Jeff Dudan explains how Homefront Brands uses AI and machine learning to speed up content creation and analyze sales calls, while partnering with Microsoft Copilot. He warns that search engines are getting saturated with AI-generated content and says franchise home offices need to lead AI adoption to stay profitable.
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Technology, particularly artificial intelligence and machine learning, are changing the way that business gets done. At Homefront Brands, we are honored to be Microsoft's SMB small and medium business partner in their rollout of their AI tool within their Office 365 suite and power BI suite Microsoft Copilot. And we are incorporating that into every aspect or a of our business looking for efficiencies, especially in terms of our data model in which that we at Homefront Brands have got all of the data into a single data lake and we have machine learning and artificial intelligence running across it. Now that's very difficult to do and we've gone through great expense and great pain over the last two years to make that a reality. But we've already started getting insights from it. Now here's some of the challenges with AI. AI is new for people to use. So particularly let's talk about marketing. When you've got marketing people that have been operating in the industry for five to 30 years, the same way some of these tools are game changing when it comes to content creation or the ability to summarize notes from a telephone call, like a read AI or an otter AI. And then you can put these into either a chat function or some other AI. And then from there you can actually create PowerPoint decks immediately. So what used to take a week of thoughtful preparation and creation now can be done inside of five minutes. So here's the question, is that good? I think it's good, but is the content good? Now that there's an overabundance of the ability to create content, what does that do to the search engines? How do the search engines look at this massive inflow of content? What we've seen is that some of the search engines have actually gotten a little clogged up because they're getting so much content. Now. It's so easy to create. You can be nimble, you can be fast, but is it optimized? Is it the type of content that's going to drive results? Or how do you stand out in a sea of sameness with some real innovative topics or something that's going to grab people? So AI solves problems in terms of the ability to create quickly, but then it creates another set of problems inside of that. But I think that the industry franchising in particular is going to sort that. And it's very powerful for franchisees because if you are part of a franchise brand or if you're part of a platform, in theory, these are shared service models. So whoever the home office is should be leading the charge on these tools for efficiencies in delivering customers, in creating internal training, in understanding, even to the extent that you're coaching inside of a sales call or a telephone call, you know, what percentage did somebody speak versus somebody else were the keywords hit? So incorporating these tools into every aspect of our business is gonna create a more efficient and leaner today and hopefully leading to more profits tomorrow.
