How AI Can Help Your business Grow Faster (No Tech Skills Needed) with Hikari Senju

Today's special guest is Hikari Senju. I hope you enjoy the show. Hikari. A huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here, James.

Now, welcome in from the Bay Area. So cool you're in the arena in the thick of it where AI, machine learning, you're right in the center of the universe right there. So my audience are very keen on understanding AI. Some want to avoid it, some want. Are curious, some want to engage deeply. For those that are keen to avoid it and just do nothing with it, what's the risk there?

Well, I think it's really unavoidable.

At this point. There was a really interesting question that was asked me recently which was like, are we in AI bubble? And the thing is, I don't think we're in AI bubble because literally nation states are investing, going all in on AI because they believe it's existential. And so the amount of resources that AI is accumulating and getting invested is just nothing. Almost, almost nothing prior in history, maybe the build out of the Internet. And, and, and so.

It'S, it's a steamroller that is only gaining momentum in terms of resource allocation investments. And so it's going to be, it's, it's already pretty unavoidable today and it's only going to increase in its impact on life just because of the amount of resources, the amount of people like just human talent and ingenuity getting invested into this space. The capital is capturing the energy that it's capturing.

Again, it's only going to continue because nation states have determined this is an existential technology for them to be competitive in.

Yeah, I can see that. And it's interesting, you know, as an individual or a business owner, it's a bit overwhelming. Like I'll just put my hand on heart and be honest. It gets, there's so much out there. There's so many things that we could be doing. Where do we start in terms of just trying to stay current and stay on the wave, so to speak?

Yeah, I mean, definitely start by being a big user of these apps. So I would say like ChatGPT, definitely be an active user on that. I think generally a lot of the.

You know, they have a pretty good range of products and features for the novice AI user to start getting acclimated. A lot of their products and features are near the cutting edge, whether it's, you know, the LMS and the text generation to the image or video generations. I think like an easy way to kind of Get a sense of where we're at in terms of the frontiers but then, you know, using other AI tools as well. So then you have tools like Gemini and also kind of competitive in terms of, in many ways in some areas actually probably better than have even more frontier models and offerings and products and then using tools like ours, Omnikey to help with automating workflows and really the business applications.

Of this technology. And so.

Definitely keeping a keen eye on what, you know, is people are talking about using some of these new products and then incorporating them into the workflows, whether it's something as simple as ordering groceries or shopping online to, you know, helping out with your business processes and driving efficiencies in your business. Really helpful advertising, but you know, in other vectors as well.

Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, I'm using ChatGPT for, I know a few years as, as has my team, as has many of my clients. I haven't really tried the other ones just because I'm kind of comfortable and used to chat GPT. So for someone like me who's just got one tool and you're using it, would you recommend that we do dabble and try others?

I think it's, Yeah, I think ChatGPT is really great at a certain domain and for certain tasks, serious tasks. I mean, I use it to help with, you know, Even I use ChatGPT help with legal advice sometimes and I upload documents and I do a quick kind of review of this legal document. Should I sign this NDA? Should I not sign this NDA? Should I, you know, like give me some quick feedback just before I send it to my legal team.

Quick set of responses I can give to, for example, this contract that I'm negotiating or things like this. And so I think there are very numerous ways where you can easily integrate ChatGPT into your life. Whether it's, you know, finding cool, cool tools to, I mean, you can, you can ask ChatGPT for.

Tool recommendations regarding certain domains. So you can be like, you know, what are the top tool, top martech or ad tech tools or what are the top tools I should utilize for incorporating advertising creative into my work, your generative ads into my workflow. And you know, ChatGPT sends us, you know, hundreds of customers a day actually through that. So ChatGPT is quite active in sending out.

Customers as well into other AI tools.

So, you know, you can, even if you're an active user in ChatGPT, just asking ChatGPT for recommendations for tools could be an effective next Step for them being like, well, for this specific domain, I'm looking for a specific application that focuses on this problem. Can you send me some recommendations of tools I could try out in this domain and so you can even start branching out from there.

Kari, that's awesome. And I guess I've been speaking on stage quite a bit recently at AI summits and I'm always like, why are you asking this Irish high performance leadership guy to come to an AI summit? I'm not an expert, but what they want me to talk about is the human element as we engage in this new digital revolution. Right. So one thing I'm seeing at these summits is that there's thousands of AI consultants. They're everywhere and they're experts and they're telling us that they have all the answers and they're charging a small fortune. So I'm always saying to people, watch out for the cowboys. When there's a revolution, there's often people and charlatans that will try and take your money. When I look at what you've done, you studied at Harvard, computer science, specializing in machine learning and AI. You've had your company since 2018.

Yeah.

Right. You've been in the industry a long time, you've studied it deeply. So what's your recommendation to people when they are going to get into bed with an AI consultant or AI company, automation company? What kind of research should they be doing on that company before they say, yeah, here's $50,000 for the first trial?

Yeah, I mean it's a great question and I think there's research that has kind of come out that's like a lot of these POCs haven't worked out regarding building say fine tuned LLMs on company data or things like this.

And I think, you know, one could argue that that's because it was trained on a previous generation of models and a previous generation of hardware that just wasn't good enough at that point. And you know, some of the stuff that's being deployed from some of these consultants or tech companies that have large consultancy businesses is not really at the cutting edge of what you know, consumers are getting in terms of say the chat GPTs. And so there is a disconnect there.

So I mean, I think it comes. But you know, at the same time, you know, as much as things have changed with AI also some things haven't changed, which is in business I think, you know, it's, you gotta do your homework, you gotta do your research, you gotta.

Yeah, like, and you have to make a decision Ultimately, based on the information you source, you trust in terms of whether this is a good investment or not a good investment, and if this is the right vendor for you in terms of pursuing some of the outcomes you're seeking.

And so, yeah, just, I think.

Yeah, like that said, I think when, when it comes to these AI consultants.

I think, yeah, like the, and I think just in general, and consulting in general, I think is getting heavily automated by AI as well. And so you can see this kind of, you know, there's an argument regarding some of the big, big four consulting firms or things like this as well. A lot of that business is getting automated AI. So some, you know, easy place to start is before you even hire a consultant to try query these queries on ChatGPT, seeing the answers there. So at least you now have some kind of a baseline for them when you are.

Interviewing consultants that, you know, you can kind of quickly suss out, you know, what they're saying makes sense and the plan and strategy they've laid out for you is, you know, something deeper and more than what you could get from, from, you know, just asking an LLM these questions. So I think it raises the game for consultancies. I think the top consultants will continue, if not to gate, actually probably charge more top dollar for their unique edge and their unique insight into the market because, you know, I think, you know, the value of that unique insight is probably more valuable in this age than ever. But at the same time, I think LLMs do automate the average consultant. And so I think it is important to kind of use both tools and services and what's available to you to make a decision ultimately based on whether something's good investment or not. Look at the track record, look at their reviews online, ask for referrals, and most of the standard stuff that when it comes to working with any vendor makes sense.

It's really interesting that also recently, so I do a bit of speaking and I had a company reach out to me and say, hey, James, we'd love you to come and speak at our event in Fiji. We're having like a celebration and we'd like you to speak. I said, yeah, let us chat. Like, how did you find out about me? You came straight through the website. Oh, James, we just went to ChatGPT and we said, who's the top speaker for high performance and leadership in Australia, New Zealand? And you were number one. I'm like, mind blowing. And I was like, I'm not putting any active energy into doing that. So you must be, oh, thank you. I was blown away. It was weird, but good weird. I'm like, I want to stay on that list. So what can people do organically as small companies or even as personal brands to try and feature on searches relating to LLMs?

Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to.

Optimizing for like searching these LLM.

The training set for these LLMs kind of are cut off at certain arbitrary time, like time periods. So for example, a lot of the LLMs today training set may be cut off in 2024. So James, I'm assuming that you've been in business for many, many, many years and you have a lot of content out there already where people are talking great accolades about the value brought for them and the solutions you've created for them and the problems you solve for them and how you've helped them grow their business. And so all those accolades are in the training set prior to 20, whenever that kind of period was for say ChatGPT. And that's now embedded in these LLMs. And so when people are searching for who is the best for this solving a specific problem, you're up there in terms of, you know, the amount of references that your name is associated with with a particular business problem. So I think just making sure that, you know, the cutoff data is going to continue to be moved forward in the future as new generations of models come out. So constantly just making sure that you have a lot of content out there and.

That positions you as an expert in this, in a certain domain and then getting, you know, a lot of people to create content about you as regarding you being the leader of a certain, you know, in a certain sector. And then, and then you also want to get like highly, you know, verified or highly kind of accredited publications to be citing your work. So things like Wikipedia or, you know, Reddit, you know, or major news channels have been, you know, those are heavily cited by these LLMs when weighted terms of these alums in terms of the, the referrals and references they make. So making sure that you're kind of, you know, widely cited amongst those accredited sources of information.

And I guess that applies to people in all industries. Like that makes so much sense. And I hear of these different programs and software you can use that literally will create, you know, 80 pieces of content for you a day and just pump it out to the Internet. So it's sounding like actually that's not going to change the game. You've got to have quality content from quality sources and it's all as opposed to one Source just pumping out about themselves.

Yeah, I mean, I definitely think both are important. I think you do also want to continue to have a lot of content out there, if anything, probably more content isn't necessarily a bad thing either, but it is definitely in combination of both the quality and quantity of things referencing you in terms of. In a certain domain. And I think the difference, perhaps with an LLM versus traditional search is.

That it's kind of embedded in. I mean, in some ways though, it is quite similar. I think that it's a fundament. They're both now at this point really like neural networks with associations and affiliations of certain concepts with each other. And um, and so like, you kind of, you know, get recommended based on kind of the strength of those connections you have with affiliated concepts and keywords and entities. And so just continue to make sure that you're strengthening those connections. I mean, if you think of a neural network as like a brain, you know, the more you exercise certain muscle or connection, that connection is strengthened. And so you want to make sure that you're constantly producing content that strengthens your association of your, you know, let's say you have like a neuron, that, that, that entity that is, that is you, is. Has a very strong, you say, myelination with like some of those associated concepts that you really want to be.

You know, you know, brought up and referenced in when someone's asking, say, chatgpt a certain query.

That's a great way to put it and it's interesting and I'm going to chat about Omni Key in just a second. But I think that, you know, five, six years ago, I spent a lot of time and I was so frustrated. But what is my uniqueness? Like? What is the company's uniqueness? What do we do uniquely? What is the problem we solve? And I honestly spent months and had consultants help me. What is it like? There's so many things I like to do and can do, but what is it? And so we just started to like, really refine it down. And once I got down to this is what we do, our team then was like, okay, everything with our content is through that lens. And so for five or six years now, we've just been pumping out all that content, a variety of content with incredible people like yourself, some personal thought leadership for myself, but it's all through that lens. So I think what I'm hearing is for the individual or the team or the company listening right now is get clear on who you serve, what you do, and create your content consistently. Around all of that.

I totally. I mean, I think podcasts are a great way of creating content that associates those connections and is also, I think, a way of.

Producing a lot of content quickly regarding, and getting it out there and disseminated in terms of what these then models will train on the transcripts of these, of this, of this podcast. And so I think podcasts are a great way. Then again, the other, James, is what you mentioned is like, focus. Just like, what is it that you're good at? And just making sure that you're strengthening that connection in every opportunity that you can is also very important so that you're the first.

Person or entity that's recommended versus say, another entity that maybe have slightly less focus in terms of what their strengths are.

Yeah, that makes sense. Hikari and I recently seen a podcast that was ranking one or two in the Apple charts. I was like, oh, I should check that out. And it was about a really famous book that's just came out. It's global sensation. I said, oh, they've got a podcast about it. But I clicked in and within 30 seconds I was like, oh, it's two AI voices chatting to each other. I just clicked off right away. I was like, this is ridiculous. What's your thoughts on that? Would you tune into a podcast that just had two AIs talking to each other?

I mean, I do chat with my, with. I do chat with, you know, I have a, I have an. So I live in San Francisco and I work in Sunnyvale offices in Sunnyvale. So it's like an hour commute. And so I do like on my drive in the mornings and at night and we, we work from the office five days a week. I do chat with ChatGPT and have conversations with it regarding like, topics like, hey, tell me about the history of X. Or you know, like.

Uh, you know, and then I have a deeper, like, can you dive deeper into this topic? Or you know.

And so I mean, I think having conversation and listening to conversations, I think both are valuable. But. But you kind of need to tune it to your preferences and it's not, you know, not all of this content is good quality. In fact, probably most of it is not very good quality. And so I think there's only one place for me, you know, when it comes to this particular instance strategy, like, I kind of have prompted it to be like, you know, like.

You know, don't be as authentic and like, you know, be more brutally and have this like, brutally honest initiation tragedy that I have conversations with that's More kind of. And it gives longer answers and more in depth answers and less, you know, surface level and less kind of trite sycophantic things. So there's a little bit where you kind of customize these chatbots to meet your needs.

And. Yeah, and then so when it comes to just AI generated content in general, I think, you know, I mean there is this kind of and I think there's element of truth which is it's a lot of, it is kind of slop, like just AI of slop is out there and.

Just because it's so easy now to create this content. So I wouldn't say by any means that the average thing you listen to is going to be any good. But this is where again, I think.

The brand of the company or person that's producing this content is very important. Like this is a source that I trust. Is this a source? Is this a person that is associated with consistently producing quality content? Is the company that is, you know, has good, has, has developed a good brand in this domain. And if anything, I think that the power of brands is going to only become more important in an era where content is, you know, the cost of producing content is free. And so this is where like, you know, James, what you mentioned, where you're the leader.

In certain domains is so critical because that value is only going to accrue as more and more slop is out there and people are more confused in terms of who they should be listening to.

Makes total sense. And let's talk about Omni Key. So what problem do you uniquely solve?

Yeah, so we solve the problem where customers are seeking to improve the return on ad spend by creating more effective creative. So traditionally the way content is produced and creative is produced, it's kind of manual. You have a designer they're going back and forth with, maybe the marketer regarding edits.

It could take weeks and definitely takes hours. And it's expensive.

Very.

With an AI, we close the loop where our system connects, integrates with your advertising platform. So meta, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, et cetera. And we learn what are the keywords where the entities are driving performance in terms of clicks and conversions and return on ad spend. And then we use those insights as well as the customer's own brand and kind of the objectives that they're seeking or the objective of their campaign to generate thousands of creative for you instantly that you can then choose from. You can edit that creative as well within our tool very quickly through chat. You can edit it through our editing tool and then launch the creative in an omnichannel way across meta, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, et cetera instantly from our platform. And it drives higher return enhancement because number one, you're producing more content to drive to the optimal creative faster. So generally I would say that, you know, for example, let's say Meta, the more creative the meta has to work with to showcase the right creative based on meta's understanding of their users preferences is more likely to then drive higher return ad spend in your campaigns on Meta. So generally like it's been suggested that you have, you know, maximize number of creative per campaign and ad set in say your meta campaigns or your Google campaigns. And also because the creative is data driven. So we're incorporating real time performance data regarding, well, this creative is getting clicks or this creative is driving higher conversions. We're incorporating those insights into the next iteration of creative so that then that next campaign you launch or that next creative that you're uploading into your existing ad sets is going to be more effective. And so it's a system, we're not just a tool for generating AI slop, but it's a system for delivering results.

In our instance, the results is return on ad spend and we're using AI as a tool and we're using generative AI as a tool to help you deliver an outcome which is superior return on ad spend. So the end is not creating content, the end is superior return on ad spend. And we are harnessing computer vision for insights and generative AI for content creation to help you achieve that goal.

That's amazing. It's interesting. So I've run events for the last five, six years in person events and sometimes we've used agencies, marketing agencies, digital marketing and they're very expensive and they've really, most of them underperformed. It's just been kind of disappointing and it's just been costly and we haven't got the conversions and we're like, God, is it the event now we brought it in house and started going, well, let's use ChatGPT to train us. Pretend we're a digital marketer. And then Meta has a very basic version of we'll keep refining it and we'll keep channeling so that it can be better. We're getting better roas for sure. If we were to come to you guys or anyone that was listening to you right now was to come to you guys, what might you be able to do to help us supercharge that? What's totally Unique about how you do that.

Yeah. So, you know, and I've experimented with Meta's ad generation tools and kind of their AI, you know.

Vantage plus ads. I mean, the, the AI ads that they generate are really not very good. Like, I would say, like just is. The ads generally tend to look worse after they've edited, after the AI is edited than before. And so I tend to turn all those things off actually sometimes for, for many of these campaigns after, especially after I see them like kind of in the wild, I'm like, meta's running what on behalf of my brand? Um, there's an element where I actually can't even see the edits. Like, it's really hard to even kind of see what is being run on behalf of my brand. When I'm running ads on Meta especially, I'm just like kind of trusting Meta that it's making those.

Optimizations that align with my brand. But then when I see it, when I see the ads in the wild, I'm like, I like, how do I, how do I turn this thing off? And so number one, I think is.

Visibility. Like our tool, you can immediately see all the creatives that you're running. You approve every single creative before it runs and you're generating all the creative that is on, aligned with your brand on our platform. And the ad only runs once you approve the that creative. So there's visibility in terms of the insights. I get better creative insights through my tool, through Omni Key on Reddit or on TikTok or LinkedIn or meta and Google. Actually, many, many instances in terms of creative insights than I have in each one of these platforms. These platforms, I mean, I'm sure you've experimented them impossible to get insights. I do not know what's being shown, who's seeing it, what's driving conversions, because it's not designed for creative. These platforms are designed mostly for distribution. And so I can see, you know, I can see the budget, I can see kind of like generally the audiences I'm targeting. But like when it comes to what's being shown and what are all the iterations and are all the iterations brand safe? Actually, really hard to figure that out. Our tool is designed for the creative. Our tool is designed for the brand and protecting that brand.

Aesthetic. And so.

One area that I think we're superior in is just that focus on the creative experience and generating all those variations, being able to edit those variations before you launch them and then actually once you've launched them to see insights about, okay, well, these are Each of my creatives and, and these are the results. Each creative variation is driven.

And that's just on one platform. Let's say that's just us comparing running our ads versus on just Meta, our interface design around creative quality. And I think there's a lot more better visibility and control when it comes to creative on our platform than just trusting Meta. But separately I would say that our real advantage is omnichannel. So you can't run Google Ads on Meta, you can't run Reddit ads on Meta, you can't run TikTok ads on Meta because these are competitive platforms. And so if you're interested you'll quickly number one hit a ceiling in terms of performance on Meta because Meta is an incredibly competitive ad platform. There are, you know, every advertiser in the world is advertising on Meta and so the CPMs are already pretty maxed out. And.

So like you're going to hit that ceiling pretty quickly when it comes to weigh ins. So you're quickly going to want to expand and diversify your ad budget from Meta to Google to TikTok to LinkedIn to Reddit to Pinterest to Snapchat to trade desk to AppLovin pretty quickly and probably sooner than historically. And so when it comes to then diversifying that ad budget you definitely need Omnikey because Omnikey is really the only tool that integrates all these other platforms, centralizes all the insights from these platforms that you see the top performing creative across all these different platforms to say okay, well you know my, the, the channel that's performed best for me in terms of return Aspen right now is this particular creative on this particular channel.

And feel double down on that for the client.

I can spend more budget on that platform. Maybe it's you know, interestingly like Reddit is doing really great and Reddit's driving a lot of highly engaged users for me now and driving high return ad spend. And this particular creative on Reddit is just completely, you know.

Doing just phenomenal. And I, and I actually want to diverse, you know, I want to shift more budget. There's, and so especially now where there are dozens of ad platforms that advertisers can pick from and also where I think generally the top two platforms, Meta and Google are so competitive in terms of CPMs and budgets that you quickly, you do want to diversify your budgets and you do want to then when you as you diversify compare these platforms against each other to make sure that you're delivering ultimately it goes back to the first point which is return on ad spend. Because at the end of the day I don't think advertisers really care if they're running the ads on Meta or Google or TikTok or LinkedIn or Reddit or Snapchat or Pinterest or et cetera. It's am I getting the best return on ad spend for my budget? And Omnikey is a platform that helps you optimize for that.

Amazing. And how quickly can. If I was to get Omniche today, I wanted to try and start getting up to speed. Is it going to take me weeks to understand it or is it kind of built for an Irishman?

Well, first of all.

I'm not sure about that last time but Our tool is.

7 day free trial.

And then you can get. And it starts 99 bucks. So anybody can get started with our tool and start finding value in our product pretty instantly. I would say you can probably generate your first set of ads and launch your first campaign within an hour of creating an account. So you know, you can sign up, start, you know, upload your website, start generating creative within within minutes and then launch that creative with, with, to Google or Meta or TikTok et cetera.

You know, just matter of just clicking on the launch button actually and then just being like what's the budget and what's the audience that you're targeting? So all that can be done within the first. Yeah, first couple of minutes. Definitely within the first.

And that's global Again most countries or every country on the planet can use Omnikey.

Yeah, so we have customers from all over the world. I mean every, yeah, every, yeah, every, like.

Every language.

Every. I think we have, we think we have users in almost every country in the world and we definitely have. Yeah. Like the other thing.

Is our product is multilingual from day one because my background, so I'm Japanese American and we have a large customer base in Japan and we have. And so we've always kind of designed the product to be multilingual in terms of the interface being.

Accessible in any language and then generating creative, high quality creative, any language. So we have customers all over the world. In fact I would say that over of international users are some of the most engaged users. And so yeah, any language both for the interface of the tool as well as for then generating those outputs.

Amazing. And it's currently $99 a month.

Yeah, it starts $99 a month.

Amazing. When I think of, you know, most agencies that I've used, they charge me usually a $2,000 management fee a month and I don't really get much for that $2,000. So what you're telling me is like news to my ears. That's great news because you have the insights. The AI is built in, there's automation. It's going to help me with my roas which is more important as a small or medium business. That's just critical. A lot of people in this scenario right now globally from an economic perspective are looking for cost savings. So this is awesome. Do you have many agencies, marketing agencies using Omnikey or is this mainly built for the individual?

We have a lot, we have. So we have a lot of self serve, self serve kind of SMB users signing up for our tool and using our tool. A large percentage of these SMB users I think are the agencies represent these self service kind of SMB users using our tool. We have some bigger agency partnerships that use our tool for multiple number of their brands and so if you're an agency interested in signing up, definitely sign up for free trial then and then, you know, please connect. You know we'd love to chat with you and see if we can kind of expand the platform to servicing multiple of your brands.

So yeah, like our tool in fact the way we built the product initially was, you know, and you mentioned that we've been around since 2018 is we were initially more of an AI enabled agency where we would kind of incorporate.

AI into servicing our customers for media buying and content creation. And then earlier this year we kind of split out the tool we had built for ourselves initially into a self service way and now that's what's growing 2x month for month and just really growing incredibly quickly.

But the tool was initially designed for our own internal agency. So if you're an agency I think you'll find value in our tools and we'd love to chat with you regarding utilizing our tool to service your customers.

Beautiful. What do you see as Omnikey's biggest risk in terms of the rate that AI is growing? Everyone's involved in it. The big players, the governments are getting involved. What's your greatest risk?

Well, I think.

The space is moving very quickly and there's, there's competition so but this is something that we're very aware of and I think we've positioned our company well with kind of certain flywheels within our product to kind of gain additional outsize value as we grow. But, but yeah, I think you know, the speed of the technology in the way it's advancing, making sure that we're Constantly staying up to date every time there's a, I think this is just the story of technology and innovation in general. But every time the technology ticks, you have to also like move a tick as well. Like one of my favorite books is this book called the Soul of the New Machine. I think and it's about, you know, I think the 1980s and kind of it was developing these microprocessors in that era. But like basically every six months you have to keep staying up to date in terms of the latest technologies. And if you, you know, every time everyone hops and skips one step, you have to stay in sync and if you trip then you know you're out of business. And that is the kind of pace of technologies. You're constantly, you know, hopping forward one.

Increment as the technology advances and it's just staying up to date with all the advancements. So for us it's making sure that we're incorporating the latest and greatest AI technology to our customers and as the underlying models improve that we're offering that as quickly as possible for our customers in terms of image generation and video generation and analytics.

And.

Doing that better than our competition as well as making sure that we have in our platform certain flywheels associated with data, associated with the number of customers we service and the markets we service so that as we get more customers we can develop superior quality creative, a more effective creative than say a new entrant can without that same base of data.

That makes sense. And Hikari, you're in the Bay Area. You're as I say, really at the center of where everything's happening with AI and technology. I was there about a year ago and waymos were everywhere. And for you guys that's old news. Like they've been around forever. But in New Zealand there's still nothing like a waymo, a taxi that's taking people around with no driver in it, fully automated, knows when to stop and quite incredible. So you are at the front of what's happening in this wave. AI agents, what's your thoughts? What do we need to know? Where is it headed?

So I don't think we're ne like it's definitely coming and I would say it's coming probably within the next couple of years where a lot of work is fully automated by a goal directed AI where you give a certain goal to an AI and then goes and achieves it in kind of a very unstructured and kind of free forming way.

So whether it's customer success or.

Sales.

Or Engineering. I think some of these have advanced faster than others and some of these are closer to being reliable products and others in other domains.

I think over the next couple of years we're going to see that fully kind of spread out across almost every domain of human work is going to be augmented by an AI assisting a human or replace, you know, replacing certain subcomponents of what a person historically has done in a fully automated way.

And for us it's back to this goal which is delivering superior return ad spend in an omnichannel way. So.

Our agent, you know, you would give our agent, hey, I'm up looking for return ad spend and then, you know, without any inter, almost, you know, with minimal, you know, connect, you know, like work involved, RAI would go and generate all the creative, launch all the campaigns across all the different platforms, test all the different channels, test all the creative and just return to you with like the optimal return ad spend. And that's like the fully agentified vision of the platform.

And I think generally the direction, you know, the industry is going, whether it's in marketing or sales or in advertising.

And yeah, it's going to be, you know, it's going to give people more leverage to do other higher level things and other types of tasks that you know, people traditionally didn't have the bandwidth to do.

Brilliant. And this idea of ChatGPT, I use the deep research tool from time to time, is that an agent, is that in some way where it goes away and researches a bunch of different websites and comes back with thoughts or is that something different?

No, that is an agent. Yeah. Deep research is an example of an agent where you give it, hey, like can you.

Go research a topic and then it creates a bunch of subtasks and then spins spawn sub agents to go and execute each one of those tasks and the nail comes back and then these agents are working together to then like say, you know, compile a report regarding these numerous facets that it went out and researched and so, you know, focus on a specific goal which was to provide you cutting edge research regarding a certain topic.

Yeah, I think the, the, the.

Now going from writing a research report which is I would say very, you know, high leverage but you know, not equivalent type of leverage to say automating entire.

You know, industries. I think that's really where that's, you know, we're going to go from that step to the next step over the next coming years. And I think it's like, well, okay, I trust it provide research part, but do I trust it with my entire marketing budget, or do I trust it with my entire sales budget, or do I trust it with all my data or my, all my cybersecurity or.

And so that's really, I think, now.

The kind of next step that we're kind of in the midst of crossing that chasm.

And in terms of cyber crime, you know, if we got these, these agents going to do positive things for us, clearly there's potential for a criminal to want these agents to go and do negative things. So what's your thoughts on where that's headed and how do we, how do we combat that?

Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I think AI is a tool, and so people use it for good and bad. And I think we're already seeing AI used in many different.

Criminal endeavors and more sophisticated phishing attacks and, you know, more sophisticated fraud in terms of calls and emails and.

You know, taking advantage of vulnerabilities. But at the same, but at the same time, though, actually oftentimes the biggest surface area for cybercrime is actually a person. So it's oftentimes, you know, convincing a, you know, it's a phishing attack on a human to then share their passwords for their.

You know, sensitive information, for, say, company information, et cetera. So actually, I would think that in some ways systems will become more secure as you reduce that surface area. As more and more things become automated, you have less surface area for vulnerabilities regarding a phishing attack, for example, and that would actually probably result in a more robust and secure system. So I think, you know, it's an evolution, but potentially we could have more secure systems as more and more of there's a reduction in surface area for these vulnerabilities.

Makes sense. And look, we are all about purpose here at lead on purpose and to doing things that matter. How do you think AI could help the listener right now and into the future live a life of more purpose and doing things that matter more?

Yeah.

I think.

The answer.

You know, I come from this in a very humanistic world, which is I believe that every soul is sacred and every human has the right to achieve its potential and pursue happiness in the way they define it and to achieve what their dreams are. And I think a lot of, you know, society and civilization is based on that fundamental principle of human dignity and.

That like every person, every soul is equivalent in the eyes of God and.

And.

Like, you know, and that, like, what I think Western civilization has done really successfully is.

Looping the incentive structure of capitalism where you give, you know, increased competition, creates better products, you have free flowing capital to the best ideas, where opportunity goes to the best productive form of that, you know, investment of that capital, whatever shape or form that sort, you know, that investment looks like, you know, and I think there's something democratizing about this kind of like, you know, liberal democracy, democratic form of capitalism, especially when you kind of loop in democracy with capitalism. So you know, if you ever have an instance where some of these institutions, some of these capitalist institutions become too.

You know, destructive maybe because in its profit motive it becomes harmful for society. Well, democracy is a great check on that because then the people will vote and say, hey, this is harmful on society. And we were going to regulate this or we're going to, you know, oftentimes you're going to regulate it or you're going to break it up or you're going to do something to benefit people. And so.

And so that's like a longer frame of saying that. I think.

You know.

The Adam Smithian view of like, you know, it is okay, you know, like it is good for your purpose to be, to provide for your family and to work hard and to hustle and to, you know, go and pursue your dreams because that is what propels society to innovate and move forward and improves the quality of life and fundamentally shares, you know, the, the, the, the fruits of that across society and civilization. I think for us in, for me in particular in terms of advertising.

We'Re, you know, whether it's commerce or advertising, I think we were creating a more democratic playing field for entrepreneurs to quickly get their products out to market, to quickly find their customers. You know, you've mentioned this, which is our product is $99 versus you know, historically you had to pay thousands of dollars a month for this kind of.

Kind of outcome. And so that is democratic now. That means more businesses can get started and grow because of our tool. And we empower more entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams and to get traction and connect with customers. And that therefore means a role with more vibrant products, more products, more companies, more startups. And that competition will mean generally for the average consumer, more options to choose from when it comes to.

You know, improving their lives and achieving their goals. And so.

I think, you know, like.

Yeah, so.

That would be kind of like my long winning way of answering your question.

That's brilliant. No, thank you. And I really feel like what you do is deeply purposeful and you know, as a business owner and as someone who serves others who run small, medium and large Businesses I can just see this tool as something so positive to help them connect with the right people, get their products out to market and actually do it at a really inexpensive level. So of course you start at 99 bucks. I imagine it goes right up. So what I want to do is put a link in the show notes for anyone that's listening or watching please go and check out Omni Key. Give it a try. Seven days free, nothing to lose. I'm actually going to do that. We've got a major event on Friday but on Saturday, Sunday I'm going to jump in, log in and we've got a service, a product that we're going to offer post event and we need to run some ads. So I'm going to use Omniky for that. Really good way to test it. Thank you.

Thank you. Absolutely. And yeah, thank you for that.

Yeah, I don't, I don't actually I don't think our price goes that much up actually from 99 you.

It'S like a lot of our customers are at the 99 tier or not much higher than that and they're finding a lot of value and so you like.

Yeah, like that. Yeah like Even at the $99 I think you can find a lot of value in the product and so price isn't necessarily going to go right up by any.

Okay, good. That's good. Sometimes with these you can see like The Enterprise models, 5,000 bucks a month or something like that. So that's cool that for the standard user and small medium business it'll be very cost effective.

Yeah and for our average, you know like our average customer is on the, you know, 99, you know like vast majority of customers are at that SMB price point and finding value and yeah, I mean if you're a company but that's much larger that needs more customer integrations or more support. When it comes to.

Certain objectives are trying to achieve and you have more budget then there is an opportunity to chat with sales and see if there's a more custom solution that makes sense. But most of our customers are totally happy at the $99 and that's great and I'm glad that.

We can offer this kind of value at that price point to it's phenomenal. Thousands of customers all over the world.

I'm super excited about it. Hikari. It's been one of those annoying problems I've had for years around ad spend and around working with digital marketers. So I just think that there's such a need for it and many of us have this problem that needs solved. So thank you for putting it out there.

Thank you, James.

A pleasure to have you on the show.

And thank you for this opportunity as well.

And, yeah, really honored for this opportunity to really share our platform to your listeners. And, yeah, thank you for giving me this opportunity now.

It's been amazing. I hope to see you down here in New Zealand or Australia someday soon on a stage talking about your amazing product and how it can help us. But for now, take good care.

Thank you. Thank you, James.

Thank you so much.