[00:00:00] Leah Sullivan: It has automated the workload, I would say of about two and a half full time people. [00:00:06] Richard Gearhart: You're going to have agents upon agents upon agents shifting in milliseconds to address consumer needs. [00:00:13] Nate Amidon: I'm not a software engineer, but one of the things that I'll say AI is really doing is kind of democratizing software engineers. [00:00:20] Elizabeth Gearhart: To learn AI. You're just going to have to practice. You're going to have to just use it. And I have been, and I've learned a lot about it just using it. [00:00:28] Lauren Hidalgo: Even more value will be attributed to the human experience as everything becomes increasingly digital, especially for generations that didn't grow up with this level of technology. [00:00:40] This is real AI Use 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. [00:01:04] Elizabeth Gearhart: real AI Use cases Business Owners Roundtable. So, Leah Sullivan, I know that we have already talked quite a bit about AI, but what is maybe their favorite way that you're using AI or what you used it for this morning? Or just one way that you're using AI that you want to tell people about and then we'll have a chance to discuss it more after we give everybody a turn. [00:01:24] Lauren Hidalgo: Great. [00:01:24] Leah Sullivan: Yeah, I would say this Town Assistant app that I'm using, but specifically it has automated the workload, I would say of about two and a half full time people. And so just everything from researching spreadsheets, automating emails, prepping for podcasts, whatever it is, it's been really helpful to integrate into all of my workflows. [00:01:54] Elizabeth Gearhart: Can you give it confidential information? Does it go out into the Internet, into the sphere and pull data? Because I'm thinking like there are some confidential things I would have it do, but I want to open myself up. [00:02:07] Leah Sullivan: Yes, you would probably need to make sure you're set up with an enterprise account. And so the way I'm using it is not with confidential information. It's more for everyday workflows. [00:02:18] Elizabeth Gearhart: Okay, great. Okay. So Nate Amadon, what is one way you're using AI in your business? [00:02:24] Nate Amidon: So I'm doing some of the stuff Leah is probably not to the level as far as automating workflows. And there's a ton of benefit to doing that. I'll also say, just on a side note, even your enterprise accounts have some AI capabilities. So if you're on a Microsoft shop like you can use CoPilot's internal capabilities and that should stay all within the firewall so you have the same security you would have if you were sending an email. I really use a lot of it as a thought partner though, which is kind of weird to think about, but brainstorming ideas and if I'm writing content for marketing purposes, like I just go back and forth and I flush out ideas, I let it say different sentences different ways and I work with it. As a partner, I'm not a huge fan of just letting AI write it and then post it. I think that keeping your personal voice is really important, but that doesn't mean you can't use it at all. You can use it as something that can really help just accelerate and be way more efficient and honestly deliver higher quality. [00:03:25] Elizabeth Gearhart: Excellent. And Lauren Hidalgo what's one way you're using AI? [00:03:28] Lauren Hidalgo: One way is also through research. I use it in a million different ways like everybody here, but for my industry, since I work in retail and I work with a lot of small businesses who make textiles, different textile products, ceramics, beauty items make. If I'm trying to write a piece on them and I need to understand their industry or supply chain better or just get more knowledge around a certain subject, then that's when I'll go to AI a lot of times, or for example, I'll draft an article, a very rough draft, and then I'll put it into AI and it will create something and then using the AI, I'll develop that further and help it again find research. If I'm trying to get numbers statistics on a certain industry or supply chain, that can be really helpful because otherwise manually doing that research is just going to take me forever. [00:04:20] Elizabeth Gearhart: Absolutely. Richard Gearhart what's one way you're using AI? [00:04:24] Richard Gearhart: I'll go back to something I mentioned earlier in the show and that is branding. As I mentioned, the law firm's practice has evolved quite a bit over the last four or five years. We're taking on different types of projects and our content and our branding haven't reflected that. I asked ChatGPT to come up with a strategy for us and it came up with something that I thought was really, really good and we presented it to the management team and we're going to be implementing it. It was able to take a higher level look and pull together different things, disparate practices, and bring them together in a way that it all made sense. We would have paid a marketing agency a lot of money to come up with that strategy and ChatGPT did it in about three minutes. So. [00:05:17] Elizabeth Gearhart: So for the last, I guess it's almost three years now, ever since I went on ChatGPT and asked a question and saw somebody's company come up as the answer and somebody's video come up, I was like, okay, I've got to make that be gear heart law. So I've been researching and at first it was really hard to get an answer. Now I'm getting more and more answers and it's better and better. But this week we got a client from ChatGPT, a lead who turned into a client just this week. And So I asked ChatGPT, I said, how did they find us? How come you told them that we would be a good fit for them? And it wouldn't tell me. [00:05:55] Richard Gearhart: It wouldn't tell you? [00:05:56] Elizabeth Gearhart: It wouldn't tell me any specifics. It was just kind of like because you've been working on it so hard and you've got this high level presence and Richard's an authority, but there are a lot of people that are authorities. [00:06:06] Richard Gearhart: But it would be interesting how it would maybe trace back to those original prompts and whether it has that capability. [00:06:14] Elizabeth Gearhart: It told me to ask the person what prompt they used. [00:06:18] Nate Amidon: Yeah. [00:06:18] Elizabeth Gearhart: And I'm like, shouldn't, you know, but. And I had the person's name, but [00:06:22] Richard Gearhart: they, oh, we can't do that. [00:06:23] Elizabeth Gearhart: We can't put their name in there. But yeah, they're giving me a lot more information than they did three years ago and I'm using it for deep research. Is anybody here using Claude? [00:06:34] Richard Gearhart: Yeah. [00:06:35] Elizabeth Gearhart: Yeah. So did you see that we can use Fable 5 now? I don't think I'm a high enough level user to really take advantage of Fable 5. [00:06:43] Richard Gearhart: Well, what does Fable 5 do? [00:06:44] Elizabeth Gearhart: I think it's mostly super good at writing code. So I want to open it up. Everybody, like, what comments do we have on it? What other ways are we using it? What do you think it helps the most within business? [00:06:56] Nate Amidon: I'll say first, I'd love to get Leah's take on Fable 5 from an engineering perspective, but I'm not a software engineer. But one of the things that I'll say AI is really doing is kind of democratizing software engineers. So like us kind of mortals that don't know how to do the magic thing on the computers now, Claude can help us do that. And so in a lot of ways I can build my own sort of applications to help me run certain things. And I don't need to use AI all the time. I can just use AI to Build the application that runs on my computer. Now, it's not going to be super fancy, but you can really do a lot of things productivity wise, where you're using cloud code to actually create your own local databases, create your own git accounts. It just really runs you through all of the things. So if you had ideas for things you wanted to build and you felt like I don't have the technical ability, that's what cloud's really unlocked for me. [00:07:51] Leah Sullivan: I totally agree. And I think that's exciting from an investor standpoint too, because no longer do you need to be a highly technical founder to build a first prototype or get your first product out there to show it to an investor, to show it to customers. And so I think, like you said, it is democratizing entrepreneurship and the ability for more people to create, which I think is a really exciting thing. I mean, I think on Fable 5, it's probably not like a good use case for everyday tasking. It is more kind of developer focused, but a huge step up function change. And I mean, we see how fast these new models are coming out. Things are changing daily, weekly, like it's constantly improving. At this rate, can you imagine where we're going to be in the next 12 months, in the next two years? It's pretty exciting. [00:08:46] Richard Gearhart: The point about democratizing software engineering and development is absolutely spot on because we are getting a lot of inquiries from clients and startups who have done just that. They may be a teacher and they're working in conjunction with somebody who has some level of software background. And between the two of them, they're building this really complex and sophisticated system that does a lot of things that was not even imaginable three or four years ago. Would have taken a whole team of software developers a year. And they're saying, oh, well, we started this two months ago. And they've got this beautifully operational system already. So. [00:09:34] Elizabeth Gearhart: Well, I use perplexity. I don't know, I don't know about the rest of you. You go down rabbit holes sometimes. Like you're saying, okay, can you answer this question? Says, what about this? What about that? And you're like, yeah, what about that? But anyway, it offered to compare AI visibility, which is what I'm really focusing in, marketing the Gearhart Law site to other sites. And some of the things on our website, it didn't find that should have been there. And so I got into this conversation with it in our blog posts in particular, and it said to me, it said, well, why don't we take your passage to Profit shows and pull out the part where Richard talks about intellectual property and other people talk about it and make those into blog posts and then put em on your website. And I was like okay. And so it did everything short of putting it on my website. And I'm like perplexity, you are acting like an agent. And it said no, I wouldn't be an agent until I put it on your website. But it did everything else. It went and looked at the episodes, pulled out. One made a blog post quoted Richard, [00:10:33] Richard Gearhart: which is, which is always dangerous. [00:10:36] Elizabeth Gearhart: And I've been using an agent for my website, my personal website, Elizabeth Garrett, Ph.D. where I have my speaking stuff and I've noticed it's improved dramatically over the last few months even. [00:10:46] Richard Gearhart: Yeah, yeah. [00:10:47] Elizabeth Gearhart: So Lauren, do you have Another comment about AI? [00:10:50] Lauren Hidalgo: A lot of people now are using AI for shopping so they're asking ChatGPT or whatever platform they're using to help find products because obviously there are so many products out there and so many websites. And I have noticed quite a few leads from ChatGPT in particular, which is fun. I work with a software developer, like a contractor part time and that was one of my goals that I brought up to him probably about four months ago. And I also asked my chatgpt how to improve. It's called aeo. I think it stands for AI Engine Optimization. [00:11:27] Elizabeth Gearhart: Sorry, Answer Engine Optimization. [00:11:28] Lauren Hidalgo: So thank you. [00:11:30] Elizabeth Gearhart: Answer Engines. Find you. [00:11:31] Lauren Hidalgo: Yeah, so we worked on improving that and it also suggested to do exactly what you mentioned, basically more blog posts that have those keywords to optimize all of the search results. And it has generated actual shopping leads, which is really cool to see, to [00:11:48] Richard Gearhart: mention a competitor, although they may not really be a competitor. Amazon has Alexa now as an AI shopping assist tool. I think it's helpful because right now the way the website is populated, it's a lot of sponsored products. Right. That I may not necessarily want. So if I have the option to ask AI to identify products with the particular characteristics I want, I find that a better experience than, you know, asking for one thing and getting a lot of different suggestions that aren't really related to the search that I input. [00:12:26] Elizabeth Gearhart: Any other comments about AI? Any like visions for the future? Do you think it's going to take over? Do you think we're going to control it or it's going to control us? Any thoughts? [00:12:35] Richard Gearhart: I think the pace of change is going to become unbelievably rapid past our ability to cope with it. You just talk about like everything that we're talking about here changing Websites changing brading strategies, you're going to have agents upon agents upon agents shifting in milliseconds to address consumer needs. I don't know that it's going to control us, but I do think the pace of change is just going to be difficult for people like me to cope with. [00:13:04] Elizabeth Gearhart: Other thoughts? [00:13:05] Lauren Hidalgo: Yeah, I actually have had this experience already with my business when it comes to customer service, when you need to speak with a human. Right. A lot of these companies have just outsourced to AI bots and it's very difficult sometimes to speak with a human. So I'm totally for using AI for efficiency's sake. But one of the things that I decided from the start and actually is one of the things that our customers say they value the most is the ability to speak with me or one of my assistants on email or even on the phone directly if they need to. If you go to Amazon or Etsy, a lot of times you have to go through a whole automated process before being able to speak with a customer. And I think in an era a lot of everything's online. Right. So it's difficult to build trust with customers no matter what industry you're in, especially if it's virtual and they can't see who is running behind the business. So that's something where I think even more value will be attributed to the human experience as everything becomes increasingly digital, especially for generations that didn't grow up with this level of technology in their everyday lives. [00:14:15] Elizabeth Gearhart: That's a great observation. Yeah. Anybody else? [00:14:19] Nate Amidon: Authenticity is going to be the game for a while. People are going to crave human interactions. So stuff like this is great because we're clearly not AI bots. [00:14:30] Richard Gearhart: Oh, you think I could be a clone of myself? [00:14:32] Nate Amidon: You know, and so I think as organizations, a lot of what we do is help large enterprises with how to implement AI in their workforce. Is keeping a human first strategy where AI is an assistant to help you be better at your job and resist that full outsourcing approach. And so the more we can keep AI as something that makes us better, I think the better off we're going to be. [00:14:59] Elizabeth Gearhart: Absolutely. Final thoughts, Leah? [00:15:01] Leah Sullivan: Yeah. I also think there are going to be new skills that we as human develop that are going to make us better at interacting with the AI. We're going to learn how to prompt better, how to manipulate, how to manage all these agents that are overwhelming. So I think there are new opportunities for new skills, new roles, particularly in organizations, for people can really manage and interact with AI in the best way to help the company scale as well. [00:15:32] Elizabeth Gearhart: I agree a hundred percent. And I think people, I was listening to this podcast, the Daily AI Brief, and the guy was saying that to learn AI, you're just going to have to practice. You're going to have to just use it. And I have been, and I've learned a lot about it just using it. Anyway, I can continue this discussion all day, but I see Richard is giving me that look. So I do want to say, is [00:15:55] Richard Gearhart: that the time to end the AI discussion? [00:15:57] Elizabeth Gearhart: So anyway, this has been Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable, and if you're listening to this on the radio, it's been edited to fit our radio spot. But if you want to hear the full discussion, you can listen to our podcast, Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable on YouTube and wherever you get [00:16:15] Richard Gearhart: your podcasts, you have been listening to Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable. We hope you found this valuable. [00:16:22] Nate Amidon: Join us again for more stories. [00:16:24] Richard Gearhart: Because the future of business is driven by AI. This podcast was recorded as part of [00:16:28] Nate Amidon: the Passage to Profit Radio Show.