36: Using AI for Unlocking Business Efficiency with Josh Rosenberg

Welcome back to another episode of the Using AI at Work podcast. I'm Chris Daigle, your host, and today we've got a conversation that's going to blow your mind. You know, we don't just bring anyone on this show, only those who really get how AI can turn the tables in the business world. And today's guest, he's not just in the game, he's actually rewriting the rules. I'm talking about Josh Rosenberg, a guy who's been in the trenches of digital marketing and entrepreneurship since 2007. He's built, scaled, and exited more businesses than most of us have ever dreamed of. And now, now he's using AI to not just replace himself, but to outperform the very best in the business. So in this episode, we're diving deep into how Josh is leveraging AI to triple conversion rates, cut down project timelines from weeks to hours, and even turn a simple restaurant menu into a $17,000 gold mine, all in under 15 minutes. It's a great story. So, folks, this isn't theory. This is real world tested and proven stuff. So if you're looking to see how AI can make you not just good, but unstoppable, you're in the right place. So 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. Hey, Josh, glad to have you on the podcast, and thank you so much for coming on, especially on short notice.

Chris, thank you very much for having me.

The conversations that we've had prior to this recording have certainly indicated that you are somebody who thinks in AI, as I like to say, and that's the type of guest that really thrives on the show, because with the things that you're going to share today, you're going to give people a lot of exposure to how different businesses, different industries that are your clients are leveraging AI with your. With your help. So before we get started, why don't we just kind of let the audience know a little bit about who you are and what you're up to as far as AI goes.

Sure. So I've been in the online entrepreneurial digital marketing space since 2007. I've built, scaled, and exited a number of my own businesses in that time. I've worked with a lot of different kinds of clients across a ton of niches, mostly as a copywriter, chief marketing officer, and in that sort of world, and I primarily focus on that because if you think about any business out there, you've got several different unique departments, but they all rely on sales and marketing. So it doesn't matter if you're talking about just your. The team as a whole, so you're onboarding your training, the people that are involved in the team. It doesn't matter if it's manufacturing, if it's distribution, if it's customer service. None of those things have any life to them at all if not for sales and marketing, because that's how you make money. And you can't have a customer service team if you can't pay them. So if there's no revenue. So I said, this is kind of like the first step. And so I focus in that world primarily. And probably about six months before people knew that AI was a thing and ChatGPT came out, I got a chance to play with a sort of primitive version of it. And I was realizing that, oh, okay, it kind of sucks right now, but I see where this is going, and every few weeks there are some updates. And it does get better incrementally, and it's not going to be very long before this is actually really good. So let me start to plan ahead now about how I can use this to replace myself. Because anyone that's written copy by hand before knows a simple email is not simple. You know, you could sit there for four or five hours working on an email that's 400 words. You know, ads, forget sales letters and VSLs and webinars and stuff. Just even the small things are a lot of work. And so if I could replace myself from all those small things, that would save me a ton of time. So I. I came up with the concept of prompt recipes where I realized we can't have a full email or a full ad or something in one prompt. It just won't be very good. Every sentence is trying to capture your attention enough to move so that you'll read the next sentence and the next and the next, and you're moving people down a logical path from wherever they start out to taking some sort of action. Maybe it's clicking on a link, maybe it's opting in, whatever it is. And there's a lot of psychological jumps along the way where you're sort of guiding people to taking this action. So if I could break it down to each of those steps, and I have a prompt that's designed for each of those steps with one variable in it, then I can literally Replace myself and I can daisy chain them together. So when you take your prompts and you daisy train them to get a bigger, more complete output, I call that a prompt recipe. So I started doing that and then I after I had emails and ads down and then landing pages came next and opt in bribes and eventually I got to point where I could write full sales letters and VSLs in about an hour. And this is something I've been doing almost two decades. So for me to spel still spend six weeks on it versus roughly an hour, I was like, Jesus. So I started testing them against, you know, traditional copywriters. And my very first client that I worked with, who's been in the relationship space for years, I tripled his conversions.

AI generated, AI coach, AR generate.

Yep, took me 47 minutes. I didn't redo the entire thing, just some key areas, and his conversions tripled instantly. And so I'm now testing my work against really high quality copywriters and I'm winning most of the time. This has gotten me invited to speak as a keynote speaker at a number of summits and expos and conferences and, and I started getting approached by business owners that are offline, that are not part of our online direct response world. And they want to know where else could they use AI in their business? They saw this as the future. They liked what I had to say and I said, okay, if I'm going to really dive into this, I don't want to half ass it. So there's a university that was offering courses on AI for business use. I took their, their course. I now have a certificate diploma from mit. Massachusetts Institute. Yeah, probably the best school in the country. And so now I, I work with a lot of businesses and that become my clients. And I figure out what can we do with AI to improve every area of your business, whether it's the production, the manufacturing, the customer service, the sales, hr, your hiring and onboarding and training, all whatever it is. Even though, you know, a law firm versus a restaurant versus a perfumery are all completely different businesses at the core, what they're doing is very similar. There's just a couple variables. Like a law firm might not need warehousing. Okay, great. We don't have to worry about that. But restaurants are going to have distributors that do have warehousing, that do have shipping issues that, you know, so they're, they do have a lot of the same things going on. So I figured if I could set myself up in a way that allows you to go into a business and just Know which variables need to be changed. I can help a lot of businesses and that's kind of where I've been focusing my life for the last year and a half.

Kind of templatizing the AI deployment effort.

Yep.

Hey, before we move on, I've got some, some great questions about some of the stuff we talked about before. But you mentioned the MIT education.

Yep.

Everybody, I'm not gonna say everybody, but people that are listening to this at least are very like, they're, they're looking to upskill, they're looking to understand how can I use AI at work. They're looking to really get a better leverage of the tool. And they're looking around and they're listening to podcasts, they're seeing the advertisements from MIT and stuff like that. Mit, there's no question it's a fabulous tool. Some of our faculty is graduates of mit. However, you come from an entrepreneurial background. You were in the digital marketing space. You were especially as a copywriter. It's a very entrepreneurial activity. Like there's no safety net. It's up to you. Coming from that entrepreneurial experience and then being immersed in like a higher education environment when it comes to talking about AI, what was your take on it? What was your, what was your as an entrepreneur going into that academia environment to learn AI? We'll be back after a quick break.

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What do you think?

So when I joined that class for full disclosure, it was the first or second time that they had offered. It's an online six week class. They meet camera. It's once or twice a week, it's only a few hours a week. And there's homework assignments. They were still figuring it out and formatting it. And this actually worked to my advantage because the computer science side, the programming side, learning how to script in Python is not going to be something that I ever do. My brain just doesn't work that way. So at the very beginning, because it was also taking it past fail, you don't get a Letter grade. I, you know, introduced myself, told them who I was and made sure that I would be able to, if there was something that just is not part of my world and never will be, I could have some kind of an alternate assignment or an alternate learning and they were happy to go along with that. I don't know if it's going to be the same these days. I have no idea. But it was very interesting. I mean, I think we all sit there and you know, as course creators, we're also course students and you'll hear somebody presenting and this, I think was a much more formal, structured version of that. It's, it. I can't, I almost want to compare like somebody that's a good public speaker versus a TED talk that's very regimented.

Yeah.

And so this, it was kind of more, you could tell that they were working off of a very, struck, very strict structure and that was fine. Like the, the information was really good and I learned a lot. It just was less free flowing than I'm used to.

Okay. The, the reason that I asked that is I'm curious because I've gone through a couple of the, the online university courses when I was first exploring my application of AI, and what I found was that at that time at least a lot of the conversation was around the, the technical or the data science side of AI, which for a decade, two decades, that's been AI has been very engineering, very data driven. But AI as we use it today, as I use it, as my students use it, as our clients use it, it's not a technical, it's more of a do you understand business? Even, even if it's, do you understand your own business? And if you understand that, then it makes it easier to use the tools that, that are proliferating, that aren't data driven, they're more degenerative AI where I can go in and I can interact with the tool and I can get the copy, I can get the image, I can get the, the script or whatever. And so for those who are out there and they're looking for outlets to be able to learn how to use AI in their business, would you recommend, you know, outside of the pedigree and, and what that would carry with it, saying, hey, you know, I graduated from Columbia University's, you know, AI program certainly gives you some credibility. But is that where you would send a curious business person to go and learn about AI?

Yeah, I mean, there's a huge difference between going there, living on campus and spending four years taking, you know, 18 credits a semest versus an online six week course that's passed Fail like I'm not going to say taken a boot camp at Harvard and some something to do with law is the same as going to actual Harvard Law School. This was all about business strategy as opposed to learning the coding. That did come up a bit. What was kind of stressed to us is that the very near future, probably the next couple of years you're going to have what's called no code coding where you don't need to be a developer to make applications and bots and this and this. And we're starting to see it already. That's what GPTs kind of are. It's a baby version of that. And so what I gathered, they didn't say it but what I gathered afterwards was that the idea of learning to code in Python for this use is not really a great use of your time. Like if you're gonna learn computer science anyway and you're passionate about that. Awesome. This was a lot more like a 30,000 foot perspective with some tactical hands on work, you know, lab work we'll call it. I did really enjoy it. I did like it. I would recommend it. It was very good. I mainly chose MIT over Columbia or over another school. Pedigree of mit. Yeah, no doubt they're the gold standard. So if it's the same money and you're learning the same information, which you basically are, and all these.

Yeah.

Why not get the shiniest metal?

Yep, good point. Okay, great. So that answered my question because there's a lot of, there's not a standard educational track for learning generative AI in small business. There's so, so individuals who want to upskill. It's, it's kind of a, they have to do a little searching to figure out what, what matches what they're looking for. But what I tell people, and I think that you're a perfect example of that, is that if you come to the table understanding how to improve a business regardless of what your tools are, then you're, you've got a good foundation, the tools just support that. Right. And obviously 20 years as an entrepreneur, copywriter, digital marketing, it's a very like, it's a very figure it out kind of environment and if you can't figure it out, don't have much of a career in entrepreneurship.

Right.

So I think that that's important for everybody who may be, is intimidated by the oh man, mit, I'm not that smart or whatever or that's going to be complicated. I think it's important for them to know that, yes, there's value there. However, if you already have a job or you're running a business or running a team, you bring with you a skill set that's hard to teach in a college or hard to teach in a classroom environment. So for those of you who are concerned that you need this in the MIT degrees and stuff like that, you don't. If you understand business, then you're halfway there. The tools are the easy part. And Josh, some of the examples that we talked about before in this interview I think are a great example of that. And if you don't mind, one of the ones I found pretty intriguing was some of the restaurant examples from your friends that have restaurants in New York City. And if you don't mind showing people how you think in AI even in a restaurant, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there the restaurant world is a very small community here, especially for top level, like really high level restaurants. All the chefs know each other, all the owners know each other. And right across the street from where I live happens to be this really upscale, I think a little higher and then gastropub, but a very nice place that the food is incredible, great drinks, I love the people there, all that. And so there's on Mondays and Tuesdays that's kind of known as the dead nights. People are not going out to eat on those nights. They're not taking out dates. Especially in more high end places. You're not dropping, you know, a hundred dollars per person all with the obviously with drinks, you're not dropping that much on a Monday or Tuesday. So it's really difficult to get people in the door. So I a lot of the times like to just take a notepad and pen and like four or five in the afternoon I'll go there, I'll have a beer and I'll just try to figure stuff out by hand, get a change of environment. And so I'm talking to the owner about some AI stuff. He is genuinely interested. And I had like a light bulb moment. I said, you know, this isn't the place where you're going to do two for one, you know, wings nights. You're not going to do pub trivia here. All the typical promotional stuff places do to get you in on Monday and Tuesdays. We're just not doing that here. But I have an idea and I be utilizing AI. And he's like, all right, I'm interested. I said, all right. I took the menu and I had chat GPT on my phone. I just literally Opened up my phone, held the camera over their menu, took a picture of it and uploaded the chat. I just prompted it by saying, study the items that are on this menu, the entrees. This is the type of restaurant it is. I want you using these exact ingredients. Nothing that's not on our menu that we don't already have. And I don't want to increase the food cost. I said, I want you to create two original entree ideas that we don't have that would fit in with this environment perfectly. And so one of them was this seafood pasta dish. Another was like a black truffle bacon bourbon sauce burger, you know, And I said, okay, they both sound excellent.

This started with you having an idea and a menu and your phone and you went to the chat GPT app, you took a picture of their phone. You obviously knew the question. I mean, not their phone, you took a picture of their menu, but you knew what, how to get the GPT to give you results. But that was all the ingredients that you had to do this.

Yeah, my idea was if we do some kind of limited time only entrees that are here one minute and then gone forever, that we, there's going to be a lot of scarcity in that. People are going to want it because they're going to miss out. Yes. Right. So that was what I was thinking, okay, I can't get you here on Monday, Tuesday doing pub trivia, but what if I make you afraid to miss out on something cool happening? And so that was the idea with. So then I took the disk I had it, it gave me the name for those things and I said, I want you to describe these items to make them as mouth watering, craveable as possible. I don't care if somebody just finished eating a giant meal, I want them hungry again by immediately after reading the subscription. And it did. So I copied that description. I go still on my phone to another AI application called Leonardo and I found pictures of some hyper realistic buildings and cars and stuff. So it looked very real. You can use the template somebody already sets up. Because when you're doing AI art, there's a ton of variables as to like the lens style, the, the art style, the this style, the that style, the gravity of this and that and the other. So you don't have to know any of that. You just find an example that looks like what you're trying to accomplish and you change the description of the prompt. So instead of it being like a hyper realistic picture of sports cars racing down the street in Venice, I Said hyper realistic. And then I just pasted in the description of the food.

Nice.

And so now I have these beautiful pictures of these entrees. And I turned to the head chef and I said, could you make this? And he goes, yeah, no problem. That looks. He's like, I kind of want that. Now, you know, these are gorgeous pictures of food. And the girl that's the bartender there, she also runs their social media. And they have a decent following for a local Russian. You know, a few hundred people follow them on. On Instagram. And I said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to call it Secret Menu Monday. And I know it's not the best name, but it was what I came up with. And I said, sure. You're going to have people vote. You're going to paste both pictures, and they're going to vote either a thumbs up or hard or. I forgot what the voting mechanism was. Whichever entree wins the vote will be on the menu next Monday and Tuesday, and that's it. Never again.

Nice.

You're going to tell them this, that only the winner will be there, and on each night, we're only going to make 40 of them. So 80 in total. And the only way that you can get yours is rscp. If you just walk in, you're not being served, that you have to rsvp. The reason is because I want to guarantee that people are going to show up and not forget, because when you RCP to Russia, you get it added to your calendar. You're not. It's not slipping your mind. So that was very important.

I want to point something out. MIT didn't teach you that. Entrepreneurship taught you that. So for all of you listening, it's not. It's about being creative with what Josh did. And if I can see him there in my mind, sitting at the bar with a phone, the restaurant's bustling, and here he is coming up with something that probably. I don't know what the results were, but if you don't mind sharing them, I would imagine better than the average Monday because of this small effort.

By the way, this whole process, start to finish, took less than 15 minutes, probably around 12 or 13.

Beautiful.

All 80 RSVP slots were reserved within 24 hours. The seafood pasta dish won. I thought the. The black truffle bourbon bacon burger was gonna win, but maybe that's just a little too heavy for a Monday night.

Yeah.

We then had enough people coming in off the street that wanted to try and get the. The seafood pasta. We Told them no, but they stayed around for dinner anyway. And with the drinks and everything, where they normally generate very little revenue. $17,000 extra and 15 minutes of work.

Jeez. So this is a perfect example. Like, there's no. There's no part of a business that can't be enhanced, improved, whatever, with the application of not just the tool, but knowing how to think about, how do I use these tools? So this is fantastic.

Chris, like you, you'll. You'll agree to this because you've been an entrepreneur longer than I have. There's something that happens with us when we work with different kinds of businesses and see things from the outside where we're not the face of the business. You know, you can very quickly lose the force on the trees when it's your company. But when you're an outside, have an outside perspective, you can spot profit centers that they can't. You'll have an idea, you'll see something part of whether it be a funnel or like this. This isn't really a funnel. This is a separate profit center that never existed before that you can spot. And so that's really what this was. So that was hyper successful. And as I said, the restaurant world is very, very small at a certain level, like most industries are. And the owner of this bar said, hey, my friend, they're renovating his restaurant. He got a big loan and he has a new general manager and new, you know, he broke up with his business partner. So they're doing a fresh start with a different name. They're keeping a lot of it the same. They're still under construction right now. Do you think, is there anything that we could do there? So I said, let's find out. Now, this is the great grilled cheese heist of 2024, I like to call it. So I knew where this restaurant was. It's right around the corner from this diner that's been open, you know, 60 years or something. I love them because it's greasy diner food and it's a few bucks. You go in, I sit there, I get a cup of coffee and a grilled cheese, and it came out to like six or seven dollars.

New York, that's great.

Yeah, that's like unheard of. Well, I go around the corner to the restaurant where I was going to be helping out, and I noticed that on the kids menu, they had a grilled cheese. And I said, would you be able to. Would you be willing to do an adult version of this grilled cheese and tomato soup, maybe on a more rustic bread? Something along those lines. I said, yeah, that's absolutely no additional food cost. Like we have all that in. And it's stupidly simple to make unless you're Gordon Ramsay and you screw up grilled cheese all the time. But if you've seen those videos, you know he did it twice. So I took the menu and I basically said, what we're going to do for you is we're going to raise the prices of every item on here with zero pushback from people. Because for his on the kids menu it just said grilled cheese, white bread with American cheese. And I said I will need you to channel your prompted the AI and I told it chatgpt to channel it's in its internal Anthony Bourdain because he writes in a very poetic way. And I said, I want you to rewrite every single item. Again, I just took a picture of the menu. I said, I want you to rewrite every single item, every entree, every appetizer, every drink, every dessert, everything. And I want to make them sound as high end as possible. Like this is something that is only served at a multi time Michelin starred restaurant. I want people to struggle to decide what they want because they want to try everything. And with the grilled cheese, it said that it's made on this handmade rustic bread made fresh every morning by master bakers. They were using this combination of three different cheeses. It's heated like this and this and this in hundred year old cast iron pans. And then at the end it said try to see how far you can pull the cheese apart. Our record is 26 inches. That's basically the exact same thing I got from the the diner for only a few bucks or they're charging, I think $34.

Perception is right.

How many people lined up and we're happy to part with $34 for a grilled cheese sandwich simply because they wanted to see if they could beat the cheese pole record.

This is incredible. So AI helped craft this up leveled menu with no additional effort from the kitchen, no additional ingredients that needed to.

Be added, no additional cost to them at all. Not one penny.

They better be giving you some of those 34 grilled cheese as a thank you.

You know, it's stupid, but that's not an absurd price in certain areas in New York City. It really is.

Well, you know, it's very interesting being a copywriter. You know this. If I say, oh, I've got a car for sale, that's whatever. But if I say, hey, this is the car that did this. And, you know, you build the story around it. You build, it becomes more than the sandwich, it becomes the experience. Right, Right, Exactly. So for those of you listening, even if you don't have a restaurant, if you can, how can I do what Josh did? How can I take my product descriptions? How can I take, you know, the, the Friday night specials that we do and leverage chat, GBT or Claude or whatever your model that you prefer to use and make this, turn this into something that's a brand new, it's a new event, it's a new experience for somebody. So this is a perfect example. Even though it's restaurants, I don't care what you sell.

Restaurants. Before, these were the first and only restaurants I worked. I just happen to be friends with the owner of one. So this isn't like I, I'm a restaurant consultant and this is a specialty. This is. I just happen to think of something off the cuff and it worked really well.

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You know, it's changed. It was for the longest time, direct response. Online businesses, health, wealth and romance are three big niches. Everyone's done that. And then I started getting obscure clients. A few years ago, I had a stem cell company reach out to me because they do these elective procedures for men. I, I had a number of charities that I worked with. At one point, I was the fractional CMO for 56 attorneys all at once. So, you know, you get a reputation, people hear you maybe from a podcast like this, and you're, you're going to get contacted. And I've told plenty of people that I don't think I'm the right person for this. I don't know what I'm doing in that field, but other ones, I figured, I realized, yeah, I can help you. And so there is no real typical client. But I did have somebody reached out to me from a large clothing retailer. They're well known. They've got a few hundred locations across the country. They're in multiple countries. I don't want to say their name because there's still confidentiality agreements and stuff. Sure. And I created something for them that I ended up now using for everybody. All of my corporate clients or clients where they have an HR department and hiring takes multiple touch points. What I, what they were saying was at least the US VP of operations was saying, young people today don't want to work. They have no work ethic. They're bad at their jobs. This, this and this. And I, I believe that to be bs. So I said, well, I'm Will, I kind of want to challenge you. How's the hiring done? They said, we've been looking for a senior server technician for a few months. Every time we think we find somebody good, it doesn't work out for one reason or another. Said, okay, well, how is this process done? Well, the department head, they write out a job description that they then send over to H on hr, posts it, they start getting a bunch of applicants coming in. They try to sift through them and try to figure out who they think is a good match. And that person, you know, they then interview the people they think would be good candidates. I said, okay, are they?

That's what most companies are doing it that way. Yeah.

Okay, well, senior server technician, it's a very highly technical job. There's a lot of certifications out there. And they said, yeah, yeah. So here's the job posting. I said, okay, well, it requires you to be MCSC certified, but there's higher level certifications that are not listed on here. What about, you know, and there's all these 3, 4, 5 letter certifications that if it's not listed and somebody's reading and they don't know what they mean, then what good is it? You're putting, you're, you're turning away probably better candidates than you realize. So I said, okay, here's what we're going to do. I wrote an app and it's a series of prompts. It's a long recipe. And I said, okay, first of all, we're going to take the job posting and we're going to have AI rewrite it so that it scares away UNQUALIFIED applicants, but it makes the qualified ones realize, oh, this is the next logical step for my career. This is where I'm supposed to be to move up to that next level. It's going to be a challenge, but this is what I've been working for. So immediately, we don't get rid of 100% of unqualified applicants. You're never going to, but we reduce that significantly. And the resumes that are coming in there of much more high quality employees. Well, HR, Ruth, and HR, who's 60 years old, she doesn't know this. So I said, great, here's step two. We're gonna just upload right to chatgpt all the resumes and we're gonna have it put them in order in terms of, at the very top are the people with the most experience, the highest level certifications, the most skills, the most. Why? Because the AI knows which certifications are better than others. And so it did. And so now it get, it tells us, okay, out of, let's just say 10 applicants, here's the order and says, oh, well, Stephen Smith is number one by a long shot. I can even have it break down how confident it is in the skills of each applicant. Okay, great. Well, unfortunately, Ruth is still the one doing the first round of interviews and she doesn't know what she's asking. She doesn't know what she should be listening for. This is a stupid decision that so many companies make because they don't want to waste a department head time with the first interview.

Yeah.

So I said, okay, great. We're gonna come up with six questions that are geared specifically for this job that increase in difficulty as they go on. So the first one, it's gonna be challenging, but it's the easiest. Then it's gonna get harder and harder. Chat GPT I also want you to give me what the 8 what Ruth from HR should be listening for. So what is the correct answer? We're asking this applicant a question. What is the answer? Or at least an approximate of what we should be listening for. That's going to be for the first four questions. The last two are going to be just testing how they think and their thought process. So they're going to be hypothetical questions, ones that don't actually have an answer, problems that you're not solving. For instance, it could be you show up one day and all of our servers are down. Disaster recovery and our backups are nowhere to be found. They're deleted. What do you do? Correct answer is you turn around, you go home, you find a new job because this place is. But we want to see how they are going to try and assess the situation. So we have those questions. Now all of a sudden we're only interviewing better quality applicants. We're only moving to the second round with the absolute best of the best. From there, what I realized, and this is a problem 99% of companies have is on day one when you start you're filling out HR paperwork. Day two, they expect you to be productive. You don't even know where the bathroom is located by day two. So just because you have rockstar level skills does not mean that they're going to translate and you're going to be a rock star on day one. If they're not going to take the time to train you and onboard you, then your skills don't matter. And this is why you don't have loyalty, you know. So I said great. I want to create a comprehensive two week onboarding and training process and where every day is mapped out. I want a full hour to hour schedule breakdown. By the end the applicant should be have memorized all of these SOPs. They should be familiar with all this, this, this, this and this. And I didn't even know what the requirements would be. Chat GPT did that for me. It mapped out everything. So this way they have 14 days of training and on day 15 now they can hit the ground running. And since then they, they're hiring the, the VP that I, I was working with said it's a nine day difference. It's, they said we're never going back to the old one.

And this is interesting because that's like I've, I've worked with recruiters and stuff for 20 years and that's what they do. However, what you just talked about without even knowing like, like not being an HR professional, you just knew the questions to ask because your little buddy Chat GPT is an HR professional and it is a tech professional and it is a operations professional and all those things. So the real takeaway here for the listeners is that whatever area, it's not about you having expertise, it's about oh, you don't know the question to that. Hey, Chat GPT, what questions should I be asking to develop this thing? Right. It's a beautiful example of.

That's brilliant. What you just said is brilliant. I've worked with clients where and we could talk about the idea of how this is all about nepotism in a minute because that's a really important lesson I think for people. But if I go into A company. And I don't know anything about how to run profit and loss reports and the finances and look at the books. That's not my strong point. I always have somebody do that for me. I just have to ask ChatGPT, what should I be doing? How should I look at this? What am I looking for? You know, make me look like a pro. Tell me the questions I need to ask you to create the prompt recipes. But you often hear people talk about training Chat cbt like, it's an intern, it's a new employee, and it's your job to train them. And I think that's stupid. Nobody takes the time out of their schedule to train a new employee at all. Yeah, you might show them, like, here's how you log in to the CRM. Here's where you do this, like, very little stuff. And if they're an intern, forget it. You're training them on how to get your coffee and how to use the Xerox machine. Nobody trains them like that. I said, I think the idea of it, of thinking of AI as the ultimate Nepo baby makes more sense. Instead of AI or artificial intelligence, we're going to call him Arty. Arty's dad is the owner of this company, the CEO. And Artie is going to very soon be given the keys to the castle. And Artie is going to be your boss. Your job is to train Artie in how to do your job. If you are good and Artie learns the skills to do your job, you're going to be safe. You're going to, you know, Artie's going to love you. You're going to get a promotion. Your job is going to be secure. But if you blow off Artie and he doesn't learn anything from you, your job is gone. You're going to be eliminated. You're on the chopping block. So you need to think of Artie as your future boss. That's going to determine if you're going to have make a lot more money and have a huge career or if you're. You're gone tomorrow. And when I said that to a lot of employees, they kind of, like, their eyes light up and they're like, oh, yeah, no shit. Okay, that makes sense. We got to get on this.

Yeah, this is. And this is an area. Okay. With a restaurant example, there was a tangible number. We did this thing. We created this idea. Well, I sat there and worked with the models, and it created, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of revenue for this company, for the restaurant HR Is one of those areas the. The expense of. Of finding candidates, screening candidates, hiring the wrong candidate. Those. Those are all issues that are. Every. Every serious business is aware that, that. That is an expense associated with getting the right people in the right seats in your company. By you doing that, it doesn't matter.

What your business is. You're going to have to deal with this. I could have taken the hiring process, and if I was working with more restaurants, I can apply that to, let's see, new head bartenders who need to know how to make, you know, 50 different kinds of drinks and be consistent with their pores. And, you know, so we can take that same idea about hiring and training and apply that to literally any kind of a business.

This is like, man, I do this weekly, right? And I. And I do this episode, the podcast weekly. But I. I work with this stuff daily, and I'm talking to people and I'm educating people, and I'm learning about new tools and I'm doing demos and all this kind of stuff. But it never fails. I get somebody on here, and we end up. I'm like, damn, that's a great idea. So if you're listening to this and you're like, why can't I. I'm not that person. I could never come up with those ideas. Just keep listening to the examples, like what Josh is giving and the other guests give, and it'll start to click, and you'll be able to go, oh, wait a minute. Maybe we could. Maybe we could have it. Tell me exactly what I need to. To ask my boss for a raise or to let the wrong employee go or whatever the case might be. So it's about. It's about like, Josh is coming in, he's identifying the issues, and then he's just saying, okay, let's see what the models can do. And then, so even with the MIT certifications and that sort of thing. So for somebody that. And I'm sure you're encountering this because this is your. Your craft now. The. The questions that people are asking. What would you advise somebody who wanted to start to dabble in introducing these types of processes into their business? These types of tools.

Play around with it. Honestly, I love creating GPTs for little, tiny uses around the house there. If you don't know GPT, you need to have chat, GPT Pro or premium, whatever it's called. And they're like, you. You make these little tools for yourself that handle very small things. They're technically bots. But I said, you know what? When I Go out to eat. I want to know exactly what I'm eating. So I said, let me just try this. I want to be able to take a picture of my food and I want to have it give me a full nutritional breakdown. Tell me what's on the plate, tell me the calories, the sodium, the cholesterol. Just like if I'm looking at the back of packaged food, let's see if that's even possible. It absolutely is. I have it and I blow my friends minds. You know, I'm having some friends over. I want to be able to have some nice drinks. Here's a picture of all of my spirits and all of my possible mixers. I want you to tell me every kind of drink I can make up to the highest mixology level or the most basic kind of drink and then guide me through how to actually make up, you know, so you can just play with it. If you want to use it in your business, pick one kind of area or task or you know, and just talk to ChatGPT. Don't be afraid to ask it. Hey, I want to improve my customer service. How can I do that? And then, you know, what do you need to know about my business in order to come up with a strategy for how to improve my business? One of the things that a lot of people don't do is they don't feed the AI enough information. So I always say, what do you need to know about my business, about me, about my product, about my service? What do you need to know for you to excel? Because if I just say, write an email announcing 20% off sale and I give it no other context, it'll write a terrible email, it'll say 20% off will make up a product, it'll make up a link, it'll make up a reason. Yeah, you know, so be very specific and ask it questions, Ask what it needs. It will do as good of a job as possible. It'll do an amazing job if you give it the tools to do an amazing job, period.

And those tools are what the context and the back and forth with it.

Let's say you're in the diet and weight loss industry and you are, you're, you're selling a workout program and you say, write me emails about my weight loss workout plan. It'll do it, but it won't be any good. I want to feed it my website, I want to feed it my PDFs. A trick that you can do is when you bring videos into YouTube, there are certain plugins you can have in the Chrome extension that automatically generate transcripts. Here is the transcript from the video. I want you to study it and analyze it and I want you to create promotional emails that get people excited using the information that you've retained from these transcripts and from these PDFs. So the better of a job you do at feeding it, the better job it will do giving it back to you.

And for those of you who aren't sure how to feed it, do exactly what Josh said. Hey, GPT, what information do you need to give me the best output? And it's going to tell you.

In the chat window at the bottom left, right where you're entering your prompt, there's a little paperclip logo that allows you to upload multiple files. So you know, you can take, and this is how people make customer service bots. You'll take all of your company's documentation about everything customer service related, including recordings of conversations that maybe agents have had and whatnot. And you upload all of them. And you say, you, you know, hey, chatgpt, today you specialize in world class customer service and especially, you know, helping people in who are shopping, customers that are shopping on my online store. Here is every bit of information documentation I have on my company. Here's our link, here's the links to our products, here's conversations. I want you to help us to become the absolute best in the world at customer service.

And then what the models can do is they can now and you can even say if somebody wants to try this and their small business or whatever, then you can say based on the information, the transcripts that I've uploaded, how can we improve what we're, you know, like it's incredible. And I'll give you an example that's very tangible. I used to be associated with a financial publishing company that was doing tens of millions of dollars per year. They reached out to me because they had a great problem. Hey, we had an offer that really landed well with the marketplace and we got a bunch of buyers. But the downside of that was they weren't prepared for that when it came to customer service, right? And they hired a customer, a guy who specialized in world class customer service. And it was, it was a six figure engagement for this individual to come in and work with customer service agents. Now they could have saved a lot of money if they would have gone into GPT and said act like blah, blah, blah, blah blah, because this person has a big body of work and even if they didn't, they could have gotten his Book fed the PDF into it said based on this information, you know, not saying that it would have come out as the answers were to come out as great as the individual themselves. But you could have done a lot of the heavy lifting by using the models with his information and your situation to where maybe that engagement wasn't a six figure engagement anymore. Maybe it was just like, hey, can we get on a couple calls? Right? It's incredible.

And here's the beauty of it. So let's just say that your customer service is usually handled via a web chat, you know, or some kind of back and forth texting. You can, after you fed ChatGPT, you can have it give you the code so that you can actually turn that into a bot that sits there on your website. So when somebody, a customer or maybe someone that has questions about your products wants to ask a question, it feels like it's talking to a real person. It's not a mechanical answer. I got one more quick story about a client that I worked with where I put another $5 million in their pocket. And I did not need to know anything about AI at all other than a little bit of research. So I get recommended to this hotel, which is weird. It's another hospitality business, but they have about 220 rooms. They in their area, there's not many great restaurants. So the, a lot of the locals go there to eat their dinner and stuff. They realized that their kitchen equipment, most of it, was reaching the end of its lifespan or would be in the near future. So they were going to be doing a big overhaul and they want to know, are there AI options out there? And so all I did was do a little bit of research about the kinds of kitchen equipment that is AI powered. A lot of it's coming out of London and Italy and Germany, some of it out of Japan. I'm not really sure why the manufacturing is specializing it overseas, but it is and I saw the capabilities and this stuff is impressive. So for portion control, size control, yes. Deep fried foods that are cooked exactly perfectly, every time the exact same amount of proportions, the oil is as clean and at the exact right temperature. You're not, you're not putting, you know, fish in with fries so you don't get fishy fries. You're making sure that it comes to temperature like you basically would feed the raw ingredients after the everything's battered and ready to be fried, you feed it in and when somebody places the order, the machine takes care of the rest. And what you're left with is the golden finished Product ready for you to be done. There's stuff about managing food control and portion control and all this stuff. And because of the amount of meals that they pump out and the amount of food waste that we were reducing it by and food that was being sent back and all that other stuff, they estimated that this would be about a $5 million difference by the end of 2024 alone. I didn't know any of this stuff. I just did a few minutes of research, probably about an hour of research. I made the connections, I picked up the phone and I called these companies and I said, this is the client I represent. You know, they said, great, we can have stuff, the equipment delivered there on next Monday or whatever the day was. And I said, great. Can we also schedule a time for your installers, your staff to train the kitchen staff and train management? I'm getting other equipment delivered on that same day, so I want to be able to schedule all the training for one afternoon. You know, does 3pm work for you? And how long would it take? So I basically, I just, you know, I did a little bit of legwork.

Yeah.

And that was a $25,000 check I received for that.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I didn't need to know anything about AI.

So for those of you listening, look, can you use it in your business? Of course. Can you use it in your job? Of course. However, if by doing that, it now makes you a desirable candidate in the marketplace to come and do what Josh is doing, come into a business and spend a half hour looking around, asking a few questions, bringing in not the bias or the blindness that the. The existing business has, being that fresh set of eyes that understands how to use these tools, even if it's not like you come in and, oh, this tool does that. Just knowing that. Okay, I've picked out a couple areas. Let me go back to chat. GPT business owner. I've got the next steps right. You don't even have to really. It's not about mastering the tools as much as it is about mastering how to think about using the tools. And I think that the broader examples that Josh has shared with us, everything from digital marketing to hospitality to clothing to all of this is an indication that if you're over there saying, well, it wouldn't work in my industry unless your industry is like, making furniture or cutting trees down. If you're working with any type of knowledge, any type of, like, financials, any type of anything like that. These models, if you're not using them, they're great. Josh, he gave Some great advice. And that advice was just play around with it, there's no harm. And yeah, most of these tools, they have a free version or a trial version where you can go in. And my experience has been, hey, that's a powerful tool. It took me about, you know, a half hour to figure out how to use it. That's it. Right. So no excuses it for all the listeners out there who are still on the sidelines. AI is not an option anymore. It's like.

And the best thing is, is do you have any idea how many thousands or tens of thousands of YouTube videos there are just getting you started?

Yes, yes, great point. And how much those cost? A little bit of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was an example that I heard recently. Anyway, Josh. So I don't know if you're, if your roster is full or if your looking for more clients, but if people wanted to follow what you're up to, I don't know how much content you're producing or anything. I know that you're a doer, I'm not necessarily a talker. How can people plug into what you've got going on? And more lessons like this from you.

Sure. So my consulting agency where I come in and I'd help and work directly with your business or you and get your whole team trained up and install systems you can schedule time for to chat by going to smart aiventures.com and if you are somebody that would rather do a lot of this stuff on your own and you would kind of like to, you know, save some money and just learn how to do this internally. I do have a digital program that walks you that gives you most of these tools or a lot of them. None of the really custom stuff, but stuff that's applicable to most businesses. And you can get that at Robot Revolution AI.

Right. I'm going to put those links in the show notes for everybody so that we've got both of those. Man. Fantastic. I'm glad that we had a chance to talk about this and I know that we didn't intend to turn this into a hospitality or a restaurant conversation, but I'm fascinated because you're the first guest that like when I think of using AI at work, I'm biased and it's knowledge work, it's working with data and information, stuff like that. But there's all these other businesses, these service brick and mortar businesses that like hell yeah, it works for them. I mean, $17,000 on a Monday, which would have been, you know, probably just a couple grand other than your 15 minutes of playing around on chat GPT, that's for a small business and that's transformative. That's like, that's a, that's a brand new business for them. That's fantastic.

So, and the best part is, is that's something you can then copy and paste to every other restaurant.

Yes.

You know, and one of the things that I do and that for the listeners out there, I encourage you to do this. When you come up with your own prompt recipes and your own formulas, you're doing this stuff, you'll realize that so many businesses, no matter what the industry, you might just have to tweak them slightly. So I save all of my recipes and I have a version that is my template version that doesn't ever get touched and a version that I can play around with and I will change out. I'll rephrase things, I'll eliminate stuff if it's not necessary. I'll add stuff if I need it, but I will tweak the same existing one. And when you can do that, not only does it cut your workload down by a huge percent, but it makes the client looks at you like you're the smartest person on the planet.

It's the tools that are doing it. That's the secret. Yeah. That's awesome, man. Thank you so much, Josh, for being a guest here. And Sharon, like what your experiences have been. I know that I took a lot of like, aha moments away from this and I guarantee the listeners have as well. So thank you so much, everybody. Any closing remarks, Josh?

No, no. Oh, the other place you can find me is Friday and Saturday night. I'm dancing on the main stage, the Meat Locker. You mentioned this podcast. You'll get half price lap dance.

I'll see you at the Meat Locker on Saturday. Thanks everybody. 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. Visit their website for a free AI Readiness Assessment and AI Strategy Guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. so thanks to our producer, Evan Desaulnier for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle usingaiatwork and visit www.usingaiatwork.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.