Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Claude was belching 30% of the tokens. It was just wasting tokens.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: My work has already been stolen as a photographer, has been stolen and used and they made it into artwork.
[00:00:08] Speaker C: Copilot sucks because it doesn't give the right. I keep telling it that it's doing a crummy job.
[00:00:14] Speaker D: Has anybody noticed that Claude's gotten snarky? Do you guys use Claude?
This is Real AI Use Business Owners Roundtable with host 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. This is Real AI Use Business Owners Roundtable. I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, your host.
[00:00:45] Speaker C: And I'm Richard Gerhardt, co host.
[00:00:48] Speaker D: And today we have Michael Hausman and Chris Fabregast with us.
[00:00:53] Speaker C: Can I be the tag along host?
[00:00:57] Speaker D: So I'm going to ask each of them one way they're using AI out of the bazillion that everybody's using it now. And then we're going to have a roundtable discussion. So let's start with Michael Hausman, aiperformance Lab AI. Michael, what is one way you're using AI?
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Yeah, we have to practice what we preach. We're an AI first shop. I do a lot of talking. I travel around the world giving talks, 50 or 60 a year.
And that engagement process used to be very slow and clunky. There were, we measured. It was about 20 different steps from someone reaching out with an inquiry to then booking contracting, booking flights, hotels. I go out and do the talk, then there's feedback afterwards. It took probably two or three hours of my day and I had an EA helping me. And we realized this is a perfect process to agendize. And so we rigged up agents that nudge every engagement through. Through that process, it calls out, hey, this client's gone dark. You should probably reach out. When engagements are moving forward, it calls out the next step. It gives me a heads up when I have a week, I need to prepare my deck or make adjustments, run it by the client. So it's been a game changer to recapture those two to three hours a day. And it's agents working behind the scenes 24 hours a day and responding quickly. So that's been a nice bonus as well. And it's been a game changer for me. I get to do more of what I love, which is creating content, getting in front of audiences, teaching, trying to blow people's minds.
[00:02:20] Speaker D: Chris Fabregas with Chris Fabregast fine art prints. He's a photographer and he wrote a song using AI. What's one way that you're using AI?
[00:02:30] Speaker B: The major thing right now is, like you said, I'm a photographer. I'm into the creative field and creative business. And with AI, that's kind of taken over the art space.
So originally people were taking my photographs and duplicating them using AI. And I basically had to figure out. It's a little frustrating as a creative person, but I had to figure out how I can join their team, how I can join the AI team.
So as a photographer, I sell huge fine art landscape prints.
In the past, I could sell a print that was 24 by 36.
But now with AI, you can use special tools, special enhancement tools to blow up a photograph as large as you can and make it crystal clear, remove all the noise, remove all the pixelization. And now I'm selling prints that are up to 10ft long that are. Instead of a little print on someone's wall, I'm selling a huge statement piece, which is really cool, to celebrities, political people, sports stars from around the country. And I can print them up to 10ft, crystal clear, using AI. So it's really cool. You know, at first you kind of get upset and frustrated, but then you think of how I can use this to join me and I'm using it to enhance my photography.
[00:03:42] Speaker D: That is amazing. I remember doing marketing. I've been doing marketing for a long time now for the law firm. Can I have the vector version of your file so I can blow this image up? Now you use AI part with your heart law. What's one way you're using AI?
[00:03:57] Speaker C: We're using it for all sorts of strategic analysis and using it as an operational assistant.
I have a lot of ideas as the founder about all sorts of things, everything from finance to marketing.
One of the things that we noticed recently was that certain portions of our practice were growing and becoming significant practice areas. Yet we weren't highlighting that in our branding and our content. Right. We fed a lot of the data into AI and came back with a comprehensive marketing and branding strategy that brought all the different pieces together in a very clean, easily digestible way.
And it would have cost a lot of money and taken a lot of time to hire an agency to. To do all that. Now we will have our agency review it and have their input as well.
But I think it's a winner and it really gives us an opportunity to highlight some of the other practice areas that we didn't really highlight in the past. So, yeah.
[00:05:07] Speaker D: I'm Elizabeth Gearhart with Gear Media Studios, and one of my favorite ways to use AI is to have it teach me how to use AI and have it do AI things for me. When I do content, I have a blog. When I do a blog post, I put it through ChatGPT and I say, keeping my voice. Of course, we all know that. Optimize this for LLM search, large language model search, put in FAQs, put in headers, whatever, anything you need to do so that the AI answer engines will find it for answer engine optimization.
And it's teaching me how to do that, how to make my content show up. So I've been researching with it for three years now on how to be the answer on ChatGPT for the law firm.
So I really am using it to teach me more about it, and I use it all the time, and I learn more every time I use it. And sometimes I learn things I don't like.
[00:06:00] Speaker C: Like what? Give me an example.
[00:06:02] Speaker D: And I'm sure you guys, if you're using it a lot, you'll agree with me. It's a very linear thinker, right?
So I help people start podcasts. So I asked it like, this is this person's podcast. This is what it's about. Da, da, da. What are some good podcast names? And it gave me some good podcast names. I said, okay, are these taken? It's like, yeah, they're taken.
Why didn't you.
[00:06:25] Speaker C: Why did you suggest them in the first place?
[00:06:30] Speaker D: Michael, you have a lot of experience.
You are like an AI guru. How long have you been using it?
[00:06:37] Speaker A: I've been building these platforms for over 15 years. So I tell everyone I was doing this way before it was cool. And I was a PhD and got my 10,000 hours of coding in. But it's been really interesting to see the space evolve in the last three, four years. It just exploded. And so what was the domain of a few data nerds has become democratized. And anyone. These are things you needed to have coding chops to be able to build these models. Now it's SaaS platforms, $20 in your pocket, and you're off to the races. And so I think it's really exciting to see that change. And now everyone can be leveraging AI. It's not just big companies or data nerds like me.
[00:07:14] Speaker C: We have a lot of startups coming to the firm who are partnering. Usually it might be somebody like a teacher or a therapist partnering with somebody who has some level of software development.
And in a couple of months they crank out a process or a program that probably would have taken nine, nine months to a year for an experienced development firm to put together. And they just, they come and it's a fully finished product and it took very little time and the skill level and expertise was very low.
[00:07:50] Speaker D: So I want to come back to you, Michael, but I do want to ask Chris, now, you wrote a song completely using AI. How did you do that? What was your process?
[00:07:59] Speaker B: Yeah, so I want to say, first of all, it wasn't all using AI. So I woke up, very creative mind, always thinking about new things, new ways to do stuff. I actually, we just moved to Nashville. My family moved to Nashville about six months ago and it was a pretty big move for us from Seattle, Washington to Nashville. And I must have been drinking the water because I woke up one night and had these song lyrics stuck in my head. And I am creative, but I've never written a song in my life.
And they just kept on pouring out of me about our move to Nashville and how we left everything behind. We left our family and friends behind and we just moved on. Hope and a prayer and we're driving down the freeway to this new home and we had no idea what Nashville would be like. So I wrote this whole song, stayed up all night writing the song.
And I heard about Suno, which is a music app to create music, and I typed in my lyrics. So my lyrics, I do want to say they were all my lyrics. I didn't use ChatGPT or anything for the lyrics, but I typed it into Suno and it instantly, it was able to give me feedback on how the song sounded and I could remove words or change words and hear what sounded good and what didn't. And it was just really amazing that I got instant feedback that night and that were that morning from this music app. And it had this perfect song. It's called Fireflies on i65. It's a song about finding home and in a new place. And I was able to instantly get this, this feedback, which was really amazing.
[00:09:23] Speaker D: How did you get the music for it?
[00:09:25] Speaker B: Yeah, so what happens is I had this song idea. I actually, I typed it in, it was eight minutes long. And I said no one in the world is going to listen to an eight minute song. So that was cool. Instantly I could see this song is way too long. I need to cut stuff out and, and change some words and make some rhymes and rhythms a little bit better. So what I did with this app is I was able to say I want violins, I want banjos, I want a piano riff, I want a harmonica solo. And I was able to type that in where I wanted it. And it, it placed it in that song exactly where I wanted it.
Now it wasn't like instantly it gave me that. It took me 75 tries to make this song, deleting stuff and moving it all around. But the Suno music app AI put it all in there for me. I said I wanted a country singer with kind of a male country singer and it gave me this male country singer voice which was, it was pretty amazing.
[00:10:15] Speaker D: Wow. I am gonna have to try that for fun. Hey co, I do have fun playing with AI. Now that is a total nerd geek to me. But Michael, so you run across a lot of business owners that are using this. What do you think are the main ways people are using it or the most innovative or new?
[00:10:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you had called out one is just in terms of marketing. They're able to supercharge their marketing. I work with an e commerce company called Petlab and I talk about this in my book. They use some off the shelf tools. Their designers were able to shorten the amount of time it took to create a campaign. It went from 40 minutes to 50.
That meant instead of launching 500 campaigns a month, they went to 2,500 and they saw a very direct and measurable impact on their bottom line. They basically grew 50% year over year and they got snatched up by a private equity company. So it's a great story. I lead the book with it of how very simple tools can have a really outsized impact. I think most companies, in addition to really supercharging marketing, social media, content marketing, are using it to find ways to achieve cost reductions and automating repetitive tasks that frankly human beings are doing right now. And to the point that I made about automating my engagement process, I think that was just a no brainer for me given how much of my time and my EA's time we were spending on it. But the cool thing is I didn't just automate that and then tell her, hey, thanks so much for the help. You're on your way. Go find another job.
I got to leverage her to do more high value tasks. She's actually very talented at technology implementation. So I said let's get you out of the weeds of booking engagements and let's have you help me build out a content library. Let's help you have you build out a communications hub. So there's so Much fear out there about I'm going to lose my job. But what we're finding is that people are actually using it. There are actually jobs being created and there are more opportunities because there are things we couldn't do before that we can do now.
[00:12:12] Speaker C: Do any of you ever think that maybe the pace of change with AI is going to become unmanageable?
Not so much the, the whole overlords are going to control our minds, but just because things took are happening so much more quickly. I find it a challenge to process all the information I'm exposed to now. And with AI you're going to see that accelerating even more.
Do you have thoughts on that?
[00:12:44] Speaker A: I definitely do. I couldn't agree more. And frankly I do a lot of speaking on stages. You show the advancing of this technology and it's going vertical. It's basically it's exponential, right? That's how technology moves. What isn't exponential is people's ability to retool, reskill, adapt to the technology. It's actually very flat if you look at the adoption curves. And so there's this big gap between the technology going, vertical adoption being relatively flat. Organizations are really struggling to upskill their employees and develop AI literacy and fluency. Frankly, that's the gap that my company fills, which is how do we train everyone to stay on top of what's happening? How do we distill all this, change all this knowledge and make it impactful and practical for folks on the front lines. But yeah, human beings are notoriously bad at changing behaviors and developing new routines. And I think that's the big challenge that organizations and individuals are facing everywhere. And by the way, it's not going to get easier, it's going to get worse because the technology is going to what just got released, Claude Fable. In seven months there will be a model twice as powerful and it'll have 2x those capabilities. So it's a real challenge for organizations and that's the one we aim to fix.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: I also, if I could just say something, I believe just as a creative writing the song I've come up come across a lot of controversy with people saying, well, AI did it for you. AI is just doing this whole song and, and I understand where a musician has been studying their whole life to be a musician, but my mom and my grandmother who have both passed away, both wrote books and books of songs and they just had no connection. They did that on a personal level and they had no connections with the music industry. So. So we still have these books of songs that are just sitting there in a book with dust on them. And they had. They never were able to go anywhere. And that's one reason that it pushed me to do this. AI music is like Michael said, it's not. You need a human behind it. So AI didn't experience my story. AI didn't write my story. My family and I did our story. AI just was a tool to help me share it with the world. I actually tried to reach out to a couple musicians before I did. So my song is on Spotify, it's on itunes. It just released a couple days ago. And without AI, I would also have a song in a book, probably just sitting there for the next generation to look at. And I think as someone like me, just a normal dad from Nashville, Tennessee, I think it's pretty cool that AI could help me push my song out to the world on, you know, social media. And another thing is that I used. I had no idea how the music industry works, so I was able to use AI to say, hey, I wrote a song. What do I need to do next? How can I market it? Where do I need to market it? Which radio stations in the whole country will take a song like mine and where can I submit it? So not only did was I able to use AI to write the song or to help produce the song, but I was able to then submit it to radio stations across the country and the world because AI said, well, these are the people looking for submissions and this is where you need to submit it.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: So let me just jump in because there's an interesting counterpoint for my book. I spoke to a number of artists and one in particular, his name is Tim Tatter. He's been doing this for decades. He's one of the most world renowned photographers out there. And I thought, and I heard he was using AI tools, I saw some of his work. I was like, oh, this guy is going to be a big AI enthusiast. And I got him on the phone and he basically said, I hate AI. This is the worst thing that's ever happened. What you've done is stolen my work, used it to train models that are now being used by amateurs and novices to take work away from me. And he's seen his book of business shrunk because previously, 10 years ago, he was the only guy you could go to Coca Cola and Pepsi and sports teams. He was the guy. So I'd be curious, Chris, if I can ask a question. Chris, you're. You've developed a skill set in photography. You are now shifting and you're able to create music when you couldn't do it before. But is there a part of you that makes you upset or nervous that some of your work probably got used to train these models and there's some someone like me that's out there putting out photography without having learned the skill that you did?
[00:16:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I totally agree. My work has already been stolen as a photographer. So as I mentioned, I do landscape photography. So, for example, a picture of Yosemite with the beautiful waterfalls and the trees has been stolen and used and they made it into artwork. And so they're selling that as a digital file. And that is frustrating. And I know it's frustrating that I'm making a music, a song within one week where it takes artists years to make music.
It also reminds me of the time as a photographer, film cameras to digital cameras.
You had to study to be a film photographer. Remember that you used to take a shot, hope that it was in focus, go to the store and develop it. And now everyone thinks they're a photographer because of the digital cameras. And you got this with you. So everyone's a photographer now with their phones. I think, unfortunately, I think it's here to stay. And especially in advertising. That sounds like an advertising photographer. That's really tough because now they have all these apps and AI that for advertising. I think, unfortunately, we're in a time of our lives where we have to join them and figure out how to take your business to a different level.
[00:17:50] Speaker C: And yeah, we had a guest on Passage to Profit recently. She was talking about how she had created an AI agent to crawl her emails and create answers for or all of them, the drafts. And then she would go through and edit or personalize it.
But it made her email management a lot more efficient. So I'm just thinking now, if everybody does that right, you're gonna have. Now you're gonna multiply the number of communications and emails, you know, by some astronomical number. And communication's gonna get harder because now the expectation is we're gonna be.
This is how we're going to be communicating. And how can one person process so much information? They probably won't. It's going to be the AI agents that are processing. We're not even going to know what we're responding half the time. And because the agent knows you and there's already clones out there, they go rogue.
[00:18:54] Speaker D: Go to your favorite client and say, I always hated working with you.
[00:18:59] Speaker C: But the point is that I see these kinds of systems coming online and I'm just not sure. How we as people can even internalize that and make decisions around it.
[00:19:14] Speaker D: We can't. And to answer your question about is it moving too fast for people to comprehend? Absolutely. I feel like I don't really know that much about it. I'm not a programmer. And then I go talk to people and they're like, oh, you know a lot about it. I'm like, all I do is use it. Like, I, I don't even, I don't know how to code or anything. I just use it. But I use it every day and I use it for deep research and I'm having it teach me and I'm way ahead of a lot of people and I just think it can be overwhelming. And I use four different models and compare them against each other.
And right now I think Claude is supposed to be the more accurate. But Claude has gotten snarky. Has anybody noticed that Claude's gotten snarky? Do you guys use Claude?
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I do, among others. But yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: I also use four Chat, gtp, Claude, Grok, and one one more for photography. And yeah, I feel like you gotta have a human behind it telling it how you want it to act. And you can either say, be mean and really analyze my thing and talk to me how it is, or Chachi TP likes to just to agree with you a lot. Right?
[00:20:17] Speaker C: Yeah, that's why I like it.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Great idea.
[00:20:19] Speaker C: It tells me how clever my question is and makes me feel good.
[00:20:24] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: I think Claude distinguish bias is a thing. And a lot of the models because the way that they're trained to give you the answer you want and please the user.
And so I think Claude, you can specify in the preferences, hey, I want this to be a little bit more professional or even healed. But in order to compensate for that, I think Claude actually designed it. They pulled back on that. And I personally, I actually prefer that. I've worked on projects where the agent will just diligently take instruction and do its thing and then I'll find out, oh, it didn't have the right instructions or it. It went about. In a way, I'd rather it push back on me and say, hey, are you sure about this? Here are some, Here are some reasons you might not want to be doing this. And I'm seeing that more in Claude. I haven't noticed the snarkiness, but I think that could be fun. If it was a whole tongue in cheek, I would love that.
[00:21:11] Speaker D: I'll tell you the snarkiness. I've been working like I Said for almost three years now, trying to get your heart law to be the answer for ChatGPT and the other Gemini perplexity bod and not I. We really haven't seen a lot of activity with Copilot, with Microsoft. But anyway, so I've been.
[00:21:29] Speaker C: Nobody uses Copilot.
[00:21:30] Speaker D: I know. Nobody.
[00:21:31] Speaker C: It's a disaster.
[00:21:32] Speaker D: It's terrible.
[00:21:33] Speaker C: So I. Copilot needs a real pilot.
[00:21:36] Speaker D: So the very first time, I think it was about three years ago was. So I had been using ChatGPT for a long time. Our son told us about it. And then I went to a webinar on it that I think Zoom put on, and there were like 4,000 people there. This was, I don't know, 20, 22 maybe. And then so I started using it all the time. That's when I decided I want. I saw somebody come up as the answer on ChatGPT, their company. I saw their video and I'm like, I want that to be Gearhart Law. So I started asking all the LLMs, how do I get Gearhart Law to show up as the answer? And four years ago, three or four years ago, they wouldn't tell me very much at all. Now they tell me a lot, but I've been asking them every single month, and I ask them every single month, what is a small business need to do to show up as the answer on ChatGPT, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So now I'm asking them, how come Gearhart Law is showing up? What are we doing to make it. That's making it show up? Because we are getting quite a few leads comparatively. Still more leads from Google Search, honestly. And Claude said to me, it said, well, whether it was intentional or not, you did all these things that AI likes. I'm like, I got. So I get in fights with these things I got, So I said it was intentional.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: I know I've been asking you every month for the last four years how to get up there. So, like, it's clearly working.
[00:22:55] Speaker C: Don't you remember anything? Claude.
[00:22:57] Speaker D: I recently bought the paid version of Claude. I had Claude through Perplexity. I don't think they quite act the same, though. Yes, I bought, so I have paid ChatGPT, paid perplexity, paid Claude. I don't have paid Gemini, but I do use Gemini personalization.
So do you have a favorite one?
[00:23:13] Speaker A: They've got different strengths and weaknesses. I tend to use Claude as my kind of multipurpose tool and especially with the agentic capabilities that it's been that it's built out. It basically now has control of my whole computer with some guardrails in place. But yeah, that one's my preference. I'll go to Gemini if I need to do more research oriented work or Perplexity. I'll do Grok if I need something that's a little bit more writing focused. But yeah, Claude is my go to.
It's open and running constantly in the background.
[00:23:46] Speaker C: When you say it takes over your computer, what do you mean? It means you're just talking to it all the time.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: No, I mean the agenda capabilities. It can do anything on my computer that I can do. It can draft emails, it can set up calendar invites, it can even send out messages via text. It can browse the web. It was just doing some, actually some legal research that I needed to do using the web.
[00:24:09] Speaker C: Be careful.
[00:24:10] Speaker A: Oh yeah, exactly. I know. Gotta be careful for sure.
[00:24:12] Speaker C: Be careful.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: Yeah. It's a good point. But yeah, people don't realize that it's not just a writing companion like it. Absolutely. It has access to every file on my machine. If I need to create a new deck, I can say, hey, why don't you pull together pieces from this and this deck? And it does it. So it's pretty amazing when people have that light bulb moment and they realize, wait, no, it can do everything I can do on this computer.
[00:24:36] Speaker D: Do you have sensitive stuff? Do you have bank statements and credit card numbers and stuff on your computer?
[00:24:42] Speaker A: So I don't know if I have those stashed on my. In my files. I do have one password where I keep all my passwords. I have not yet given it access to that, so it won't go behind paywall sites. It can't yet use my credit card, but I'm slow. I think there's a trust building exercise that occurs and I'm slowly getting more and more comfortable with it, even making purchases on my behalf. It's a slow process, but yeah, I probably have more. I'm a technophile. I probably have more trust in these tools than I should. And this is the question I get from companies everywhere. I was giving a webinar this morning, bunch of smart folks, but they were like, hey, we can't just let our employees run loose with this because they're sensitive data. What if it asks copilot, give me everyone's pay grade at this company. That's information that's in SharePoint. Yes, a person could find it, but they can find it much faster and more easily using an AI. So there has to be some safeguards. But because we're a small business and it's effectively me that's running the show, I can take a lot of risks because it's, it's my, it's my company.
[00:25:47] Speaker D: So if you find a Ferrari charge,
[00:25:52] Speaker C: they'll say, oh, that's just number five.
I thought I was a Lamborghini, I guess another Ferrari, you know, I don't
[00:26:05] Speaker A: know if the AI would use a car, but I know the AI would love to get a lot more computing power. So if I all of a sudden see some Nvidia Blackwell machine show up at my front door, I'll realize Claude really, really wants more power.
[00:26:17] Speaker C: We ordered that for you, Michael, and we decided that you have the budget for it and a good investment.
[00:26:25] Speaker D: So Chris, do you have a favorite?
[00:26:27] Speaker B: Yeah. So there's a couple things that just sparked my mind, but So I like ChatGPT, one of the originals just for asking information. Grok is great for writing. So I was stuck a couple times with lyrics. I've since written a second song that I'm going to produce and stuck in that lyric not knowing what to say and how it would flow. And Grok was great there. Grok also I like for images and generating videos. So it's nice to animate my photos into a 10 second animation, make them come to life and then I can post that on social media to grab people's attention to share my photos. So I can make a moving photo, then they click on it and it goes to my website. One thing is cool that I think a lot of people in my industry is I use Shopify, which is where I sell my photography. It's a great website to sell, sell merchandise and they've gone to AI. So instead of typing out all these products describing my product, I show my picture and it types out the whole product description. It sends my quality and quantity and it does it all for me. In the past I'd spend hours or days uploading one product and now I can do it in a matter of 10 or 15 minutes. So I think what's nice is besides all these chat pts and Grok, all these little things like Adobe, I use Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. And now you upload your photos to Lightroom and it'll tell you if someone's blinked or if their eyes are closed or if it's out of focus and it'll delete that picture for you and you can move on to the next one. So there's a lot of AI built into different businesses, which is cool. And if you don't mind. I'm going to go back to something Michael asked a little bit ago. He said, how do you feel about these people that are losing jobs because of AI and like his the product photography. And I completely understand that with my photography selling landscape prints. So I've actually had to switch and I'm doing more portrait work as well. And I also love sports so I'm shooting a lot of athletes.
So that's something I feel like AI can't. Someone can pay you to go shoot their baseball game. You can't type in, hey, I want a shot of John Smith playing baseball. It's not going to look like John Smith. You actually still have to go to a game, still shoot them. And then if you want you can use AI to make a cool background, good stadium in the background. But I just, I got to transform my business from landscape photography to more portrait photography just because I know that people are going to steal my shots.
[00:28:40] Speaker C: Chris, I wanted to ask if you ever find that using AI sparks new creativity that is not. Is more of a product like a. AI is the springboard and it gives you ideas that just, in other words, you're not just adopting AI but you're working through it and then it says something that triggers you to have a creative thought of your own. Does that ever happen?
[00:29:07] Speaker B: Yeah, so actually that just happened recently. I was so like I said, I started doing more sports photography because that's something that I feel like at the moment AI can't really do. I was typing in how could I make a cool dramatic background for some of these shots so it looked like they were in a major league stadium. And I was able to, and it suggested like do an advertisement for like Nike or Adidas. And so I did that and I said please make this look like a major campaign for a sports, sports company. And I was able to have some smoke and probably a ten thousand dollar production just by typing it into chat, GTP or grok. So I was able to make this dramatic photo like they're in a baseball stadium with thousands of people around.
And that was something that I just sparked my interest a couple weeks ago. Instead of just a baseball field with a chain link fence, I was able to have a full stadium of fans behind these, you know, little league players. And they thought that was awesome.
[00:29:58] Speaker C: I was going to say that would be great for kids who would like to pretend like they're in a big major league stadium. That would be fun for them.
[00:30:07] Speaker B: Or one kid said, yeah, one kid said I wanted, I wanted to look like I'm the only guy in the stadium just standing there, taller, heroic, with the light shining down on me. So I was able to remove all the fans and just have the. The tall bright light shining on them and some little dust and smoke in the air. And it was really cool.
[00:30:24] Speaker D: A group of us went to Rise New York and it's this really cool. It's part museum, it's history in New York. It's this little museum. And then at the end is this really cool ride which if you ever go to New York, Rise New York is really fun.
And in the end you go stand on this little platform outside that has this tiny Statue of Liberty holding up her torch. And then for 10 bucks you can buy the digital prints. And they put different backgrounds behind everyone. It's like one has a New York Times Square and all of a sudden. So I'm sure that's AI right. I.
Yeah, it's very cool.
So what LLM do you like the best?
[00:31:00] Speaker C: Oh, it depends. I tend to rely on ChatGPT because it knows I don't put anything that's confidential or client oriented into ChatGPT because I do have to make sure that it stays within, you know, that the attorney client is privilege is protected, which I Copilot. I use Copilot and try to use it for some things because it is supposed to have the higher level of privacy.
I'm trying to get legal tools for Claude and I'm very interested in testing that out, but the software is not answering my inquiries. I put in a couple of different inquiries and I guess we're just not of interest to them.
But I do for client oriented work, I do use Copilot at least once a day. I type in Copilot sucks because it doesn't give the right. I keep telling it that it's doing a crummy job and Copilot is.
And then there's the versions that append to the Outlook and the Excel, the different programs. Those are virtually useless and they put all sorts of prompts all over your email. We use Outlook right? And it's like you have to go fishing around to find the space where you can start typing. And you open a new email and it asks you, do you want help with this email? You don't even know what I'm going to say yet. So why are you putting that prompt there? It makes no sense to me at all.
So I would say Copilot's a necessary evil. And I also use Claude for a second opinion. I use ChatGPT just because I put a lot of personal stuff in there and I'm just used to using it. I haven't really thought it through like you guys have.
[00:32:52] Speaker D: I got in this rabbit hole of perplexity but it started acting almost like an agent. It was amazing. I think these things are so close to just be turning into agents. But I did want to ask you Michael, about MCPS because I was going to try to learn how to program agents and I talked to my son, he said no mom, all these programs are doing MCPS now that hook into claude. I looked into it a little bit so I know that. So we use descript for video editing. I have a video studio and now you can hook descript into CLAUDE with an MCP and you can tell Claude how to edit the video and it just has the script do it. The only what I got into though researching this because I'm always asking the questions is you get tokens or credits and you use Claude credits and descript
[00:33:40] Speaker C: credits Both sounds like money making approach. Right by the software companies. Imagine that.
[00:33:49] Speaker A: Yeah, they know what they're doing. It was interesting when CLAUDE had its leak of the source code. It was a couple months ago and folks were able to poke around and figure out what's under the hood. And one of the discoveries was that CLAUDE was effectively like belching 30% of the tokens. It was just wasting tokens. People didn't realize that but yeah, they then they also have tricky things that they're doing where they'll default you token models that are entirely unnecessary for whatever your task is. The good news is there's tools like Open Router that help you figure out how do I optimize my token usage? Especially if you're spending a lot. If you're a developer it's really hard to hit the. It's hard to avoid the caps. But yeah, unfortunately as Richard pointed out, like these are for profit companies. They're not dumb. They know that there's a lot of opacity in terms of what's under the hood. No one's going to really check to see how those tokens are being consumed. And the only thing you can feel decent about though is that those tokens you're using, even though they're being wasted in no small part, you're still getting them highly subsidized by VCs and other investors. We're still in the era where there are funds that are paying. You're not paying the full cost of the tokens you use. So there's a Counterbalance there. But, yeah, they're not dumb. They know that the more tokens they use, the more money they make. And. And they've orchestrated things to run up the bill, so to speak.
[00:35:12] Speaker D: And I had another thought, too. I don't know if this is being done or if it's even possible, but.
So we all know that these things just use a ton of energy, right? These data centers, and you have to cool them down and everything.
And people are looking at nuclear power plants now to supply the energy. People are looking at putting these things in space to cool them down in space. You know, up space. I don't know what that would do if you start heating up space, but
[00:35:37] Speaker C: I think that would make a great song. I work on an energy station in space.
I'm floating around here.
[00:35:46] Speaker D: Okay, David Bowie. Anyway, but my. My thought is, have they asked AI Claude especially, or something even stronger than Claude to solve the energy? Cold fusion maybe, or something to solve the energy problem? Have they put the AI on these energy problems? I would think somewhere in some lab someplace, somebody's doing that.
[00:36:07] Speaker A: I did a webinar last month on space data centers in space. So I do think that the AI is being asked. The companies that are doing this, that are building out the data centers and the models are very sophisticated. They know the capabilities the data shows their developers, their product managers, their lawyers. Everyone's using AI at a much higher level in cloud and in OpenAI than outside of it. But, yeah, I do think there's a world where the AI could help us solve these problems. And I also want to call out the tech. Everyone's alarmist about this, the water usage, energy consumption, but the technology grows exponentially. That's true of energy efficiency. That's true of cooling. So I think it's one of those problems everyone's yelling about right now that kind of solves itself because the technology gets better and better over time. So that's my own somewhat unpopular opinion.
[00:36:55] Speaker C: My opinion is it's a way for people to push back on AI.
[00:36:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:59] Speaker C: If you're not an AI fan, you can talk about what it's doing to the environment and make a point about why we shouldn't have AI or it should be regulated. Those concerns are probably legitimate. It does have a high energy footprint. But I think it's going to be hard to stop this.
[00:37:20] Speaker D: And it's solvable.
[00:37:21] Speaker C: And I agree. It's solvable.
[00:37:22] Speaker D: It's solvable. Computers used to take up a whole room. Remember that?
[00:37:26] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:37:26] Speaker D: And now it's on your phone.
[00:37:29] Speaker B: My Family's traveling around the east coast right now. And we actually were in Kentucky, but we were just in Virginia, in Loudoun County. And I think that's the largest county in the United States right now for data centers. And everywhere you go, there's a data center on every corner. And we were watching the news and they had. They had a. A Loudoun county meeting. And the room was overflowing, and they had hundreds of people in another room debating data centers. And I mean, there's pros and cons right there. There's pros just like we all said that for AI and we need this technology to keep on going. But the cons, these people were. They could hear a humming from their house. So their house was right across the street from this data center. And she's like, I can't sleep. I hear a constant humming.
Our property value is going down. And people are. They don't want to move to Loudoun county as much as they used to. The population is going to drop. So that. I just heard this yesterday on the news. So they were concerned about property value. This humming from the data center that they could constantly just stuck in their head every day. And that's kind of their com. That was their complaints. But then the other people were saying, you know, like, for example, me just. I just released a song on Spotify. And you need a data center to help with Spotify and run this music and so much stuff now, like, music is going to be online. It is online. Right. We don't have CDs or records anymore.
And we need these data centers to keep going.
So there are pros and cons. But I think what I did here yesterday is the room was overflowing with people supporting data centers.
[00:38:54] Speaker D: Oh, really? Well. And they can put them in the middle of nowhere. I think that the problem is, and this was like the whole superconductor technology that I studied years ago is as you pass electricity down a line, you lose. It always erodes like you lose some. But if you can conduct the electrical signals faster and better, and that's going to be improved too, then you could put these data centers in the middle of nowhere and send the energy wherever it needs to go. Right?
[00:39:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:21] Speaker C: But in general, you want your energy source to be as close to the computing source as you can, because that would be ideal. Yeah. Maybe they can make them efficient enough that you don't have to worry about that.
[00:39:33] Speaker D: Yeah. Just to diverge a little bit, we talked to this guy that had this computers for doing trades on Wall Street. Like sending trades to Wall street and they're in New Jersey. But if your computer is, I don't know, a few feet closer, you get your trade faster.
It's just so bizarre.
[00:39:49] Speaker C: And so they pay a lot of money and they.
Those. The spots closest to the computers are more competitive because it allows them to react quicker before everybody else and they can make more money that way. Right?
[00:40:02] Speaker D: Yeah. So I. For the ones that I use, this was not true until a few months ago, but ChatGPT is doing really good images now. It used to be you would have it do an image and it could not change it. And now what I'm finding is it has a little edit button on there and it can make small changes to the images and it's doing some pretty good images for me. It actually did do an image of someone.
I asked it to create an image of this guy that was presenting at my meetup that I used to have, telling the computer what to do, telling Claude to tell the script what to do and have the robots anyway. It was this goofy picture, but it took a picture of him head on and turned his face sideways and had him like saying something and smiling. I couldn't believe it could do that, but it did it. Sometimes it's better than others. It depends on what you want it to do. Obviously, we all know that. But I do use Gemini for multimedia, for video especially, because Gemini gives you like a million credits and it handles video the best.
And also if we're doing stuff on YouTube, Gemini as Google, which owns YouTube. So I figure I hope it's going to give me better answers because it knows YouTube inside and out. Yeah.
[00:41:15] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:41:15] Speaker D: And I use, I use Perplexity and what's the other one? I use ChatGPT, Gemini Quad. Perplexity.
Used to use Copilot. One more thing about Copilot was I was in a Word document and it popped up on the side and it said, how can I help you? I said, make sure all the font's the same. It said, if you show me the document you want me to work on, I'm like, what are you talking about? You popped up in the middle of it. Michael, what is the name of your book?
[00:41:41] Speaker C: Peter?
[00:41:42] Speaker A: Yeah, Future Proof. Transform your business with AI or get left behind. I've got copies right behind me on this shelf. You can pick it up on Amazon. I think it's got five star, all five star reviews. So I'm very happy with how it's done. And I think it's. It really meets people where they are it makes it accessible. It's not a lot of technical language. There's no math. It's really meant to help folks start from zero to one.
[00:42:05] Speaker D: Okay, great. Thank you. And Chris Fabregas, what is the name of your song?
[00:42:11] Speaker B: Yeah, so my song is called fireflies on I65 and you can find that on any streaming service. So iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, music, it's across all the online streaming services.
[00:42:24] Speaker D: Okay, great. Any final words?
[00:42:26] Speaker C: Just remember, hallucinations are better with AI.
[00:42:32] Speaker D: This has been Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable. Thank you, guys.
[00:42:38] Speaker A: You have been listening to Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable.
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