227. The AI First Mindset With Varant Bomboushakian

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builder's Secrets. In this episode, I interview APB's head of operations, Varant Bomeshakian. In this conversation, Virant and I unpack what it really means to be an AI first building company. We talk about daily habits, key decision making, and how you can lead AI adoption in your company by supporting your team. If you want your building company to stay ahead when it comes to AI, we without overwhelming your team, this episode is a must. Listen this episode of Professional Builder Secrets is brought to you by Apparatus Contractor Services. Apparatus provides full scope, end to end QuickBooks, Precision Construction accounting and CFO services for residential builders. If you feel like you can't completely trust your weekly and monthly financial reports or you feel like you're flying blind, you, Apparatus will rebuild and operate your QuickBooks accounting system and give you precision construction accounting capability you can trust. Learn more@apparatusteam.com or on the APB Rewards Partner Directory.

It's all good to get a ChatGPT account or a Gemini account, but if you don't know how to use it, then it's like having a Formula one car and not really knowing how to drive it. And I'm going to be really blunt right now. Margins are tight already and they're only going to get tighter. So. So the builders, and I should say businesses that survive the next five years who are AI first are the ones who are going to have the best opportunity to survive and thrive.

I know with my team there's been a few occasions where I pull up ChatGPT live on a huddle where they ask a question and I start solving the problem live and the next time around. It has retrained the behavior, the mindset

that you need to adopt and really sort of ingrain is that AI needs to be a habit rather than an initiative. Don't treat AI as a one project.

Welcome to Professional Builders Secrets, the podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely. I'm your host, Will Blunt and today I'm joined by APB's head of operations, Varant Bombashakian. VB, welcome to the show.

Oh, hello Will. Thank you for having me again.

Oh man, I am super pumped for this. So thank you very much for coming on. I had you on the show episode 146 last time, which was, believe it or not in August 2024. We're now in 2026, which is crazy for a number of reasons. We spoke about AI at the time, advanced AI tactics and I'd hate to think what Advanced was back in August 2024 compared to what you know now. The other part of it is I can't believe we haven't covered AI in depth on the podcast since then. So fantastic to have you back on. Thank you for giving up your time. Just for a bit of background, for anyone listening that doesn't know who you are, you're obviously the head of operations here at apb, but you are a legend in the APB community when it comes to AI and its strategic implementation in building companies. I just wanted to share a bit of a background for people that didn't know who you are or how you have learned so much about AI over your time at APB and beyond. I used to go to our APB events, like our state events and our summit and stuff like that, and builders would come up and they'd be like, oh, will, I love the podcast. You know, that'd be, that'd be a conversation starter. And I had this experience at our summit this year, which you speak at, you've done for a couple of years, one of the highest rating speakers on AI and there was a builder walking towards both of us and I was like, here we go, this guy's coming over, he wants to have a chat to me about the podcast. You know, I'm the guy and I was like, I was getting the hand out, I was getting the handout ready to go and straight past me. Brent, Brent, Brent. And I'm just going, I've done the old hand up through the hair. I've been over, overtaken.

So not at all, mate, not at all. I, I still saw quite a few people coming up to you, so I think you haven't lost your luster there, man. You do an incredible job on the, on the podcast. I listen to it quite regularly as well. And, you know, I think between the both of us, as much value we can add I think is going to benefit all our community. So, yeah, really pumped, really pumped in the summit experiences are awesome. I must say, year one of summit was a bit awkward because, you know, I, I post a lot of stuff on the members group, but it doesn't get much engagement in terms of likes. Not that I'm chasing vanity, vanity metrics. And then you turn up at a summit and people know who I am, especially me with the extremely long name. You know, it's usually easily forgotten or misspelled, but everyone knows how to say my name and they know who I am. So it's, you know, great effort from what you guys do in marketing as well, to, to push out the value that we trying to give.

So AI is. This has been a buzzword for a couple of years now. Right. And but it's getting to this point of maturity where it's beyond just this, oh, I'm using ChatGPT or I've heard about AI, all that kind of stuff, to something which is a really strategic, you know, must have for building companies out there. And so the journey that we've been on as a company in terms of our implement implementation of AI and the journey we're trying to take our builders on to make sure they're at the forefront of the industry like you are pivotal to that. So what are we going to talk about today that is different to what we've spoken about before?

Yeah, absolutely. So today's topic, like, like you said before, we were almost on what is it? Year three, year four of AI hitting mainstream. When ChatGPT sort of came out in November, when was it? 2022 I think it was, or 2023? 2022 it came out. You know, the first couple of years were very shiny objects, lots of cool tools, lots of viral posts about how AI can do these magical things. And the last couple of times we've spoken they've been about specific tools and how to use them and where they can add value into the business. But I think now that AI has been sort of in our vision for the last three to four years, I think the focus for me this year is how do we bring this together for the organization. It's all good and great for one or two or three people who are kind of AI ninjas but. And those individuals can move the needle definitely for themselves and possibly for the company as well. But when you have a whole team that's effective effectively using AI and when you've got a very clear approach on where to include AI in your automations and your processes, I think that's where the focus is going to be on this year. It's stop looking at the shiny objects and start looking at how do you roll this out into your company and your teams and your individuals so that it's not just a hey, I'm cool, I'm using a and look what I can do with this cool poem or song. But to actually get real impact, real business outcomes and a big return on investment because that's what we're in business for. We want a return on investment and we're not just going to chase a shiny object just for the hell of it. We want to see a return on that. Not just for individuals, for the teams, but also for the company. And fast forward to the customers as well. So I think AI first is, I guess what we want to focus on. How to be an AI first company in 2026 onwards.

Yeah, AI first, that's the term that you mentioned to me. And it makes a lot of sense because I've experienced it through working at apb. Having a leader of an organization who gives you the right to use AI, test new tools, all of that kind of stuff initially, but then builds it into the strategic makeup of a company. It can have such a huge impact across every department. So why does it matter for builders now to start thinking this way?

The reason why I guess I'll start with what AI first isn't because there's a lot of myths out there where people think they are AI first or that they are embedded with AI or they're running AI through their company and it's doing all these wonderful things. But let me first put out what AI first isn't. So AI first isn't having chat, GPT or a Gemini account for your company and giving people access to it. It's not about having a few tools that you've purchased that have AI functionality in it. And it's not one or two employees that use AI really well in your company. You might be a team of 15 or 20, but you've got two people that use it really well, the rest don't. That's not being AI first. And it's definitely not the owner of the company. Occasionally using AI throughout the week to draft a nice email here and there. Not AI First. That's all that is, is you're using AI in some capacity. So what does AI first actually mean, and how am I going to define it today is when you say you're an AI first company or when you're trying to get your company to be AI first company. It's when AI tech is the first place or the first instinct that every single team member leans on when it comes to solving a problem. It's not their last resort. And this all starts. You very well mentioned it before. It all starts with leadership, modeling it as a daily habit. It's not a one time project. It's. It's not a one off initiative. It is a ongoing daily habit thing. And when leadership sort of uses AI openly and encourages experimentation, that kind of sort of flows through the rest of the organization. And the rest of the organization just organically adopts it just because of osmosis, you know, when it comes from the top, it's okay to do so. People start getting more comfortable with using it. It turns everyone into being very well empowered to use AI as a copilot. Not just for writing emails and redraft copy and text and creating marketing material, but for solving real business problems with real impact in the right places of the business as well. And this kind of happens, being AI first happens across three levels. The first one is AI working inside your business processes. For example, you might have a few workflows or automations that you've built in and sprinkling AI strategically throughout them to reduce the amount of mundane effort. So for example, PDF processing or transcribing or consolidating estimates baked into your workflows. The second level is it's embedded in your team's daily operation. Everyone is working with an AI copilot on the other screen where they can just quickly refer to and spin up something quickly, ask questions, get ideations, or even if it's not office based staff, if you've got site supervisors on site, they could be using AI voice dictation tools to put together the progress reports in as little as five to 10 minutes instead of spending an hour back at the office typing things up. And the third level is AI interacting with your customers. So that's answering, you know, every customer asks very similar questions to the, to other customers and being able to answer their common questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week gives your customers a much better experience as well. So there's, there's the three levels of being an AI first company and it all starts from the leadership level. And I think why this is important and why it matters right now, you know, 2026 onwards, I'd even say this mattered quite a bit partway through 2025. And I'm going to be really blunt. Right now, margins are tight already and they're only going to get tighter. Cost for materials, cost for labor have all skyrocketed since COVID And I personally know that because I built something before COVID and now I've built something after Covid and there was a 35% difference in cost, which, you know, puts a little bit of a hole in my pocket. The competition's only going to get fierce and your prices can only go up so much before you're priced out of the market. So the builders, and I should say businesses that survive the next five years who are AI first are the ones who are going to have the best opportunity to survive and thrive because they'll be the ones who are going to be finding operational savings to balance out all these rising costs and tightening margins. And AI is certainly one of those really powerful tools that will help businesses along the way. And I guess as a bit of a analogy or a example, let's say we've got two building companies side by side. They're both, let's say, fictitiously, theoretically, they're both exactly the same, they've got the same number of people. The company that is not AI first might be building, say 15 builds, doing 15 builds a year, but the company with the same team count, with the same structure, same setups, might be doing 25 builds a year with the same number of staff working the same hours. The only difference between the two, one is AI first and one isn't. The AI first company has the potential of moving at a much faster pace, more efficiently with their processes. They can quote faster, they can respond to customer inquiries faster, they can deal with leads coming in faster, they can market much quicker without having to pay a lot of money to agencies. And that compression of activity in a week compared to a company that's not AI first, all that's going to do is create more results, more opportunities, and stabilize and streamline their business even more as time goes on. I'll take APB as an example. My team, specifically Kazak, I live and breathe what we do here in Ops. We've got a team of seven and we do the equivalent work of between 11 to 13 people. And it's not because we work longer hours. I mean, sometimes we do when we've got deadlines, but it's because we're leveraging the tools, automations and AI very effectively on how we do things. And importantly, we understand the process of our workflows, we know our processes and procedures and we can apply these workflows and tools and AI to them to make it more efficient and make us more effective as individual contributors. Sorry, that was a long question, but

I think, I mean, it sounds attractive if your fixed costs are saying from a salary point of view are essentially staying the same, but your output's increasing, doubling or whatever it is, like that's just straight on the bottom line. So pretty amazing stuff. But I've thought of a story when you were talking about solving problems, and I know that was a while back in what you're saying, but I've been holding onto it. It reminds me of probably 10, 15 years ago, I was having a couple of drinks with mates and I asked a question and one of my mates looked at Me, as if, like, oh yeah, that's, that's interesting. Like, I want to respond to you. And pulled out his phone and walked over to me and handed it to me and he just had Google open up on it. And he goes, google it, mate. And I was like, it just reminds me of that, the anecdote of donut. Like if you ask a stupid question, which this was, you could just Google it. Well, these days there's so many different ways you can get an answer before bringing that to your manager, which increases the time the manager can focus on strategic work, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And it kind of flows on from

there, but absolutely, absolutely.

I never asked that question again.

Yeah, yeah. Now with AI, we can ask anything and get an answer for it, whether it's right or wrong.

That's right though. You gotta, you gotta check that.

But yeah, yeah, yeah. Whether it's right or wrong is a different story. But that's where, that's why we still add a lot of value as humans because we have what's called a brain and critical thinking. So, yeah, AI is a tool, not a replacement for your brain.

I think you touched on it when you were talking about what AI first isn't. But could you dive a little bit more about what builders might be getting wrong at the moment when it comes to AI? I'm sure there's a lot of builders with the best intentions about implementing AI at the moment, but I'm sure there's mistakes they're making as well.

Absolutely no. And I experience this whenever we do our events at Summit. The intentions are definitely there. So I know everyone is looking at this seriously and they want to jump into it, but this is just a builder problem. It's an industry wide, across every business problem. So. And I saw an interesting stat before. I sort of jump in and see and sort of explain some of the areas that might, people might be getting wrong or missing the mark on. I saw a very interesting station towards the end of last year. I'm sure you would have seen it as well on your socials and LinkedIn's that 95% of businesses are seeing a zero return on AI investment. 95% of businesses, that's a lot of businesses. And you know, I was kind of gut wrenched when I saw that because there's so much content out there. But I know we're also limited with time as individuals. So let me break it down. There's only three sort of areas, but these three are really important. Making sure you get your head around so that you can move towards being an AI first company, the very first one, and I think we've touched on it twice so far, is leadership and culture. Let's put AI to the side. The biggest mistake that I think businesses are doing at the moment when it comes to their approach with AI is they're not supporting AI top down. You know, if leadership isn't using AI themselves, actively encouraging their teams to experiment, break, break things, test, what happens is AI adoption dies. Leadership needs to create a culture where it's okay to test things, to break things, where no one is afraid to try using AI and you can't automate chaos. So if you don't know what your business's processes are, if they're not defined, if you haven't systemized your business, I think that the mistake in this leadership and culture, people just trying to shove AI into a process or a workflow that hasn't yet been systemized and defined and doing that poh. If you haven't got your business systemized and your processes defined, all AI does is it complicates things, it confuses things, it makes mistakes, and it just makes, it breaks more things than it makes becoming a very expensive and costly exercise. So leadership culture, leading from the front is extremely important. The second one is tools and training. And I've said this so many times, so many times that I think there's hair growing on my tongue. Not getting paid AI tools is a big mistake. Every business should have a paid subscription to a horizontal chat tool. And a horizontal chat tool is basically your chatgpts, your Claudes and your Gemini. So why paid? Because the free versions, in the free, using the free versions, you are the product. You are helping these big companies train their models based on the data that you put into their systems. And for building companies that are putting in maybe client information or project specs, that's a risk. You don't want that stuff being used to train models. The second is out of the tools and trainings portion is training. I look at a lot of anonymous chat data on APB Brain, so I can see the builders who haven't signed in having conversations with our AI solution. AI Russ, APB Brain and you know, four or five years on, four years on prompting, the fundamentals of prompting is still missing. Asking simple questions without context is going to give you simple answers with average responses. So I think training is still missing. And I don't accept the excuse of I can't do training because I don't have the budget, I'm a smaller business you know, that doesn't fly for me because we have this great tool called YouTube. There are thousands of videos on there. All you need to do is invest a little bit of time to skill yourself up on some of the areas that you might not be familiar of with AI. So we've covered leadership and culture, we've covered tools and training. The third area where a lot of companies are making mistakes in the journey of being AI first is their implementation approach. Most businesses are still, unfortunately, at the stage of chasing shiny objects or asking the question, oh, a new AI tool comes out and they say, oh, how do we use this? That's the wrong question. The right question is, what process is broken and how might AI help fix this? I think, you know, at these, at these events, when I speak to people and, you know, everyone wants that moonshot. You know, an AI that can design a home, an AI that can do the drafting for you, an AI that can do all your estimates for you. But I think we need to move away from those big dream moonshot ideas and focus on the stuff that's going to give the biggest return on investment. And that's the boring stuff. The boring stuff like data entry or endless document creation, or answering the same client question over and over again, or converting one spreadsheet that a supplier may have sent you into a spreadsheet that's going to be customer facing and ready. Those are the boring things that take a lot of human time, that AI absolutely minces. And the reality is, I think most businesses at the moment are using AI so narrowly, you know, they're only using 5 to 10% of its capacity. The technology is multimodal. Now, Four years ago, ChatGPT was text only, but now we've got four or five of these horizontal tools and they're all multimodal. They can analyze spreadsheets so you can spot cost blowouts or look at or understand trends or insights. You can do deep research on suppliers if you're looking for a particular product, or you can do deep research on compliance and regulations. I know, I've done that because councils have a lot of rules, a lot of planning rules and they change from area to area. There's a lot of multimodality built into AI, and all these features are applicable to every single department within a building company, as well as any other industry as well. So, yeah, so those are the three big areas where people are sort of making mistakes. Their implementation approach, the tools and training and as well as leading from the front, leadership and culture. It's got to come from the top for it to be adopted and accepted by the organization. And I think if people focus on those three areas, they're going to see themselves move leaps and bounds in being an AI first company.

It's interesting the data supports exactly what you're saying there. We recently did research in the residential building industry, the state of residential construction industry report. If people aren't familiar with it, it's the sixth year we've done it. And when we asked the question last year, how many people using AI in their company? 37.8% of people said they were. This year that jumped to 66.7% which to you and I right now that sounds, that still sounds pretty low to me, but it's obviously a massive jump forward. The interesting part was though, and this is not just specific to AI, but the adoption of technology alone didn't improve the operations of a company. The training aspect was critical to making that actually work. So the gap between getting, buying software and then investing in training was where the biggest gap was. The companies that were investing in training alongside the software were getting the best efficiency output across the industry.

Absolutely. No, I saw those results as well. And a good call out. You know, it's all good to get a horizontal, you know, get a ChatGPT account or a Gemini account, but if you don't know how to use it to its, I wouldn't say full ability. There's a lot of things AI can do at the moment but use it effectively, then it's like having a Formula one car and not really knowing how to drive it.

What does it actually look like at a leadership level? You mentioned how important it is to be looking at AI first top down from the leadership level. So on a day to day basis, what can the owners of building companies be doing to adopt this mindset?

You know, leading from the top. That's the most critical thing when it, when it comes to being an AI first company because nothing really can stick unless it's really backed by the ownership or the leadership of the business. So this, this question actually is multi pronged. It happens at multiple different levels of leadership in a company. You know, at the, at the top leadership level. So owner, CEO, founder and executive team, the team level and then also company wide for everyone. And it is so important, this is so important being AI first. The critical thing is leading this initiative from the front. So at the leadership level. So executive, executive, CEO. When we're talking about that level, I think I'll just use APB as an example because that's going to really clearly answer how we do things internally, how it translates as well. Russ Stevens, our founder, epitomizes the leading from the front when it comes with AI. He's constantly bringing it up in our leadership meetings. He's always testing new tools. He's at times building small micro solutions, small little workflows or small prompts that solve a business problem that we may have had. And he demonstrates it to us as leaders. What happens when your leader is getting excited about AI showing and demonstrating AI showing that they're making, breaking, failing, succeeding is it gives us as leaders permission to experiment. So it's not talk, it's not just a, AI is an initiative. I want you all to do it. It's hey, look at what it does, how this is how it works. Can we try this out? Have you heard of this tool? It's not talk, it's action. And that flows down. When that happens, it flows down to the team level. So you know, us as leaders, we hear this from our founders on how excited they are about AI, how they're using it, playing with it, how they've integrated it into their daily work that flows to our teams. So my team, for example, we share AI wins regularly on our team meeting. When someone finds a new approach or a new way of fixing an operational problem with AI, it's shared. And the reality is, you know, three or four times out of five that we might share a new way of using AI. Those three or four times, we don't use them, they fail or they don't work that well. But at least we've tried and we've learned and we've put into our knowledge base saying, okay, we've tried that, it didn't work, let's go again. So this makes it, this helps people not build in fear, not be scared of using AI or the wrong solution or the wrong tool. And as long as they know that it's okay to play with AI and break it, you know, as long as it doesn't affect our customers in our business operations, they should have the freedom to be able to experiment and see how AI goes. So leadership level flows down to the team level. We encourage quite a, quite a bit on the team level and encourage everyone to use it. We give everyone the tools as well, paid tools. And then lastly, once you know this, we're talking about the leadership level now and individual team level. The last level is the company, company wide level. Every quarter on our company team meetings, we recognize one person who has had an innovative AI use case this consistency, you know, bringing it up at leadership, bringing it up in team meetings, and then bringing it up in the monthly company wide meetings really puts AI front and center in terms of an initiative and a daily habit. And that's a regular reinforcement that it's okay, it's good, let's try it, let's use it, let's break it. And what happens when you do all of these activities? It takes time. You're not going to become AI first with one or two meetings. This is a consistency game. You bring it up regularly, you focus on the wins, you encourage the losses. And over time, what happens is when you lead from the front and you share as a leader on how you're using it and integrating it as a daily habit without fear, your team starts adopting it through osmosis and they start getting a little bit of FOMO that they want in on the action. They want those efficiencies as well. They want to be part of the journey on being more effective, adding more value. And it all starts from the top.

Yeah, I mean, that's a great breakdown of the rollout that we've had at APB across the last couple of years, really, and it's amazing to reflect back on that. One thing that it got me thinking of is Rust and Sky have put their money where their mouth is as well. Like you've got an experimentation budget, for example, to go away and test AI tools and fail and learn and all that kind of stuff. So you need to invest, you need to actually support your team from that perspective as well, and not just to your point. Get the low hanging fruit tools and accept that that's going to be the best you can do. Some of the habits you mentioned there, I think symbolically is really all you need to start. Like putting it as an agenda item on your meetings, like that alone is going to start bringing it to the forefront.

Absolutely. Because the conversation is always there on the board, so it's always front of mind and it's always, you know, like I said at the start, one of the habits that you want people to develop on the journey of becoming AI first is instinctively leveraging the technology whenever there's a problem and not just leaving it as the last resort tool. The copilot is well and truly alive on their second screen and they're able to pivot to it and come up with a new method or come up with a new prompt that solves a mundane problem or something that takes a lot of time and get a clean outcome in a much faster time.

Yeah, I'm laughing because I know with my team there's been a few occasions where I pull up ChatGPT live on a huddle where they ask a question and I start solving the problem live.

Yeah,

like it's, I'm subtly saying go and ask that first, don't bring it to the meeting kind of thing. And it has retrained the behavior. Now it's all about, you know, doing that first and trying to solve the problem yourself first before bringing it to leadership. Which is exactly what you want to try and create, right?

Absolutely. If you build a habit of staying on top of AI as a leader, you know, you'll be across all the little nuance updates and upgrades that happen. So just to your point, you know, you want your people to be finding the answers to the questions before they come and ask you to then give you the options. You know the tools. Now if you look at ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, they're all integrated into your business tools, into your email, into your documents. So ask a question where the answer might lie in a document somewhere in your repositories. It's possible. Now you don't need to click through Explorer and look through different folders and open up documents. You can ask the question and it'll find you the answer in the document under in a folder full of documents. So if nothing else, if as a, as a team leader, if you know that you're going to get less dumb questions and more smart questions, then that should be the encouragement.

No question is dumb, though. No question is dumb. You know what's funny? I'm thinking about the bottom up version of what you're talking about now because you got the top down, which is leading from the front. But I actually want all my team to be better at AI than me, so I'm learning off them. And if they're bringing new, and I've noticed that if you create the environment where it's okay to test, you start to see these things happen where, you know, if they share an AI win on one of the huddles, you're like, wow. Like, that was, that was sick. Like, how did they figure out how to do it that way? I never thought of it that way. Which makes you better, makes you learn more as well. And it just. Like it's just a cycle.

Absolutely. I mean, you made me blush at the start saying how good I am at AI, but the reality is, once you know, if you're doing this consistently with your team and you're putting AI out there, it's okay to break, it's okay to test, it's okay to experiment. I have found that some of my team members that have demonstrated some solutions, I look back and go, oh my goodness, how did you figure this out? Because that's what happens. You know, as a leader, we shouldn't be the ones building all the tools and automations, it's the wider team. And most of the time I found that we've had the best AI implementations and solutions because it was. The genesis was because it was recommended by one of the team members because they prototyped something small. And then we said, oh, this is great, let's take that out and build it out. So you're going to get gold from your team if you lead from the front with AI, encourage them to get comfortable with it, you're going to find these golden nuggets that appear after a bit of time.

It's interesting, a lot of this is coming back to the fundamentals of how to build good team culture. Having systems in place that are well documented enough that you can start to actually try to improve them with automation and AI and things like that. Right. But also creating the environments where they're willing to fail, willing to test things. So it's kind of the fundamentals of running a good team, isn't it? And AI is a new vehicle that you can do that through.

Now they're on the head. Absolutely.

Let's round out the conversation with one final question. What's the first mindset shift you think builders need to make if they want to lead with an AI first mentality?

Sure. Look for any of the leaders listening to this right now. You know, if you're leading a residential building company, the mindset that you need to adopt and really sort of ingrain is that AI needs to be a habit rather than an initiative. Don't treat AI as a one off project. Don't treat AI as a initiative. One off install. AI has been moving so fast in the last three to four years that it's changing. And two weeks off, three weeks off over the break. Even in those two or three weeks off, there was tools and functionality that were added over the break that weren't there before that actually made a difference in some of the work that we tried to do. So making it a daily habit means that leaders are going to be on top of all the nuances. And I'm not suggesting leaders become AI implementers and experts, not at all. It's just keeping your finger on the pulse, staying fresh with the technology. So you know what's possible and what's not possible, you know, what will work, what won't work. And that only happens when you're using AI on a regular basis over time. So once you commit to using it daily, you know, a couple of things kind of fall into place. And I've certainly had that experience from the moment ChatGPT came out. I think, you know, my nerd personality sort of lends itself to these kind of things, where I picked it up and started using it every day to see how I can leverage this amazing technology, because it reminded me of when the Internet was first sort of really mainstream and I started using it in high school. I thought, this is better than sliced bread. So making it a daily habit for leaders is really important. And the things that fall into place is, you know, leaders start really understanding how to speak to AI. They start understanding its capabilities, they start understanding what it's not good at, because AI is not perfect. We've all seen how it hallucinates, We've all seen how it makes stuff up. We've all seen how it cuts out stuff that are really important. So it's important to have your brain switched on in your critical thinking. But having those experiences means that leaders will have a realistic expectation of AI, and then they can give instructions to their teams or external contractors that might be building a solution for them to build a solution that's going to make an actual impact and not being, I guess, glossed over by all these incredible Facebook posts and LinkedIn posts that say, AI can build you a house, AI can design you all your designs. AI can start from the basics, look at the mundane stuff, make it a daily habit, integrate it into your daily work. And over time, that innate exposure to AI will help you make better decisions in leading your company forward with AI initiatives and with your teams using and utilizing AI.

If everyone listening today can just take that one step towards making it more of a daily habit, I think that's going to be a huge step forward. Get it on the agendas of your meetings and start, you know, leading from the front, basically.

Absolutely. It starts from the top. If you do this on a consistent level. I mean, I'm still getting gobsmacked and surprised with some of the solutions that my team comes up with and demonstrates. I'm like, but that would not have happened had Rust not been so vocal and so interested and so fascinated about AI. And then it filters down. I'm sure you have it in your team as well. I've seen your team do some incredible stuff with AI. Where we've saved tens of thousands of dollars with web developers because we can figure out that one bit because folks are using AI. So, yeah.

Awesome. Wolverine, thanks so much for coming on the show today. If people listening today want to learn more about AI, we have an AI action plan for members. So that's a great place to start if you want to scale up and you're based in Australia or you want to fly out to Australia. Varant's talking at our summit in June this year, which is a must watch. So that'll be the third year running back by popular demand. Would be great to see you there. If you're not a member and you don't want to come to summit. We also have APB Brain available, which is an AI trained tool on all of our education over the last 10 plus years. You can get a little snippet of that by asking a few questions on our website. So go and check that out. That's one that Varant and his team have trained, but Vran, or VB as I like to call you. Thanks again for coming on. It's been a great session and there's tons of value in there. So here's to being AI first.

Here's to being AI first. Thank you. Will really appreciate you having me on and going through this journey with me, working alongside you. We see daily ourselves what AI first means. I still think we've got a little way to go for being AI first, but we're certainly putting in as much effort as we can. And it's not just me and my team, it's your team, your team members. You know, it starts with Russ. So yeah, thank you for making such an exciting conversation. Really happy with what we were able to share.

Be no fun if there wasn't a bit of a way to go. So. Always a bit of a way to go.

Absolutely.

Cool. Thanks for. And also thank you to our listeners wherever you are in the world today. If you like the show, please subscribe to Professional Builder Secrets on your platform of choice and if you're feeling generous, leave us a review. But until next time, have a great day.