21: Using AI for Chatbots & Business Strategies with Arvell Craig

Welcome to another episode of Using AI at Work. One of the areas of AI I'm particularly interested in using at work is voice AI, and our guest, Arvel Craig, is as deep into it as anyone in the space. In addition to that, we unpack the future of chatbots, discuss AI adoption timelines, and share insights from Arvell's recent speaking engagements at events like LeadScon and Digital Summit. This episode is packed with practical advice on AI and call centers, compliance tips, and readily applicable tactics from Arvell's book, the AI Strategy Playbook. Whether you're looking to cut costs, boost marketing performance, or navigate the complexities of AI integration, we've got you covered. Now let's get started with this week's episode. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Okay, and this is the episode with Arvel Craig. Arvel, welcome to the podcast. And before we get started, why don't you just tell everybody a little bit about yourself.

Got it. Thank you, Chris. Hello. Hello. My name is Arvel Craig. I'm AI evangelist for V Agents. We are a conversational AI startup, helping call centers, contact centers cut costs and scale their calling. My background is 20 something years in digital marketing. I've always been a nerd and a geek and a hustler trying to use technology to make money, help people started out in small businesses, websites and SEO, shift into automation. Chatbots in 2016, 2017 was a real strong niche. I thought that was like the second coming of email marketing. That was the way I could bring all my stuff and automate my life. I did it for four years and, and I love chatbots. And then Covid happened, business died, took a year off. Now I'm back in this AI world. You know, it's different, but it's chat, it's AI. So I'm using all my experience of like marketing and chat and conversational marketing. Apply that with AI to help companies figure this out, you know, help people figure it out. And I'm also an author and a speaker as well on the AI topic. So that's a good overview of me.

I want everybody, we're going to talk about the new book and just what it's like speaking to all those people about AI. But first I want to dive into what you're doing at the agents because voice AI is very intriguing. You know, you see some Demos. And now were those real demos? Were they Dr. Demos? I don't know. But you see some of that and you're like, wow, this is, this is the next phase of like this is really intelligent stuff. Can you maybe some examples of who would be a good client for V agents and what would be the app? Like, what's the ideal use case for this type of tech that you guys have built?

Gotcha. Yeah, thanks for the tee up to talk specifically about my company or the company I work for. So our company is, the parent company is in the lead generation space. So in the world of lead generation, when companies are not just hiring agencies and marketers to do work, they're just buying the results. Give me 100 leads a day, a thousand leads a day. And the higher volume of scaling that operation, sometimes the quality isn't always there, the manpower to like call. Because speed to lead is such a critical thing. What companies have done over the past 5, 10 years is begin to outsource call centers near shore, offshore, even the U.S. but the idea is that you have to talk to those leads as fast as possible and qualify them in order to make sure it's a good, good lead and it's worth it. With the budgets that companies have, it's worth it that a Legion nursing company partners with a call center to qualify them in order to give them that lead. And so what our company does or the parent company does realize that there was a. The AI and conversational AI and things. The technology was getting really, really smart and really, really good. Like we were doing $100 million a year. They do $100 million a year and selling phone calls. But we realized that AI could help out with the quality assurance. That's kind of a sister product. We started with a quality assurance that would listen to the cause to confirm it was good. But then the agents was built to actually use understanding telephony and phone calls, honestly. But you got to understand TCPA and the FCC regulations, automated technology. And I technically, when I mentioned my background, that stint after chatbots to now, I spent a year and a half in the, in the compliance space of call center compliance. I understand what's legally required to make high volumes of calls and texts both nationally and on the state by state because there's a lot of different laws you have to deal with. So what our company focuses in on, we're not like integration for a startup. We're not going to, we're not the ideal use case for somebody who's just doing, you know, a couple thousand Dollars a month in ads and AI. We, we're looking for people who already have and spending money with 10 to 50 to 1000s of call center agents. We're looking for those people with a higher volume and then they can start with that a minimum. You can call it 10 seats or 10 agents or 10 phone numbers, however you want to call it. That's how we start. So we not get, so it's like a startup. We want to make sure they have volume already. Can they understand TCPA and compliance, things like that. And what we do is we listen to their call record, we find what their best salespeople are doing, we create a script. But the AI is not really a script, it's more of a prompt. It's guidelines. You know how AI prompting works. You give it an identity, you give it like a job description, you feed IT information, some FAQs on the company and we give it like your use case or your job is to find these couple questions people ask you things outside of scope. You can only kind of COVID these FAQs. You bring them back and you make sure you answer five, six, seven, eight questions. And depending on if they answer all the questions, if they meet the criteria, the AI would do a warm transfer to ideally to the the main company's licensed agent, their tier two agent. You know, the real sales closers who don't need to waste time fishing through the leads. So that's our core use case. Again, that's the minimum scope. Again a lot of our, our industry is in either insurance, solar mortgages, financial services, some master or legal. But some of those high volume companies are the most most likely candidate to get immediate benefit from what we're doing.

This is fascinating. Have you run kind of like the back of napkin, how much money that would save your 10 agents or whatever you want to call it, 10 inbounds versus that same Class B office space that's full of 10 agents with cubicles and drama and all that other kind of stuff. I ran a, I ran a 40 seat call center, okay that was full of all of that. The drama and the learned a lot. Now if this would have been virtual my life easier. Yeah but what is the cost savings for something like that? Have you guys like do you have a ballpark of what that would look like for company?

Yeah, I mean ballpark because again some companies if you're going overseas, you may not be spending a lot per agent. We're definitely, we're right around a thousand dollars an agent per month. So technically you could, you can Maybe spend less overseas. In the US you're definitely initially. But there's multiple layers and I'll, I'll get into it. It's not just one to one comparison. If it's a US person, there's four or $5,000 a month. We're definitely 75% cheaper. But as you mentioned, there's not just your staff, there's your offers, your office, your supervisors recruiting, your training, your turnover turn. So there's all those different costs are, are all factored in. Again, we provide the phone number, we provide the did, the deliverability and make sure that the numbers stay clean. We kind of provide all those things in our platform. We just connect to the, to their, to your CRM. So again, I would say you at least say 80. 80. 80% is a good ballpark on those 10 agents.

Huge. Yeah, right. This huge. If it was 20%, it would be huge. Now one thing you didn't mention was that I'm assuming that for $1,000 a month per agent, they're also working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Gotcha. Is that right?

That is a. Yeah, that's a huge factor. But again, back towards, back towards compliance and legal, legalese. If somebody calls in, we can leave the, we can leave it open definitely for inbound. Again, if you understand FCC regulations and state laws, you're definitely going to want to. Yeah, we look at, we're definitely always pricing it from that, you know, from what, 8:00am East Coast Time to, you know, certain time West Coast. So we're looking at still 10 to 12 hours a day. I would say, yeah, you know, five days a week at, at the most conservative time set up. But again, we're not, you know, legally required to control what you're doing. But I'm always advising people just to stay safe because all this stuff is still new. Right. People are wondering, can I even do it legally? Can an AI talk to me? All those kind of things. But again, if you understand TCPA and how the regulations deal with auto dialers, it's going to be very similar. If, if you think about cold calling, you're not going to cold call with AI thing where you and code call with a, a dialer. So again, there's, there's other nuances that people need to be understanding.

So this is primarily going to be for inbound use. So if somebody's got a big national campaign or a regional campaign that's generating a lot of inbound calls, this would be a good solution for them.

Yeah, no, exactly. And it's inbound and outbound.

And outbound.

Yeah, yeah. But the outbound, you just want to make sure you have some type of certification that you legally have permission that they want to call. Even for customer service, Even for like again, you got your new for onboarding. Like you mentioned, somebody can be a new customer and we can follow all the customers and clarify, make sure they're actually using the service. There's all kinds of use cases that do include outbound as well.

So for the listeners, if you're not familiar with the compliance requirements for using a telephone and commercial activity, they're big. And the fines for you not complying with things like us as consumers, we have protections that us as business owners, if we're not doing it the right way, the fines can be six figures, seven figures for even for a small business who's got some small infractions. So it's very important you do this compliantly, as Arville has made us, you know, clear for us for sure. Now that's very fascinating. I hope that any of you who are listening who are interested in finding out more. Well, we'll add whatever contact info in the show notes for sure. Arvell but where can they go? Is there a place like right now? V.vagents.com vagence.com Nice. Just like the third. So go check it out. Because this, this is a, if you can dial in this voice AI, it's hard to have an edge now, especially if your competition is very AI immersed.

Right, right.

Voice AI is one of those areas where you can, if you dial this in, you can like, I see that as being a big advantage. So it's very cool that they're doing that now. You let me know that you had released a new book and I was very excited about it because it was specifically addressing common use cases that most of us would encounter in our business and some, some AI effication that could occur to those. Tell us about the book.

Oh, thank you. So the book is called the AI Strategy Playbook. And I wrote it like in this year, three or four months ago. I was doing workshops every week to my email list, to my audience about AI. How do you use it? How can you use AI to replace one task per week? That was my hook that I was doing. And again, the biggest thing was happening. People just, again, because we're nerds, we kind of are more into it. Mostly we're just like, I don't understand what can I do? They just weren't wrapping their heads around what can I do Right now, not just a theory, not so. And all these fancy things you see online or Twitter that are not reality yet, but most people. I wrote the book, so the subtitle is 21 Marketing Plays to Cut Costs, Increase Performance and Increase Adoption. So the goal was just very, very simple. It's written for leaders, marketing leaders. Again, most people I know, they're too busy. They understand it from a distance. They're reading the headlines, those are scared or they confused, but in reality they're just doing their regular work. And I think you're fine, you, you're not going to be the nerd, but let me be the nerd for you. So the book does. It just shows you this is what you can do to plan out your marketing campaigns. Here's some plays for planning, here's some plans for like production and producing content. Content creation, which is the main thing we hear about. But this is what AI can do. When I say AI, I mean generative AI, which I mean it's cloud or OpenAI's AI. That's a. Here's what AI can do to personalize your marketing, right? So it's broken up in these five seconds. And I got, I gotta give credit to Paul Racer in the Marketing AI Institute for these five Ps of Marketing AI. I got the categories from him, but the plays are just my own plays. And then like, how does once you have your content, it's your strategy, your plan, your content, personalize, how do you promote it? How do you get it out there? That's the promotion category. And I give, I just give some ideas. If you don't know what it can do, this we can do. Then lastly, how do you tweak the performance? How do you optimize? How do you look at spreadsheets and data and analytics and let AI teach you what you don't do, Your business intelligence, things like that. So those are the five categories and I give three or four ideas for each one. Like View agents is in there. If, because if you have a call center, and I always preface, if this is a situation, then this is something you may want to consider. And every chapter or every play, that's all it says. If you don't have a good irresistible offer, you don't know if people are converting. You may want to look into how can AI help me increase. Improve my offer. So I reference Alex Hermosi. He's got a great book on offers. And I say, if you read the book, AI can teach you the book. Or you can find a YouTube link or a blog, put in AI and say, using this framework from Al, how can I make my offer more irresistible? So theoretically I would increase my conversion. So I give the idea I just want people to see. And then when you're done, when it's time to execute, what do you figure out? Say you either come to me for a referral, I can teach you some of these things, or I can connect you to someone, or I can connect you to a tool. Because you may not need to try to figure out prompts yourself. You may want to get to an organization such as chief AI officer if you want to just enroll in a full comprehensive training. But I kind of gave just a framework in the book and then I point to different resources when we're ready to take the next step.

So I, I saw some social posts. You had been speaking somewhere and I guess that you had handed out some of the, to some of the attendees, copies of the books, their reactions. You know, when, when your friend writes a book, you're like, oh, congratulations. But honestly, I've gotten a lot of like first, what do they call those? Publisher prints or whatever. Love my friends. I'm a busy man, I can't read them. So. But to see that these people like at the event were going through your book and were like so engaged with it that they were making social posts and excited about the information that was in the books, that's great. So you get a chance to speak a lot, right?

Yeah.

And give me some idea of kind of the, maybe a random sampling of some of the places that you've spoken or will be speaking. Just so that kind of get like how broad the spectrum of audience is.

Yeah, I mean, of course AI is such a hot topic and it's everywhere. So last week I was at leedscon, which is the largest lead generation conference, I think in the country. Three to four thousand people were there. I was on a panel talking about AI's opportunities and threats. The week before that I was in Chicago. Digital Summit is a series of regional marketing trainings all around the country. I was there two months ago. I'll be there in Kansas City in May. I'll be there in Atlanta in October. I may be there. So it's a series of. For marketers, I'm there and then here, I live in Arizona. And so I've got some events with some community colleges next week. This week I was speaking to a trucking company's organization, their national or their business meeting. So there's a lot of very, there's a variety of places, whether It's a big event or a small event. You know, again it's because it's moving so fast there's no way you can stay up to date. And for most people it's a waste. You can't keep up. You don't just want to know what's new, you want to know what's relevant as you can. How can I use AI at work today? Because the more you use it today it's like a muscle that you have to exercise whether or not AI looks like it's going to look like this in the future. So I'm always so there's just so much value. Go to an event, find an expert, find out what's happening and apply it as soon as possible so that you can get work that muscle so that you can navigate when things speed up even more. You know.

Great point. So that was a good answer about the audience. Cause the next question I didn't want it to be like well I only talk to doctors. Well you want input, you give me will only be related to them. But because you talk so many different like business backgrounds. Yeah. What are the commonalities? Because I know been a speaker at the end if people like it, they run up and they go hey, I got a question. Hey, you gotta, you get that little group around you right. In, in those, in those instances for you, are you seeing commonality of the questions that are being asked? Like is there a general few questions that you're hearing over and over?

Actually no. Again when I was doing things earlier this year, if there was a common theme of questions of I don't understand what can I do recently depending on if I'm talking about V agents, if I'm talking to call centers, concept centers, if I'm explaining how I think it's. Klarna has an AI that does the work of 700 people. Which is great. 2, 2.3 million tickets it's solved. But the, the other half of that picture is 700 people no longer have a job. Some people are coming to me and asking I don't again, not everybody's looking to fire people. Some people like how do I maintain. So there's some leaders. Last week was, was talking about how do I keep people. Somebody say you know what's, what's going to happen? What do you think what jobs are going to be gone? As you know, they're kind of wanting some prediction about, for their own self preservation of their jobs. Those, there's, there's those questions and other times that you know it's more like the risks. A lot of it is speculation. What do you think is going to happen when it comes to, you know, what's going to happen on more that.

Negative side, when people ask you about what do I do with my, my staff, that now I can do it better, faster, stronger, like, what do you tell people? What, what about how to mitigate that with their staff? That's no longer necessary for that role. We'll be back after a quick break.

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Yeah, again, most people haven't got there, but they're worried. So to me, you gotta just, you gotta crawl before you walk. There's just two things that's gonna happen. Two things I said. Number one, you want to be transparent with your staff and your team because you want to get them involved and not fearful and not, you know, sticking to their calculators when there's the Internet. So you, you want to create an environment where they feel comfortable. You want to have some kind of policies and some advising on what you can and cannot do. So there's those kind of things that will come up. And again, I think it's still early before most jobs are going to be affected. But as you experiment more and as you see what's going to happen and if you're honest and open with your people, I believe there's going to be a neatness. I think there's going to be new opportunities, not for everybody, but your company no longer has to do A, B and C. It's not just going to cut your cost, but if you're an entrepreneur, you're a business owner, your mind is still racing. You're going to be able to see things that you've never seen before. And there's a lot. I want to just help them to leave some room for that opportunity, to experiment, to evolve, to figure out what new opportunities can you come up with. Because again, your staff of 500, if all these 500 have an AI helping them, your, your, your next quarter, your next Season of growth could be keeping the same people all managed. Instead of adding another 500 people, you can keep those people. And so I, I think there's a lot of nuance to what the future will look like. And if you're flexible and fluid and open, it's not just less and less and less people. There's going to be some kind of new. New opportunities and new things that they think there was.

Well, times to be in generative AI, for sure.

Yeah.

Hey, so I got a question with the people that you were talking to at the beginning of the year where you seem to be getting more like discovery type. And now the conversations tend to be more. It almost sounds like people have had a chance to evaluate it. Now they're coming up with that next stage of question. Oh, does that mean this or that? Do you think that the people that you're encountering in, you know, April are already more AI literate than the people, than that same person was in January? You think that's what, what's okay?

Yep, definitely. And I've, I've tried to, again, I'm, I'm always speaking. I like being specific and practical, but I'm also trying to give people the right way to think about it, the frameworks, the paradigm, so they can see. And one of my biggest things back in January, I was telling. I was realizing maybe, maybe again, those are probably smaller companies. They were trying to use AI to do things that they've never done before, like, oh, I can do this now.

Yeah.

And I'm like, that's cool. But I'd recommend do what you already are good at. Do what you know really well. You understand the frameworks, you can analyze it, you can judge it. So that was something that I kept having to run back towards, like, you're not doing it now. You, you know, so this is. I'm always kind of leaning back towards find out what you're already doing. Learn AI to manage that faster, cheaper, scalable. Before you start to use AI. AI is going to make phone calls and do cold call for like, are you making cold calls now? Well, no.

See you now. Yeah, I hadn't considered that perspective that people. Because here's what happens. If you apply it to your existing business. You end up creating more time. And with that, once you've got that, with that more time, then maybe you say, well, we've never had the horsepower to do content, so let's explore it. But great point. Don't the shiny thing today at the expense of your existing operation. How you keep the lights on. Right. Like, get that dialed in with AI and then explore some more, I guess, like second effect use cases for your business. So, yeah, great advice there. Let me ask, how do you stay on top? How do you stay like in the loop of what's happening? Because this stuff happens most fast. Tools change. Tools like, evolve rapidly. How do you stay on the edge?

Yeah, yeah. So I used to stay. Look on Twitter, follow a bunch of people, sign up for a bunch of newsletters, the AI newsletters. Those. That was number two. Number three was podcast. And number four was some Slack communities, which mean you aren't a couple of them. It was all four. I have definitely again, past four or five months, decreased most of those. I listed media podcasts, one per week, one or two per week as. As compared to daily. And then I also try to go through my Slack communities for their updates a few times a week. Because that's the thing. I think that the challenge, even the thing about AI is like. And this is where I've. And I've had to. Because there's never been anything in the world that I know of this in my 20 years of being a professional, an adult, as sexy. If there's ever been a shiny object syndrome. This is the worst ever. Ever Struggle with that. This is the worst ever.

Yep.

But. But with that, the need to reinforce the foundations.

Yeah.

Of your life, of what is success, of what's. What's. What's economically. And the business valuation, this going to. To me, that's the challenge. And I. So I have been reinforcing my commitment to fundamentals. So even like AI, Somebody told me, because I was in chatbots for, you know, three, four years, and I thought it was, oh, okay, nobody wants a chatbot code. It's here, the world's ending, and it's like if you're too early. And I realized like a lot of this base. There's a lot of success in the boring. And this is. I'm learning. There's a lot of success in the end. The end of the fundamentals. And that's where I am challenged. And that's when, like when I speak to audiences. My main talk, when I talk about how to use AI to get a breakthrough, to really change your business, 80, 70% is all about the fundamentals of your business, of your processes, and only when you really understand the business fundamentals, the value proposition of what your company does, the needs of your customer. Most of that does not relate to technology. Technology is not your limiting. Technology is not the thing that keeps you where you are in your business and that's why. So it's kind of weird. Not weird, but I'm, I'm checking myself. I want to talk about AI. I do it a lot of time. The goal of AI is to make my life happier, to make more money, to, to provide for my family and to make an impact. And if you really look at those things, happy, money, impact, whatever, the thing that keeps you from making an impact of touching people's lives and then whatever may or may not be a tech, techy AI related. So you have to, you have to control yourself. And that's again, so that's really the second half of my message is always to balance and to reinforce the foundations of what really makes a difference. What's meaningful, what's going to be most impactful. Because AI may or may not be the thing that you really, really need right now to get to the next level. So let's just be, be honest about it.

You know, I talk to people and I say, listen, if you don't have a plan for your business, all and it's already chaotic, AI is just going to allow you to be more chaotic faster.

Right?

It's not going to, it's not solution. The fundamentals without those. Start with the fundamentals and then say, okay, now that I've got that mapped out, where can AI plug into that? But don't do it the other way around. You got a great point there. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So are you just to get back to podcasts. So folks, a part that's I like a whole lot and it's called the now it's called the artificial intelligence show, I guess with Paul Reuter. Is that the one that we were talking about? That's, that's everybody I talk to who is serious about like exploring AI and applying it. That's the number one podcast they all listen to. So for the listeners that's like an inside. I mean they got more than just me and Arvel listening to, of course, but they do a great job. What about, are there any YouTube guys or you know, do you not fool around with TikTok? Because TikTok now it seems that there's a pattern and it's here's my 100 shitty prompts. Here's, you know, like the bunch of. It's almost like a bunch of like hucksters almost that I don't know that they're doing a service for establishing the legitimacy of what generative AI can do for a business. But I don't know, maybe I could be wrong. Are there any social profiles that you tend to follow where you're getting good intel?

The only other resource I mean there is the AI exchange is definitely. And the people in there just that that other Slack group mother and she has a. She's on Tick Tock.

Oh that's right. So Rachel Wood. Yeah.

So she's. Yeah, highly. So just her and her community. She's like. She's all the people that she's connected to in that group.

Yeah.

But the biggest one lately to balance is Ethan Malik.

Yes.

So I just bought his book Co Intelligence and I'm listening to. I think I'm halfway done. So he's. He's lately and his one useful thing is this substat group substack on channel or newsletter. So he's like a core person that I get. Him and Paul Racer are the team that I'm pretty much committed to taking my time because they don't just give you the highlights. They give you the business fundamentals or the ways to think about the adoption and the policies and the. And Ethan Molly's talking about how to use it even in a university and how to have a heart of curiosity and experimentation and listen just here's this. But those two are like my main content sources that I'm on regularly. Yeah, definitely.

That are listening. I'm going to put those in the. The show notes because I think it's interesting that Arvell obviously knows what he's doing. He's talking to crowds all over the country, soon to be all over the world, I'm sure about this topic. This is. This is like. This is probably what he dreams about me too. When I'm walking the dog, I think about this stuff. And for both of us to endorse the. It's the Marketing AI Institute but their podcast is called the Artificial Intelligence show. And for both of us to say heck yeah. Ethan Mollick, M O L L I C K. He has perspectives that are worth consideration. I would say for you listener, whether you're pro or not at this stuff, if those aren't on your radar, get them there. You're gonna. You'll get a lot of value out of. Very cool. So the. What is the benefit of the speaking for you as a business? Is it on behalf of the agents? Is it. Is there an interest in being like a much more active speaker?

No, thanks for asking. I mean honestly, it's both. Again, five, six years ago when I was on Chatbots and nobody was talking about it, that became my number One way to get in because I was mainly partnering with marketing managers and SMBs, being a consultant. So that was my main way to get in front of people. And I see I like speaking, so those things went together. As I've gotten more into it, speaking has become the door opener for most of like my current job, my speaking, my brand, my personal brand or whatever has helped me get in the door. So is I am 100% always representing the agents currently and their products. I'm always talking because it's very practical conversation. It relates to my chat bot, the conversation AI. But me as a, as a human, the next 20, 30 years, I do plan to continue to get better at the craft of speaking. That's again that goes back towards. I just want to throw it out on the AI thing. AI's as it does more and more and more. How do you as a professional become more and more and more yourself? And as far as I can concern, who I am when I speak is I'm never going to have any. I do that for me because it's like an art. It's not just the results. I actually like the experience. I like the human connection. So I think again you hit them. I just want to jump in that topic because when AI does more and more and more for you, what's the future going to look like? I think individuals will need to like develop if you don't know what you love to do. I understand work is about work and work is about money and that not everybody follows their passions. But it wouldn't hurt to know what your passion is because if you again you're delegating more and more stuff to AI, leaning more into it. So speaking is definitely a passion. You know, I used to just speak for free. Now I get paid to speak and it's just evolves and I'm studying the craft of speaking, the craft of education and entertainment and all those things go together. So it's definitely a commitment for me.

I guess that that leads an obvious question. Are you using AI in your speaking preparation? Speaking practice?

That's a great, great question. The answer is no. But a few months ago I was trying to get on this TED talk and the guy who was kind of coaching mentioned he had an AI that would evaluate your delivery. So it was an way to wow and yeah to just to monitor the sound and the fluctuation of your, your content. So that is something that's on my back of my mind because I'm always thinking I'm talking about AI. I never feel like I use it enough, but that's one that I may look into. And one other thing, again, I haven't. There is the way AI can make presentations. There's certain. I think it's maybe beautiful, whatever. But the way you can make decks, I am challenged to. To use it more for. For decks. And then thirdly, I'm challenged to use AI to research and to keep me updated on the newest facts. Versus me again looking at all the feeds and studying a thousand people. If AI could do 90%. So those are the three things where I would. I'm curious and interested in using it, but for the most part I don't use it a lot. But I do want to add in more in those areas.

Yeah, using it, like finding that perfect AI powered pitch deck creator. I'm on the hunt for that as well. So if I find it, I'll let.

You know for sure. Awesome. Thank you.

What normally circle back to is. You mentioned that. So chatbots well used. Actually I prefer them in a lot of cases for customer service. I'd rather just get the answer than wait for the human. So chatbot arc today, they're not like exotic, but when you first started messing with them, you were early, as you mentioned now, and like early to the point to where you probably like a couple of years at least early to the. The chat bot really getting traction with AI, do you think with. With the tools that you're building at the agents and the topics that we're talking about, do you think that we are still exotic early in generative AI and small business?

Yeah, definitely. There's, there's, it's like chatbots came out and there was nlp, there was natural language processing. It was like it could pick up keywords. And it's like people oversold it and they tried to make them do more than they could. And so users were kind of frustrated. I think things dipped and then I felt like live chat kind of came. Maybe live chats went out, was out first there always live chat, but who wants to staff that? Chatbots come out and then it goes back. I think, I think live chat kind of came in. And now with AI, the main thing I feel like that's, that's limiting. The chatbots is like it's gated. It's like, let me capture that lead. Give me your name and email, qualify yourself, push these buttons. It's not yet really fluid. It's not really helpful. It's not dynamic based upon the page. And so there's a lot of opportunities that I think where, yeah, where it's more integrated into the website experience. I think there's going to be developments and advancements there. And maybe it's more. When it's more audio and it's more maybe connected to the hardware. Maybe if, if there's a dynamic connection between Siri and the website where there's. There's something. But I do think there's a lot because there's, there's still friction and you don't get what you want fast enough yet. And I think yeah, but, but again that's. But the mindset is like legion. The mindset is like I gotta protect. Like why didn't even name an email. Like it's taken. Like there's no. You don't need to gate your, your chatbot, everything.

Yeah.

So there's I think this. But that's a paradigm. This is fine from an inbound marketing paradigm or, or a demanding paradigm that's applied to chat versus if you had a human at a trade show, you're not going to say your near email, drop your card and then I'm going to talk to you for those paradigms of how we're. Because we're using out of the paradigm with chat bots and I think that limits its effectiveness and eventually it's going to be trusted enough to be more nuanced, more open that when that goes away people will just go to the website and just start talking and there's going to be. I think it's going to be something like there's something there. I don't know, I'm just brainstorming and.

It'S pretty fascinating like. Cause that kind of sends me off on some. Wow. So now because you could, I would imagine it'd be pretty easy to set it up to where it was text to voice or voice to voice through a bot. So like I use PI sometimes when I'm walking I'll. And PI's been pretty good at mapping out automations, believe it or not. Like if you say I want to do this, this PI, I'll say go to Zapier. And anyway, for geeks that's an insider tip. But like I'm used to engaging with an AI via voice to voice as more people do that I would imagine that they're going to want to see that on site experience for support or questions or whatever.

Yeah.

To be also congruent with their off page experience which is like of course you can type into ChatGPT but for those of you who don't, who don't have the ChatGPT mobile app, you can do voice to voice. You can talk to. It'll say beep. It'll respond to you in voice. Pretty fascinating stuff. It just, it started me spinning a little bit. But one of the things that I wanted to also talk about with that being early in the bot space was the, the distance between the gap between early and now more relevant was a number of years with AI. I think that the distance between early and like obligatory. I have to have it. It's not a couple we're talking about literally like maybe measured in one or two quarters of a business's lifespan. Because if a business is still on the fence in 2024, either your business going to moderately like you're not that serious about your business in the first place. I don't mean that derogatory or negatively. Some of you may just want a lifestyle business and you might not want to push the edges of optimization and all those things. So I just think that, that it was an interesting. Because bots are. Bots back then were okay bots. Now I'm interested, like show me some tech. But that was a couple years and now I thought I was late because I didn't start messing around with ChatGPT until like March of last year. And it came or. Yeah, and it came out in November 20. I thought I was late back then. Yeah, right. Like. Oh yeah. But so what's your thought like for. Is there a legitimate urgency for businesses to start figuring this stuff out or is it because you and I live in a, like at the tip of the spear that it seems that way?

Good, good, good question. I mean, I say AI and it's, it's inevitable. It's going to, it's. I mean you can't, you can't be too fast with it right now. Agreed. I mean, again, so let's say if it's 1993 and maybe the Internet is out, but, but it's not widely adopted like you said. But that time you're, you're saying, your argument is that the time that it's going to take for it to be influence your market is going to come really, really fast. You got a point. Yeah. So I, I would agree that the, the acceleration of whatever the curve is, it's going to be unlike anything we've ever seen in history because of the technology and the processors and I guess.

Honestly, like what's the. Why, why would you hesitate if even if it was one use case like the V agent environment, why would you hesitate if, if the, the Tech was established. The customer said, hey, I'm okay either way. I prefer fast response. And they're getting it from the technology. There's no, for the listeners, there's no benefit to you saying, I'm going to maybe before you transform your entire business, perhaps, but there's certain things that you could do right now that there's. It makes. There's no logic behind waiting before you implement it, whether that's customer service, content, voice agents, whatever the case might be. So I don't know, we'll close on that perspective. Yeah, I, I love these because I get a chance to talk to people who are more than casual users. The people that are, as Ethan Mollick talks about those three sleepless nights. Like once you. Until you've had three sleepless nights because you're considering, wow, does that mean generative AI can do this and this and this. Right. That you haven't quite had your aha moment is what he mentions. So I, I don't get a chance to talk to people who have had those three sleepless nights and are really thinking about deep edge case application and business of these things. So sometimes I ask some random question.

No, I like it. I know it's, it's a good question. There's another quote. Ethamonic talks about advanced. Something like disruptive technology can only be too slow or too early. And in regards to your question, there is a lot of unknown. And just the fact that I think AI is so much associated with uncertainty as compared to any technology in the past, from mobile phones to the Internet. There was no fear associated with its growth. AI has a stigma where there's fear associated. So people are going slower because it isn't just all positive. There's other things associated. And I think that makes more people slower to quickly jump on it. But, but that is a truth that you, when you're too late, you're going to be, you could be too late, but not that you can't recover from that. Because I always like to end on the positive. Even if you fail and you have to start a new company, which I recommend. Why would you do that? But yeah, you would. It would just start. I say be positive, be transparent, have a culture of experimentation and don't worry about failing. I mean, those are some of the things I kind of lead off on. If you're, if you're really not dipping your toe in there, anybody can see the negative. Anybody can see the fear. The only thing, the only thing evil about AI is the humans who drive AI. So don't worry about that. Be positive, be proactive, experiment and be transparent with your team and your customers. And that's a good place to kind of get going.

It's a fantastic way to end this. So listen, I want more people to hear more of what you've got to say. So where can they go to? I'd love for them to be able to get the book for sure if they're interested in V Agents. If you want to just kind of give us some contact info. All of which if you're a listener and you're driving, will be in the show notes, please go to the show notes to. To access this now.

No, thank you. Yeah, so yeah, the agents.com you know, we have links there. I would say call Comply is our other AI that does quality assurance. Again, if you don't know what the AI is talking about, you can use a heavy product to listen to our AI, to listen to the AI. But again, my name is Arv Craig, so arvcraig.com has information on my speaking. My. I'm on substack publish every week now. I'm finally consistent publishing a newsletter on AI workflows for wealth. That's kind of the, the, the, the title there. Besides that, I'm on like I'm on most of social media mainly Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, a little bit of Twitter. You can find me anywhere. And yeah, I would love to chat with anyone more. It's got more questions and things like that.

Cool. So they can get the book@rvelcraig.com yes. Okay, great, guys. Based on the feedback that I saw almost real time from some of Arvell's recent speaking engagements where the book was distributed. People like this book and they like the use cases. So I would encourage you to grab a copy of it. There's, there's nothing better than having a roadmap of even if it's just the ideas of areas where you can start to apply this. Very helpful. So with that. All right, everybody, thank you. We'll see you next week. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

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