Perplexity - Make better business decisions that drives profit

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Thanks for joining us today. I'm glad everyone took time out of their busy day to join us. I know some people might be on spring break time of year, and for you joining us is great. And if you're in the Northeast, we're finally getting some nice warm weather. My name is Ben Mills, and I'm one of the co-founders of the AI Ready Business, where we're committed to breaking—

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Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us today and taking time out of your busy schedule. We really appreciate it. I know some of you might even be on spring break, so it's even more impressive that you've taken some time. My name is Ben Mills, and I'm one of the co-founders of the AI Ready Business. Well, we're committed, Ary and I, to breaking down AI topics and tools and showing you how AI can be used effectively, efficiently, and not only in your business but your personal life as well. I'd like to introduce my partner and co-founder Ary Aranguiz real quick. Take it over, Ary.

Hey everybody, welcome, welcome to the AI Power Lunch. Today we are diving into Perplexity. It is a beautiful day here in upstate New York, the Hudson Valley. Beautiful spring day, blue skies and sunshine. Please say hello in the comments. Tell us where you're calling from. Remember, we can't see you, um, so a nice hello and where you're calling from would be great for us so that you— we know that you're there. And I'm gonna drop our networking sheet in the comments here. So that you can share your information, and we see the first hello. Hello, Ari and Ben. Thank you for doing this for us. No worries. No worries. Our pleasure. We are very happy to be here and to be spending this next thirty minutes to show you perplexity. So we're going to take some care of some housekeeping items right now. Our regular disclaimer. Just remember that this presentation is for informational purposes only, and participants are responsible for conducting their own independent assessment before adopting or relying on any AI tools or recommendations discussed. Attendees should carefully review each AI provider's confidentiality, data security, and privacy policies to ensure compliance with their organization's legal and regulatory requirements. All right, so now that that's, uh, out of the way, and while we're waiting for some people to join us here, please drop your questions in the chat. This is our 8th Power Lunch, and we have been getting some amazing questions. We've covered a lot of different tools, and if we don't get to answer your questions live, we always follow up. We love the questions, so Whatever comes up during the demo, or if you think of something after, shoot us a DM or put it in the comments on the page. And if you're wondering if Perplexity is right for your business, you know, feel free to ask questions, specific questions about your business, and we'll follow up with you. Or if we get a chance, we'll answer them live. So say hello in the chat, tell us where you're calling from. And then also we ask for a big favor. We have been building up our community on our LinkedIn page. We take a lot of time to share valuable content for you. Please follow our LinkedIn page. It's the iReady Business on LinkedIn. Follow us as well. And, um, that will, uh, take care of this introductory portion of our presentation. So with further ado, let's go ahead and get started.

Let's get started. So what are we going to cover today? Actually, we're going to be covering perplexity. To be honest with you, Ary, it's one of my favorite AI tools. It's probably the one I use the most, and I've had a lot of good luck with it. Today we're going to be covering what is Perplexity, who's it for, how you can use it, some of the security and privacy considerations that you have with all AI tools. Then there's also— we have 3 live demos of things that we're going to show you where we use Perplexity to do various research. Like with all of our seminars and our Lunch and Learns, We're open to questions, comments, ideas, best practices. Share, share what you know, uh, in the comment section. We're happy to share with everybody because one thing we've learned is when you're using AI and growing, everyone uses a little difference, and we're sharing your information, sharing your skills helps everybody. Uh, so today's topic is Perplexity. So what exactly is Perplexity? Perplexity is an AI tool, power answering machine. Think of it as a brilliant research librarian. You ask it questions, it searches the internet and gives you the real-time answers. And I know you're probably sitting there thinking Gemini does that, Claude does that, ChatGPT does that. The one thing that I like about Perplexity is it not only gives you the answer, but it gives you the sources of the answer. It gives you a link to where it's getting the information from so you can validate it in real time and maybe read an article and even learn more about the answer than you initially thought about when you when you set up the prompt. Another part of perplexity is the perplexity skill, and that's a set of reusable instructions that you can teach an AI assistant how to handle specific tasks consistently with your standards every time it comes up. It's— think of it as a detailed playbook or standard operating procedure. So if you hire someone new at your company, it's a resource that they can use if they have questions on how— think how your company operates, Or how to handle certain situations. And then the last area that we're going to touch on a little bit is called Perplexity Computer, and that's similar to having a full operating team in one conversation. Uh, just doesn't answer questions or work in your local files. It runs an entire workflow end to end. It can research in parallel across the web. It can write and execute code in the cloud sandbox. It can create professional documents. It can use 400 different apps. It can deploy live websites. It can remember your preferences and your styles across many different tasks. It runs like on autopilot. But that's enough of just the background of Perplexity. Let's just start jumping into some actual uses of Perplexity. What we're all here for is some demos and see how you can actually use it.

Let's do it. We'll come back to the safety. Um, let's, uh, go ahead and dive in. So what I'm going to show you today is we're going to do some market research and some competitive analysis, and also I'm going to show you how you can build an FAQ for your business, uh, for your website. So I'm gonna go ahead and jump right in. So this is Perplexity here, and like all of these different tools. The first, the most important thing is for you to understand how to navigate the tool. And can everybody, can you see my screen there? Yes, perfect. All right, just wanted to make sure there. So when you go to perplexity.ai, you're going to have this chat box here, this chat window in the middle. And then on the left, you will see all of these different, the, the different menu. This will always take you home and you can search. This is computer, which we'll come back to in just a minute. This is where you can click to start a new chat, but because I've clicked computer, uh, it takes me right there. So I'm going to go back to the home page there. And then you can see any, uh, conversation that you've had. You will be able to see it here in the history. These are all the different conversations that I've had over the last few months. You can see any media that it's created for you, any apps that you've created, because Perplexity can also create apps for you, documents that it's created for you. And then you can always jump back in and go to a new thread there. And then here, Discover. This is an amazing feature here because this is up-to-date information. You can filter, you can Identify the topics that are of interest to you and customize your Discover experience. So if you're interested in tech and science, business, arts, culture, sports, entertainment, you can select that. And then you can just click here and discover, and you'll get up-to-date articles and research and all kinds of information. It's pretty amazing. And this is again pulling from the web and curating it directly for you. Here, for example, it'll give you the top articles, and then here you can explore by topic. Now here, Spaces, we'll come back to this, but as Ben mentioned, Spaces allow you to create your own knowledge hub. Think of it like NotebookLM. It's very similar in that sense, but it goes a bit further because in your Spaces, and I'll go ahead and jump to a space that we've created, you can actually create your own operating team. You can make this your marketing content engine, your operations, your strategic analysis, your competitive analysis. This is our space that we've created. We've added our files, we've added different links. We— you can also add, uh, custom instructions to have it go out and do specific things. And again, these are the types of topics that we explore in our AI Ready Business Community, which we encourage you to join. Because if you join, we will walk you through setting this up for your business, for your purposes and your goals. And of course, you can always share this with others so that it's private. Notice that Ben and I are part of this one. And you can determine the view access. So that is Spaces there. Now if you are doing research about finance, crypto, earnings prediction screener, this is another section here with tons and tons of research, uh, that can guide your investment, uh, strategies there. And you have information for US markets, India markets. And here, this is a new feature Health. If you have a wearable, if you have a scale, the Withings scale, you can connect it to the Withings scale and the Health app on your iPhone and get all different kinds of information, nutrition information, a fitness coach. It's just amazing. Perplexity, it is just all in one. It does so, so much. And shopping, you can compare prices, get the best deals, just incredible, um, amount of information that you can find there. You can try— you can, uh, also use it to plan your trips. Again, in 30 minutes there's not enough time to go through everything, but we highly encourage you to go in and, and look around and explore. You can also do academic research and even get information about patents. So that's just the lay of the land here on the menu. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to Perplexity here to the homepage, and I'm going to show you the deep research. Excuse me. So I'm going to show you the deep research here. So if I just remove that there, I can click the plus sign and I can select deep research. And then I'm going to take a prompt. And in this case, the first prompt that I'm going to use is the prompt on doing a market analysis. And I've done it before, um, so in the interest of time, I'm just going to show you the prompt. Act as a market analyst. Identify the top 5 competitors to your company or product. You fill in the blank. And then for each, provide your target customer segment, value proposition, pricing model, key differentiators, strategic moves, weaknesses or gaps, Summarize where the market is saturated, where there is opportunity. So I would click that, and then in the interest of time— and I'm going to click it, come back to it later— and it starts thinking, it starts going out to the web and finding information, uh, doing the research for you. It starts asking me questions also. But in the interest of time, I'm going to go to the history here, and I am going to show you the, um, We did for demo purposes, and here's the same prompt. We identified competitors for ShopRite. ShopRite is a grocery store here in New York, and so it identified that the top competitors for ShopRite are Walmart, and there's one Walmart and Aldi and a couple others. Um, but I want to show you how detailed this report is, and you can download this competitive analysis as a Word doc, a PDF. You can save it on your G Drive. You can add it to a space and keep asking questions and revisit this and use the insights for all different kinds of strategic planning. So this is just one example, and again In our community, we go much deeper and we help you create these assets for yourself to empower yourself and make better business decisions. And the beauty of this is that there is a very low— like, uh, it is not very likely that it's going to hallucinate because it is doing the research from the web. It gives you the list of all of the resources And so you can validate the information there in real time. You can share it with others. So that is the competitive analysis there. And I'm just checking there, checking on the time. So we're doing good on time here. So another example that we want to show you is, and I'm just going to come back here, is I'm going to turn it over to Ben because Ben did, um, some outreach for us. So let me turn that over.

Yeah, so we were working with somebody who was interested in targeting nonprofits in, in a county in New York State called Dutchess County. And he was trying to figure out how he could get a list of them, how he could meet the people that run them, how he could get the contact info. And his initial thought is, I would have to just, you know, sit on Google and go to every single nonprofit's website and get the information off their 990s and stuff. But what I did is we created a prompt that basically said, create a list in Excel of all the nonprofits over $1 million in 2024 located in Dutchess County, New York. Identify the name of the organization, the board chair, the board chair's email, the executive director's name, the email, and the phone number for all the nonprofits in the county. And we are looking for it to create it. in Excel. And let me bring up and show you exactly what it did real quick. And the output that it came up with was— it only took a few minutes. I can see it.

No, we can't. Not yet. Oh, almost. Here we go. There we go.

So what it brought up is here's the full list. Now you're asking why a lot of this is blank. It's because I stopped it because it was going to take longer to do. And the person I was doing it for was really focused on nonprofits in this range. But you can see it lists all the board chairs. Uh, some of the board chairs' emails were not as readily available, but you can see here's all your executive directors, here's their emails, and here's their phone numbers real quick. So it organized it very quickly. Um, and what I did is I picked a couple of these nonprofits that I actually work with As a way to validate the information, and everything that came back was, was, was spot on and correct, that, uh, they are the people in charge and they are the people, the executive directors.

Awesome, great use case. And, uh, I'm gonna go ahead now, and Ben, I'm not sure if your camera is on.

There we go.

There we go, no problem. All right, so great use case, and, and again, that's something that can be added to a space, a Perplexity space, and you can continue to build upon that and gather insights and add additional instructions. The next use case that we have for you is the market trends. Again, I have the prompt ahead of time here, and in the interest of time, I'm just going to show you the one that we did before. So we did analyze current trends in the AI consultancy space over the past 12 to 24 months. And again, you fill in the blank there with your industry. Identify emerging trends, gaining traction, declining or oversaturated trends, key drivers behind these shifts— technology, regulation, consumer behavior— what these trends mean for SMB specifically, and provide actionable insights, not just descriptions. So again, we are using that deep research, and how we got to that is just clicking here, deep research. We click it, it goes out to the web, starts doing its research. I'm going to go here to history to show you, um, the, the report that it came back with. Here is the same prompt on AI consultancy, and look at this report. It is so robust, so many great insights that then we can use to build our strategy. Um, it gives us all different kinds of ideas for opportunities. And, uh, again, you can add this to a space as well. Gives you information about key drivers behind these shifts. So much detailed information that we can act on. And again, you can, um, download this as well and share it with others. You can download it, copy it, share it, do all kinds of things and validate the information by taking a look at where the sources came from. Another one that we want to show you is social listening. So what if you could be a fly on the wall and you could actually get a sense of what people are feeling about AI, so that then you can tailor your outreach and your content to what people are actually caring about. So there is actually— let me— sorry, let me go back here. Sorry, I'm jumping around here. So if you go to the plus sign here and you go to connectors and you select social, what Perplexity does is it can search Reddit, LinkedIn, Um, and other social media sites so that you can get a sense for what people are actually talking about. So I'm going to go ahead and show you.

Um, so, Ary, what you're saying is you could take your product or service that your business does and you could get a trend analysis or an idea of what people are talking about that product or service, and then you could start tailoring your message to address the concerns Or opportunities that are being monitored all over the social media channels.

That's absolutely right. Yep, that's exactly what this does. So notice the prompt here: analyze recent discussions across Reddit, LinkedIn, X, and forums about agentic AI. This helps us better understand what is the word on the street, right? What are people saying? What are common questions people are asking, frustrations or complaints that come up? Misconceptions, the language that people are using. Summarize the top 5 patterns and what they reveal about unmet demand. So fill in the blank with your industry and you could get this social listening right there at your fingertips. And again, it is, um, not going to hallucinate. It's going to give you the actual source that it went to. And you could see it here under links. Notice that it went to Reddit and it identified what are people saying in this particular Reddit space about agentic orchestration? What are people saying on LinkedIn? This is another amazing use case here. Another one that we wanted to show you, Perplexity is not just about research. It does the research for you, but it can also create— in computer, you can also create apps. And if you go here to, let's see, hold on one second. If you go here to the plus sign and you go to create files and apps, you can create all different kinds of dashboards and apps. And I am gonna show you one specifically here that is pretty funny. And Ben, if you wanted to talk about this one.

So this is one they have preset up, and you could change it and make it anything that you want. But this is a Big Mac— McDonald's Big Mac tracker. And what it does is it tells you the price of the Big Mac in countries all over the world, not just today, but you can go back in time. And Ari and I just found it to be interesting. But the point of us showing this is you could change it to any kind of product or any other types of things that you want. We just thought it was interesting that to show you the power of the tool, you can just pick a product and find out what people are paying for that product in different parts of the world. And it translates it right into the US dollar based on the current currency or the currency at the time. And it also shows you the change in the value of it over time.

Right.

So we just found it to be an interesting example and for the McDonald's lovers out there. And we also thought that you can then apply it to any other product or service to find out what is going on with it.

Yep, absolutely. And notice it says build your own. So this was made with, with Perplexity Computer there. And then it gives you different examples of different apps that you can create and presentations and even videos. You can actually create 8-second videos as well. So with that, we have—

The one thing I wanted to highlight again is that social media tracking, because Ari and I talk about our business all the time, and it's very easy for you to think you know what people are concerned about and you know what they're worried about when it comes to your product or service. But the social media app, really what it does is it, it, it goes out and gets true answers to those questions, not people responding to you, but really goes out and finds out what the concern is on the street. And I think we've tested it a couple times, and it's interesting what you find out because often it's slightly different than what you think people are worried about. And sometimes it could be the simple things that are keeping them from buying the product or the service. And what that does then is it can help you tailor your message better for the customers— your customers and what they're buying based on what their true concerns are, not what you think their concerns are. what their concerns truly are. We think that's an incredibly powerful tool.

Yeah, exactly. You actually get specific quotes of what people are saying out there. Another one that we want to show you, the last one here with Computer. Again, next week we are going to dive in again to Perplexity. We're going to show you its browser comment and what that can do, and we'll show you more about Computer. But we encourage you to sign up for our newsletter. It's not just a newsletter, it's also a community, it's also live courses. We work with you in small groups. That's how we, we are different, uh, because, uh, we want to work one-on-one with you and make sure you walk away with the systems that you need, with the agentic AI that you need, and, uh, with no technical language and, um, Overwhelmed.

I would even add one more thing to that, Ari, is that our trainings, we cap on the number of people that can attend. You'll never be in a training with 400 or 500 people on a Zoom call at one time. You're never going to be in a classroom setting if it's live with 300 or 400 people in the room. We're doing a presentation in a couple weeks and they capped at 18 people, and we're, we're requiring, or we're hoping, or we're requesting that people show up with their laptops their computers because we want it to be hands-on. Everything we do is hands-on. So we do a video training with you, we're going to want you to be on your computer actually doing and not just listening and looking at slides. It's more focused on actually doing the activity. I think we've all been in training courses, myself included, where within 15 minutes you're already lost and the next hour you sit in confusion. And you never get that hour back in your life. Whereas this is hands-on. So if you're lost in 15 minutes, Ary or myself will help you get back on track. So the hour becomes very productive.

That's right. That's right. So one of the last things we want to show you here, um, is the ability to create, uh, all different kinds of dashboards or landing pages. This is a dashboard that we created that went out to the web and did research on AI's impact on the workforce. And it identified all of the different major research organizations: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, McKinsey, Forrester, Oxford University. And if you click on the source, it actually takes you to that source. So again, it's not hallucinating at all. Obviously, you should always validate your sources, any output from AI. But this was created probably in about 5 minutes with just a simple prompt. It tells you what its database is. So lots of great information here for different industries. If you want to learn more about how AI is impacting the workforce, how it's being— how it's impacting how it's impacted the workforce over the last few years, um, what is confirmed as far as layoffs are concerned, and it shows you all the different companies that have actually laid off employees and how many employees have been laid off. So this is just one use case of, um, the type of dashboards that you could build. And notice it even created a timeline for us. And this was something that I didn't necessarily give it those instructions to create a timeline, but it recommended that the best way to present this type of information was to use a timeline. And then it even shares like its methodology. How did it— what was the process that it used and what were the types of sources that it used to come to these conclusions and provide this information? So with that, there's so much more. There's not enough time in 30 minutes to cover everything that Perplexity is capable of. We'll continue this conversation next week. And now we are going to come back here and—

And again, we do a newsletter that comes out twice a month. It highlights a tool. It's got best practices. It has uses. It has real-world examples that you can and start implementing it tomorrow. It's not— it's geared for more the beginners or intermediate users of AI. There's also CFO Insight. So if you're running a business, how you can look at it and calculate a return on the investment for that tool. And there's all sorts of information that goes on with this newsletter. And as a subscriber, you also have access to our online AI community where people are sharing ideas, people are sharing best practices. or just raising questions or trying to figure out a new tool. One thing that Ary and I have realized as we've been doing— working more and more with AI is whatever you learn on Monday is usually outdated by Friday with some new tools and new bells and whistles on the current tools. So it's a constant learning experience. It's not just learn it today and you're good. It's an ongoing learning process into the future. So I'd encourage you to do that. And by also subscribing to the newsletter, you'll have access to tutorials, you'll have access to training seminars, all free. And the last thing I would ask everybody to do is follow our LinkedIn posts. That's where we're constantly putting up information about current AI events, trainings, tutorials, and modules and things like that. And we also try to tailor a lot of the discussions and trainings to what our members want to learn and what they have questions about. Because what we've also learned is some people might have questions and they're common questions that other people have as well.

Yeah, that's right. Awesome. Well, we thank you again for joining us. We will see you next week. We'll dive in again to Perplexity. Send your questions our way. I see a question there and we'll answer that now after the session. We hope you have a wonderful day and see you again next week. Thanks again, everybody.