's something to be said for using your brain. I like that idea. [00:04:28] Ron Platt: I think that a lot of times as we get more into AI, people are going to think less for themselves because they're going to rely on this piece of information to just think for them. So that maybe, well, I mean, it's too soon to realize it, but I think even when it comes to putting together a resume or it comes to kids with their reports these days, they're just going to AI to have the report written for them and they're losing the ability to learn how to write a proper report or how to do research. [00:04:54] Elizabeth Gearhart: We'll come back to that, Ron, because I do want to talk about that more But Richard Gearhart, what's one way you're using AI lately? [00:05:00] Richard Gearhart: Oh, I mean, we're looking for a new CFO and we are looking for somebody who's good at financial modeling and projecting. And so we've talked with some people, we've asked them to give us redacted spreadsheets showing their modeling. Right. And trying to grow the law firm. And instead of actually like looking at the models, I just plug them into an LLM and I say which of these models best reflects what, you know, would happen at Gearhart Law and what we would need to do in order to scale the business? And it does a comparison analysis. I don't even look at it. So on the one hand I think that's great, but to Ron's point, I didn't look at it. So how do I even know it's right? And it needs to be double checked. I'm losing skills because I'm letting ChatGPT do something that maybe I should be doing. I don't know. [00:05:57] Elizabeth Gearhart: So anyway, for me, Elizabeth Gearhart with Gear Media Studios, which I'm going to be calling Gear Media Labs, I think eventually, because I've been doing all this research. I've been doing all this research, but I'm giving a presentation in July. It's kind of a basic presentation on how to use AI for this certain group that I'm speaking to. But I thought I should put a little bit about AI visibility in there for them. Anyway, so I've been doing this research and using Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT and getting their information, putting it in my own insights from being CMO for Gearhart Law. And I'm having them look at the presentation and give me feedback like, what do you think? Well, I have one slide in there and that they all hate and they're all like, take that slide out. I'm like, no. And it's a slide on AI slob. I went through with Gemini and I got this whole explanation of yes, these directories help a lot with LLM search, et cetera. And then I decided to try it for myself. So I put in a couple people, one that was in a directory, the one that wasn't. And I had the answer engines look at them and say, which one is better? And then I said, did this person being in a directory affect your opinion at all? They're like, no, very little. So then I went back to look for the Gemini string where had told me all this stuff and was gone. And I had copied it into a Word document. So I put that into Gemini and I said, find this. It's like, well, you erased it. I'm like, no, I didn't. It was crazy. [00:07:29] Richard Gearhart: Wow. [00:07:30] Elizabeth Gearhart: I know. [00:07:31] Richard Gearhart: That's pretty devious. [00:07:33] Elizabeth Gearhart: So these things they do have, but I think there's humans reading some of this. [00:07:38] Richard Gearhart: Oh, really? [00:07:39] Ryan Stana: But if there is human oversight, that's a lot of work on humans to expand. [00:07:44] Ron Platt: Sometimes you can type in, hello, is anybody there? And see what kind of response you get. [00:07:51] Elizabeth Gearhart: Which one do you guys like to use the Most? [00:07:54] Ron Platt: I use ChatGPT. It gets to a point where it says if you want more, you have to pay for it. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not there yet. I'll go to another one. But ChatGPT is already beginning to know my business model. So when I ask a question, it goes back to my company and it says it might be pertinent for this or whatever. So keep sticking with the same one at this point. [00:08:11] Ryan Stana: Yeah. And same with myself with ChatGPT. But as far as a business holistically, we're in the process of only allowing one program internationally that can be used for our employees on our employee own devices. [00:08:26] Elizabeth Gearhart: And is that going to be chatgpt? [00:08:29] Ryan Stana: I actually have no idea. It is in the midst of finalizing all of that right now. [00:08:34] Elizabeth Gearhart: Okay. [00:08:35] Joey Stiver: I think personally on my phone, I have Perplexity where I can click the side of the phone button and the Perplexity app pops up. I started as a chat user, got the business chat. I think I'm slowly graduating and evolving into cloud, but I think they each have a best use case and each have a little bit of upside. [00:08:53] Elizabeth Gearhart: They do. What about you, Rich? [00:08:55] Richard Gearhart: Well, it depends what mood I'm in. If I'm in a serious business mood, then probably Clot or perplexity. If I need a little shoring up, I'll go to ChatGPT and it'll tell me everything I do is wonderful. You're acting like a pro. Only a pro would ask a question like that. [00:09:12] Elizabeth Gearhart: Yeah, so for me, I use them all for different purposes. So for something that's really deep research, that's more mathematically oriented, or to generate like, schema code, I'll use Claude and. But I do like ChatGPT for image generation. I don't know if you guys have tried it for that lately, but it's gotten really good. And then I do a lot with video because of everything that we do. And Gemini is better for that. Gemini gives you the most tokens and it handles video best. So I use all three of them. I think Claude is the most factual. [00:09:45] Ron Platt: When you say videos, are you creating AI generated videos or are you editing it? [00:09:50] Elizabeth Gearhart: No, it's more video editing. So, for instance, this podcast right now, we'll take this and we'll put it into descript is a program for. It's an AI program for editing videos, and we'll make YouTube videos out of it. But if, for instance, wanted to have Gemini evaluate my video for YouTube and say, is this going to be a good video for YouTube? I would use Gemini for that because it's easier to upload it too. So I do want to go back to Ron's point quickly though, about people's brains turning to mush because they depend on AI too much. [00:10:21] Ron Platt: Yeah. I don't have a need to use it very often because again, I've been an entrepreneur for over 30 years. There's a lot of knowledge in this head of mine. And I also am very creative. Like Ryan, my ability to create comes in my written word or if I'm designing advertising brochure or directing some kind of video. So I think if I relied on AI too much, it would start incorporating that and take it away from me and my creativity part would suddenly diminish. And I don't want to have that happen. Every time I sit down to write an ad, create an ad, it gets my juices flowing and my creative part of me gets going and I don't want to have that taken away. I think if we rely on it too much, our ability to create, our ability to think, our ability to problem solve becomes lessened and it dumbs us down. That's my personal opinion. [00:11:10] Ryan Stana: Yeah. Also from a legal standpoint, we as a business need to know how we are stating that we are using AI. So a lot of companies that we bid against internationally will go into a room and say, here is a design that we're doing for this event. Well, it's completely pulled AI design work. So we are now stating before we go in to do pitches, we sign off on something with our clients, clients saying, what you are getting from us is real design work, not AI design work. And as we move forward, here's how we're going to be working from a legal standpoint on delivering this to you not using AI. And we have to call out when we do use AI, if we get a last minute request to do some creative to, we'll go into that meeting and say, you know what? Because you called us 30 minutes ago, here's a visual of what this would be this was done with AI, but if you sign off on this extra spend, we will then go back and design it the correct way. We as individuals and we as companies need to learn how to navigate that. Making sure we're calling that out when [00:12:23] Elizabeth Gearhart: AI has been used, that's absolutely essential. I think that transparency. [00:12:29] Richard Gearhart: Yeah. I used AI to design our firm mailbox, right. Because we have a very distinct color scheme on our building here. And I wanted a mailbox that would fit with that. So I used AI to design that, and it came up with some lettering. The building is called Innovation Plaza. And then it has, you know, Gearhart log your media studios. And then it had the words patents, video innovation. So I thought that was really cool. And then I started thinking about it, and I was like, well, I don't think I've ever seen a mailbox that has that kind of stuff on it. And I was just got to wondering, well, does the post office have regulations that prohibit advertising on mailboxes? And guess what? They do. And so I went and I ordered. I painted the mailbox and I ordered the letters for it. And then I found out afterwards that the post office would probably arrest me and throw me in jail because I put advertising on our mailbox. [00:13:30] Elizabeth Gearhart: So. [00:13:30] Richard Gearhart: And so to Ryan's point about the legalities, you have to make sure that it doesn't send you in the wrong direction. Right. [00:13:37] Elizabeth Gearhart: So I want to ask the Brain Mesh question of Joey, because he hasn't had a chance yet. [00:13:43] Joey Stiver: For us in the telemedicine and health space, it's difficult because a lot of the Attorney Generals sent out signed letters to Meta saying, hey, there's all these consumer ads showing a better body or someone with muscles alongside these prescription drugs, and that's deceiving to the consumer. So for us, we use practically no AI when it comes to graphics photos, because there's a lot of red tape around it. And I think in some cases it can come off as just disingenuous a little bit. When people see something, it doesn't connect as well with the consumer. Just feels like someone took a shortcut. [00:14:17] Elizabeth Gearhart: So, yeah, yeah, I use it for images for my blog and also for the podcast and YouTube, because ChatGPT can make great images. But I don't try to even pretend like I could do what it does. [00:14:29] Ryan Stana: Right. [00:14:29] Elizabeth Gearhart: And I do say on my blog that I optimized this blog post using ChatGPT, because I do put my blogs through ChatGPT and say, optimize this for LLM search. And sometimes it changes things and I have to go change it back, right? And then I'll put it into my blog on Manus. My website's on Manus, which is an AI agent. It changes it again and I have to go in there and change it back. So I'm in a constant battle with these LLMs. So anyway, this has been real AI use cases. [00:14:59] Joey Stiver: You have been listening to real AI use business owners Roundtable. We hope you found this valuable. Join us again for more stories. Because the future of business is driven by AI.