46: Using AI for Business Consulting Strategies with Karl Yeh

This podcast episode is sponsored by chiefaiofficer.com offering training and certification through the International association of Chief AI Officers. Interested in a new career or leveling up your value in the marketplace? Chiefaiofficer.com can help. The following is a conversation with Carl Yau. Carl's the chief AI officer and co founder of a consultancy called Zero to 60 AI. They bridge the gap between AI and traditional industries. As a consultant, Carl focuses on medium sized businesses and multiple industries that happen to be in his local market. In this episode we dive into Carl's unique approach to AI implementation. How he navigates the complexities of personalized AI solutions, the challenges of integrating cutting edge tech into established businesses, and the strategies he employs to drive meaningful efficiency and growth. Carl's insightful perspectives are informed by his hands on experience, giving him a deep understanding of how AI can transform any business from the ground up. 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 everybody. Welcome to the episode. I'm really excited to have Carl as our guest today because he's doing, he's doing AI at a level that most individuals out there aren't. And we were just having this conversation before we went live with this. Like the, the information and the perspective that Carl is sharing and particularly in LinkedIn where I follow him, it's priceless stuff because it's not coming from opinion, it's coming from, hey, I'm in the trenches, I'm dealing with clients all the time. Here's what's really happening. Here's discoveries I've made by being put into challenging situations with clients. So I'm really looking forward to sharing Carl's perspective with everybody today. So Carl, as we get started, why don't you just let everybody know who you are, where you're at? What, like what does a day look like in the life of an AI expert?

Yeah, you know, I, I, I never ever consider myself necessarily an expert. More of like on the same journey as everybody else and maybe just been there a little bit longer and you know, had some really interesting engagements with, with clients and people and I just want to bring that back. So I'm the chief AI officer and co founder of a company called Zero to 60 AI and really our focus is to help businesses get the benefits of artificial intelligence and cut kind of through the hype. And we do it through strategy, education and implementation. And really for us we were a little bit unique in that our target is more medium sized businesses. So anywhere between under 500. Ideally we do deal with enterprises, but very, very more focused on the medium sized businesses. Also traditional businesses, oil and gas, construction, manufacturing, flooring, real estate. Any of the industries that most people would think those people are like the laggards, the last ones who are going to adopt some of these tech. And I think like it's a space that I feel there's an opportunity because not very many people go there. Everyone's trying to target the enterprise and tech companies and, and so on. And so kind of the day in the life of if we're either prospecting, meeting different businesses, municipalities, different organizations or actually doing the implementation. So AI automations, digital assistance training, doing strategy work, building roadmaps and really doing what we're finding is AI is very personalized, personalized to the individual, personalized to the team, personalized to maybe the company and personalized to the industry. And what I mean by that is the same two people in an organization, same role in the same industry, could be using AI very differently because it helps them in a very specific way where you can't just drag and drop this type of process and this type of tool exactly the same way. It's very personalized, very tailored. And that's what we're finding in these industries. You can't just drop the same automation. Like I, I see a lot of like posts about this. Automation is going to get you $5,000, $10,000. We're like, well no, because that necessarily automation doesn't fit with how this business, how this unit operates. You can't just drop that, which means it's a brand new engagement. So and taking that into account, especially in our target industry, yeah it's, it's very hands on with the, with the, with the clients, especially those in those industries who don't have, who aren't in the AI bubble, who at times don't even care that whatever the latest AI tool is like hey, can you help me meet my margin? Yeah, I don't care about Voice Canvas, I don't care about that. Like could AI help me improve this? And that's really the day in the life of, in our focus before we.

Go on, like how did you arrive here? What were you doing prior to November of 2022 when GPT 3.5 was released?

So a little bit of history. I don't know if you remember 2018, Sundar Pichai Google IO I remember I was seated to. I was at a company called Brookfield and they. He did a demo on stage where he reserved, I don't know, party of 10, I think, and used AI to call a restaurant. Do you remember that? Yes, yes, I remember where I was. And I was like, that is gonna change the world. And it's mind blowing before everybody's X post is mind blow blowing. And here's 10 ways it's just changed the world or whatever that is. Yeah, So I remember that. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. I gotta really dig deep into this. So dig deep. Learned about DeepMind, learned about all the different players. And at the time it was more of just slowly doing it, kind of testing some tools. GPT2, the first version of. Of. Of stable diffusion. And me wrong. You knew right away none of this was usable. This is. I was like, oh, we're still a decade away. Yeah. And so you kind of played with it and you're like, oh, this looks like all claymation. Very funny stuff. Then obviously, November 22, November 30, like, just happened. And it got me thinking, wait a minute, this is. This has opportunities to really change. So I started creating some content around it. But then businesses asked me, hey, could you come and speak to some of this?

Sure.

And then businesses started saying, hey, could you build some of what you're talking about? And at that time, I took my first rag course from a guy named Mayo, and he was one of the very first ones to actually, you know, build Python. Like, oh, this is interesting. So we built some of that for some clients. And it started snowballing to the point, I think my business part. I met my business partner. We've been working together since like, I don't know, 2013, 14, but really made it official because he sold his company and he said, okay, we got to go all in. And that was like last November, because we were on a roadshow since July or June last year doing bits and pieces. And even I was like, I'm not even sure, but he kind of saw it. He's been an entrepreneur, entrepreneur for, I don't know, 35, 40 years, multiple businesses. And he wanted to go, but I. So I said, okay, let me give a date. Let me target a date that let's go all in and let's kind of build it towards there. And yeah, that date passed and we're full go. And we've been busy ever since.

So what. What were you. If I were to talk to you in 2018 and said, what do you do? What would that answer have been?

So at that time I just. We just sold or just sold a SaaS company and I was actually working with. I made a kind of a deal with the vice president of marketing at the time at Brookfield where I'm like, hey, I'll work on your mostly marketing operations like really into the digital. And we were working on that because I really didn't know what I was wanting to do. I was like, well, do I start a new company? Do I. Because I'm, you know, I have a background in history and marketing. So like do I do there? So yeah. And that's where I was in 2018.

So now though, the work that you do with your clients isn't marketing specific.

No.

So you're doing full enterprise evaluation of AI application and.

Yes.

And one of the things that you mentioned when we were getting before we turned on the recorder was that most if not all of your clients, you see them in person, you're. They're regionally specific, which is kind of unique.

Yeah, well it actually turned out because so my business partner has been a. So I'm in Calgary, Alberta and he has been in the business. So he owned a video agency that has worked. That's his target market, the mid sized non traditional market, heavily in the Calgary area. And then just all the connections that I've made, like for example Brookfield Residential Local builder in Alberta, even the tech company I worked for, Benevity headquartered in Calgary, even though it's more of a global company. But then we thought one of the easiest ways we to get the message out there or wanted to showcase ourselves is the local chambers, the local industry associations, the Rotary clubs. My business partner just opened the door. It's like hey, present here, let's, let's present here, let's present here. So yeah, just ended up that what we found is when we go local, it's awesome just meeting, going to these businesses, learning what they do or you know, whether you, you've known them or not. And just sitting in real life is just, I don't know, there's something a little bit to it than doing a virtual meeting. And what we found is we close much higher in person than virtually. It's not even close like sitting down with people and talking about a high. There's just something about it and just.

Works for us, you know. That's a path that has been mimicked by several of our chief AI officers. They started in the local environment, Better Business Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, economic development councils in their areas. And that turned into honestly more business than they would ever generate from LinkedIn ads or being a thought leader and all that stuff. So I find it fascinating because I've come from a marketing background as well. And with marketing, you think scale. Yeah, Right. And this is not scalable.

Right.

Like, like Calgary is only so big, but it keeps you busy. Now one of the things, it's this concept that I've been kind of noodling on for a few months now. And I see it like in generative AI right now, for lack of a better analogy, it's kind of like everybody who is like a you or like a me, we're holding a lottery ticket. There's going to be a lot of money made in this space by being the person who is bringing the knowledge, bringing the implementation to these companies. However, what I see is that a lot of people who are good at this, the natural path for them is to go and do consulting. Now the challenge with consulting is scale, like bandwidth. Right. There's only so many Carls that can go out there and do this and what ends up happening. And right now it's, it's awesome because there's not a lot of people like you out there. Every day that changes. Six months from now there'll be more. A year from now there'll be even more.

Right.

It's a very inefficient market and people like you and some of our chief AI officers are able to take advantage of that because like, people don't know where to go, oh, he's local, let's talk to him. Right. So how are you going to, I guess, get the most juice out of the squeeze here from this fact that you're early in a lot of blue ocean, but that it won't be that case forever. How are you going to get the most out of your business? Result or rewards from your business?

I think there's, there's that because of that history in, in, in, in marketing. Right. So you kind of understand if you are top of mind, whenever companies are ready to buy or ready to engage, ready to have a conversation, everything that you've done to that point, they'll remember. So whether we, this podcast, whether our own podcast, our own show or YouTube show, creating the content and what. Because we're trying to do this locally, all the presentations we do, all, even our webinars are very local. I don't really care about reach outside of Alberta. It's like, let's target these specific companies. And what we find is a lot of them like there's people in them that do engage in LinkedIn a lot, but most of them, there's no way we would have reached them through any of the markets outside of talking and referrals and being part of those commerce. Like, for example, like, oh, the tourism head, head of the hotel association. Well, the only reason we knew him was because we presented at a rotary and he's part of the Rotary. Like, no way LinkedIn would hit that. No way. None of this would have, would have worked. And, and so to us, from a blue ocean perspective, I think we have a little bit of time because of our target industries, because of we're focused on local and we know that there may. I haven't seen very many consultants, and not that there won't be, but I feel a lot of them, the consulting is. I don't know if you've noticed this. A lot of marketing agencies and even people are targeting marketing agencies to add in AI components to them. But we're like, that's fine because that's just still marketing. Yeah. This is why we hit every single piece of the. Every single thing, every single operation department in. In companies. And the second thing too is what we find is a lot of companies say they do AI. They're just like, oh, yeah, we have this taken care of. What do you mean? It's like, oh, we bought this company that's helping us with AI. I'm like, oh, that's amazing. And that's what we're finding is like, like products are reaching them. Yeah. So it's like, oh, the home builder product. Here's a product to help AI. Specific product to help home builders. I'm like, that's cool. Do that. Here's more of a broad operation that you can use. And we can. I think what we're trying to position ourselves to is being that AI advisor to these companies, not necessarily a salesforce or HubSpot implementer, because we know that I don't know what the tools will be in three months. So what our goal is, hey, let's give you a foundation of what we call, like the. Call the 10 to 40%. Could we increase your efficiency or productivity by 10 to 40%? Because we know that's reliable and that is scalable. That's not automating everything. That's not taking over anybody's jobs. That's more of, hey, making your business use AI really efficiently. Could we do that and then maybe test some of the new crazy stuff? If it works for your company, but it's still grounded in hey, how is AI actually helping your business meet your revenue targets, pipeline targets, customer service targets. And it's still grounded on that because the presidents, the CEOs, the executives we talk to, that's still their focus. They're like, oh, this is because unless you ground it in that then you're just testing a bunch of AI tools, which is fun but doesn't do anything.

So this is interesting. So you're not necessarily coming in with AI being the message. It's more 10 to 40% optimization, enhancement, efficiency. That's more of the message with AI being the vehicle that supports the 10 to 40% as compared to companies thinking, hey, I don't know what it's going to do, but we need AI, right? Like two different stories.

Exactly, but. And we've run into companies that have thought AI could solve their problem. And we said two things. One, no, because your expectation of what we can deliver, yes, we could take your money and take the contract, but it won't help you because you have more of a strategy problem. You have a marketing problem, you have a business operation problem, you have an HR problem. AI can't. AI is not good enough. Now I think unless we have AGI, that's not going to help you. So today we recommend you go with this marketing company or I would suggest you do this and bring us in maybe later because that's more important. The other thing we can we do is, hey, we have this business problem. Here's a, we think can AI do this? And we're like, well that custom build wise, we could. And then we ask our devs, what do you think it'll take to build this thing? Not 200k, 500k today. And then so we bring that number back and we say you could build this, but because AI is moving so fast, don't build anything. We Recommend you wait 3 months, 6 months, because most likely something's going to be there. Like for example, Cohere's new multimodal AI search. There was one company we worked with, they have a problem, just like anybody with trying to find certain image files in a directory that been there for 20 years and folders. And the problem with building or moving it to a DAM system is you kind of still have to tag it. So but like this thing just solves that because it can recognize your images. Maybe not a hundred percent, but 60%, 40% gets you enough of the way that you don't have to dig for an hour trying to find the specific thing to recreate. So that's what I mean, like, you may just want to hold off just a little bit.

It makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

So let's say you present at the business luncheon. Where are you starting? Do you have kind of like a standard, like, hey, guys, this is the 101 stuff, or do you tailor it to the industry? Or where do you start when you're doing a broad group?

A broad group. So I've seen so many presentations that do the 101, and that's cool. Like, they show a bit of use cases, a bit of like, here's where it is. I was actually at a. We got invited to a major brand conference in Banff, and there was one session I just wanted to attend. It was. It was called AI and AI powered Advertising. I was like, oh, I want to see what the. But that whole session was. I think 15 minutes of that session session was talking about how AI is like the car and electricity and, you know, Ford and all that stuff. I'm like, that's cool. But I need to know how this is actually useful to the business. So that's what we do. Our presentation is, hey, we're going to show you today actual business use cases. I want you to think about it from the lens of your business. Is there data involved? You know, is there repetition involved? Is prediction involved? But look at it from the lens. And then we show them a variety of use cases from our clients. So it's like, here's this use case, here's AI research, here's some digital assistants, here's some. Here's a custom build, here's voice and video that our clients are actually using. I want you. And then what happens is those president CEO operations people start thinking of, oh, could you do this? Could you do this? Could you do this? And that's literally just a check mark of all the things that we could potentially pilot with that company. And that's it. That is a majority of our presentation is demoing business use cases instead of trying to 101 it. Because the people that we talk to don't really care. Sorry, don't care. They don't.

Makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

They just want the result.

Yeah. So it's like, how can this thing help me launch a new product? And for example, so we were at a meeting yesterday, I was like, oh, so you're telling me that through voice and video I don't need to travel to Lethbridge, Edmonton? You know, Brooks, I can just have an AI avatar and use notebook. Lm to just, you know, talk about this new product launch and just send it and then use a digital assistant to have people ask questions and train people up. Yes. That is a legit business use case for the tools. Right. That's straight. Oh, and then. Oh, we can make it fun. You. And then we showed them a little bit about act one. Oh, we can make it fun because our mascot is this. And we can just upload like. Yeah, sure. And that's what the. That's what it means by actually, like, business use case.

Yeah. So when you've done the presentation, the. The CEO or the decision maker comes up to you afterwards and says, hey, can I get a minute? How do those conversations typically go?

They typically go, hey, could you present to our team, our executive team? Could you present to our leaders? Could you. And we want to, you know, can you tailor it a little bit to our business? And it's really kind of the same presentation. We do add some tailored bits to. Depends on what industry. Yeah. And then they start asking us the exact questions that you said, like, could it do this? Could we do this? Could we do this? And then from there we. The one thing we try to avoid is trying to build things out right away, because everyone wants to get to that. But you still have to have the strategy bit. So our really focus is, hey, let's deep dive into your departments. We'll just press record whether it's virtual or in person. We'd like to do in person. We'd like to meet the people. We just sit there, ask all these questions about how their process works. They tell us it's all recorded. And once we have that, we actually want to build the company a strategy. Our roadmap of what we think. Plus, in agreement with everybody, let's start with three to five pilots. When we say pilots specifically because we don't want to scare anybody and we want to ensure that if it doesn't work, it's super simple to fold up. But if it does work, then we have another conversation. How would you like to scale this? Do you scale it in phases so we aren't overwhelmed, the company isn't overwhelmed, and they get some people to actually work on it. That's for most people, lower risk, but has high potential. And that's usually where we start.

So how much of what they ask of you is upskilling their own staff as compared to you coming in and black boxing.

Depends on the business. And we always ask this too. What is your level of AI use? Because it varies from company to company. Company. And then what we want to do is enable the the champions or the advocates in their business because we want to work closely with them. Because none of this will work if there isn't a, a subject matter expert and there's someone who's constantly on people talking about AI in that company. So once we, once we connect with that person or you know, build those people, then it's more of does the company actually want us? We recommend this. Part of the our strategy doc is hey, we'll include one or two training sessions with your team. We can definitely talk about more just to level up, whether it's a simple prompting, maybe advanced prompting, maybe it's understanding different use cases, how to think about using AI in, in the business or showcasing them. Different, different tools, different processes, other than probably what they're just using, which is most of the time just chatgpt free too, by the way.

Yeah, yeah. 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 chiefai officer.com insiders to accelerate your AI journey. Now back to the episode. So you come into the companies, you start with strategy. What does and I know that we talked about like some process mining to identify some pilot projects, but do you do a sit down with the company just to make sure that they're clear on where they want to go with or without AI?

Of course, because we sit down with their presidents and the business heads or the department heads and really it's more of hey, what is you, what's your business goals? What are your Quarterly, what's your QBRs, what's your annual goals? What, what are the things that from a business perspective you are focused on? Where do you think AI can help? And let's kind of bridge that and have that conversation because sometimes the, a big thing for us is managing expectations because we have run into sometimes where the client think like has this grand expectation of what AI could do. Probably fed by the hype. Yeah, probably fed by watching a lot of movies in the past too and thinking that certain tools can do this stuff. And it's like, no, it actually can't do what you're just saying. We're still a little bit away. We can piecemeal that entire process that you just described. But again, let's Just start with a 10 to 40% and kind of incrementally work our way up rather than try to promise the entire thing. And at the same time we all have to realize these tools are changing and most companies are at the front end of applying implementation. Yeah, obviously they're not. You're going to have the good with the bad and just as long as they know that they're more acceptable to taking the risk rather than trying to promise them that this is going to be the outcome. It's like, no. This is why there's extensive testing internally. If we deploy tools or automations, then we also extensive monitoring at the very least for the first month to make sure those it's stable enough to do that 10 to 40%, you know, and.

That the first time I saw that 10 to 40% was actually from a post that you did. And I like that a lot because what we teach our chief AI officers is that when you go into that, that sit down, arithmetic's not an opinion. If you've got skeptical individuals in there and you, and you give them the hype, they can be like ah, but if I can show you data that says in the oil and gas industry and our examples, this is what's happened and real estate, this is what's happened. It's not my opinion anymore. Right. So we always encourage them to go in with some sort of a forecasted ROI. The number that we tell them is 20% because any, any process KPI that gets AI going to have like 20, 20% is safe. This 10 to 40 range, I like that a lot. Do you, do you feel that you're underselling it when you come in at 10 to 40% or do you think that that's because if I said look, 100% improvement they're going to say right, of course, yeah. So do you feel that, that 10 to 40 is like a no brainer or that you're going to blow that out of the water or.

No, because we've consistent ever every single one of our clients, it's been consistent the program, there are been outliers. There are certain things that, oh, that's 80%, that's pretty good. There's certain things that clients are like, well it's only 5% but it's actually, it works out. But we're consistently in that range. And where I actually got that is when I was still working at a SaaS company, we, we were actually talking with the OpenAI product team and I was, I, I was talking about this 10 to 40. It's like, hey, what's the, is it 10 to 40%? Is that consistent? And they're like, that's exactly the spot where we like to tell our enterprise clients, like this is where AI actually works today, that 10 to 40. Because sometimes there's those out, there's really big expectations. Yeah. And when you get there, you get in trouble because that's where, oh, this doesn't work. This sucks. It doesn't do what I want it to do because you're trying to automate more than what the tool can reliably do. It may be able to do it once. Yeah. But you have to, can you repeat it so many times and scale it at that level? That's what I mean.

So that 10 to 40, when you present that to the decision makers, is their reaction skeptical? Is their reaction, like, are they underwhelmed by that number because they think that AI is going to come in and do, you know, backflips or what is the, what is that interaction like when you share that with them?

I provide the 10 to 40 percent one as setting the context. But really back to our presentation, when we showcase all the business use cases in their mind, they've already kind of done that. That's why I set the contacts. And then when they see it, they could either it falls perfectly within that 10 to 40 or they have bigger expectations we want to bring right back. They're like, no, we can't do that. Come back. And we always say, hey, this is, is why we start with the pilot. Can we start there? Can we start slow first and kind of build on top of whatever we're doing? Because again, AI is moving so fast. But your company is not, is not open AI, so that's not your goal. And that's usually where we, we begin.

The decision making. Like, you know, when you, the, the bigger the business, the longer the sales cycle. Typically for something like a consulting package or introducing new software or whatever. Are you finding, and with your background in software, I'm sure you've got plenty of experience with that. Are you finding that the AI conversation, does it move faster, like the decision making, or is it still one of those things? We need to evaluate this. Thank you for your time.

That depends on if they have a legal team. That depends on if they have an IT team.

Yeah.

And, but this is why we want to play in the 500 employee or less. That's why we want to play in medium size. Because whenever we work with enterprise, there's a lot more people, even if The CEO is like, hey, I want this execute, I want this. It doesn't matter. There's so many things that have to go into it. And then security wise, you have to have a conversation about, hey, data privacy, security for custom builds.

Yeah.

Do you want to build local? Do you or are you, how comfortable are you using the APIs? How comfortable are you using the use case? And this is so new for a lot of companies that it'll always default to, oh, the typical IT buying process is this. Right? How come you're only charging this? Because we, we charge maintenance, but it's like that seems a little too low. We're like, yeah, but we're only on three month cycles and we want you to, we actually want you to review what happened because I don't know what's going to happen in three months and the solution we agreed upon to implement that could potentially change. And I want to make sure you as a company have the flexibility to move rather than. We've signed a deal, like a Microsoft deal that we're stuck and now we've stuck with the tool and now we're handcuffed and we can't do what we want to do. So we try to be as, we try to get the companies as flexible as possible and we find that people like it because they're not bound to. It isn't like a typical product where like let's say a HubSpot, you have to sign and you're stuck with it for at least a year, maybe two. Well, we're not, we don't want to do that. We want to be super like, oh, we'll switch, we'll switch, we'll switch because that's where AI is. But that's very, very different process that a lot of companies are. It's very new to them in this entire. And we, we're trying to help them guide it, but we find that is we're not trying to handcuff a company and ensure revenue for our company. That's really not how we work. And I think it's a new business model too because if you think about agencies, what better way you want that stability, hence you want your retainer. Yeah, we're like, yeah, but AI doesn't work like that, so why would we do that? And so we have to adapt to the new world. How the, you know, this industry works too.

You know, that brings up an interesting point especially, you know, for the AI consultants out there. How do you bill for this stuff? Because, right, because like as a, when I was Doing strategy consulting, I would spend X number of hours for X number of dollars.

Right.

But with this, I can go in with the right prompts and get the same result and maybe a 30 minute session instead of an 8 hour session. How are you guys first off, what is that conversation looking like when you're introducing your pricing and how are you justifying your pricing and yet still feeling like you're being compensated for the value that you've got, not the hours you spent?

Yeah, and we've had that a couple times too. We've, we've met a couple of businesses that again, back to the. Who are like, hey, this solution is going to be this many thousands. And the person's like, oh, can we do that in H? I'm like, what is H? Hundreds? I was like, I kind of laughed. I was like, no, because. And I think with the audience of chief AI officers, right, they're not just necessarily paying for you to develop a strategy using ChatGPT or a custom GPT that you've developed. No, it's everything that you've learned that you're ideally continuing to learn. Yeah, all the knowledge, that's what they're paying for. Yes, they could go out and build their own AI chatbot, no problems. But can they do it in a way that understands the custom instructions, that understands your privacy, understands vector database? Which one's better for this specific use case, custom build, and can they maintain it at the level that again, reliably works from a 10 to 40% range? That's what they're paying for. And we try to make that known based on the conversation and just how, you know, the business use cases and making sure we connect it back to, to the businesses. So from a, from a charge perspective, we usually charge, we obviously charge for the strategy component, the roadmap and the training, but that also contains us physically going to the company, the departments and having these two three hour discussions and then building the plan, but also recommending the pilots and having that roadmap because sure, we will use AI to develop like, you know, that first draft or whatever draft. But it, but what you're paying us for is everything that we've learned or continuing to learn added to as context to that, tailored to that business. And then from there, because again, back to position, we want to be that company's AI advisor. Not necessarily just here's a bunch of.

Tools in a transaction. Yeah. One of the things that we talked about early on was you were sharing kind of some perspective on people internally, their expectations, when and you mentioned managing expectations with a leadership team. But what are some of the things that you're seeing when you go into the companies and you're working? You've already had the conversation with, with the decision makers and they're like, okay, let me introduce you to the department heads. And department heads get their teams together and you start talking. What are you, what are you, what are you being most surprised about? I guess as far as how those conversations are going and people's aptitude and understanding of what's possible.

Usually those meetings are less about. And we will get asked this because we, we preface the meeting by saying we're not here necessarily to talk about AI solutions. We just want to know your process and we want to know any, let's talk about your, the boring, the mundane and the things that you really hate doing. But you'd have to do it week in, week out, month in, month out, quarter, quarter, let's talk about that. And that usually gets people going like, I hate doing this, I hate doing this. We have to do this, we have to do this. And then it's, it's a lot of, like just a lot of frustration about what. And sometimes it's not even in our scope. And this is where we start finding, hey, you actually don't have an AI, like, yeah, this is, this is more of a strategy. This is not, well, how about. And sometimes we get kind of, we try to get away from that. We don't want to be part of that frustration and the venting. We just want to sit there and listen and see what are their top processes that we can alleviate. 10 to 40% on. That's what we're really listening for. But it's a good way to understand what is, what are the issues. And then even we've even solved issues where, oh, when we met with the next group, we just said, hey, did you know this group has this issue? And they're like, oh, we didn't know that. And we're like, okay, maybe we should just talk and have that conversation that has nothing AI related. That's just you talking to each other. So that's. And most of the time the processes are exactly what you would think of any, any company. So there, there was one company that we met with, it's an adult themed entertainment company. So. And they were like, they were asking us if we could enable AI to do the craziest things. There's one request where he's like, so you take our president and the president is like this older gentleman, right? And he's like, yeah, could you make AI take his clothes off? And everyone just looked and we're like, what? And I was like, I'm not sure. And they're like, we want to do research on these specific keywords. And like, I don't know if you're going to pass the guardrails for those keywords, but when we actually started digging deep, they're like, every single company. I hate this email that I have to do. I have. I hate this reporting that I have to do every week. I don't even know where these numbers are coming from. Like any other business the exact same. So we always hear the exact same. And it's like, oh, but back to the. They do it differently. So you can't just apply the same solutions. Like, but our, our process is this, this, this, this, this. Oh, okay. So that's what we're listening for. Right. And that's a surprise is it's not surprising. Some of the processes are, are definitely head scratchers. Like, oh, that's. But just like any business, you've had these processes for years. Decades. Yeah, they're not going to be.

Quick question. And I'm like, nobody says, why do we do it this way? They're just like, oh, that's.

That's how I got it. Yeah. Yeah.

Interesting. It's got nothing to do with AI. It's got to do with the process.

Yeah, we just talk about that and they get. There's. Any business will have these frustrates. Yeah, it's like part of it. So it's kind of a fun conversation to have because sometimes they work themselves out too because they kind of talk and talk and talk to them.

They haven't really talked about them before. You asking questions.

Yeah, we just sit there and press record and listen to this stuff.

Interesting. So you're. What I'm hearing is that there are universal activities that occur in business. Hr, finance, marketing, sales, operations, blah, blah, blah, blah. That every company does those things, but they do them a little differently. Do you guys. Have you, have you identified patterns to where, you know, hey, when we walk into a company, we should probably start with this department first and then have the conversation here because that's going to inform the rest of the conversations we.

Have sometimes in the same industry, but not all the time because sometimes the, like the CEO or the president has already something in mind. Like, hey, we have this really big issue with accounting because we keep doing this and we really hate it. And if you could just solve that, that would solve so many. And then you see a bunch of accountants do this, you're like, we really hate this. And it's like, oh, okay. Has nothing to do with any other thing we talked about in another company, but.

Right.

It's just a big issue for them. And we're like, if we could solve it 10 to 40%, they're like, 10% that would help us. And that's enough to, okay, let's dig in. Let's see if there's a solution that we can try. And most of the time, there usually is an AI opportunity to help them. And that's where we want to start. Because then once you scale it, then it's like, oh, sometimes in my mind I have like, hey, this is really cool use case. But I never bring it out until we've been the foundation of, oh, that's a cool use case. Now that you kind of know how AI works, you're kind of understanding what do you think of this? And it has a bigger impact because, like, they connect the dots much better.

Right? What is that? That learning curve, how long is that normally are you seeing? It's taking the executive teams or the decision makers for them to go. AI can do everything to. Then they have this understanding. They're witnessing what's happening in their own company because of what you're doing with their employees and their process. And then they're starting to, like, when they walk the dog, make their own connections or when they're, you know, driving the car thinking about this stuff. How long is that usually taking for people?

It varies and it depends on the role because sometimes we get an email or, or, I don't know, at Slack Message. Hey, I had a really cool idea. Yeah. This, this, this, this. And sometimes it's like, we would have never thought about it because we're not in the space, like, hey, let's take a look. Or yeah, that's not happening for like 20 years. Yeah, that's. That's a really. I don't even know what that even is, but you will never know. But what's really neat is they're actually thinking about it. And yes, they've seen it, but they need to see the actual business use case. They can't just see a bunch of tools that they're using. It has to come back because they have to see the easiest return on investment is the hours. Oh, I noticed that Kim Rea has 10 more hours this month because of this. That might be so small, but because the CEO sees that EA has 10 more hours and can do 10 more hours of work that is that direct impact that they wish. Whenever they have marketing agencies or other agencies, they can see that direct connection. That's what we're looking for right away.

And then they also start saying, well if she can do that and he can and they can and they can't and they start running those numbers and go, yes. Oh yeah, get Carl in my office asap.

Yeah. So like this is where like hey, we need, can you save us more hours on this and this and this. Right.

So Carl, for those who are listening. And again this, the theme of this podcast really was about the, the art and craft of being an AI consultant. And if you need somebody to tell you you're an expert, I'm telling you you're an expert. So embrace the mantle, please. But what would you tell somebody who has learned this stuff? They've had their career and they're starting to see opportunities that come from being that recognized AI expert in either their business or their industry. Where would you tell them to start? As you know, if they're launching that AI consultancy or AI practice.

I was listening to, I don't know if you ever heard of his. He's actually starting his own AI course on it. I love all his content. His name is Gianluca d'. Amaro. He's from, I think he lives in Barcelona. He has his own AI course. He's training a bunch of people. But what he said is, and it resonated to hey, if you're starting and if you, you know, you're in deep into this stuff, one go out and build something. It could be an automation, could be, you know, a free chatbot, Go out and build a custom GPT and once you have that now go out to, I'm sure most people would know a friend, a neighbor, a someone, a family member who has some sort of business and ah, go out and hey, could we try do exactly what we talked about but on a very, very smaller scale, single problem, one pilot mini and try to build that or try to strategize around that. Don't do it for charge because this is something that then will get you thinking in that way and then you'll, you'll start to learn about business and so on. This is a very, this isn't a new technique. This is what I would have recommended to anybody who let's say wanted to start a. Delivering Google Ads maybe a decade ago. Go find that small business, help that person do it for free and get the reference, get the referral. Because once you get the referral Then you can do a lot more. But you've got to actually do and go in there. And that's to me the easiest way to start.

Love it. Now you mentioned, you know that you do a lot of local presentations for business groups and that sort of thing. How did you. Did you just reach out to them and say, hey, does your audience want to know more about using AI in their business?

You won't believe how many industry associations, chambers, rotaries are starving for someone to present to their group that's not them. Because it's always hard to find different people. And it's easy because when you say AI, it's in the sphere enough, that's like, oh, and usually especially for rotaries and industry associations because they're usually talking to themselves and maybe it's a little bit different now. They may have one or two speakers. They still love to have more of a conversation. And you being part of that. Because if they're always looking for speakers and they're always kind of talking about the exact same thing, then this is a little bit of fresh air. And so that's one definitely look at that. But also something simple as, yeah, just sending notes out. So I know a couple people in like another. A couple people who, who are kind of doing the same thing we do in like Vancouver and stuff. And they would just, they just reached out to I think like this Calgary, I mean BC Transit or TransLink. And they just got a meeting. So I was like, there's so many businesses, but don't try to go with the most obvious. There's a bunch of like dental offices, there's a bunch of dental associations, college of physicians, places where you would think they're the most. Why would I actually go reach them? It's like, yeah, because there's a whole bunch of doctors and dentists and college and surgeons and people there. Like, what are those places that don't really come to mind when you think of AI? Yeah, even like rec associations.

Sure.

Because just like any, any business still has business, there's still a business. They have those issues and AI is so prevalent they'd love someone to help them out. And don't lead with AI, just lead with hey, 10 to 40, can we make your business more efficient and productive? I love that I have yet to see a business that says no.

Carl, this has been fantastic and man, I am excited about you being more involved in kind of the message and the chief AI officer community, like just in general for those and everybody. I want to tell you, like I was telling Carl, before we got on here how much I appreciate his perspective that he shares in LinkedIn. I don't know where else you might share but I see you primarily on LinkedIn. It's, it's pure wisdom when it comes to AI's participation and impact in business. Non technical.

Right.

Like he's not getting into the weeds on the technical stuff. And if you're looking for, I'll just say thought leadership on AI and business. If you're not following Carl, I would say that you're, you're missing out on a huge free education just from your posts. So outside of LinkedIn, is there any other place where if people want to plug into your brilliance where they can find you?

Yeah, no, I think more so hey, follow along in our journey and, and I think so I do a lot of the same content on TikTok so you can find me there. And we actually just launched our show, it's called the AI accelerator for Business show because we wanted to really give that. Me, my co founder just have those conversations about taking AI and actually providing value to business and how they can reach their goals using AI. And we, and if you're trying to who it's not for is if you want to get the latest news, probably we won't be talking about it.

Yeah, same here.

But what we will talk about is maybe a week or two or month or three later we're like oh, how has this tool, let's say canvas. We all haven't even talked about that. How applicable could this be for business? How could this new thing. Because there is no way we'd know how the impact of whatever new thing that comes out on day one takes time. Yeah, it's ridiculous. You can have these takes of it will change this industry. We'll do this. And it's like you don't know, you don't know how businesses will adopt this. We all thought Copilot, everybody thought Copilot was the greatest thing on earth, but it's not. And companies are like why did we buy this? Yeah, marketing. You've got Microsoft's got to pay their marketing team or whoever because they're just lining up contract after contract. But like you got to think about do you really, really want to have an AI tool for a year? Didn't you want to test it out first to see what your adoption is before signing the lucrative deal? And I guarantee you Microsoft wants you to sign the deal. They're not going. They may give you a trial but like they want they needed to sign a deal, too. And then what's crazy is they make you send the deal, then they send you a survey. And then it's like, oh, here's a report from Microsoft that 77% of companies are using AI. Like, I, we talked about that.

We're like, really?

Because the companies we talk. I'm seeing. Yeah. And we're talking to these business every day. So, yeah, there's something there. It doesn't, it doesn't match.

Well, I'm excited to subscribe to your show. You've already. The episodes are being released now.

Yeah. So we've, you know, for. On the podcast side, we, you know, whatever podcast you platform you listen to, Spotify, Amazon Music. We've got our first three episodes there on YouTube. We've got our first, we published our first episode. The other two, I'm trying to stagger them out, but we, we've done, we've recorded six. Uh, we're going to record another three to five more. We're really trying to keep this weekly and trying to just focus on, on the business element and how that can help.

I can guarantee our audience will be big consumers of that. Carl, thank you so much, man. I'm looking forward to continuing to support what you guys are doing. And again, I appreciate you sharing your perspective and your time with the audience here. I have a mad respect for what you're doing, man.

Oh, thank you very much, Chris.

Thank you so much, everybody. We'll see 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. 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.chiefai officer.com. so thanks to our producer, Evan Des, for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle using AI at work and visit www.using aiatwork.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.