Using AI to amplify your strengths, with digital agency owner Pete Sena.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we are going to New Hampshire, Connecticut. We're meeting with Pete Sena. Pete, welcome to the show.

Good to be here, Jim. And I'm in New Haven, Connecticut today.

Oh, sorry, New Haven, not New Hampshire. New Haven.

I wish I was in New Hampshire. New Hampshire's beautiful this time of year.

Mate, I, I wish I was too. Although Wiltshire, I've got to say, is a picture as well down here in the west of England. Now, you and I are going to talk about how AI can help an entrepreneur to write themselves out of their own business. You are a creative entrepreneur. You've got a digital agency. You also have an amazing podcast called Future Obsessed. So Pete, I know you're helping clients to build brands and using technology to do that. But as an entrepreneur, how do you think AI can help to write somebody out of the script of their own movie as an entrepreneur.

Yeah, no, I love that. And it's certainly a topic right now, especially with writing people out of the movies is a big topic here in America right now. So I think I've been on this quest recently, because I've— just for the audience to know, like, they're probably asking the big question, well, why should I listen to you? Well, I've spent the past 20 years designing and building brands, technologies, that sort of thing. So I came up as a software engineer first and foremost, and then kind of got deep into design, and then From there, found a love for marketing and blah, blah, blah. So why you should listen to me ultimately is I, I only share advice on things I've done on myself. I'm the biggest guinea pig. And on that topic, Jim, that you were saying, I started thinking a lot recently with all these LLMs, right? So if you're not familiar, large language models, I'm guessing if you're, if you're listening to The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, you know what ChatGPT is and the things like it. But at the highest level, just to, for the audience to make sure that I'm speaking to everyone here in a way that connects with them. These technologies, ChatGPT, large language models, they're bigger than the internet itself in terms of like scale and power and possibility. So I'm really excited, you know, when I think about just what's going to be possible with these technologies. So when these started getting really popular in the past, say, year and a half, 2 years, obviously ChatGPT is very new. Things in sort of AI tech move a million miles a minute, right? So why is that important? Well, it's important because I think what we're seeing now is when I was digging into this, I asked myself, what are all the things I do as an entrepreneur? What are all the things my clients who are founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, what are all the ways we can automate their business? So I started from the wrong place. I actually started from the place of let's automate everything using these tools. And the more I automated, the more I realized that that wasn't the right solution. What I needed to really focus on is not automation. But acceleration and amplification. So really what I realized when talking to my customers and talking to their customers, really it wasn't about removing or replacing people with tools and technologies. You know, a lot of my clients, my bigger clients were like, oh, well, if we can reduce headcount and save costs, you know, everyone's trying to do more with less. But what it really came down to when I went 5 whys deeper, as we say, so ask why and then ask why, then ask why. When I got deep into it, What I realized is they just wanted to get more output out of their best performers. And what it came down to is, if you think about it, just audience listening into the show, right? Think about any team you've been on, and let's be honest, you're probably one of the top performers if you're listening to this show, or maybe you're a bottom performer in the middle, right? And typically, it's the top performers that pull the most weight, right? So the challenge is what ends up happening with a lot of companies is they they take their best individual contributor and they promote them to be a manager. And then they realize that not all managers want to be managers, but also forget about that. This is not a conversation about leadership development, right? Happy to have that another time. But what they end up doing is they lose their best individual contributor. So what I started to ask is a different question. I said, well, what would it look like if I could take the best people and make them faster, better, stronger? And how could I change my mindset from automation to amplification? And that's where some magic started to happen. So just to go a little bit deeper on that, Jim, and definitely jump in here if I'm going off track.

No, Pete, this is great. To talk about amplification rather than replacement is also super reassuring for everybody that's worried about AI, right? You're going to get enhanced performance, not replacement performance. So carry on, Pete.

I love it. Yeah. And what I always say to people is an AI is not coming for your job, but someone using an AI is. So you got to level up or you're going to get leveled in this space. There's no question about it, right? So anyone that comes to me and tells me that ChatGPT or tools like this, these large language models or LLMs, can't help them work faster and better just doesn't know how to use the tools. Period. End of story. So if you're not already playing with these tools, I highly suggest you do so. And my favorite thing to do is to look at what are the highest leverage activities that high performers in organizations typically do. So one of the things I hear a lot from my clients is that their best, best and brightest people are creating great content. So one of the things that we can do is we can really study the knowledge, the voice, the tone, the communication styles that those people do. And then we can train or fine-tune in some cases, these different AI tools and technologies to think and write like them. And then ultimately, then we can provide a similar set of inputs, but we can scale the set of outputs, which ultimately speeds up the contribution to outcomes. So now, as an example, I was recently working with a client in the financial services space. And what we're doing right now is we're taking their 2 best writers, and we're scaling them to basically produce like a team of 5 or 6 would produce. So you can think about like the scale of that, it's actually pretty immense. And what we're doing is in the financial services space, there's a lot of rules as to what you can and can't say. So what actually makes some of these copy creators really good is that they know the business, they know the legal constraints. So they understand there's a framework on how they think. So the beauty of these tools is that the more you can put your way of working into a described, visualized way of working, the more you can train these systems to produce content that way. So now what ends up happening is instead of having a bunch of content writers, we have a bunch of really great content editors. So what we're able to do is we're able to put some inputs in these machines, scale the amount of outputs, and then instead of a person spending 8 hours writing an article, which they were doing in this case for this financial services client, they're spending 2 hours editing an article and getting it to the finish line. And then because of the power of automation, what they're then automating is, you know, sending it off to get graphics created, doing a bunch of these different things. So now what we looked— when I look at the problem through the lens of acceleration, amplification, I'm getting to a better outcome where their staff is happier, they're doing more meaningful creative work, and they're collaborating on more meaningful things versus the other side of it. When I first came at it through the problem of let's automate everything, What I ended up doing is approaching it from the wrong problem. So what I say to the unorganized entrepreneur and, and anyone who's trying to build their businesses, the first thing you have to ask yourself is, am I solving the right problem? And I think as an entrepreneur myself, like one of the things I recognize is almost every time I've been massively unsuccessful, it's because I was not spending enough time with the problem space. I was spending too much time with the solution space. So that's just what I would say to that specific thing when it comes to AI, Jim.

There's a huge amount in there. Can you give us an idea of the tools that you're using just from a practical point of view? Because for many people, the idea of harnessing, let's say, one subject matter expert inside a company, most companies have got one person, or in fact, the entrepreneur often is the subject matter expert. They're the engineer, the technician, the service provider, but they don't have the capacity to write, for example, to create the videos. Can you give us an idea of some of the tools that people can use where really that person is giving their knowledge to the AI rather than to an external writer or videographer or even hiring people and training them as we used to, to try and get to the same level as, you know, as the expert? Absolutely.

So I'm purposely not gonna go and name a bunch of tools like ChatGPT and Jasper and, you know, Writesonic and all these different tools. I'm gonna tell you why. I'm not going to name those tools. If people want to send me a tweet or an X, whatever we're calling it these days, thanks, Elon. Yeah, I'm happy to respond to anybody with a list of my tools. I've compiled over 100 of them in a free thing that I'll give to anybody.

Thank you.

What I do want to start with is, what is the point of knowledge, right? So is the knowledge in your head? Can you speak it out loud? Is the knowledge in a white paper or a document? Where is the knowledge in your organization? So what I always say is you have to get the knowledge documented. So if you're a busy CEO or entrepreneur, you can literally turn on voice notes on your phone and just start recording voice notes. We can transcribe those voice notes, we can catalog those voice notes. If you're a long-form article, one of my clients is a large franchise and they have over 10,000 pieces of franchise content for their franchise network. So what we're doing in that case is we're doing what's called a vector database where we're actually ingesting all their content. And we're essentially building like mini ChatGPT for their business. And why that's special is it's only trained on their knowledge. So what we're, we're doing there is something called fine-tuning, where we're still using OpenAI, which is the maker of ChatGPT, or in some cases we're also using Anthropic, which is the maker of a tool called Claude. So we're using these really well-established large language models, but then we're fine-tuning the models only based on the retrieval data that's in our vector database. So if you haven't heard the term vector database, I would say check out a technology called Pinecone because they're getting a ton of investment and they write a lot of great content. Again, the tools change, the techniques change, but the most important thing is if you're looking to scale yourself, you have to get the things out of your head and out of your, out of your computer into a place that can be accessed, whether, whether that's pictures, videos, words, Whatever that is. And then from there, you can start to build like a data corpus, which is just a fancy term for your information. And then you can figure out how to access that information, repurpose that information, and scale that information. And that could be anything, that could be the way you work, that could be your process. So it doesn't matter if you're a dentist, or a chiropractor, or the CEO of a SaaS technology company, all of these businesses have knowledge and information that they can repackage and repurpose. And that's the place to start. And then once you figure out what your sort of golden goose is, you know, in terms of information, then you can look at all the other things you're spending your time on. And most of the things you're spending time on could be automated, right? Like the other day, I got a call from somebody, they were too small to work with, with me and my team. So what I basically said is go on to zapier.com and You could automate just about anything you want in a couple clicks of a button, right? So when I get this email that says, hey, Jim, can we work together, automatically add that to my Slack channel so somebody on my team can do that. That's something you can do yourself if you spend a couple minutes on YouTube or you go on a tool like Zapier or Make. These are sort of what I call low-code automation tools. So there's levels to the things that you want to automate. But again, what I want to start with is Start with the big principles of what am I automating, why am I automating it, and start with the outcome first and then work your way backwards versus don't start from the input first and work your way forward.

Pete, that's wonderful. And this idea of capturing essential knowledge and then training the system to be able to amplify that without your direct involvement is really a great way to start to write yourself out of the story, but then to be the producer rather than the main actor, if we can carry on the analogy there with the movies there.

And let's, but let's, let's add one more even flavor because I love a good metaphor, right? Which is, if you think about the people who get remembered most in history, it's the people who have the most leverage, right? So it's the conductor of the orchestra, not the best violinist. It's the owner of the sports team, not the best person that's on the field, right? So what we have to, I think, think about is for the first $10 million, $0 to $10 million in a business, You know, typically you're a player coach, right? Once you get past ten million bucks, generally, and again, these are general numbers, right? Different for every industry. Then you go from being a player coach to more of a coach, and then from from coach, then you sort of go to being sort of that that owner mentality. And I think that what a lot of people that I work with face is that they're spending too much time in their business and not enough time on their business. And what I like about these types of systems is it forces us to communicate. The questions we ask these systems, the ChatGPTs, is you and I could sit in front of a computer and, Jim, you know how to use this stuff. I know how to use this stuff. But people listening to the show right now, garbage in equals garbage out. Whether you're asking a human to do something or asking a computer to do something, the quality of our inputs dictates the quality of our outputs, and the quality of our outputs and our measurements dictates the quality of our outcomes. So, I think that a lot of times people are chasing this AI bullet, which is moving too fast. I think they have to just stop, pause, and look at where are they at in the journey? And where do they want to go next? And it's that definition and documentation that I think creates the force multiplier for growth. And again, that's me just giving context based on doing this for the past few years. The space is moving quickly. And from the time you hit post on this, on this interview, 100 new things will have cropped up in this AI space. So I just want to make sure that I focus on those principles. Yeah, not the sort of buzzy things because they come and go like the wind.

Yeah, no, it's really faddy too. And I know, Pete, we've only got 20 minutes of your time, but I know you're busy and you have to scoot off sometimes soon. But it's possible, isn't it, to kind of automate your way out of business by, if you like, depersonalizing the company so much that you lose your clients?

Yes.

Right? So, we've all experienced this with the bank bots and the mobile phone provider bots where you you know, in the end almost want to throw the phone. Tell us your view on sort of brand experience and AI, because it does seem as though a lot of companies are in danger of sort of abdicating that final touchpoint to AI tools. What's your view, Pete, on how an entrepreneur can amplify their personality and engage their customers and their team and still use the tools so not to be tied to the business?

Yeah, so what I would say is, you know, personify, personalize, and customize, and in that order, right? So first and foremost, we can use these tools to help our brand personify what is the voice and tone of the content that ultimately will reach somebody. Then we can personalize it directly to the needs and wants of that customer. No different than when you go on Amazon, You know, right now on Amazon, I'm seeing a lot of baby stuff because I have a 2-year-old, right? But if I was seeing that stuff before I had a kid, I'd be very frustrated, right? So, you know, again, you can personify what you want the brand to look like first. Second, personalize to the behaviors and actions. That's where marketing technology becomes really powerful for you in any aspect of your business, or CRM becomes really powerful in your business. The third thing is customize. What I mean by that specifically is there's a lot of steps in your customer experience. And again, I'm going to speak broadly because we're talking to so many different business owners. There's a lot of steps in your customer experience that people don't want to deal with the human for, right? Like, I just want to know when is my delivery driver going to show up with my product, or I just want to know when I'm going to get something, right? But there's opportunities for surprise and delight. That's where the human factors are really, really important, right? So when I walk into a high-end restaurant, yeah, I want the text telling me when my table's ready, but when my table's ready, I want to be able to deal with a human who's going to say, Hey Pete, really, really excited to have you tonight. It sees that you're celebrating a birthday with your significant other. We're gonna walk you to this specific table. The personalization component gets you to the— can do en masse, but the human customization component I think is the most magic. So I think what's really important, I think about the legendary startup kind of entrepreneur, Paul Graham, right? Really famous essay, Do Things That Don't Scale. I actually have a shirt that says that. So what I would argue that people should do is all the things that can scale for a person, Scale those with technology, scale those with AI, but understand that there's certain parts in the journey. And the only way you know the answers to that is by talking to your real customers, right? Actually having human conversations to understand where do people need that human touch most, and where do people not need that human touch. And I think that what's going to happen now is the The opportunity to scale those magical human moments is what's going to make brands excel the most. A good example is take Chewy, right? Chewy is an e-commerce brand where you buy pet food, right? One of the things that happened recently, which is still getting press, is a friend of mine lost a pet and their automated systems do a great job. And, you know, they were reordering pet food and dog food showed up at their house, you know, like it normally would. But what Chewy didn't know, and their system didn't know, is that the pet had died. So now they got this big bag of pet food. And my client was super emotional about that. And she writes back to Chewy. And a human sees that, right? So a tech sees that the, the whatever they were using, routed it to a human. And a human apologized, said, you know, please don't worry about sending this back. Just, you know, donate it if you feel comfortable. You Et cetera, and then a day later, a flower arrangement showed up at their house, and the flower arrangement had a handwritten note to the person and said, "So sorry about the loss of." They knew the pet's name because it was in their CRM. So sorry about the loss of. We apologize for this mistake, and you know we're here if you need anything kind of thing. And that brand experience went from a terrible automated brand experience to they fixed it with a personal human experience. And now, as a result of it. When she goes on to get another dog, and she's told me this, right? When she goes and gets her next dog, no mistake about it, she's only going to order from Chewy because she's going to remember that experience. So what I always say to people is technology, you should aim to automate whatever you can. But don't forget about those human moments that people are looking for. Because no tool or technology can ever replace that human touch. So I hope that tracks for the audience. It's a real example Just happened recently, and it's a great example of a company that's masterfully using these tools and technologies, but understands when humans should step in. And I want to just add one more thing to that point here, Jim, which is I think it's super important to understand that that customer service person would not have had the time to be able to go and do that custom flower arrangement if they didn't have all those AI technologies that were automating all the other things because they just wouldn't have enough coverage. So I think what these AI tools do is they give us back time to think. Time to process, time to create, and time to connect. And that's why I'm super excited about how we can remain forward obsessed with these technologies is it's about creating space for the humanity, not replacing and removing the human.

And, you know, no AI chatbot could have said what you said so beautifully and in such an articulate and insightful way. You know, Pete Sena, if you want to find out more about you and the kind of work that you do, How can they come to you?

Yeah, so I'm pretty active on most of the social channels. If, if you like to read long words, I'm Pete Sena on Medium where I write a lot of content. If you want to just kind of connect with me directly offline, it's just petesena.com. And then, you know, if you want to see the work that me and my team are doing at scale, you can check out digitalsurgeons.com, which is the brand transformation agency that I started 20 years ago. But again, any questions that people have, I'm happy to publish all of my wins and losses. And there's always more losses than wins. And when you come to innovation, you can't fail without failure, right? And sorry, you can't win without failure. So, I hope that's been helpful for you in the audience. And it's been great being on the show.

Pete, it has. And look, thank you so much for joining me and my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs. And of course, I'll put Pete's details in the show notes. And it's Sena, S-E-N-A, just with the one N, in case you were wondering. Thank you for listening to this episode. Really interesting how You can use AI to write yourself out of the business, but that should free you up then to spend time with your lead actors in your business who are really your clients. So thank you for joining Pete and I, and I hope you've enjoyed it. Please leave a review if you possibly can, and most importantly, share this with a fellow entrepreneur that you think would find it of use. And until we meet again, just encourage you to keep on communicating. Thanks for listening.