FridAI + Understanding Context

Business Brain, episode 623 for Casual Friday, February 14th. Nope. International Winter Bike to work Day. Seems cold here. Maybe for you, Shannon. 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas, we crunch them, we dissect them, we use them to tune our business brains, to further our abilities to lead those charmed lives that we love. Speaking of charmed lives. Charmed lives. Shopify.com business brain is where you're going to go to sign up for your $1 per month trial period of my favorite sales engine, shopping cart, everything management. We'll talk about it in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in the Sierra foothills, getting away for a few days, I'm Shannon Jean.

Nice.

Happy Friday.

Happy Friday. Happy Friday I Shannon Friday I that's right. We've got some stuff to talk about.

We do. We do. This is the segment where we talk about the ways we're using AI and we actually had a little tidbit of it on the, on the Wednesday show. So if you missed that one, go back because it's really good and powerful.

That one blew me away.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's crazy how you just kind of stumble across this. So I'll, I'll start go. If I was. Last night, I was working on some, you know, I, I'm constantly looking at auctions and liquidations and stuff to, to buy, to resell or that's my thing. And, or I, you know, to, to give to somebody else to buy whatever it is, talk about it, educate people. So I came across this pretty large tool auction, like cordless tools, industrial tools. And I'm like, oh, that's interesting. I don't normally buy that stuff, but I was curious, but it had this big PDF which was the manifest, which is great, and had all these photos and everything. And I was like, man, this is gonna, this is crazy. So of course I was like, hey, I need to use my, my AI assistant here. So I just uploaded the PDF. I said, hey, help me analyze this PDF. This is what I need to know. How many items are on the, you know, at the most basic thing, how many items are on, on the list? And then give me a breakdown on all the different categories of tools. Like, hey, there's. So it, it instantly told me, okay, there's 230 items on this list and, you know, 20% of them are cordless. You know, tools of the, of that list. There's this, this, all this amazing breakdown of data that would have just taken me a long time to dig in. And then I said, this is where it really gets powerful. I said, I need, I need you to give me an estimated value of the products listed on this PDF. 229 different tools, power tools, hand tools. Very eclectic. It would have taken me hours to. And I've done this, I've done that. Search, cut and paste. Okay, that's worth 500 bucks. Okay, that's worth 300. So you can get. What I'm looking for is what I can pay. You know, you, on these deals, you work them backwards, right? You say, okay, here is what they sell for. What can I pay it? It's it. You. You make all your money buying arbitrage. You make all your money on the buy side, you know, not the. You're not speculating.

You.

You're not.

Oh, this is interesting. Of course, as you say it, it's obvious you, you won't. You don't think about. All right, well, how much can I mark these up? It's. What are they worth? What's the realistic value?

Mark it up. I don't get to decide the value, Right? The market decides.

Has already decided.

Yeah, it's it. So you look at this stuff and say, okay, if it's worth 10 grand, what can I pay? Shipping this, that and the thing, what can I sell it for? All that kind of stuff. So chat GPT went out. It took a little longer this time because it was really digging, you know, I heard, I could see the steam coming out of my computer. And it came back and said, based on what these are, you know, and the average sale prices that I found, yada, yada, yada, it's worth $12,000. And I was like, oh, okay, so I can then, like I said, I can go backwards. And now the bid that is $4,000. And I'm like, okay, well, there's some money in here, you know, and so what's the maximum I would want to pay to. And to deal with this product and all stuff? So it's just math. But the, the way it helped me break down, I did this while I was watching the Super Bowl. You know, I sat sitting in my lap because of course, you, if you're listening to this show, understand the importance of keeping your laptop on your lap at all times when you're sitting on the couch.

Yes.

Because it is your. Is the keys to the kingdom. Because there's so many things you will discover when you have downtime just sitting there and you can still have a beer and relax, but have that laptop in front of your notebook or whatever you got. You can use your phone if you want, but I find the laptop helps focus you a little bit more. So that's my Friday AI story. What about you, Dave? What do you got?

I was talking to my son this weekend and about AI, and he asked chatgpt on his phone to do something. I forget what it was. And it gave him the answer. And then it said at the bottom, in my opinion, and gave him a summary. And I was like, wow, that's not something I've seen before. He says, oh, yes, I've instructed it to do this. I said, what? And he said, yeah, you go to Settings Personalization. You can do this on the web or on your phone Chat GPT app. So you get a Settings Personalization customize Chat GPT and in that customization setting, yet you can tell it all kinds of things. So you go Settings Personalization and you can. You go to customized custom instructions. The instructions that he gave his, I think were.

It.

It asked, what traits should Chat GPT have? And he said, respond with a precise, concise and accurate tone. Focus on delivering clear and direct answers. This will all be pasted in the show notes, by the way.

Thank goodness.

Clear and direct answers while avoiding unnecessary elaboration or repetition. Use structured formats such as bullet points, numbered lists, or short paragraphs where appropriate. Prioritize clarity and relevance, ensuring responses stay on topic and align with the query's intent. Tailor the explanation to be universally understandable, avoiding excessive jargon unless explicitly requested, and then be opinionated and prepared to support your opinions. Always state and make clear what statements are opinion and. And not objective fact.

Oh, that's cool.

Oh, I know.

Yeah, I want that.

I want that. It's there. It's in the show notes. You're good to go. Yep.

Yeah, I'm definitely doing that. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing I love, like, you mentioned it, actually I think it was in the last episode, is that it's such a great starting point and it helps create structure around some kind of either, you know, a concept or a framework you're working on. And it allows you to. It's not doing the work for you, but it. It allows. It helps you get your thoughts together.

It's a collaborator.

It's a collaborator.

Yeah, that's how I think of it. Yeah.

Yeah. And I highly, like, rarely do I cut and paste.

Right.

I'm always like, okay, yeah, that's some good. I can do that now. I'm gonna. I gotta massage this. And I wanna do this because I. I want it to have. Especially if you're creating content, I want it to have my voice.

Yes. Right.

And now you can upload your content samples so it will have your voice, you know, pretty good.

That email that I talked about in the last episode, that it just kind of did it without me even being able to, like, tweak it was actually the second thing. I wrote the email, but knew I didn't. Like, I knew it needed to be cleaned up, which. Which I would. Which is normally how I operate. Right. I just kind of think. And it's like, oh, this is what I want to say. I don't know, like, how do we clean this up? So I gave it to ChatGPT and it cleaned it up. But I do that so often that it knows my tone now.

Yes.

Right. And that's. This would not have happened the first time I did it, but this is, you know, years into this, it knows my tone. It was like, yeah, that's it. That I'm good to go.

So that's awesome.

Pretty good.

Such a great tool. Yeah.

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All right, I have a problem.

Okay.

And I need some business therapy. Yes. To figure it out. So I have some great assistants.

It's.

It's kind of irrelevant where they live, but let's say they don't live in The United States. So. Well, it is really.

That is super relevant.

It is relevant to this conversation. And I. I constantly struggle to give enough context on. Related to the work I want them to do. And I believe that this. I know I'm not the only one that has this problem.

I know exactly what you're talking about. I have some. I have some tricks I've learned. Yeah.

Okay. That's what I need help with. Because what I find is they're amazing. Super talented, super smart, and I love working with these folks. But if I just let them run with something, if I give them the initial, hey, this is what I want. This is what we need to do. I want it. You know, build this, do this. I'm often. I'm not disappointed in the effort. It's like they put a lot of effort into it, but they're completely missed the mark on the context of it. And I don't want to go into the actual specifics because it's not relevant to the conversation. But it's just like. Well, I will mention. So I do a lot of stuff about Costco.

Right.

Because I buy store returns and all this kind of stuff. And I'm getting him, you know, here, look at all the stuff I've written. I've created massive amounts of content around this topic.

Right.

Because it's so popular. And I. It's changed my life in buying and selling their stuff. And this team spent like a week on this thing I wanted to work on and it was completely wrong.

Yep.

Because I did not give them enough context, text. And I don't think they understood what I was talking about in those posts, in this blog posts and articles that I've written. How do I. Without being a micromanager, you know, up in their grill every minute. How do I get that context across to them in. Yeah, how do I. How do I fix this problem, Dave?

So I. I've been dealing with this for decades. I. It's my first experience with remote workers, offshore workers, non U.S. contractors. Was a team I still work with today. They were in Siberia. They are no longer there because they don't want to have to live in that country right now.

Escaped.

They escaped, essentially. Yeah. But for a long time, you know, they're. I. And I call them the Russians, but.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And.

And it was this team of Russian programmers in Siberia. Really talented guys, great guys. Have become friends of mine.

Nice. Yeah.

Yep. But I. And so I would instruct them do this thing. And they were a team that was initially hired by somebody Else somebody we actually had to sue. But that's a whole other story. We never sued the Russians. Yeah, yeah, that would have gone sideways real fast. But I found the same thing that you're, that you're describing here. And so, and I, and I was frustrated by it. And then I, what I found was. And I don't know how or what inspired me to shift my thinking on this was what really helped me was when I started to learn their cultural norms. Okay. And then I could understand. Oh, I see. I used to joke, and it might not be too big of a stretch, but I used to joke. I don't think that there is a Russian phrase for quality control. And what I, what I meant was that they would just write something. They, you know, they were about 12 hours off for me. Right. And their schedule was such that they worked from about their time, 2pm to 2am So 2am my time, maybe 1am my time, to 1pm my time. So the path was I would stay up late, which I do anyway, I would give them instructions from like 1am to 2p 2am Yep. Then I'd go to sleep while they worked and I'd wake up at like 9am and see what they did, you know, and then we had a couple hours to like go back and forth on it. Invariably, especially in the start, they, I would give them the instructions, I would go to sleep and I'd be blissfully asleep while they were rolling out completely broken versions of this software. Live in production.

Nice.

Yeah. Oh yeah. And I'd wake up and I'd be like, what the. You know, what'd you do? What'd you do? We got to fix this. This is now. Now instead of this being a nice collaborative thing, this is an emergency. And, and it was the third or fourth time that this happened that I realized, ah, I need to tell them in the 1am to 2am slot. Here's what I'd like you to do. And then get it ready on a test server for me to test at 10am When I am back here ready to rock. And giving them those instructions was what they needed. Right? That was to solve that one problem. But it never dawned on me here in the US that is atypical. You would not just roll it live to production. Every programmer understands. But they didn't. And until I asked them.

More explicit, yeah, more explicit instructions, but.

Not explicit about everything. Like I didn't tell them and make sure to use Java to do this and use version 7. Because then they'd be like, dude, like why are you treating us like this? You know, so it was, yeah, that's.

My concern is I don't want to, I don't want to treat them like, you know, they're children.

Right.

Yeah. They're not, they're very.

You have to figure out. And that's where I say learn their cultural norms so that you are like surgically choosing which things to nitpick and micromanage and then which things to just completely leave alone. And once you learn that they. I don't, I've never had this conversation with, with these guys, but they've never felt belittled by me as far as I can tell and all that stuff. But, but I, you know, and normally it's like, yeah, you, you, you get this. Yeah, I understand. Okay, great. Put it on a test server. You know, it's like, yes, but it's only, only those very specific things. And. Yeah, and, but I will say that when it comes to writing content, when you are contracting with someone for whom A, English is not their first language, despite how much practice they might have had it, and B, if they are writing essentially marketing content, which is what you're talking about here, in some way, shape or form, like it's got to be something captivating for the reader if that reader is an American. If your target audience is American. I have found that while it seems more expensive to hire an American to do it.

No, I agree.

It's not in the end. Because they have all of this knowledge that you would just have to dump on these people.

Yeah.

You're probably better off having ChatGPT write that content.

Yeah.

Telling it to target it towards an American English speaking audience than having someone in the Philippines who speaks great English write it. They've never lived here. They don't necessarily understand the culture unless they've been doing this for, for decades, in which case they probably understand that their value is worth the same as an American. And then you're not saving any money anyway.

And, and to, to clarify. So my situation, they're using, taking my content and creating other things with it. Sure.

Not.

I learned right away. I'm like, no, no, I don't want your, I don't want you to write content. I've got that part figured out. But I need help structuring all the content that I have created. And then.

So you're already doing this.

Yeah, yeah. And I would say too, one of. And I'm about eight months into this project and it's gotten much better. I found that one of the other Well, I guess contextual issues that I deal with is teaching them that it's okay to hold me accountable as well.

Oh, oh, that really important. Let's do an episode on teaching people. People who's checking.

Doesn't matter who it is.

No, but people who checks you sign. That's how to hold you accountable.

How to do that in reverse next week.

Yeah, I fail it.

There's a lot to, there's a lot to unpack because.

Yeah, that's next week.

I'm not going to go into it. We're going to go. Come, come back on live stream on Monday.

But, but it'll be February 19th, which is our 10 year anniversary, so.

Okay, well super 10 year anniversary party.

Yes.

And come back and we're going to talk about how to create accountability partners out of people you pay.

That's it. Because it's hard. It is hard and I understand why it's hard.

Yes, it is, of course.

But that doesn't mean we don't need it. That's right.

And in the meantime, you can remember, get entered to win a MacBook, go to businessbrain show/review and leave us review the show. Let us know what you think and then we'll come back, we'll read it on the air and get you entered to win. Win this fancy laptop so you can keep it on your lap.

That's right.

That's it.

That's it. Yeah, we'll, we'll give you the thing that goes on your left. BusinessBrain Show Review Feedback at BusinessBrain Show Shopify.com BusinessBrain Keep living that charmed life. Have a great weekend.