https://www.listennotes.com/e/8a811bf6866c408a93ace05091103209

G'day guys, it's Dan here with episode 372 of the How to Scale a Video Business Podcast. And today we're continuing our conversation around AI. On our elite VBA call this morning, we pretty much spent the whole time talking about it. And there's some mixed feelings about it. But the one thing that is clear that's come through loud and clear is AI is coming for our jobs. as filmmakers, and it's totally naive to think otherwise. However, it's not all doom and gloom. It's not all bad news, because one thing that we've, I guess, been discussing is, you know, where, where is AI not going to be able to do what we do as filmmakers? And my belief is in the human experience of when we research a subject like an internal comms film or we connect with someone on a documentary, we're doing research to capture someone's real story. And something magical happens when you sit down with a researched interview and you interview someone who has a story to tell and your extraction of that information from them is based on the rapport you build with them in the room. And that is the thing I think we'll still be hanging on to as humanity. Now, I don't want to sound too dramatic, and I have been immersing myself in this for the last few days. I probably spent four or five hours on Sunday just watching YouTube video after YouTube video. Everyone from Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, to people trialing AI as a dating experiment to see if people could tell the difference. And the thing is, at the moment, there's still holes, okay? There's still parts of it which make us go, that's AI. but we're really not very far away from it being indistinguishable from real. And I think that creates somewhat of an existential crisis for humanity. But in seeing that, there are so many wonderful aspects of using AI in your video production business that I think if you start getting on board with this early enough and you start pioneering the use of AI, then I think you will be well served. The example I used this morning on the call was, you know, you're standing on top of a mountain and you feel a rumble. And because of your experience, you know that's an earthquake 100 miles out at sea. Meanwhile, everyone's on the beach below in a calm lagoon drinking pina coladas going, what a beautiful day. And you know a tsunami's coming. But if you said to everyone, Hey guys, you need to get off the beach, tsunami's coming, they might not believe you. until it's too late. And so my philosophy has always been to try and look at where the waves coming in and catch it in time to be able to capitalize on it. Now, one of the conversations that came out this morning was a lot of folks in the elite have got young kids under five, and they're like really concerned about what their kids are going to do when they leave school. So I think there's a lot going on with the eye, but let's stick to the positive sides for now. We're developing our own business operating system that we're calling CNOPS. And it's built on the go high level platform, but that's the only comparison. A lot of people reskin go high level. We're actually taking it a stage further and building out an entire client acquisition system of an automated reception and AI you know, first line of inquiry. We're building this out. We're going to push all our content through it, and we're rolling it out to our elite members, and we've got a new level we're opening up called Ascend that we'll be getting access to it as well. But the reason I'm sharing this with you is because there are a lot of incredibly cool things happening with AI already, and depending on how immersed you are in it, I mean, yes, sure, you can turn yourself into baby in a cartoon and make yourself do that that but it's moving at such a rapid pace that I think within a year, it'll be able to handle sales calls, do outbound sales, and take away some of that pain that many, many filmmakers hate, you know, the selling part, the marketing and selling part of their business. So what I wanted to do today was just run through a few things we're testing with a view to helping you to understand, you know, where we are using it. I mean, I use ChatGPT 15, 20 times a day, probably. I use it for everything. I find it's become my PA. I yesterday built a project where I wanted to, I don't know if this resonates with you, but I'll often have ideas at random times, or I'll see an ad on Facebook or I'll see something on YouTube and think, oh, that's a great idea. So I built myself yesterday a GPT called Voice to Action Marketing. breakdown. And essentially, it is just a, a marketing test. It's, it's, it's, it's a way for me to have an idea and then from that idea develop some responses. And, and what that's been able to do is being able to help me to get some context around my ideas so I can turn it into actionable strategies. So, for example, I had an idea about a specific offer I wanted to create. And usually what I do is I write that down in notes, but instead I I added it to my custom GPT and that then in turn created a set of to-dos for me, which was pretty cool. It gave me a lot of simple ways to retain information and follow up with it later on. Now, at some point, I'll build out an entire workflow that will then ping that into an email, set it up on a Trello board, and then, you know, be able to get my team to work on it. So that's just one example. The other example I've been testing is the AI inbound voice dialing, and that is pretty good. What it's lacking at the moment is the ability to add more training material to it, but that's going to come very, very quickly. So I think the thing with, so it's where that's going to be useful for you potentially is it's going to allow you to receive calls while you're on set or in an edit without you disrupting your flow. And what that call can do is gather information, share some of the insights to what you do, and then the AI agent will ask for the person's name and contact details, and then they'll update them in your CRM, and then they can ping you a message saying, Hey, you just had a call from Joe Blogs, and he's after a video, he uses details, and then you can decide whether or not you call them straight back away or you set up some automations to send them some more information. So this all comes down to where people sit in the buying journey. And we just finished a four-week accelerator inside the Uplevel program. And essentially we talk about the top of funnel, which is cold traffic or people that don't know you yet. and you might do that through your socials or through some ads. Google My Business is another great one. We call that top of funnel or discovery, where you teach people about what you do. And then at that point, we try and move people into some sort of data capture, create a contact in the CRM, add them to a pipeline, and then move them to what we call middle of funnel or MOFU. which is where you generate desire and you prove that you are an expert in the field of video production and ideally aligned with what they're looking for. This works extremely well when you are niched. Then we move to the deal component, which is bottom of funnel, and that's where you convert people into customers. And again, there's different different steps and stages for each of these. But essentially there's three stages, discovery, desire and deal. And what AI can do is we can build this and generate all the copy in your voice in a way that makes it super, super, you know, easy to create lots of content. So I think that, you know, what's really important is to not think that AI is going to take your job and don't worry about it. And also be mindful of where you have conversations about it, because a lot of filmmaking communities will be like, no, no, they won't take our jobs. And that's based on the fear of the reality, which is if you're in motion graphics, if you're in visual effects, I think that your days are numbered. I think as video editors, a lot of the tools are certainly complementing editing at the minute. And I think if you use everything correctly, you'll find yourself in a position where you are going to be able to speed up workflows and you're going to be able to do things faster. Like one of my clients today was filming an event and he said to the client, Hey, you know, we could take all this long-form content and cut it down for you and give you like 50 or 60 different short clips. They were like, that'd be great. He said, what's the cost? He said, a couple of these editing. So let's call it three grand. Now, that kind of thing can be done with something like Opus Clip, where you can do that in probably two or three hours, five hours max, if you did 60 clips and you watched each clip, because you still have to, a human still has to check that it's not bullshit, right? And we've been using Opus Clip for My Wife's YouTube channel and it's phenomenal what it can do. So I guess what I'm saying is, you know, don't ignore AI. Don't think it's something that's going to happen later. It's going to happen much faster than you realize. And for the first movers, there's an enormous opportunity. and one of the reasons we're creating the Ascend level and our up level program is because we want to have a space where we're already discussing this in our elite program. But to be an elite, you've got to be doing 250 000 a year and above. And for some people who've been an up level for a while or haven't worked with us yet, they're looking for some higher touch points. We're introducing a higher touch point membership called Ascend and that is going to be where we're working with a smaller group of people in a done with you capacity, where we'll be rolling out what we are doing for our clients with you inside that community and supporting you to implement and be ahead of the curve. Because I think the last time I felt like this was when we first started making content for the 5D Mark II with Philip Bloom. And I just knew this was a big deal. And I said, Phil, we've got to make some training on this. And, you know, it wasn't the easiest thing to get off the ground, but we did it and we sold like $300,000 worth of DVDs. Because at that time, everyone was trying to make depth of field adapters work to trick the cameras who had small sensors into being bigger sensors. So this is why I think it's such a big deal and I wanna be leaning more and more into AI. I think we're in very uncertain times. And the one thing that's going to maintain throughout this is the need for human connection and the right community around you so that you can be in the right space where people are testing things and sharing information, because the first mover advantage is going to be absolutely game changing for AI. So if it's something you are interested in, drop me a line on socials. Let's have a conversation, see if it's the right fit for you.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator podcast with your host, Den Lenny. If you are a Video Business Owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support, and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.VideoBusinessAccelerator.com to learn more about how the Accelerator Program can help you today. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on iTunes, and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review.