AI In Digital Marketing Agencies

We're combining AI plus prompts AI with prompts into a template. Maybe it's a three part combination of like process prompts and templates. So process prompts and templates, those go together. It's just, it's like Lego bricks or a slinky going downstairs. You're like, oh my God. This is.

Welcome. We are here to talk about AI. I think we're seeing it impact every industry, every department, every team member. And recently I've been shining a light on business owners that have been applying smart systems thinking and an AI first approach to get extraordinary outcomes in their business. And today I'm joined by a little bit of a legend in our systemology community. I've got Simon Kelly. He's the director of a digital agency called sgd. I'll make sure I pop a link so you can go check them out. He's a certified systemologist, also a long time contributor in our community. He's drafted many different systems and processes that we use. He helped to launch the business Systems Accelerator program. He even did some of the early designs for the System Hub interface. He's worked with a range of different systemologists as well. So he's got a really great understanding just with systems and process and the impact that it can have on small business. And recently we've been having some discussions and he's made some really awesome steps forward to become an AI first company. That's what I wanted to explore today. Really find out a little bit about how he thinks, where he sees this going, real world use cases, and probably most importantly how you can take some of these ideas and then deploy them in your business. So first things first, I'd just like to welcome you to the call. Simon.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Dave for the intro. Yeah, really excited for this conversation. It's great to be here.

Well, maybe to start, I'd love to know when you realized that AI was a huge opportunity for business and this is a incredibly destructive technology. Like, yeah, if you take us back in time. When was the first time you got an inkling that this is something that needed your attention?

Yeah, I think it might be a year and a half ago. I put a video on my barely touched YouTube channel just with my kind of reaction to I'm creating some content with ChatGPT and a bit of like early warning signs for myself about what I saw the future was going to create with this because just the ability for it to produce really great language and I think this was whatever the first version of the public chatgpt was like 3 something, maybe 3.5 when that came out. And I was like, this, this is amazing. But where this is going is it's, it's going to help people produce content, which is great, but it's going to. And I think the exact words I used were it's going to create more landfill on the Internet. It's going to be harder to sift through the noise of content, which is already excruciatingly hard. And I think that's kind of exactly what's happened is that a lot of people have used it to produce a ton of content. So that is like one very simple use case. But I saw the opportunity of having, seeing what it can build with answering questions, using specific bits of knowledge in with our team, helping empower our team a lot more to get things done faster. I think that's, that was the big aha moment and excitement for my business. But also the, a bit of the fear of what, what some others may do with this tool.

Yeah. And how did you start to think about it and dabble with it? Like, and was it immediately obvious? Did you see it and think, hey, there's going to be a huge opportunity here, I need to go all in on this? Or did lag time happen and you just go, oh, this is going to be a passing fad or. Yeah, from seeing that to actually taking some action on it. What happened there?

Yeah, so I was testing its content ability, like its writing ability first of all. And I was like, okay, well I can see that we do a lot of SEO work at sgd. So I was like, well, I don't want to, I don't want to touch SEO with this just yet because I can't imagine that Google will be very happy about mass produced content written by like, there's no experience, there's no uniqueness, there's no expertise in there. It's just regurgitated and reshuffled and then spat out again. So it's not really adding any value. So I was like, let's not, let's not use it on the SEO side. But where we are struggling to produce content, perhaps in social media or email marketing, it can take some of our ideas that we've got with the team and it can turn it, it can help our team articulate things better than they can. Like they may have the idea, but they just can't quite articulate it. And then running it through AI, they're like, oh yes, yes, that's what I was trying to say. But it needs to be a Bit simpler. So we kind of learned how to massage the content that helped to produce, like, what our team wanted to say a bit easier. So we first use it for a bit of content and a bit of customer support. Wording.

Yeah.

And, yeah.

Sounds like the first thing that you thought about is, okay, well, sitting in my seat, looking at the business that you're involved in with the digital agency, you're seeing some of the problems that are going on inside the business, and then you're thinking, right, well, how can AI help to solve this problem with that frame of mind? And I know you do a lot of work with other agencies as well. Like, you help to train other agencies and teach them some best practice. So what are some of the common challenges that you see digital agencies have as they're starting to grow their business that there might be an opportunity to kind of apply some AI thinking to help solve some of those problems?

Yeah, I think a huge issue that consultants, agencies, service providers, Providers face is that is scope and keeping that together. Like, when things go out of scope and communication. I mean, that's a very broad thing to try to solve, but that, like, where does the communication sit and how can I communicate with my clients and my team as efficiently as possible to get the job done? That's just chaos with some agencies, and they're quite streamlined with others. So there's tons of opportunity in simplifying and streamlining that level of communication. Reporting, that's a big thing with agencies. Monthly reports. Some people, some agencies dread it. One of the tools that we use for SEO reports leverages AI to summarize ranking changes, traffic changes, conversion changes, that it's just rinse and repeat stuff without a lot of intuition or strategy needed. So it gets that job done for our clients and for our team, where we can spend more time thinking creatively and, and building relationships with our clients and understanding their goals and where they're going. So it's taking. It's taking off that as I suppose, mundane rinse and repeat work a bit more to free us up to be. To be more human, to be more creative.

Yeah. How? Because there's probably an infinite number of problems that small business and agency owners face. And as their business grows, it's not like the problems stop, they just change and different things pop up and different things have levels of priority. So how do you think about.

What problems to start trying to solve first as you start to think about from an AI perspective? You mentioned a couple there, like, okay, well, it's got to be communication and reporting. Through to clients. And there's probably internally with the marketing team needing to post on social media. Like, these are all things that are consuming time and challenging sometimes for different team members. Where we go, okay, well, there's something here, like, how do you think about prioritizing or where to put your attention?

So trying to think about this is an ongoing challenge. I'm not sure if we've mastered this, but the way I'm thinking about it now is what gets the. Gets a lot of touch points. So if we're doing customer support, for example, which we're doing a lot of, there's a lot of tickets per day, a lot of communication per day. So there's a lot of volume. Where if we made a change or leveraged AI in some way, that would have a significant impact because it's getting lots and lots of touches and it gets a result, which is customer, like, client satisfaction, great client relationships. So in order to optimize that, free up some time, get a better result, like working in there would have a significant impact. So I'm trying to think about what has. There's something from, I think Clay Collins from LeadPages called the Ice Score, which is impact, certainty and then ease. So having a look at, like looking through that filter. Yeah, I want to see what's getting lots of touch points. What's the impact if we did something here, how certain are we that doing something would have a measurable impact? And then how easy will it be to actually introduce this solution? So we're thinking through that lens as we go through the business rather than like, oh, we saw something cool someone did with AI, but it doesn't really tie into a business objective. Like, it might be some sexy, cool thing with content or social media, but it's just. It's taking us away from, like, our core business, where we could free up time and have a much more measurable result.

Kind of feel like that comes back to the idea of what are the core essential tasks that the business is doing? Or what is the business's objective? And getting very clear on whom are we serving, what is it that we're doing to solve their problems? And then thinking through, you know, we talk a lot about each department and how each department needs to deliver on what it needs to deliver for the business. Marketing has to deliver leads. Sales have to deliver.

Like, close those leads and deliver clients to operations to then do the work. So having a really good understanding of your business, what works, what gets results, what's essential, I think is really critical for navigating through this AI landscape because it's bright, shiny objects everywhere. Something's trying to pull your attention in every which way. And, oh, AI can do this. Maybe I should start doing that. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or if what you see with other agency owners around, some. Maybe ways that they're approaching AI, that might be causing them some heartache.

Yeah, I think it comes back a lot to the heartache coming from posting content, like creating lots and lots of content. There's a big difference between activity and results. And I think when you're just doing things and producing AI and making. Producing content with AI, sorry, if you're doing a lot of that, but it's not getting the results. So that, that would be marketing. And a lead is what you want out of that. And we're both from the marketing world, so we've probably heard many, many times clients and businesses talk about, you know, I just want to get my name out there. It's like, you don't really. You, you'd say that. But what you really want is a return on investment, a return on effort, and some leads out the other end. Like if. What if we got that instead? They're like, yeah, of course that's what we want. All right, well, let's, let's focus in on that for that particular department instead of just making more noise and doing more activity. So it is really narrowing in on that result. What is that specific result that I'm trying to achieve here? Am I just saving time and pain because I don't like what I'm doing? Like, what's the end result? Is it a lead? Is it a closed sale? So one of my roles in the company is sales. So in order to achieve the objective of producing more proposals per week, per month, ideally signed ones when I'm at capacity. And I, let's say I do four per week. If I was to double that to eight, I've got various levers to pull. I can free up some time to work on that. I can be more efficient at proposals that I'm already doing. And that's pretty much it. So how can. So I look at that as an end result, more proposals signed per week. So that's my anchor. I'm going to work from there backwards into what are the steps I'm currently doing that produce that result of a proposal. I have a conversation with the lead, I identify the scope, I identify, go through the sales call process, create my notes, put together the proposal. What part of that could I Introduce AI to leverage it to do it faster, cheaper, better. So it's really about that end result in the way that I'm thinking about it.

Yeah. And I love, I mean you're a systems thinker, so you naturally default to my language there, which is, hey, you have a process for doing this, you're issuing out invoices and okay, well we have a discovery call with the client, we then prepare the proposal, we send it off, we have the communication in the email. Like you're quite clear around, well, what are we currently doing manually? Like how does the process currently work? And I mean that's classic systemology, which is capture what you're currently doing before we look to optimize. Then we start to look, we're talking about optimize. Where is the low hanging fruit opportunity? So if we keep running with that example, because I love the real world use cases.

As you've gone ahead and started to think about applying AI through that process, which chunks were immediately obvious to you that, ah, I can rewrite this bit, create a prompt, and now I can accelerate this bit.

This comes directly from you, Dave. It was looking at where is the pain? And I hate to admit it, but writing proposals, I just, I just didn't want to do it. I would have a physical reaction and it would be always some kind of mental game I'd have to play with myself to reward me taking action on that. And like, I enjoy sales, I love getting the deal and talking with clients, but actually putting it down on paper and doing the specifics, not so fun. So there was pain there and that was the constraint. So the constraint in order to get to the eight proposals per week, that's the constraint and that's where the pain is. So that's where I, I looked first. I kind of got the alarm bell in my mind. It's like, yeah, it was just immediately obvious you don't like doing this. It's, it's the thing that's holding you back. How can we make this, get it done faster first of all. But actually maybe we could make it fun. Is that too much of a stretch? So I, I wanted to go down that path of like, yeah, well, I, I'm enjoying playing with AI to achieve a result. So I'm going to introduce that as part of the proposal writing process and see what I can do.

And how do you, how do you do that? Like you said, you started, you start with a phone call. So what, what is it that you're actually using the AI to do?

Yeah, so if we think of. I've had a phone call with the client. So not a lot like we've got existing systems and existing templates and I suppose in some ways, some scripts and some guides, some a question bank stored in System Hub, of course, as to refer to. So there's not. There's no AI at that point. I've had the call with the client, I'm doing my thing and now I've got the notes from the call. So I've had a call just like this and it's recorded. You use a tool called Fathom AI to capture the recording, transcribe it, and in a matter of seconds, the page loads with a summary and recap and the transcription right there. I put that into ChatGPT and I have a prompt that has something along the lines of what are the business needs? List the 3 to 5 business needs, list the target audience list the 3 to 5 target audience needs, list the budget and list the timeframe. I put that. And that's an existing AI assistant through ChatGPT. I can just put in the transcript and it'll come out with that. And that's my recap that I'll send to the client. So taking the notes and the conversation, it's going to take the transcription and filter it through this so I can send a recap nice and fast to the client and it'll give me an organized recap so I can use that to write the proposal. There. There is another step, but I'll kind of pause.

Yeah, no, that's. That's perfect. I mean, you talked about earlier on Key thing in Agency Land is the way that you communicate to the client.

Yeah.

And for them to get that moment. I've had it before where I've seen systemologists, they will send summaries after some of their sessions using Fathom and sending the call notes. And that. That feeling of wow, this person is so organized and so on it. And they've detailed everything out and they did it like that. Like for some people, AI is still a little bit of magic. And for the regular person that's not using this, they don't know that that was incredibly easy for you because you put the work in up front, you asked the right questions and you got the prompting right. So now it all just happens. So I kind of feel like that ticks a nice easy box first and then how do you. Yeah. Leverage that then into the proposal itself?

So with the. With the call recap as well, something else that's amazing of that is you could use that call recap to communicate with your team. So you've. The challenge with agencies is the communication. Like just with the client, if that was all that needed to happen is just communication. That's, that's tricky enough. So optimizing that is really good. But now you, you've got a team that's hopefully going to deliver or you're going to deliver. And you've got to remember in multiple clients, how do you transfer that conversation and even that energy and the goals and the action items, how do you transfer that seamlessly over to the, to the team? And AI will help to just take those nuggets, organize them and, and help you do that. So this fathom transcription as it is is fantastic. And then with the, the prompts that I just mentioned, really good to move to the next phase which is putting the proposal together. So if it is a good fit, we have a template. We use better proposals. So we've got an existing template with the structure. Starts off with something along the lines of about the business business snapshot, I believe we start with and we talk about the problems, we talk about the business itself and the current situation. And then we go into the solution and we're using the information from that initial conversation filtered by the business needs and the target audience. And the target audience needs. I extracted from the first conversation. And we're putting, we're combining AI plus prompts, AI with prompts into a template. I think this combination, maybe it's a three part combination of process prompts. I wish it was a P word now. And templates. So process prompts and templates, those go together. It's just like, it's like Lego bricks or a slinky going downstairs. You're like, oh my God, this is. I just tap this and offer goes. It's beautiful. So we put the proposal into the template and it's so much more enjoyable now to see that I've still had the conversation with the client. We still built a template based on the many, many proposals we've done before. So it's still leveraging a ton of work that has worked in the past. But it's so enjoyable seeing it come out in the format that, that we want that, that reads well.

Oh, hey, I know you're tuned in right now, so I'll keep this super quick. But you like awesome YouTube videos, don't you? Well, there's not really that many YouTube channels that create great content about how to systemize your small business. So I want to make sure that you catch every video that I publish. So if you haven't already, firstly give this video the thumbs up and then go ahead and subscribe to my channel. You can even hit the bell notification to make sure that you're the first to know when I publish anything. So go ahead, do it right now, I'll wait a sec and then I'll transfer you back to the video.

Yeah, yeah. Because I'm imagining when you previously created that proposal, you had a process and the way that you were doing it, so it's really just trying to get prompts to go, oh well, we can carve this chunk off. Oh well the first thing that Simon thought about was okay, what are the objectives and outcomes that they're looking at having? Okay, where are they having some pain points. Okay, now from here we're going to have to recommend some marketing strategies for them. And based on what I've learned about them and what they want. Okay, great. I'm going to suggest let's do some SEO, let's rebuild your website, let's run some ads or depending on what it is that they're looking like, I'm assuming, and this is almost like Lego pieces where you would have chunks and blocks that are pre written that would just get tailored based on everything that they've shared with you, which is what you do normally, only now you can just do it faster.

Exactly. Yeah. We previously I was writing my own proposals and then our project manager, Ismay was writing proposals and doing a fantastic job. But again the pain came up. People take holidays, which is totally fine, but someone's away on holidays, a proposal needs to be written or Ismay is very, very busy. What happens then to like speed in sales is so important. So being able to do it really, really quick is essential. And AI is, is now being leveraged to suppose to Ismay's happiness to, to skip that step because I'm not sure if she loved doing that anyway. But it's, it's now not key person dependent. We can, we can leverage this tool, we can leverage AI, we can leverage the assistance and the process and the templates. I potentially will be redundant in this role at some point in the future.

I think that idea, even just that the thinking experiment that we went through then when applied to so many interactions that are happening in your business where you're meeting with someone, you're trying to digest what it is that you've learned and then repackage it and use it to then make recommendations or to get work done. Like that idea, no matter what industry you're in. No matter what part of the delivery process you're in. I mean, we've just heard it applied to sales, but that same process could be applied to. I know you do something similar with the discovery called roadmaps, which is a paid first step for clients and you apply the same thinking and then even when it comes to delivery and report writing and the ability to take once you start doing the work. And you mentioned using a SEO tool that can analyze ranking results and suck in data from a website and then be able to provide valuable insights. So you might have a discussion with a client, mix that together with the data and then receive actionable insights that then can be communicated to the team, the client they feel great about. Communicate it with the team and then, great. Now let's go to work. Like just that idea, you can kind of see like what sort of time saving. I know you said at some point you're, you know, going to be redundant, like from how long were proposals taking you to how long they do now. What, what does that look like?

I think I'd procrastinate for an hour first. That was the part of the process. So go for a walk, go do something else, clean the house. So maybe an hour and a half beforehand to write proposals. Now it's down to half an hour or less, sometimes 15 minutes. And I'm high fiving myself when that works. Super smooth. But the more challenging ones are more towards half an hour and much more enjoyable. I get to skip the steps where I'm like collating information and notes and spend more time going deeper on things that interest me or I'm kind of drawn into about the client or about this project. So I'm able to use more of my creative brain as opposed to my list organizational brain, because that part can be taken care of or supported by AI.

Yeah.

So significant savings there.

Yeah, just the proposal bit. So if we included the hour procrastination, because I know that feeling sometimes if there's something you're not looking forward to, you kind of can be a little bit slow off the mark to get it done. Let's say that a proposal, if we include a little bit of procrastination time, maybe a couple of hours there, potentially you're going from a couple of hours down to half an hour, if not less. So basically a quarter of the time that it previously took and on our.

SEO report side of things could be up to like between half an hour to an hour per report. 30 clients. Now significant amount of that is automated, so not even any time it was the setup time and the prompting which would have taken maybe a couple of days across all of those clients that's done once and now it's automated and again that frees up the team to be more creative and to be more invested in the client's business and where they're going and their goals and thinking about with their creative brain as opposed to the checklist. Automation.

Writing, content, organizing information kind of brain side of things, they're freed up to do more creative thinking.

So from the report writing things like that, that's once a month you were doing reports. So yeah, like almost straight to the bottom line. We're talking probably, you know, 30 clients, some setup in between. There's probably 30, 40 hours worth of work per month, which is basically, you know, a court, like almost like one full works, weeks worth of work a month for an individual that can be saved there.

Yeah, and I know from feedback of the team it wasn't the thing they look forward to very often as well. So that as well, it's the, yeah, it's the. Maybe there was procrastination in there as well, but it's the, the loss of energy from doing a task that you don't want to do. So how can we free up the team from those things so they can spend more time on the things they have to do? Like now I'm not saying that all of work is just like should be fun and perfect and everything. Sometimes you got to do the hard thing and that's okay. But like why not leverage a tool like this in order to make things a bit more fun, free people up, enjoy their work a bit more and to, to help them just go deeper on the client relationship on their business and partner with our clients a lot more.

Yeah, yeah. So I think I can. You're driving a lot of this innovation in the team at the moment. Is this setting the tone for others? Like are others seeing what the AI can do and then also looking for opportunities? Like where else have you seen inside the agency AI speeding things up.

So our Google Ads specialist, Jason has been privately working on some AI related ads analysis, analysis tools. So he's been doing that without, without prompting, forgive the pun, but without any prompting from anyone else on the team. He's like excited by AI and working on something over here. I haven't seen our developers do anything just yet, but I'm hoping something will come out of that. Ray Miladani, who's recently joined the team, we're in the office in Collingwood and like just looking at different opportunities to leverage AI. He's more on the delivery and customer relationship side of things. And I mean it would be everyday AI conversations. How else can we leverage it? And we'll just look at each other, eyes light up, look at the screen, oh my God. And then we'll go down a rabbit hole of how do we make things faster, cheaper, better, more like take out the busy work, take out that, the activity that it's just a stepping stone, it just needs to be done. Let's speed this up so we can spend more time with clients. So yeah, lots of little projects that aren't quite kind of released at the moment, but it is filtered through the results that we're trying to achieve for our clients. Like one does it filtering through generating revenue for our business and then two, from an SEO perspective, is this helping our clients increase their rankings, traffic conversions or helping us deepen our relationship with them? So that's our filter for anything we're doing.

AI wise, I love the example that you gave because it's really concrete around the proposals. Do you have any other like concrete examples where you kind of like this is the use case application and even the result that you're getting from applying it.

So Ray built a bot for. As part of one of our SEO steps we build something called an LBi which is a local business.

Information. There we go, local business information sheet. So it's just all the information about their business so we can build citations and various things to directory listings to help their, their business information and build trust on the Internet. So that's something that's, it's quite a tedious job. There's a person previously went and did some research, communicate with the client, confirm things and it would take quite some time to get it approved and, and get it accurate. So Ray has built a bot with prompts that will look up a URL. So a client's business URL, I think maybe he puts in the current address into chat GPT and it will come back with a formatted table exactly how we want it. Just missing photos. It won't go and select photos yet, but we'll probably make that happen. But there's like a, it's like an 80 line spreadsheet that we need and it will go do the research, come back and I mean the, the time saving on that, it would, it would take a tenth of the time that it did.

Yeah, it's one of those things. I know certain tasks in business that previously might not have made financial sense if a human was to do it or there might not be any margin in now that this kind of opens a whole realm of possibilities. And again, the aim of the game is just how do we continuously get your highest value team members working on the highest value tasks? Which means, you know, delegating down to either less skilled team members, which we do through process, or through to AI, which reduces that cost, you know, very close to zero. Again, we do that through the process, we get very clear on, well, what is it that needs to be done here. And you know, I've been often saying now that process is the programming for the machines. Again, I know you have vision around.

Process because being a systemologist and the, the way that you have gone through the training and think about process, I'd love to get your thoughts and takes on where process fits in in the equation here. Like how, how from what you have learned by going through Systemology and even using System Hub and things like that, has this kind of well positioned you to take advantage and be in the right spot to leverage this to go. Here's a huge opportunity and I know what to do with it.

Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. I think, I think it is that it seems like a natural step. The thinking, like the foundations of the thinking are already there, just as you mentioned, with helping the more skilled, the more expensive, I suppose, team members to delegate down, which includes delegating down or empowering them with AI. So delegating to less expensive team members to do things. But AI as part of the team, as part of the POD or however people call it, like AI is a key part of departments and actions that need to be done. So just like we have software and we have laptops and we've got various things that are powering this, these are tools that we're using that didn't exist before. Like, we don't really, I think with AI we're not going to be talking about, with software, we don't talk about, oh, this code is helping me do this, we just call it an app, but we're talking about AI a lot. I think it's just going to be part of a ton of things that we're doing already. And we're probably not even going to talk about AI at some point. We're just going to talk about the tool and it will just be powered by AI, just like software's powered by code. Anyway, a little sidetrack, but coming back to the process side of things, thinking about the critical client flow, which essentially, and forgive me if I Get this completely wrong. But it's the flow of the money through the business. So the systems, the critical systems that identify the path of revenue through the business. So only the 15 to 20 systems that help to achieve that end result. So we start with that, that's the foundation of the process, that's the foundation of the systems in the business. And that won't change just by introducing AI or team or anything like that. Like that's still the foundation of structure of the business. So thinking through that lens, then we introduce team, we introduce the systems of course and then we empower each step with AI. So where again, where is the pain? And this is a systemology thinking it's like where is the pain in the ccf? Like once we've captured that and the team are working through and we're achieving the result without key person dependency, how can we make that each step achieve the result faster, cheaper, better. So and, and what would get the biggest bang for buck? And typically that's around sales and finance. Like how are those things going to improve the results? I think a lot of people go down marketing and it makes a lot of sense to think that way, but I think people get lost in again, coming back to the like activity does not equal results, just it's the spray and pray attempt at marketing of just producing a ton of content to get your name out there. There's no results focused AI or team. So in some way, if you wouldn't pay someone to do this task, don't like, does it make sense to spend the time to get AI to do this?

Yeah, love it.

You're just creating more work for yourself and probably if you looked at it, it would be a cost more than anything else. So thinking through that lens has been huge. And we have a map because we have the ccf. We can see that quite clearly. It's nice and compact. We can look, I can have the conversations easily with the team who aren't trained systemologists, but I can show them that map because it's nice and simple and we can kind of diagnose like where is like triage, I suppose, like where is the pain and who's. Who's doing this particular part. Where, where are things getting stuck? And we can do that after projects like we've launched a website that one part of it took a significant significantly longer amount of time than usual. So we can identify like let's look at the pain. What do we need to introduce there? Do we need, do we need better process? Like how's that, that's okay. Do we need different team or that's okay. What can we do with AI to empower the team? Where, where can we introduce resources or shift things around in order to solve that Next time when we have that CCF map in order to, to help us do that.

You gave me a little bit of a flashback. I must have some PTSD when it comes to agency work. And I remember building websites for customers and I remember always we would be waiting for the content that needed to be loaded onto the page before we could start building or getting things together. I can only imagine now that problem has now evaporated because no more Laura Ipsum. We can just quickly draft up something. Hey, either give me what you want by this date or we'll preload it with the template and then you can change it.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we, we've got people powered processes and AI powered people. So our content team are great content writers, empowering them with AI. They can do it faster, they can do more, they. It becomes cheaper because their capacity increases.

Yeah.

So there was, there was actually there was a site that I saw the other day and I won't mention, I won't mention who it is, but I just want to, I just want to share with you that AI and we did not create this. The AI written content that's on their contact page. That is. Yeah, written by AI because they, they weren't able to do their own content. And I'll just say a little portion, so you can't really Google it. There's about two sentences before it gets to. We truly promise assiduousness, diligence, punctuality and dutifulness in all our deliveries.

What was going on here?

Yes.

Who writes like that? No one writes like that. They would never talk to their customers like that. Assiduousness. It's like. Do you know what that means? Have you ever used that in a sentence before? Of course you haven't. So AI powered like. Yes, simplify, please. Like, this is the landfill that's crushing the Internet at the moment. I am so much more confident as a cop, as a copywriter now. I've been trying to. I've been learning copywriting for years, but now that AI has come out, I'm like, no, that's it. I'm writing copy. I'm publishing things because it's so much better than this. This is horrible. This is worse than nothing. Yeah, you didn't ask a question there. But I needed, I needed to.

Someone to tell. Yeah, look, I think.

Part of this will just continue to improve over time as you continue to train the AI and give it examples and you tell it the way that you would like to write. But this whole idea of human in the loop, especially at the moment, I don't think.

AI is a replacement for the human, like having your process that you identify and chunks that are done by AI. But there will be steps where, great, this is the point at which the human steps in and validates or double checks and just make sure that the machine hasn't gone off down some rabbit hole and hasn't quite got it. I think that's one of probably the biggest changes I think of, like where we've come from with automation versus where we're going with AI. Like automation. If we think about Zapier, it's a series of different steps and it'd be really easy for Zapier workflow to break. When this didn't match up just right. The system said to do this and connect with that and it didn't and it broke. And then everybody doesn't really know that the automation's broken. And, you know, months go by and then someone goes, oh, this isn't working the way that it should be. Whereas now AI can follow workflows and it can make intelligent decisions and paper over the cracks and fill in the gaps when it needs to make a decision. Just like great team members do when it comes to process. Like, just because you don't have something documented doesn't mean it's going to magically stop happening in your business. And great team members will paper over the cracks of very poor systems. It's just that AI now is, is able to step up and, and start to do the same. So that's why I think this is so extraordinary, because it is stepping in to be able to complete tasks and make decisions with the. If you've got process, it can start to fill in the gaps. And I think it's just a matter of time before these AI agents that are trained on your specific data that you can engage and talk with them and say, great, I want you to go do this task or research this thing for me and come back to me when you're done and I'll take a look at it. Oh, no, that's not quite right. Can you go away and have another go at it? And I want you to think this, this and this, like that's the future that we're headed towards. And I'm always thinking about where things are going and how does a business position themselves to take advantage of this move. Like, while we don't exactly know where AI is going to go because things keep on moving and everybody thought that AI was going to come for all the creative stuff last, but then AI came for the creative stuff first with writing and video and graphics. So a lot of people got that wrong. So it kind of underscores that you don't exactly know where this is going to land. So what can you do though that at least sets you up to take advantage of whatever this future is going to look like. Maybe that's like one last thing I'd love to kind of leave people on. If you have any thoughts on what could people be doing. If we know this is the direction that AI is headed, we know people want to become AI first companies or they should seriously be thinking about it, otherwise they'll be doing their business a disservice. Yeah. Are there any bits of advice or things that you would think about to make sure that you're well positioned for this wave that we are currently riding?

I think knowing what your critical systems are, what's your critical flow like, what creates the best result, what generates revenue, what's a revenue generating activity or client happiness activity or a time suck for you? So in one of those buckets there'll be some opportunity to leverage AI. Now, as business owners, as busy marketing people, as busy people in finance or whatever department that you're in, you probably have an extensive workload right now. So where are you going to find the time? Do you learn about AI? Do you hire someone? Like, how does that work? I would recommend actually hiring an AI consultant to help you with one of those critical pieces of your business. So not experimenting with something that doesn't create an impact, but something in sales perhaps, or in finance or in communicating with customers, showing an AI consultant. Here's what we do, here's the result that we get. We do this a lot and it gets a great result. It just takes a lot of time. Is there something that we can do? What can we do to leverage AI here? There's a, there's a good friend of mine who writes grants for businesses across Australia, but specifically in Victoria. He hired an AI consultant that I know and he was able to.

Halve the amount of time it took for his team to write grants. And he's, he's very good at writing grants. He's recently hired people to write grants for him. He's now introduced AI halving his costs, having his time, leveraging his workforce significantly better than before while maintaining quality and in the last 12 months significantly increased his profit. He was telling me the other day, so like significant wins all round and freeing up his time. He's very big on having tons of time free and I can't imagine grant writing being something that you get a lot of spare time once you're doing that. I expect it's a very resource and like cognitive, resource intensive process. So I think that's a way to accelerate that process. Just like you'd hire a marketing consultant or a sales consultant to accelerate your understanding and knowledge. But if you are really bullish on this and really want to learn yourself, there's, you've got like Dave Jennings, you've got tons of great resources and, and workshops around AI, so whatever role you're in, I definitely recommend learning about those. But an AI consultant will just accelerate your, the application of that so there'll be knowledge that's good to know. When you work with an AI consultant, when you learn things in YouTube and Dave's content and whatever else you can find, but the application in your business, the returns on it can be, can be huge.

Yeah, I feel like there's almost like one prerequisite in there which is you need to know what it is that you want to improve. You need to understand what you're currently doing. You need to understand that process because when you're working with an AI consultant which is got another client, she runs an accounting firm in Mornington and she went to an AI consultant and basically said, here are all of my processes documented inside System Hub. I want to know within here with this and this and this task, what chunks can the AI do? And then that for her has been extraordinary. There's Shannon Schmidt, I've got a case study on that. It's definitely one worth looking into because it's exactly what you're talking about, which is the same thing that this grant writer has done. He has a clear process, he knows what he's doing, he knows the steps that it takes to get it done. And then he's gone to someone and say, well, this is what I want to do, this is how I think it should be engineered. And, and I actually think over time the systems champion and systemologists like they're prime people who can really help accelerate this also because once you understand process, it's a very small step to then get the AI to, to complete the process.

Exactly. And someone is going to have to keep that going. So yeah, yeah, I think about things we've got like maintenance, growth and projects and if you've got like A project would be like with an AI consultant helping you really rapidly integrate AI into your business. But then there'll be a maintenance mode where it'll be like, okay, we need to make this recur, we need to make this not break. We need to make sure the zapier, as you had seen before, like the connections are still there and this, this process is still achieving a result. And on a growth side of things, like we're improving it over time based on what we've learned.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's definitely huge change and I mean even the chat GPT that you first used and I used when we got all excited about the opportunity here is now worlds apart from what it can do today, you know, few short years later. So it's something that you need to stay on the cutting edge, like the growth trend here is significant. So look, I'm going to pop a link, I'll pop a link through to SGD so people can check out the work that you're up to and then is there anywhere else we should point people, like if they want to search you out on LinkedIn or anything like that?

LinkedIn. I'd be on LinkedIn. Simon Kelly. I'm sure there's about 4,000 of those, so the one that looks like me should be, should be pretty good.

Maybe.

Simon Kelly and Systems. I wonder what that would produce. Systemologist. It's in there somewhere. So, yeah, find me, say hello, ask any questions. I'd be happy to share what we're working on. AI wise. I love talking about it, if not just with Ray while we're in here. Perfect.

Well, thank you so much, Simon. I'll point people your way.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Dave.