FridAI - Operators and Agents

Business brain, episode 677 for Casual Fried AI August 22nd National Tooth Fairy Day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where you or we come up with some ideas. We then crunch them, we dissect them, we use them to tune our business brains each and every time we get together, usually twice a week, so that we can each keep on living our charmed lives. Our sponsors for this episode include constant contact.com, where you can go and try Constant contact free for 30 days, and bitdefender.com brain. That's where you're going to save 30% on BitDefender Ultimate Small Business Security here. We'll talk about more of those in a little bit. But here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And I'm Shannon Jean. I'm still out in Lafayette, California. Happy Friday.

I Happy Friday. I, I, I want to take a little Friday eye detour, though.

Sure.

Because this National Tooth Fairy Day reminded me of a parenting story. But I think there is a business. There's a lot of parent, like running a business and being a parent, there's, there's, there's many similarities. They are not all similar, obviously, but I remember. And if you're listening with your young kids, we're going to talk about the Tooth Fairy, and I'll leave it at that. So you can choose whether we're going to keep on talking together or not, folks. But I remember I was traveling. I was down in Austin in our office there, and, you know, I would call my family every day, and I talked to my kids and I talked to my daughter first, and she said, hey, did mama tell you? And I said, nope. And she said, yep, we talked to her about Santa and the Tooth Fairy and all this, and we know. And I said, okay. And I asked her, I said, what do you know? And she said, that's good.

That's good.

She said, well, we know that Santa's not real. It's you guys. I said, huh? Okay. And she said, and Lucas, you know, our daughter knows, or our son, rather knows, too. I was like, okay. And she said, well, would you have anything to say about that? I was like, no. To say, yeah, like, no. And she's like, well, like, is it true? Like, suddenly she was questioning everything.

Yeah. Yeah.

And. And I said, what do you mean? She's like, well, do you believe in Santa? Like, she's like, there's no Santa to believe in. And I was like, well, that's interesting. And she said, what do you mean? And I said, well, I still. The. I said to her, the only thing that has changed today is the entity that decides whether or not you believe in Santa has changed. It used to be me and your mother, and today, now it has shifted to you. And she said, oh, do you believe in Santa? And I said, I should look at it. I said, I sure do. I said, and what I know is that I wake up on Christmas morning and Santa has left gifts for the whole family. And she's like, well, wait a minute. Does that mean if I don't believe in Santa, that Santa won't leave gifts? And I said, I don't know the answer to that, because I have always chosen to believe. And she's like, well, I think I want to keep believing. And I'm like, sounds good to me. And. And. And that was it. But there's. There's. There's. I mean, there was. It was an empowering moment. Right. But empowering. And. And she was empowered to choose to believe in Santa and everything else if she wanted to or not. If she wanted to. Like, this was fine. The only thing that changed that day was that she gained autonomy over. Over this decision to believe. And. But there was still the dream, and the dream stayed alive. And I think that there's something in our businesses where with our teammates, our business partners, sometimes our employees, you know, we work really hard to impose at times our vision on our. Our. Our teams and our company, and we have to. But at some point, if you can, it's really good to give your team the ability to choose to believe that without you telling them this is how it is, because.

Or they can leave.

Or they can leave. Well, but that's. Right. I mean, like. I mean, at some point, that's what it would come down to. Right? Like, you know, if you're not on board, believe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you don't believe. If you don't believe.

Yeah. But it can't be up to you all the way through. It's up to you in the beginning, just like it is with the Santa and the Tooth Fairy and whatever else you got on your list there. The Easter Bunny and, you know, all those things. But at some point, you got to shift that.

Yeah.

To them.

You don't have enough energy to carry it forever.

No, you don't. No.

And. And it is, you know, in the beginning, all the energy to get things going is coming from. From you.

Yes.

Yeah. Your optimism, your delusion, if you will, your unrealistic expectations, all those things help you create systems when you're first getting your business started, but eventually the energy has to come back.

Yeah. You need it. Right. You need it to come back in order to keep it alive. Because you can't keep it alive forever. No.

And it could come back from your customers. It does come back from customers, but it also has to come back from the people you work with.

Yes.

They have to believe and they have to buy into the impact your. Your noble cause. If you.

Yeah, yes, exactly. Yes.

And I. We had a whole thing, we had a big thing in our building that said, you know, we're changing the world one repair at a time. This is a tech restore.

Yeah.

And people would think, what do you mean by that? And I would just explain some examples. I said, yeah, you know, this college student sent their laptop in and their thesis was on here, and they just couldn't get it. You know how they get it back and we turn it around and I could just over and over and over, I said, don't discount the work you do. It seems like it's kind of the human condition.

I know.

To just to often discount the.

It happens to me, too. And when your team is on board, they can help you with that, just like you helped them in the beginning. Yeah. So I love it.

Yeah. Yeah. I really think this is valid.

Yeah. No, as I noticed, it was National Tooth Fairy Day. It, of course, reminded me of that moment. And. And I share that moment with new parents all the time. It's like people. If people want parenting advice from me, that's my go to. It's like, I love it. You know, you get to do this and. And. And you can. You're welcome if. If you want to use it. If. If not, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good.

More parenting advice later. No, no, no. We've got AI stuff to talk about later in the episode. Next, we're going to talk about our two sponsors because. Well, this episode is sponsored by bitdefender, a global leader in cyber security. And let me just say, they can save you from a very expensive mistake. If you run a small business, you know the drill. The invoices pile up, you pay them as fast as you can, and you hope nothing gets missed. But one day, I got something weird. An invoice for a service we never used. It happens. It looks legit. It had a logo, a real address, even a phone number. It was a scam, right? You've seen this, too. A totally fake invoice designed to trick us. And that's exactly why I recommend using our sponsor Bitdefender Ultimate Small Business Security. It scans everything. Emails, attachments, links and flags shady stuff before anyone on your team clicks or pays anything. 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Get a free 30 day trial when you go to constant contact.com. try Constant Contact free for 30 days at constant contact.com again, constant contact.com and our thanks to Constant Contact for sponsoring this episode. So Shannon, today we're the day that we recorded this. We recorded four episodes, two weeks worth of stuff. Uh, because of the travel schedule that I have going on here, which happens sometimes, and it's always I'm, I think we both are in a of a flow where we come up with enough topics, sometimes too many topics for each week. It's never like we rarely are digging deep into the, you know, the, the, the, the recesses of our, our agenda to find things. But when we do two weeks worth, sometimes we dig. And today for Friday, I, you know, I did a little digging and I started seeing some old topics that we sort of covered in different ways or maybe chose not to cover because we had better things to do. And there were several about operators and now agents with AI. And as I was looking at those, I started thinking, you know, we've talked about it, we've chosen not to talk about it. We've put it on the list. It's been top of mind, like it's definitely there and we've both used it in different ways. But I haven't found a use case for an operator or an agent that really is doing what I want or need in a valuable way. Sometimes it's fun, but it never delivers. Like, I haven't had it deliver something that's like, oh, I could like. This weekend we were playing with it. We had an idea for, for a children's book that really was like a snarky children's book for like people who we didn't think were parenting their children right. We're not usually all that judgmental, but we were having fun with it, you know, and, and so we, my son started using an agent to like do all this and it, you know, it did okay for a little while and then it went way off the deep end. I was like, yeah, okay, so fun and fine. And there were no stakes. We weren't actually going to publish this book. I mean, who knows? Maybe. But you know, it wasn't, it wasn't like, I need this for my business. Sure. And, and, and that's kind of how I've been using agents is that way. Have you had success with them yet? I think maybe we're not, we're just not there yet, which is fine. But, but maybe I'm not there yet.

Yeah, I think it's, I think that, yeah, I've had a similar experience in the sense that it's, it almost gets you there.

Yeah.

It's like it gets you to the 20 yard line and it kind of. I can't do that. Or yeah, I did it. I did that. And you're like, no, you didn't. Yeah, I did. No you didn't. It still doesn't work. Yeah. But I do see people in my Kind of SMB bubble. Same that I think are better technically inclined than I am.

Okay.

That have more familiar familiarity. You using these kinds of tools that are doing some pretty cool things, but I couldn't give you like, great examples.

Okay.

So that's probably tell. Telling as as well.

Right? Well, that's the thing is like, I'm part of a bunch of different, like AI groups and things like that. And sometimes, you know, the prompts that we get that we share here come from those and of course we always link you through to them and all that stuff. Very transparent about that. But because we love crediting sources, we can't come up with all this stuff on our own, obviously. But I really haven't, like, even with that and even with actively mining them at some level, not just for my own sort of personal use, but for discussion on this show, in this segment, I'm actively out there mining them and I just haven't found an agent, like a use case for an agent where it's like, oh my God, that slays. We need to share this. It just hasn't come up now. I could have missed it.

I would agree.

The algorithm hides things all the time.

So, you know, I, I would agree with you. I mean, there's no doubt. I feel like Chat GPT is probably the best thing I've ever paid 20amonth for.

Yeah. Yeah. Even $200 a month.

Yeah. Don't tell them, but I know $1,000 a month and it would be. I mean, it's saving me thousands of dollars, right? Yes, no doubt about it. Maybe tens of thousands.

And we had a service we were using that was costing us about 100 bucks a month. And the other day Sadie came to me and she's like, don't renew this. Like, I'm not going to renew. I mean, she was managing it, but she's like, I'm not going to renew this. I've. I've been able to do it all with Chat GPT. And I'm like, I know, I know.

Exactly.

Same.

So, yeah, from that aspect, I have, you know, no regrets, but I do believe. I don't believe it's there yet.

Yeah, that's okay.

At least. At least for. I would call myself a casual user, even though I use it every day.

Yeah.

I still think. I'm not a pro user of it.

Yeah. But I mean, I'm pretty technically inclined. I'm not the most technically inclined person.

But far more than I am.

And my brain just sort of gravitates to that stuff. You Know, and even with that, like, the best. Well, one of the best things I've used Chat GPT port for, and I pay for this is I pay for GitHub's copilot, which is the coding assistant that you get. Right.

Yeah.

That is like, every time I use it, I am so thrilled with how well it works. It's just amazing what I can do. And being a programmer, using it to vibe code things.

Yeah.

Like it's a. It. Like it. It 10x is my ability to code.

Yeah. I would say a lot of my stuff. Absolutely.

Yeah.

But that's not launching the agent, the browser.

No, I'm very engaged.

I'm.

I'm spending two hours, but I'm getting 30 hours worth of work by someone that knows more than me. Like, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we would love to hear if you're getting, you know, if you're using Operator, an agent with one of these AI services. FeedbackUsBrain show. Reach out to us or find us on any of the social platforms. Just search for our name. You'll find either Dave or myself. And let us know, because we want to know. And I want to talk about it. I want to feature it.

I know the day will come where. I know the day will come where. Where. It'll have been six months since I started properly using agents. And it's. It's just like we are with ChatGPT now. It's like, you can pry that from my cold, dead fingers, you know, But. But I'm not there yet. And I. I want to be there. Like, I'm willing to take some pain to get there.

I'm ready. Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm ready to go, dude. Yeah, for sure.

So I'm. I'm eager.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, me too. Yeah, me too.

Folks, let us know. Like he said. Feedbackusinessbrain show and thank you very much for listening to the show and engaging with us. It means a lot to us and obviously we have fun doing this and we get value out of doing this, but I don't think we'd still be doing it if it weren't for all you, so thank you. Thank you for all of that and keep living that charmed life and have a great weekend.

See you guys.