34: Using AI for Democratizing B2B Growth & Marketing with Emin Can Turan

Welcome to another exciting episode of the Using AI at Work podcast. I'm your host, Chris Daigle and today I'm thrilled to have John Turin join us. He's the mastermind behind Tripbles AI which can supercharge your go to market efforts by using artificial intelligence combined with market tested GTM models and proven business methodologies. John's got an incredible story. He's built this tool from the front lines in Ukraine and now he's here to drop some serious knowledge on how AI can transform your business. As always, this episode is packed with insights on how early adopters like John are using AI at work and how you can too. Now let's get started. 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. All right, I'm very excited about having John Turan on the podcast episode today. John is the founder of Tripebbles AI among a bunch of other highly esteemed accomplishments in his career. The first conversation that we had was from a war zone. So I'm excited to hear how life is and being an AI expert in Ukraine as well as all the other places where you're practicing your skills. And I'm particularly interested, John, in talking about the new software that you're going to be releasing very soon, triples AI. So with that, is there anything in particular that you think that the audience needs to know about you before we get started?

I have a background in marketing and strategy and I works in the big tech companies such as Google, Cisco and Walmart holding as well as worked in the leading accelerators in the world as pro bono for likes of Founders Institute, PwC scale, Virgin Startup and other global accelerators. I have spent most of my time in my working career in London and currently I am back and forth between Lviv west of Ukraine AKA the IT outsourcing capital of Europe and London. So we are treading into the footsteps of Grammarly, which is, you know, between Kyiv and San Francisco, which is a global tech powerhouse valued at 13 billion. Like them, we are a SaaS platform productivity tool and but unlike them, our focus is only for B2B companies or helping them going to market by democratizing very well kept secrets of marketing strategy, market intelligence and execution principles so that every company has an equal fair shot of going to market.

Yeah, it's pretty fascinating on the original call where you and I kind of got to know each Other, before we did the interview, you ran me through your software and I haven't seen anything else like it. So I'm excited for the release. Let me, let me ask you real quick, before we get into the using AI at work part of IT software is a heavy lift, especially in the AI space where things are changing so frequently. What was the motivation for you to plant your flag on the software side of AI?

Oh, good question. There's two reasons for this, I guess. The first is a more professional reason. I fundamentally know that there's a huge gap in the market between basically what the multinationals like Coca Cola and Unilever can afford in terms of buying strategy intelligence from the likes of McKinsey, BCG and Bain and what us mortals SMEs have basically, which is, you know, anywhere between working with a head of marketing, which might be a mis hire, where you're paying anywhere between 100 and 300k for per annual, or you are basically at the mercy of certain consultants and marketing agencies that unfortunately historically don't always perform the way that we would want to. So you know, it should not come to a surprise to all of us that you know, we all know that 9 out of 10 companies fail, but we often don't know that the majority of those failures are actually attributed to, you know, go to market reasons. Yeah, and to be frank, that kind of pissed me off for a very long time. It's a very unfair distribution of knowledge and high skillset. You know, if you want to hire a Harvard grad, MBA grad with three, four years of industry experience, you can't afford that as an SME. So you have to figure it out by yourself and why. I mean there's so many founders out there and so many bigger companies out there that can, they have amazing products, they have amazing services and they don't see the light of day just for that fact. So from, from, you know, from a professional point of view that, that really I, you know, I saw that gap and running my strategy consultancy, as I kind of coined as the SME of, of the, the McKinsey for SMEs, um, I, I understood I, I can't, I can't scale myself. So the question was how do I get my proprietary strategy models, my science led methodologies as well as our very clever persuasion sciences into a SaaS platform enhanced by AI for every company to use. Basically having your own personal senior analyst at McKinsey, your head of marketing at Google, as well as your high emotion intelligence sales manager from Microsoft into a system that anyone can use essentially, so where we can make them at least give them a chance to let them meet the unmet potential in their profitability essentially. So that, that was my professional way and the personal one. Well, yeah, it's not like I've, I've been in, I've been in a position of an angel as a consultant, as a mentor, someone in corporate and now also as an entrepreneur. And the thing that really grinds my gears is, you know, there are so many founders of small and larger companies that don't always make it.

You know, one of the things that I liked particularly about the demonstration of your software that you showed me when we spoke was exactly what you've mentioned. Okay, great. The small business owner can use generative AI and they can go in there and they can say, hmm, okay, okay, chatgpt acting as a blank. But a lot of times those small business owners, they don't, they don't know the questions or they don't know the Persona that they need to define in order to get the quality output that you're talking about here. And with what I saw, not only were those Personas already built into your software, but they were built in and calibrated based on that high level strategic contribution that you've made to those larger companies. And you know, that you, you mentioned earlier. And so it's great that the small business owner has this tool, but if they don't know how to use it in the way that that triples AI is, is doing it, it's, it's a missed opportunity for that small business owner. So I was particularly impressed that the small business owner doesn't need to learn prompting. They don't need to learn, you know, become a generative AI expert to get the benefit as if they were a generative AI expert. It was very impressive. So one of the things that we like to talk about is certainly the software we're going to get into that because I'm very excited about that functionality being released to the public. But the process of creation that leveraged generative AI for your operations, for your programming, for your marketing. If you don't mind, maybe share a few examples of how generative AI really came to the rescue in the creation of Pebbles.

There have been AI companies before, you know, before OpenAI, but it was really the breakthrough that OpenAI had that which allowed us to really piggyback basically on their logic. So we understood very early on that the time has come that OpenAI and then soon after Google, Microsoft, we're, or getting to the stage where we almost like, like with the Internet revolution. We are getting into a similar revolution with basically with OpenAI, sorry with generative AI, but it is still a hard I. It's still horizontal mass market, you know, product. Their goal is, from what I understood my conversations, for example with Sam Altman himself, but also with other leaders in industry, is that they want to. They want to keep the cost down for intelligence or generation as low as possible and give it and get it as much adopted as possible by the world. Our goal is completely different. So they're building a horizontal AI that will be soon, for example, adopted into our Apple products. And it's for mass market. Ours is something much harder to solve, which is B2B go to market, which requires a very deep understanding in corporate strategy, neuromarketing, persuasion sciences, communication science, digital psychology, statistics, data science. I mean, I can go on because B2B is fundamentally. It requires a longer consideration process or a sales cycle because we're not buying an $800 iPhone here. We start anywhere between a thousand dollars and 100,000, if not a million. So that requires a certain dance. It requires certain processes and methodologies and a certain etiquette, certain leveraging, certain principles where you can get a person from Tell me more to okay, give me the service agreement. I'm ready to sign.

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Nice.

So your involvement in AI certainly predates the release of OpenAI's chat GPT 3.5 in November of 2022. Do you and a lot of the listeners here, they don't have a technical background. They weren't involved in, you know, machine learning or data science. And there is some hesitation that is that going is my technical expertise going to be challenged here as I'm using Generative AM AI in my business. As someone who's been on both sides of it, the deep technical side as well as the. The generative side that you're leveraging and your software, what would you tell the average small to medium business owner, if they had that concern.

Okay, there's two schools of thought here. I'll be. So I'll be the Dutch director myself and the diplomatic self. Okay, the diplomatic one is more what our AI director says, which is, yes, you don't need any technical skill set. You know, we'll make Pebbles AI. In fact, we're in the road of making Pebbles so easy to understand, to use that your grandmother, you know, with half an hour training would be able to. To understand essentially how to use it. I, on the other hand, well, I'm the son of two academics, so I like teaching. And when I was doing my bachelor and I was always a tutor, I fundamentally believe that people should have some basic understanding of, you know, what is to come. I mean, you can't hide where we are heading. There is a change coming. This is. I mean, there isn't genuine. It's like hiding from Google Search. You couldn't hide from it. Yeah, that times 10 is coming right now. You understanding the basic principles, you don't need to be technical, but understanding the logic and the basic principles, like we learned the basic principles of physics, of chemistry and mathematics at high school. We ought to understand that also with AI, and in fact, we are building, or we have already built Pebbles AI in a way where there's a layer and you know, we don't have to do this, but I wanted this. We put the extra effort there. So if you have the platform, so what you see, there's a whole backend essentially where you hover over question marks and a question marks everywhere. That explains to you the certain sciences and what this button does and why it does it. So I'm trying to also educate my users as well of going to market, but also how the system works.

I wish more software would do that. That's actually pretty brilliant. I've got the choice at that point, as the user, if I'm interested and curious, the information's there. If I just want to get the result and I'm not interested in curious, I don't have to know that to, to use the tools, you know.

Exactly.

It's interesting. It's what you referenced about, you know, hiding from Google Search. There's a quote from Ayn Rand that I think applies here, and that quote is, you can deny reality, but you cannot deny the consequences of reality. Right. You can say, oh, AI, I'm not, I'm not interested. It's not going to affect my industry. It's going to be years before I need to worry about this. You can believe that. However, simultaneously the competitor next door that's now simply using chat, GPT or something basic now has an advantage that you cannot match unless you're using that technology. So I like the way that says. So for those of you listening, the takeaway from that explanation is that do you need it? No. Should you, should you have that understanding to some degree of how the technology is delivering the results? Yes, absolutely. And I'm in agreement. We don't spend a lot of time talking about the technical side of things. However, I'm pretty curious about like we routinely talk about the, the stages of, of AI with narrow intelligence, general intelligence, super intelligence. We talk about that stuff regularly. Even though do I need to know that in order to create copy with, you know, a generative AI tool? No, I don't. So the, the size of business and I know that with your software you're, you're addressing needs across a broad spectrum of business sizes. You're not necessarily focused on enterprise, you're primarily focused on the ones like our thesis as well. The small to medium businesses will not have access to the Accenture talent that's billing, you know, a billion dollars in the first half of this year. We just won't have it. So it's either up to us as an individual or it's up to people like you and I to provide them with, to provide the SMBs with their version of that tool. The type of business, the size of business that you think would benefit the most from leveraging something like you've got. Tell me about your ideal customer business for Pebbles.

Sure, it's a good point. I think the, the ideal customer for us that will benefit the most are, I think there you got three groups here. You got startups and scale ups anywhere employees anywhere between I think five to 50 essentially. That's really. This will make a huge difference for them. Huge. And then we're looking really in the big players. So we're really looking at companies around 500 to a thousand employees that have so many inefficiencies and they haven't really centralized all their marketing sales product teams into harmonized go to market like machine. That will make a huge impact. It will not just save cost, it saves cost while increasing efficacy which in return increases profitability. And the final thing is channel partners. So we're talking about the global accelerators in the world like tech search, Founder Institute, Y Combinator, but also marketing agencies and lead gen agencies. They have the biggest gain on this because they can serve with much more value through their incumbent clients and also increase their competitive advantage as well at the same time. And we offer them or essentially a white label with combination of an affiliate program where we share kind of the profits. Like our goal right now is not to maximize profitability, it's adoption. It's, we want to see it in hands, we want to see it helping people. We want, like Etsy did, right? Like they had a great case study. They, they went for, you know, the case studies and for the success stories. That's what we want to see. So in the, you know, in the first year or so we will be very lenient with that. And yeah, and I, I think, I think also going back to your previous point, I do think that society has become slightly, I don't want to call it lazy, but let's just say lazy. Yes. You don't like, let's do a metaphor. Yes. You don't need to know the intrinsics of how a car works. You need a driver license. You need to know the basics of how to drive it. Good point. So I think that's the same with AI and I think you need to take it seriously. You need to know how to drive it and how it high level operates. You know, it has wheels. If you pedal, it's gasoline or electrical. You know, you need to understand these things. And I think we came became very complacent with these just in life, you know, TikTok comes in our life and it's all 30 second videos and you know, it merges our brain and our attention spans become shorter. I think we need to wake up and we need to take control and ownership of our own lives, including our businesses and our communities.

That's a great point. Now if I'm a business owner and I'm listening to this because I have an interest in doing exactly what you said. There's a lot of resources out there of varying, I don't know, credibility. Let's say the, the 30 second tick tock video as compared to, you know, an hour conversation with, with you, somebody who takes a more mature approach. What would be the advice that you would have for the, the AI curious when it comes to being selective about the information that they choose to, to, to immerse in when it comes to this topic.

Let's start with generative AI. I think you need to understand high level how it works and start experimenting. I'll give you a practical example because I know your audience likes these practical examples. So you know what really helps with generative AI is to be very clear you know, like what is your goal? So my goal is to write a newsletter to X, Y and Z. Okay, great. And to go a bit more deeper in terms of. Okay, so here is the audience, here are the characteristics of the audience. More is not better. So condense it like. Okay, my old audience lives in New York. They're founders of larger companies, et cetera and they typically love these kind of things. And they, they, their problems are X, Y and Z essentially. And then provide them what good looks like so that the system understands. Here's my benchmark essentially. That's one problem. Stop there, run it, and then take an iterative process to really hone in the precision and the accuracy of that newsletter, essentially. How do I know this? Well, it's a combination, right? It's a. By practicing and doing, I reverse engineered back this logic, but also by reading research articles. You don't have to do that. Just do it easier. Go on X. I mean you can say whatever you want about Elon, but he has really, you know, rejuvenated juvenile the life into or forward Twitter. And you can see a lot of smart gen AI engineers that speak normal language that anyone can understand. It's quite interesting actually. And you learn more. Yeah, it's, it's bite sizes. I mean every day just read 30 minutes and you'll be, you know, on top of your game and you'll, you'll out. Out compete. Anyone?

Yeah, that, that's a great resource. I, I agree. Twitter tends to not be as sensational obviously as Instagram or TikTok. So the stuff being shown on Twitter, at least the people that I in the AI space are much more interested in rather than the magic tricks, the real use, the applications. Hey guys, look what I just built as compared to, hey look, you know, let me show you some razzle dazzle from AI. I think I would agree with that completely. Are there any particular podcasts or news sources that you. Because I understand who your, your ideal customer is. Regardless of your position with AI and your, your depth of understanding, you need to, I'm not going to say dumb it down, but you need to be able to translate your level of understanding into a layman or a new user's experience. Are there any news resources or podcasts that you feel do a good job of what you do, which is translating from the technical and complex into the accessible and usable.

Okay, first off, I mean for anyone listening, I would say go on your X feed for Twitter or online going to the followers. I just follow all the people that we're following I've really taken very careful created approach of who I'm following. Honestly, these guys are amazing. So they're engineers From Gemini to OpenAI to other people that I know personally. And they're not only brilliant, but they're also very kind people that are really trying to make a difference in the world. And they're not like, they're not money driven, they're really achievement driven and they want to, you know, really push some positivity in this world. So that's number one. Number two is podcasts like yours or diaries of a CEO for example are really helpful. They get very interesting people just go into their channel, scroll down. This is also often where I want to listen to other thought leaders in the field as well. It really helps informing high level r review of Tim of how to use these machines or these systems where we are as a society and where are we going. So you can also anticipate basically the heading as well. Unfortunately you have to do, in my opinion, you have to do this because with, with the Internet it was different. The Internet can't think by itself at this point. This is, this is a car that will become a self driving car which will eventually become a self conscious car. Yep.

Yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting and I'm glad you brought that up. I've been having this conversation with other people in the space. I'm, I'm commercially driven. You're commercially driven. We have to be like, we've got families to take care of. We've got things that we want to do in the world to support others and that sort of stuff. However, at this stage in Generative AI in small to medium business enterprise, I don't, I can't speak to that. But at least for this, the, the culture of the leaders in the space like you, like others that come on the show isn't an ego driven effort. It is very much like I heard a quote that I like a lot because it applied to me and that quote was from John Doerr and that quote was, in business you're either a missionary or a mercenary.

Right.

And for me in business ethically, but I was driven. The commercial intent of a business was much more interesting to me than the passion behind it. That didn't ever happen until I got involved with Generative AI and I saw how simple it is to have a major impact on these businesses that would otherwise be struggling to afford talent for access to that talent that, that has the kind of, you know, frameworks that Pebbles brings to the table and so for any of you listening, I think that, that, that John just said was it's important for you to understand now is the time to ask questions. There are a lot of people asking questions and the people that are answering those questions right now in gen tend to be very supportive and they're not, they're not seeing competition necessarily. I can't share that with you. I can't help you because you're going to compete with me. That's not the spirit of things. So right now is probably the best time for you to get involved because of the open nature of the sharing. Look, I don't care if he says go listen to another podcast. I'm curious. I, I want to learn just like you. So this is a great time for individuals to be listening to these, asking these types of questions. Connect following the people, reach out to the people on Twitter, communicate with them. If you're enjoying this episode and want to learn more about how to start using AI at work, we've made it easy for you. For just $1 you can have full access to the Chief AI Officer community which will give you additional training, custom software, daily Training calls on AI tools using AI automations, getting more from your ChatGPT sessions and the business of being an AI consultant. Simply go to chiefaiofficer.com insiders to accelerate your AI journey. Now back to the episode. So let's talk about the the current endeavor that's that's taking most of your time. What has and I know you've been involved in projects in the past but what has been the biggest difference between leveraging generative AI and the creation of your SOFTW as compared to pre gen AI attempts at creating software?

It's huge honestly. In one word huge. Creating. Creating our own models which allow us to produce agents who are autonomous thinkers. You know as again the McKinsey thinker of the senior analyst that can provide you actionable intelligence. That agent that can act like a head of marketing at Google for example or you know sales manager with very high emotion intelligence that has persuasion sciences baked in at for example the likes of Microsoft or Cisco. Building that requires a a fundamental strong understanding of how to go to market or any vertical like the workflow works but you need to understand like really deep and not just theoretically you, you should have lived it and you, you should know what good looks like. So enterprise you should know how it is when it's growing and mid sized companies and you should also know that the level of startup scale ups thereafter you got to have to basically be able to find and write literally yourself empirical studies that are scientifically proven with market tested models or find that kind of two Venn diagram like okay, this is proven, but does that actually translate into business practicality? If yes, great, let's push it in there. Um, so we, we've done that for everything. So every business case study we have, for example within the platform, whether or not your goal is upsell or cross sell or an expiration email, there is a whole specifically suite on sciences connected to that. So when you press on it, the output of that campaign or email or sales asset like a proposal is maximized for persuasion, communication and also getting the prospect prospective client across the different layers of the funnel. If that makes sense.

Makes perfect sense. And the fact that a solopreneur can have access to this kind of output is I think a testament to the capabilities of generative AI. Because again folks, you haven't seen the inside of it like I have. There's this saying that's been going around in generative AI for at least a year and a half now and that is the first billion dollar one person company is going to be possible because of this generative AI, this acceleration that's occurring. And you say, okay, yeah, whatever, until you see something like what you showed me with Pebbles AI and you realize, oh, and the reason is, is because of a word that you used earlier, which is agents. And that is something that if somebody's new to generative AI or they're using maybe chat GPT, but they're not, they're not holistically understanding its application. Something like an agent comes on the scene and it's like the next level up from generative AI. Do you mind taking a minute to kind of explain the, what an agent is as you define it and the impact that it, that an agent brings to the table as compared to just you messing around on chat GPT.

Yes, in chatgpt, you take control. So if, let's go back to the newsletter, shall we? That newsletter, I told you, you, you, you push, generate, generates and you're like, you're not fully happy with this. This should change. That should change something very simple. It's written in American English. But us British, we're snobs. We're like, you know, it should be written, you know, British English, for example. Something small like that. You have to go and tell like, can you write this exact article in British English, please? Right. With agents that autonomous thinking is baked in. So before it gets to you, it's almost like Having your own super smart kind of assistant next to you, that is. First off, the IQ is so much higher. It's much knowledgeable and it knows exactly what you want and what your business is. So it, it already knows this. This newsletter is going towards the British market. So that should have been written in British, you know, American English. Even though you forgot the agent did it, so it did it for you. And so when you see it, everything's already done and it's already written in British English. So you don't have to go, you know, start editing, et cetera, et cetera. That's just one agent. But imagine if you have a group of agents. So web one, web two, web three, that was McKinsey, head of marketing, head of sales, kind of people around it, and they keep themselves in check and they talk with each other, they share things. So in our platform, our web of agents that look over, for example, actual intelligence, which is basically strategy, has different things fed into them and different frameworks and logic. And the model is built in a different way than, for example, if you want to run a campaign. Because when you do actual intelligence, it's like, okay, should we go into the Dach region? Germany, Austria, Switzerland? Okay, that's a high level question, typically boardroom question like, shall we do this? You know, some very smart young analysts do some calculations. Market tells you, you know, yeah, I think we should do it. I think Germany is quite interesting. It's growing. Maybe Frankfurt is a great place to, to, to penetrate, et cetera, et cetera. Or for example, New York could be anywhere. But you know, you give a general direction at the point when you do a market campaign. I don't need that anymore. At strategic level at this point, we want to be surgical, so precision and accuracy comes into play. So different, we require different skill sets, different kind of sciences and different logic at each stage of that workflow, if that makes sense. So imagine if they all do the works amongst them and then come to you. You just say days, if not weeks of work.

And you know, not only that work, but the, the, the mental load of you having to come up with the questions that you would be answering the models in order to get the answer. That is, that is taken off your plate. Now all of that, that neural capacity, that mental bandwidth is available to address the important and urgent things that are occurring in the business or in the Eisenhower matrix. Maybe you've got time now to work on those longer while these agents are doing all the stuff and giving you an output that's already been considered Intelligently designed, reflected upon by different perspectives. It's incredible. So you know, we hear a lot about, I do, at least I hear a lot about agents and people, oh, go check out the site. You can build agents. Go check this site out and you can build agents. I don't know that what, what those sites are building though meets the, the reality of what you're talking about here. Is that functionality available off the shelf for somebody like me to go and start building agents? Is that capability here yet?

From the blue ocean competitive analysis we did, we, we saw that predominantly agents are built by companies with a specific purpose and they tend not to white label it. But I, I do, I do see things coming up, spring up essentially where you will be able to train your white label essentially.

Got it.

However, training your agents I think is like training your kit for example, you or, or but in one specific topic or a plethora of topics. It really requires a structured, logical approach because there is, you know, if you put in nonsense, the agent will be trained incorrectly and the output will be incorrect as well. So I don't see it getting very democratized in the near future frankly. Because I mean it's, it's our ip, it's also the IP of some other younger com AI companies. But yeah, I mean I think the future will be really like, listen, I need an agent for HR matters and recruitment and policies internal and everything else. You can go to Pebble's AI, but then the HR version of it to another company for example, which is built on a different vertical that is trying to make it easier. It will be for, for the time being a close to guarded secret.

So you know, just when you think you're, you're getting a handle on generative AI in particular, I'm like, okay, good, like I'm comfortable using generative AI. Then comes agency and, and folks, we're not talking about like an advertising agency, but agents that have, that can make their own decisions based on the data they've been fed, as we talked about here. But that becomes like a whole, a whole new way of thinking about generative AI. The, there's this, this importance that's put on proper prompting format and you know, calibrating your prompts for consistent output. But if an agent is there, the agent is going to no longer need my contributions. And all of this investment that I've made in the, the current best practice of using these tools, it's going to be, I don't know about obsolete, but certainly superfluous because now we're going to have a level of this technology that I can probably at some point go in and say, you're trained on my data. I need a, a public relations and public relations agent.

Right.

And that the agents will actually be building other agents. Is that, is that where we're headed?

Well, I hope not, because if other agents are building agents, then I'm not sure how good the secondary agents are. Ah, I mean, look, this is, this is a prediction. Of course, I don't, unless you have incorporated all the knowledge, including ip, that is not, you know, public knowledge, of, you know, companies that respect the vertical, say HR or whatever, within, within the agents that are building the agents. I honestly don't think at this point that the quality will be as good as the original ones. However, what I do see coming up is a marketplace for angels. I do see that. So for, for, for agents, I do see that happening. Like if you, for example, I'm just making something of a crazy idea would be, look, I worked at Google, so I kind of know how they're working. Imagine you, you got an extension, so you, you have your browser extension, right? So you know, the marketplace for browser extensions. You know, you happen to need an HR angel or anything related or recruitment agent. So you download it and then you can ask it, you know, to write up a, you know, a certain JD or job description or you can ask it to write out a startup HR policy within the U.S. and compliant with the U.S. laws, labor laws. That's possible. I mean, I think that's going to happen, but wow. I think it's going to make everyone's life easier at the beginning. And I think the first two to five years we'll, we'll see eventually our lives being, our quality of life will be better. Like we'll have more time to go home and spend time with our loved ones and our efficacy will be higher after that. I mean, it's anyone's guess to be honest. And with all the drama that's going on with OpenAI now and people quitting from ethics department, that does not promise any good. So I'm a bit concerned that capitalism is taken the forefront over AI ethics. It should be balanced.

Yeah, that's what happens when you give it to Silicon Valley, I guess. Hi, Silicon Valley. So this is interesting. Okay. If I am an early adopter and I'm using these tools right now, certainly I have an advantage over the other, I don't know, online marketer or education program or consultancy or whatever. But they're going to, eventually somebody in their company is going to say, hey boss, check this out. This is called Chat GPT. Like it's going to, it's going to start showing up now, that's fine. But if, if I'm using agents and there is a lag time between my competition adopting the use of agents in their business, the gap that I would forecast would be much greater and achieved much faster. For the companies who are you talk about this two to five year timeline for the companies who are taking a wait and see approach or it's, it's on their plans but for next year or whatever, will they be able to catch up with early adopters?

No, sorry I had to be Dutch direct here. No, no, it's because the longer answer is people need to get used to new technology. It's, you know, if you look at historically in any, any technology there is a, there is a life like a cycle of, of understanding adoption, a cultural acceptance of a new technology. So if you wait a year from now from you know, doing introductions, I mean there are already, which company was it already like one of the top tier strategy consultancies is already starting to include AI training with their new graduates already. I mean even if you're not adopting it immediately across the board, you need to get people used to this product. It's very funny actually. My dad just messaged me just before this podcast like this ChatGPT4O. I mean that's quite interesting. Um, so what can you do with it? Quite funny. You know, it shows even my dad is who is historically quite conservative in these things. He's one of those people that was against Apple until I had fortunately down his throat. And then now he has everything. He has an iPad, iWatch and a MacBook. He has the whole shebang. Even the stupid mouse, he hasn't.

Yeah.

So, but he's already getting interested in ChatGPT. So anyone that's listening, my dad has already showed interest. He's 67.

Just saying it's time for, for people to adopt this. So, you know, I'm, I'm very. There's a quote that we, we use a lot in our educational material and it's a quote from Peter Diamandis and he was on a podcast called Impact Theory and this was from about June of last year and June of last year. At the time I thought, boy, I'm really behind on, on this AI stuff right now. That was a year ago. But in that interview there's a quote and he says, and he's. This is coming from the Singularity University with all the research they do and all the predictions and the successful track record they've got of predicting impacts. And his direct quote was by the end of this century there will be two types of companies. Those that are AI enabled and those that are extinct. That's it. That was a direct quote from Peter. And you know, when I bring that up in conversations, if I'm training and stuff, people go wow. And I say, well here's what's even scarier. That was from a year ago. What have you done in the past year since Peter said that? What have you personally? Your company, your, to train your people to make sure that you are on the winning side of enablement and you're not one of those. It's like, you know, where'd all our business go? It's all gone. So let's talk about Pebbles because I think that from what I saw this would be a tool that would be a force multiplier for that business who even if you are still on the sidelines, if you had a tool like this, your, your catch up pace to any of your competitors would be compressed significantly. Now if you go and learn the tool, let's say your competitors are already using the large language models, maybe they've got some gen AI subscription tools and that sort of thing. That's great. They're beating you, they're getting more done with less effort. However, if you were to show up and skip all of that and show up with a tool like Pebbles that had the agents, essentially agents built in, that had the, the pre calibrated thought environment for those specific niches within the business that were based on not hey, what is my competition doing but what is the McKinsey guy bringing to my business? Do you see that this would be a chance for an individual to, who is ready to get off the fence to kind of bypass all of that learning curve that would, that your competition has had to go through over the past year.

Yes. So we would be the third. Very simple. Yes, we, we are the third category which are essentially a bunch of people from industry leaders and very, very skilled and talented developers that are building tools that want to make sure that, you know, economy thrives. And the reason for that is because I mean in a, in a healthy capitalism you need competition.

Yeah.

And where we're heading right now is, is always like, if you look at the data is that you know, the bigger companies are quickly buying up basically smart, you know, startups and scale ups and merging them together and that's it. They died out. You bought M and A Version acquisitions done. It's two things at the same time. You kill your competition and you grow and you, you and you basically implement their IP within your existing stack. It's like three, three, three birds, one stone. And I honestly think that there needs to be a couple of us that don't want to be that billion dollar solopreneur. I mean I appreciate you maybe insinuating that I might be that person. I am really not driven by money. I really am not. And I find it. I have this very strong sense of injustice. Where startups and scale ups and mid sized companies can't flourish to a certain level, where all consumers, society itself can benefit from it. If we give too much, we all know how we are like as a humankind, we get too much power. Ultimate power corrupts ultimately.

Yep.

Lord Acton, I mean where we heading is not the right direction. And I think having not just Pebbles AI, but there's also another company that I really admire, I won't say the name that does basically hr, workflow, automation and all the smart things that you require in mid sized companies. I mean from little I know about them, from what I can sense and read is they're really doing this to help companies and people and employees and founders. We need more of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, if it happens that yes, our company becomes a billion dollar company in the midst of it, yeah, great, perfect. Are we still performing? Are we still helping people? Are we still a NET positive +4 Societies across the globe? If yes, I'm happy, I'll sleep peacefully.

That's a wonderful perspective for anybody who's wanting to use these tools. Look, the first thing I get it, you're like, oh my gosh, I can make more money with these tools. I can get more output out of my employees, I can work less, whatever those things are. But now, once you've achieved that, that I don't know, that victory in your business, this approach of now, how can I provide a better output for my customers? How can I give my customers 10 times the value that they were getting from us before? I think that that right there is, that's the people that I'm encountering. I'm not, I'm not operating at the environment where there's M and A occurring and things like that. I'm working with the practitioners, right? Like at least in my business, and here's what I can tell you that I'm doing is I am encouraging them to recognize the impact but not necessarily the financials or the economics of the use of this, but the impact, impact of the use of this and what we're looking to do is we're looking to create a culture of individuals who, the assumption is the money's coming, right? If I know these things, I'm in demand, I have an advantage in the marketplace. However, I shouldn't solely be focused on how can I use these tools to make money. I should be focused on how can I. Exactly like you're saying, like the pioneers of this space are doing, how can I impact the other shop owner like me, who wishes he could be at his kid's game or would like to be home and not have to work on, you know, a holiday or whatever like that? If you approach it from that perspective, yes, the money's coming, right? It's inevitable because of the value that's being created by tools like Pebbles and by training, like what we do. The value is, is obvious. And when you provide that value, people will pay you for that value. But if you're looking at this strictly through the going back to that quote from John Doar, missionary or mercenary? You can be both, folks. But I think that the, the sentiment that we're sharing here is that be the missionary who makes money, don't be the mercenary who ends up finding a heart later in life kind of thing with this stuff. So wonderful perspective. So I, I, I would like for people to be able to follow the progress of what you guys are doing at Pebbles. What's the best way for them to do that and what do they need to know if they are gonna, you know, follow the pro progress and get in the wait list?

Well, they can always connect with me over LinkedIn. I accept almost everyone, so I post quite few. Well, every two weeks I, I do at least one post with some updates and where we are, you can also go to www.trypeverils AI. You'll see the website and then just click join waiting list and put your name and email and be there. We have a very special promo going on for the first thousand users that we call our early adopters. We will treat them like our VIPs because not only will they get massive amount of discount and also additional perks and they will be the first ones getting the new features, but they also will be collected at a platform such as WhatsApp in order for them to provide feedback to us as well. To say, hey John, this would be great if we had this feature or hey, maybe can we do this? And we will collate that information, that feedback and build the product around additionally around their needs. Etc.

Well, Matt, when you're ready to start showcasing this, I would love for the Chief AI Officer community to be on your circuit because what you showed me was leveraging generative AI to a level that I hadn't come to that conclusion myself.

Right.

But it was instantly apparent that if this thing works, it's a game changer that I now have like the requirement for me to go and study how to build a prompt, to train it, how to be that McKinsey strategist out the window. I don't have to do that. It's, it's, it's ready for me to. That agent is ready for me to start communicating with it right away. I would love for our community and our listeners here on the podcast of course, as well to be considered for that early adopter environment. So please, it's an open invitation. When you're ready to start showcasing it, I would love to, to assist in getting that message out there because it's fantastic what you guys are doing to.

Build on your point. This thing, obviously, you know, we have at least. I had six engineer meetings today. We tested every day. In fact, we're. It works so well. What we're doing right now is stress testing it, which is completely. So it works so well that we're at you trying to break it. Exactly. So that just to make sure, you know, not everyone has a perfect business plan and not everyone has all the information. So we just want to make sure it is still it, you know, at least it has a multiplier value effect for everyone. So we're trying to break it. Exactly. But yeah, honestly, it works so well that we're, we're. I don't want to say scared, but we don't. There's a lot of sciences in there that also can be used for propaganda, so. And we don't want to become the next Cambridge analytics scandal. So what we're doing is we are blocking it in Iran, North Korea, obviously Russia, because the American elections are coming up soon, the British elections as well. So thank God the Dutch elections are already over. But yeah, we don't want our platform to be abused by actual real foreign agents. So, and be used in, in, in certain scam farms because if you use certain tools and your, your eyes are trained. I had a life before corporate. Yeah. Which I am not really at the liberty of. Talk about. You can see the Russian propaganda is already ticking up on X. It's going up and it's, it's very subtle, but you can still, you can still see it like if your eyes are trained for it, I don't want them to use this. So we'll block that everywhere. It's going to be only used for in within countries that we know will not abuse it.

Yeah. So folks, that's a whole nother consideration. These tools you were talking about, you know, oh, let's make an email campaign. Well, these things are powerful enough to actually persuade mass populations. So it's a consideration that is beyond the use of how we're using it, obviously. Well, this is fantastic. John, thank you so much for joining the show. I know how busy you must be with six engineering meetings just today with you guys being so close to launching it. But I am serious, when you get close, please put us towards the top of the list, if not the top of the list of, of audiences and communities that this is the type of stuff that is. This is the future. And I would love for our people to have the opportunity to see it as we take the wrapping off the package. Right. So keep that in mind, I guess, you know, as we, we close. Is there any final, obviously your LinkedIn profile and the site, the website, we're going to be adding those to the show notes. But is there any final messages that you want to leave people with?

Be vigilant and educate yourself. I think that's the only way we can make sure that the AI revolution goes in a path where it, it increases our quality of life as opposed to endangering our way of life.

Fantastic. Love it. All right, everybody, thank you so much. And John, thank you for sharing all of this. I really enjoyed the conversation. I never know where these are going to go, but based on our initial conversation, I had high expectations that this would be exactly what we did. And that was a fantastic conversation.

So thank you, Chris.

Thank you so much, everybody. We'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer for empowering businesses with AI education and training.

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