AI Workflows: How to Get Started

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Podcast, helping you put AI to work.

And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators and business owners who want to know how to use AI. Today I'm going to be joined by Christopher Brock and we're going to talk about AI workflows. We're talking about using AI to replace repetitive tasks. By the way, I'm Elzner on Facebook and ikestelsner on X Twitter. Also, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcast. Appreciate so you don't miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Christopher Brock, helping you simplify your AI journey.

Here is this week's expert guide.

Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Christopher Brock. If you don't know who Chris is, he's the host of ChatGPT for Business and Life, the largest Facebook group focused on ChatGPT with more than 260,000 members. He's also the founder of Primary Hosting, a brokerage for small businesses who are looking for app and web hosting. And he's the founder of AI Online Classroom, the source for video based AI learning. Chris, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Good. Thanks for having me, Michael.

I'm super excited that you're here, Chris. Today, Chris and I are going to explore how to get started with AI workflows. Now, some of you might be like, what is that? Don't worry, we're going to get to that in a minute. But first, I'd love to hear your story. Chris, how in the world did you get into this AI space? Start wherever you want to start.

Great. So I've been working in tech for the better part of 15 years. My first technology project I built was actually at my college. I built something for student life using like WordPress. And this has been over 15 years ago. But being able to build something that I didn't really create, I just sort of combined. But it made an impact. Definitely influenced my entire career. I have a great story that I'm happy to share, like my background. But how did I get into AI? I saw that it was a transformational event when I used ChatGPT for the first time. And I was in that very end of November of 2022, first week of December, and it was like this miracle dropped onto my computer and I was able to do so many things that I wish I was able to do for my entire career. It was almost like going into Star Trek in a sense. So it was like this future that was right here, knowing that it was going to have such an impact, and I thought it was going to be ubiquitous. I started the Facebook group ChatGPT for Business and Life because I realized that AI wouldn't just impact business, it would be in our life. It would just permeate everything around us in all facets. So with that, I started the Facebook group and it's been an amazing journey since I started it. I've been to MIT and Harvard events around AI. I've been out to San Francisco to the AI conferences. We built some systems that we even got to go to Quantico and present to the Marine Corps Systems Command. So it's been an amazing journey that I'd worked in tech for a while, but AI really like sort of this phoenix from the ashes moment after Covid, after all the small businesses got so disrupted from 2020 to really now, you know, like we're just now finding this bounce back. AI gave us such a opportunity and enthusiasm. It also gave me this ability to build conversations and dialogues with others.

When did you decide to start the Facebook group and did it instantly pop or tell me a little bit of that story?

So I started the group at December 17th of 2022.

So you didn't wait very long at all. You were like a couple of weeks in, right?

I was December of 2022. I was able to do so many things with AI. Like, I started the group. I invited all of my friends, colleagues. I have a lot of friends that are in tech or in academics, small businesses, larger businesses. And I said, hey, just join my group. You know me, please give me, you know, some love. But it grew from a few hundred by the end of December to a few thousand by the middle of January to tens of thousands by February. And now we're at 260,000 and still growing. So it's been a phenomenal Growth and it's been really great because we've had had this really cool dynamic of early pioneers and early adopters of AI. People outside of my friend group were the first to really jump in. So really growing and seeing the maturing of AI or some of our early group members has been exciting. They build really phenomenal businesses just in this 15 month period. So that's been phenomenal. The, the actual questions that we get. I'm always impressed by ways that people are using AI and the questions that they have around AI and now having a community that is not just me coming up with answers, but others. It just really is an amazing thing that we have social media but now we have AI as a topic that really brings out the best I think in all of us. That's been an amazing thing for me personally just to see all of the growth around AI and being able to be part of something that is a community. I didn't really put that in my business plan. I do run a tech company. I didn't really think in 2022 that I was going to start a Facebook group and it was really going to amount to anything other than my enthusiasm because I saw what AI was going to do.

So you decided to launch this AI online classroom. When did that come about and what is that all about?

So having 260,000 members and Michael, you might know this, you have a big community. There's so many people with so many questions coming in, with so many different journeys into AI that I realized that I'm pretty technical by trade. I'm, I'm a developer, a Linux admin, I'm a tinkerer, I'm a coder. Some people are not. Some people just want to learn how to use it every day. So I realized that, hey, I don't want to be over everybody's head, you know. So I also realized that the people that want to go deep, I want to go deep with them. So the idea was like Netflix and Amazon Primes and Disney Channel, Disney plus. It's a great place that you can go and just sort of veg out and watch whatever you choose. What I thought would be great is that since we have so many different people from so many different AI journeys, if we could just gather all of the best AI based video content in one place that that would be significant. It's great to go to YouTube and watch videos, but you go from a something you're searching for to something that a, you may not even be able to find on AI because YouTube is working on Your algorithms on your search habits and your watching habits. It's not necessarily focused on AI. So having a focus place that's all about AI that we sort of curate, I think curation is a very important asset and skill that we're going to see over the next several years is curating content instead of creating may be a major place. So curating all of this content that's easy to find and then using AI, we use something called RAG AI or retrieval, Augmented generation or just basically we trained AI on all of the videos. That way you can ask our AI any question that you may have or describe a little bit about your situation and it will give you recommendations on videos in a way that none of the major providers of like a Netflix or Disney are doing. Plus we might have a larger ecosystem of videos, maybe even more than Amazon prime when it gets down to it. So what's really cool is that as this platform develops, we will continue to try to make our AI smarter and a better matching solution, one that doesn't make stuff up or hallucinate, but drives people to the locations that they need to see or what they choose to see, I think is going to be a big deal. And having it just open, there's no fee to go in and like watch videos. I, I wanted to eliminate every possible barrier that way out of my community. When you ask something about AI, hey, go here. And hopefully this is your guide to help you learn and be educated about AI. Obviously I run a business, so I'm always selling AI or implementing technologies as well. But there's just this time frame now that people need education. So the best way to provide education, I think is through video. And then we do have a full learning management system that has tailored courses that if you really want to go deep and focus, you can do that with us as well. But what we found is just a more is more approach. And then having AI help us eliminate any of the traditional barriers of entry would be a big benefit. So that, that was sort of the driving factor is we had all of these people asking questions all the time. And though I love to be part of the community, it's also something that's a 24 7, 365 on button. So how do you offload that into AI a little bit to. To provide a better service and solution.

Thanks for sharing your backstory, Chris. I do think that there's a lot of people, including myself, who are either listening or dabbling in artificial intelligence, but they've got another business or they work for another business. And right now they're in the exploratory stage, which is why they're listening to the show. AI explored. Right. And there's a lot of marketers who are maybe a little skeptical about AI and especially AI workflows. So what do you want to say to those? Why should they focus on using AI to help workflows? And then we'll get into kind of some of the tactical side of this.

Perfect. So when I first got started in business, AI was not around, as we call it, generative AI. But social media hit and cloud computing hit at the same time. And we had this thing like social mobile, local and this. When I started really in the ad space with Facebook, that's really how I started my tech career, was running Facebook ads. I started running it before they had any of the data brokers. And it was really specific. It was around like weddings, let's say. So Facebook had that data around us and they enabled us to buy ads. And that was a new thing. It was no longer search, it was now social ads. And I saw that. And from that I went from wedding vendors to joining a team called App Addictive that we built Facebook fan page apps. We ended up with 10 million Facebook fan page apps. And very soon after that we had a programmatic ad tool for social and search engines, this big tool for enterprise. But essentially we were working with big banks, big brands, big names, and it happened so dynamically and so fast. It happened in three years. I went from weddings to the largest banking system in the world that fast. AI. I do believe the generative AI movement is going to move faster and be bigger than social media. It's going to impact every single aspect of every layer of business, even going to permeate into our personal lives. So with AI, the first thing is to realize that generative AI is here. 2. A lot of people say they've been doing AI for a long time. And though that's sort of true, it's no longer required to go to Caltech or Stanford, MIT in order to participate in this AI movement. It's natural language programming and it really hit 15 months ago. So no one is truly this expert level that you couldn't be yourself. So embracing the technology and using it I think is the main thing is like first learning how to use it yourself, just what is it? And then you can start thinking about the workflows that you're doing in your day to day tasks that could be automated or augmented with AI in a way that would just make your life a little bit More freeing to do other things that are more important than doing something that's mundane.

That's really cool. So let's define what the heck AI workflow is, because a lot of people are working with AI, AI, but it's not necessarily a workflow. So let's define what that is and then let's get into kind of what some of the misconceptions might be.

Sure. So an AI workflow, at least to me, means it's going to do some type of productive work for you more than one time. So areas in your day to day working life, you're going to probably see these in your office365 or your Google suite in a way that there's emails, there's spreadsheet systems, there's Word documents, even search drives. Right? Like you have a drive of documents, you have all of this office suite. How can you utilize AI in that office suite? We all have heard prompt engineering at this point and that's a very valuable skill. What's really cool with AI workflows is how do you daisy chain prompts in a row to perform a workflow? So something that's more than one prompt, how can you get an inbound, let's say email that you want to respond to? Maybe you give a proposal that's personalized and maybe you can give a follow up feedback based upon something that was in that email. A workflow that's AI generated would be able to ingest that email, understand it, look at the data that you trained on your business to that workflow or that bot, and then using that the bot, auto responds back or, or at least auto automatically pushes the workflow to a human. I think it's probably still important to keep a human in the loop in certain cases, but whatever would take 20 minutes in the past. How do you make it two minutes? That's what we're really working out for AI workflows. So moving that to two minutes, keeping a human in the loop. And now you're able to service your client base better and more efficiently by augmenting your workflow process with AI.

That's really cool. And a lot of people are like, ooh, that sounds really cool. Because I'm having a hard time finding quality people. And if the AI can do it, that's really exciting. Now why don't we level set here a little bit on what reasonably can be expected today as we're recording this in early spring of 2024. What can be achieved by AI workflows and maybe, maybe even what are some of the misconceptions of what can't be achieved right now.

So the easiest ones off the top are if you have an, if you have a form, any sort of input form digitally. We all know about using email marketing and personalized emails or trying to build a customer journey. Imagine being able to take that form, input data or lead data that you're capturing and using an AI to respond back in a personalized manner quickly, efficiently making sure that the links that would drive that next step of action are all there. That's a very easy one to pull off right now, like whether you use like Zapier, probably do this and you can wire it together. There's also other platforms out there that you could utilize to build these sort of basic workflows. And that's the easiest one to, to build is an online form system, a personalized email or action based off of someone putting information into a form. As we get deeper into it, you can actually build workflows for almost any use case or any purpose. If you can define what a workflow process is for educators, let's say grading essays is what you do every day. You're a teacher, you have 500 students, you gotta read all of these papers every day. It's very difficult. There's a rubric. It's not quantum physics, it's not. But I think AI could handle that. But it's not the most difficult thing in the world. There's a rubric, as an educator that you use. You can build a workflow where you can take a picture with your phone of that essay, let it hit the rubric, grade it, and give the student a personalized feedback on how they could improve that essay. That can be done today with some platforms I wouldn't recommend trying to get into how do I build this open source and from scratch. That's going to be way difficult. I would focus on trying to find some solutions out there that are already available that may be a small fee per month, but you can rent it. And by renting it, you can perform amazing work by automating things that you're doing a lot of. And when you're thinking of workflows that you can automate, try to think of things that are you're doing all the time repetitively. And you could draw a diagram from the beginning to the end. And if you can draw it on paper, you can probably build an AI to map that work.

That's really cool. Is there stuff that isn't possible today with the workflows? I mean, you talked about this teacher grading an essay. When we were prepping for this, we talked about like contract reviews, right? Like you could have some sort of system that could look at a contract and maybe identify things that are in the favor of the other party and not in your favor, these kinds of examples. But other things that any warning signals or anything.

So things that it can't really do, it can't really become Terminator 1. So don't be afraid of it. Like, just because you build a workflow doesn't mean you're going to take all the humans out of the jobs. And now there's robots working everywhere. That's not really something that's happening today. I can see how AI in the workforce is going to have a major impact over time, but right now it's such an open playing field that if you're just good at leveraging AI, you're going to win back a lot of your time. And if you're a good operator of whatever business you're operating now, you're still going to be a good operator. You might even be a better operator. I was just at MIT last week and they're saying you could be 100x to a thousandx better yourself. If you look at it you versus you, they're saying that's the sort of competitive advantage you can have right now, which is a amazing and sort of mind blowing, but it's really true. Like if you're doing something repetitively, how can you automate that and then free up more time for yourself? So don't think of it that you're, you're just going to have a robot and it's going to do all the work. And now no one has any work and everyone's unemployed. I don't think that's the, the immediate impact of using AI. So that's one fear. The second fear I think that people have is like, is really just getting over the hurdle of using it. Like, I wouldn't outsource all of this to agencies and outside people until you sort of play with it yourself. Because AI is easier than what some people can come to believe. I mean, if you don't know how to like code a website out, that took a little bit of time and it's gotten easier and easier and easier, but still complicated for some. Using AI is much easier than building an app or a website, in my opinion. So that's one thing. Like getting over and actually using it is the second. And I think the third thing that people sort of fear when they're going to use AI is that like, how do you know if it's truthful? How do you know it's responsible? How do you know it's going to perform this workload over and over again? I think we're getting closer to this level of getting rid of hallucinations. I don't really love that term hallucinations, because I feel that if I saw a person hallucinating, I could tell.

Yeah, but hallucinations are when it gets it flat out wrong. That's what we mean by hallucinations. For those that don't know.

Yes. And like, let's say you're doing legal cases. We were talking about, like contract law. Like there's been in the news. Like it will cite sources that look perfectly cited and they're perfectly cited. They just don't exist.

Yeah.

Because it made it up. But. And that for me, they call that hallucination, but I call that confabulation. It, it seems like it's very correct, you know, and it would fool most people. But when you go and look at the citation, it doesn't exist. What we're finding is that that was a problem last year with rag AI or the ability to train AI, you can limit that hallucination or that misstep in the process. So if you're still mindsetted that last year you heard the lawyers got in trouble because it cited wrong cases, yes, that happened. But I would blame the user on that more than the technology. And now there's tools that you could have all of the information about your business that you could upload into an AI, that it understands the whole framework of your business. It can understand your Persona or how you want to approach clients. It can understand the source material that you wanted to know first. And before it goes out to Chad, GBT or Claude or Gemini, it uses your information first as its source of information. So if you learn how to use tools to train your AI first, you can get out of that fear that it could make stuff up. It will not make stuff up. It will actually perform the job incredibly efficiently and accurately. If you put the right workflow framework in place from the beginning.

Yeah. And I would imagine if you're just getting started with creating a workflow to take work off your plate or one of your staff's plates, you're going to want to spot check at least for the first many whiles to make sure it seems accurate. Right. Just like you would if you hired someone. Right. You're going to check the work, you're going to make sure, it's accurate and you're going to have a critical eye on it, but it's easier, I think, to check for mistakes than it is to create the whole workflow and to do all the work right. So if that's the last step you've got to do until you get a certain amount of confidence, that seems like kind of a no brainer. Let's talk about filling the gap between AI potential and AI results. I'm sure you've tried ChatGPT. Are you seeing real ROI? Most marketers are barely scratching the surface of what's possible with AI and it's because they're missing the training and the frameworks that will allow them to be very successful in their careers and in their future. AI Business World allows you to get that training. When you attend, you get two full days and 20 expert practitioners, many of the people that you've heard on this very show, that will teach you exactly what you need to know to build the workflows and to succeed as an AI enhanced marketer. It takes place April 29th and 30th in Anaheim, right alongside Social Media Marketing World. And here's the good news. You can save $300 when you register by January 16th. Head to AIbusinessWorld live right now. This discount ends soon. You know, I think one of the big challenges a lot of people are thinking about, especially in business, is security and privacy. So let's talk about that a little bit. How do I know that when I feed my information into these models that it's not essentially taking my conf. Intellectual property? You know what I mean? How do I know it's secure? Because this is one of the big things I think a lot of people are pondering right now, including me in my organization.

That is a major concern and falls under that ethical AI and responsible AI. So how do I know that my data is secure and private? First off, good rule of thumb is that if you're paying, it's probably going to be more secure than if you're not paying. Okay, if you're not paying and you're putting your information into being or one of these search browsers, they're probably keeping that content. I don't know if your small business is going to make an impact in this gigantic model by any means. But be careful in where you are uploading your data into because there's some models I think even that if you use like the Chat GBT model, that's the free model right now, you're sort of authorizing them to be able to maintain and use your data to train in the future. So if you're paying for it, you sort of get at least one step of security that you're probably paying for your own secured space. That's super important. Second, know that like what is mission critical, super important IP and what's just helping me rewrite some wording on a paragraph in an email or a contract, if it's not incredibly important, maybe it's not necessary to pay the premium of security. Because even for our team, we launched a product that's AI and IoT for facility and heavy assets. So like if you have a trained H vac system on your building, you don't want anybody to tap into that, know it, you know, but you want your team to have access to it. And it's in the cloud. We take a lot of precautions. We sort of work with Homeland Security and CISA and we're hoping to work with government entities in that case. We, we find privacy security incredibly important. I'm on this call from a data center. We love secured environments. That being said, a lot of this is not at that mission critical level of a nation state. You're talking about how to utilize AI for your small business. Buying ChatGPT or getting it copilot through Microsoft or using Gemini through your Office suite through Google for work is going to be secured. They're not going to share that data. It's going to be as secured as your cloud email. Now, are those 100% secured all the time? Like, I hate to tell everybody, they all get broken into all of our phones, everything has probably always been hacked and it's, it's just a perennial problem in technology, but nobody gets fired if they choose. Microsoft is sort of a saying, same thing here. Like if it's in Microsoft, you're doing what meets or exceeds industry standards. You're doing the best you can to protect your business. And I wouldn't recommend that, especially if you're a small business, to really tie in so many protocols around security that it hampers your ability to use AI. I think that there's a lot of people that are so concerned about privacy that they're going to wait a year or two to feel comfortable to use AI. And their competitors are not going to have that issue and they're going to have an 18 month ramp of better output and productivity than their competition. So right now I think it's a definitely a balance for privacy. But make sure that you're not valuing security over competitive advantage in that landscape because Right now there's companies that will not have the same security hang ups and they will move quicker, faster and more efficiently than your business. The other thing that I think you could do is work on an AI policy for your business. That way you can work with your employees to let them know that hey, please use the AI that we're giving out. Don't use the free models out there, use it in our ecosystem and we'll provide you tools. So try to retool and reskill your teams and make an effort to invest in some AI tools even if it's like little skunk works in your organization to see, hey, will this AI work? It's a X number per month or an X dollar amount. And some people we're going to put to it, see if it works and see if that can bring value and then you can move into further securing your data as you see fit. But I do believe that this stuff is very secure in the sense of your email or your data that you put into Google Drive. At this point it's very similar.

I think you hit on something and we've had some other guests, you know, on the show that we've talked about policies and we're working on our own internal AI policy. One of the big things that we do not allow inside of our company is these automated note taking tools to come into our private meetings at Social Media examiner. If you look at the terms of service on a lot of these things, even the paid versions, you are granting them perpetual rights to use that data, which is your private meetings that you're having with your staff and somebody happens to have a note taking app that comes in and sits in as their assistant. And those are the kind of things that I'm concerned about. I don't know if you've taken a view on these kinds of things or not.

It's a good question for me. Like there's certain areas that I know I, I need to be more precautious. Yeah, I will use a note taking app because I know my productivity is much better. I'm running 20 meetings a week, every week for the last five years of my life. Now I have a better understanding and a better follow up. I do understand that there's some security, possible vulnerabilities. I don't believe that Zoom or Otter or Microsoft Copilot is going to do anything to damage us at a level that would destroy their whole business model. So I, I don't see how they were going to use it maliciously against us. However, that's a gamble. I mean like I have friends that don't want to move from an Exchange server because it's on premise.

Yeah.

To Office 365. Obviously Microsoft has our data. It's clear they could do anything they want with it. And we just hope they're good stewards and being as big as they are that they won't do anything malicious and if they do, we'll see what is to come with that. But I personally I don't have the same fear now when I, I haven't even had calls with Homeland Security that are not too top level that I've used Otter. So I'm not going to say I haven't used it in government, but if I would meet with the Marine Corps Systems Command and it would be a private meeting, I probably would go back to a traditional note taker just because I. I can read the room a little bit.

Yeah, thanks for going down that rabbit trail because I know it's something a lot of people are concerned about. Let's say we want to our workflows with AI, what do we need to be thinking about? Where do we start with. With this? Beyond what you've already talked about, You've already talked about. Identify your recurring things that you do that are ripe for opportunity to bring AI to the table. But let's say we've identified some things that we do that we want to automate with AI. What's the next step?

So first thing I would think in this AI movement, think of low code, no code as much as possible. Especially if you're not very technical. And in fact if you have very technical staff and you're allocating the budgets, I'd still recommend that you go low code, no code instead of trying to build some crazy open source solution that costs tens of thousands of dollars a month. Just a host. Plus you got to learn by doing. I recommend finding solutions that have already gone through the process of trial and error. Maybe some platforms that already have 5,000 to 30,000 clients in the last year, which is pretty significant, that have some good wins. Also having platforms that you're not bought in or solely stuck into the model, you can find AI workflow engines that you can start with ChatGPT4 Turbo by far awesome, really good. But if you want to switch over to Claude and it's built into the platform, imagine you build your workflow but now you just switch out which large language model is sort of the API pushing it or I'm using the tokens for the output. That's a Big deal. Because there's AI platforms right now that will allow you to experiment with all of the large ones. Anthropic OpenAI cohere. You can probably do some open models like llamas that they're self hosting at their organization and putting into their workflow model.

Yeah, and llamas from Facebook. Just so everybody understands, that's the llama model. And as we're recording, they just came out with version three, which is supposed to be really good.

Right. Right now you don't have to necessarily think of like multimodal models, but we are moving into this world where we have text models. But imagine turning text to visualization or text to video. That's multimodal, going across major different areas. So that's one thing to really consider, the other thing then to consider when it comes into workflows. A dear friend of mine, his name's Paul Byer, he just got named the generative AI expert at Harvard. He also runs Gai Insights. Great organization, really studies the AI dynamic. He said that we should think of this in our organization with his WINS framework. You can look this up, it's a Harvard Business Review article. But WINS in your organization, anything that AI touches in your organization will hit the winds framework. WIND stands for words, images, numbers and sounds. So when you take just this understanding in your workflow, what can AI do? Right now, AI can look at words, images, numbers and sounds. Outside of that, you're still pretty open. If you're doing physical activity, there's no robot yet that's affordable to replace your people. So don't think about that. Think about ways that you can use this WINS framework in your workflows.

Real quick. I want to zoom in on that. I like this a lot because most people experience like the free version of chat GPT and it's just words. They don't realize that the paid version of a lot of these tools have vision capability. Right? So you can take pictures, pictures, and you can interpret pictures. And you've already mentioned it, taking a picture, for example, of an essay from a kid or a scan. But numbers is also something that a lot of people don't think about. Right? You think about spreadsheets, you think about raw data, you can upload CSV files to this and you can ask it to do data analysis on it. And you can probably do anything you could possibly imagine, right? Like let's say you had rows of data that was daily data and you wanted it to basically look at it from a monthly lens that would be a little more complex for you to do, but it wouldn't for AI. You can say, hey, I show me a little chart of this data on a monthly basis and then compare this month, this year, over last year based on the daily data. Something it can do very easily. Sound side of it. I mean, the sound side of it is kind of scary, but kind of cool. Adobe, as you know, allows you to do audio enhancements. Obviously you can do voice augmentation. I don't know what else you can do on the sound side of stuff. But, you know, video is obviously coming next, but there's a lot of things you can do. And when you think about this framework now, all of a sudden it opens you up to the possibilities, right?

That's right. Like, I think what we've seen over the last month that's really taken off are like, I believe it's like suno AI. There's a couple others that are doing like, if you wanted a jingle for your business because you're going to do some radio advertising, I think you can knock it out of the park right now for 30 bucks, 50 bucks in credits. And using an AI platform to create a jingle about your business. So now you have music that you couldn't afford. You wouldn't even know who to call before. Or if you call the radio station to say, hey, do this, they'd say, great, here's this fee, plus this fee for advertising. Now you have that capability that you can, you can create sound. This may be great for teenagers or kids using, but I see this being applicable in business. You'll also have the ability to automate. Imagine if you are in HR and you're hiring people. Imagine being able to put a voice, not a music, just a voice to your training and compliance. That could be very big. And if you don't want to add the voice to it, you could at least train all of your AI or your chatbot AI on all your compliance and all your hiring documentation. So you have a 24,7 AI companion for any of your employees that could ask about their plans or who to call or how to access certain features and their benefits packages. You could train that and have that. So I think that there's just a phenomenal amount of opportunities that you could look at in your organization and say, you know what? I have taken 10 calls about that over this month. And so that 10 calls, I'm spending 10 minutes per call, 10 times a month. That's 100 minutes a month that I'm handling now. There's 12 months in a year 120 minutes, or is that 1200 minutes a year that I'm on the call, just answering stuff that could be answered through a chatbot. That's a big savings. And imagine that chatbot is 50 bucks a month. And if you buy that, you might be able to build a couple other.

Chatbots and it never sleeps. It's instantly responding to people. Right, because everybody wants answers immediately. I mean, you fill out forms on a website, you know, and then you wait to hear back from a human. Well, now you could instantly get responses through some sort of an AI workflow. Now you mentioned earlier, Chris, that you should try to find tools that already kind of do some of the things you're looking to, rather than kind of using these large language models and trying to invent it from scratch. I think one of the questions going through the minds of a lot of people is it seems like there's AI tools popping up everywhere. How do we discern whether or not this tool is even going to be around tomorrow?

That's a really great question. I don't think we have ever seen this much investment in so many startups. I think that it's good to see that a company got investment because at least you know that they're keeping the lights on now. But that can lead to catastrophe down the road. So there, there is some issues with picking good companies. What I think you should look for are the trust marks. What big organizations are utilizing this AI? If they're good enough for Dropbox and Nike and Audi, they might be good enough for my small business. And if it's 50 bucks a month, if I can find value in that free trial, I will hopefully be able to use that long term. When you think of long term as well, which ones are absolutely going to be long term? OpenAI and Microsoft. That's long term. If you're in the Microsoft ecosystem, you're probably going to be OpenAI for foreseeable future. If you're the Google ecosystem, you're probably going to be in the Gemini. Whatever else they decide to rename their their system, they've renamed it a couple times or pivoted. But if Google has a direct native integration into their entire back end, that's probably the one that's going to win out for your office work. And there's probably going to be determining factors of why you're choosing them and it's going to be because you've already been on their platform for 10 years. If you're in Salesforce, and that's what you're using they have an Einstein platform. Maybe that's for your salesforce. Maybe that's going to work a little bit more natively. Some things that are not in there. But maybe you should find out. If you're running a shopify store or an E commerce store, how do you find an AI chatbot that can look at your website every single day and look at your inventory, look at your offerings and not only like in the past, like with ChatGPT, help you write your product offering, but actually be a recommendation chatbot engine for your users to say, hey, what are you interested in? I want a yellow dress. It will come up with all the yellow dress recommendations on their e commerce store because you're, you're communicating with that personally. I bring that example up because my wife and I bought a dress recently through Amazon. Amazon is launching this through their storefront where you're going to be able to communicate with an AI that's going to have a recommendation for product engine built in. So if you have an E commerce store, figure out how you can have a chatbot that does recommendations of the products that are in your store handles that support ticketing. Maybe not all 100%, but imagine if you could automate 80% to 90% of the data that's already on your website, maybe in your fax page, into a personalized chat bot that could answer it. Because someone has a question. It's a great replacement for what was traditionally maybe an intercom or a live chat feature that you had a person staffed for. Now AI can handle that and there's a lot of solutions out there that you can look at that can start to handle that E commerce purchase path.

Right now let's talk about integrations with Google Workspace versus Office 365. I think that there's a good chance that 98% of the people listening are using one of these. And my guess is the small businesses are all using Google products. So how important is this? I would imagine it's very important. Right. And OpenAI has got to be working on Google, not just Microsoft, even though they're big backers. Microsoft. What's your thoughts on on this? What should we be looking for? How do we even ask the of the tool providers?

That's a great question for Google. For one, like I've been working with a company called Scripted. They have an immense plug and play native integration with Google. So when we talk about like AI workflows, we already know Google has an amazing API infrastructure. They're very easy and very tied into. So Many API enabled software solutions that I think Microsoft has sort of, they were the larger incumbent so they had to move slower and Google really designed their platform to make it easier to code into. So finding platforms that already are integrated that. If you're getting data into a Google Sheet, imagine what you could do if that that is already in the sheet. It's coming in from a live feed. Maybe you're buying ads and that's how it's getting reported to you. Maybe you're just doing inventory. Whatever you're doing in your Google Sheets, imagine being able to take that Google Sheets and make maybe a dashboard or make it a little bit more actionable than you could before. You can start using AIs to sort of plug in in that ecosystem. And if you were already using Zapier in the past, it's like Zapier on steroids. So like how do you find solutions that can tie into your current ecosystem and then be able to further it? Imagine having a bunch of information in your Google Drive. Maybe it's customer reviews of your product. Imagine just throwing an AI on top of it in a very easy manner and do sentiment analysis for thousands and thousands of reviews over five years. That's a lot to look at and usually just stays in a folder and nobody looks at. You can start tying AIs to look at this for you in a way that you're paralyzed and even trying to do it because it would take way too much time. You don't know if you're going to get any benefit out of digging through with a person through this folder. But you know that in that folder is like my entire business history sort of lives in this folder in a unique way. Imagine being able to add your AI to it and say, hey AI, what is in this folder? Tell me. And it will sort of tell you what it's seeing in a general framework. And if you agree with what it's saying it's seeing, you can say, you know what, analyze this. Help me build our performance metric that I can look at this and score this in a way that I could better my business. What are the takeaways from what you're seeing in this folder? That if I would improve, my customer service would be better or just my service in general would be improved.

I'm assuming Gemini Google's actively working on their alternative to open AI that will do everything you just said. But are we looking for tools that work with Gemini or are we looking for tools that work with Google? Because like I'm putting myself in the Mind of the consumer, you know, how do they know what to look for? Does that make sense?

Yeah, I would say look for ones that work with your data. And what I found, like I primary hosting, I've been around for like 15 years, like we're a cloud brokerage platform. What I found is there's no one single solution that fits it all. In fact, most companies have a combination of solutions and it's how you have this combination of solutions that you can put together in a way that effectively helps you run your business. So I'd say you need to look at this most importantly, your data is your data. What solutions are going to tie into anything that's outside of the Google ecosystem as well? I think you're going to always have more power if you look into open source tools like WordPress, if you're running your website, it's open source, you can do whatever you choose from it. Google may not try to build something to help you out with your open source projects. They may not try to help you with your CRM tool that's not in the Google environment. They're not going to help you out with your project management tools necessarily. So try to find the tools that have the best overall reach across your ecosystem that you have in place. So if you have 25 tools, try to find AIs that play with the most of those tools. Because if you do choose one that's totally dependent upon the Google ecosystem, that's all it's going to do in that ecosystem. It'll never help you move into your other tools. So you might have to add other AIs to bridge that gap or other solutions.

So what I'm hearing you say is that the big tools are going to have lots of integrations just like all the other software that's existed before AI. Right. When you look into an AI software, you're going to want to look for the integrations tab or whatever, right? And you're going to want to see all the different things. And obviously Google might be very important for a lot of people or Office 365 depending on where the data lives. Because once you get access to that data and you connect the AI to the data, then you can apply whatever large language learning model you choose, depending on the solution and you could be off to a racist man. We could talk about this, Chris, all day long, but I know that you've got some places you might want to send people if they want to learn more. So where do you want people to go if they want to learn more about you and also if they want to connect with you on the socials, what's your preferred platform?

So if you want to really see what we're doing every day. Chat GBT for Business and Life. It's a Facebook group. You can find it just by searching. Chat GBT for Business and Life. We'd love to have you join us. We'd love to hit 300,000 members soon. We'd love your feedback. If you see this, watch this and join, please let us know and let us know your questions. You can find me on Facebook. I'm definitely that that's an ecosystem I'm really on the most. I do quasi participate in other social media places, but that's the the core location I'd recommend as far as following what we're doing. Aionlineclassroom.com is a great place that you can go to to learn about AI. We keep that updated daily. We're trying to train our AI to be smarter so when you come to it, it could be your 1 source resource for video education. We do have some really cool things that are going on in that space, so you can always check that out. And as we grow, our company's called Primary Hosting. So it's Primary Hosting and one important plug for us. I'm an enrolled citizen of the Picklesaunee tribe of Alabama, so we are working on putting out some of the things we're doing for our community and our tribal peoples@pickleshawnee.gov so all of those places you can check us out.

Christopher Brock, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing their insights with us.

Absolutely.

Michael.

Thanks for having us.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@social mediaexaminer.com a5. Be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcast app. And would you do me a favor and let a friend know about this show? You can tag me. I'm Elsner on Facebook and ikestelsner on X Twitter. And do check out our other shows, the Social Media Marketing Podcast Podcast, the Marketing Agency show and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful. The AI Explored podcast is a production.

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