How to Utilise AI to Improve ANY Business

Hi.

Thank you for joining and listening to the Boostly podcast. This is the podcast that gives hosts the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly, the confidence for you to go out there and get more direct bookings. My name is Liam Carolan and Mark Simpson's co host and today we are focusing on the spotlight on a business, which you really need to know about as a host. You really need to know about if you're in any business at all. Because we're talking about AI and we're talking about a system or a AI mechanism that could help you in any business that you're in. And I'm excited about this because this is something that Mark Simpson has actually put into practice. This is something that I'm now putting into practice as well. And yeah, it's just really exciting. So today we're going to be introducing you to Delphi Deli is where you can go and find out more information. We've got the co founder and CEO, we've got Dara Ledyavadian, and yeah, I'm just so excited to have him here and I'm not going to take any thunder away from him introducing the business because what it does will all become clear. Just stick around for the next 15, 20 minutes and you're going to be really excited to find out about this. So welcome along. Dara. Thank you for joining me, Liam.

Thanks for having me.

So first of all, can you give yourself and your business an introduction? Whereabouts in the world are you at the moment? You know your, your name and also what the business does?

Yeah, definitely. So I'm originally from Houston, Texas, studied physics and computer science, been working in AI for the past six years. And this is an important part of the story because it's what's led to the insight for starting Deli. When I was working on my first company, I was reading a book about my grandfather and I wanted to be able to talk to him and learn from him because he was no longer around. And so I created a clone of him using a book that was written about him so that it could think like him and it could speak like him. And I kind of treated it as a personal mentor as that first startup was being worked on and that startup got acquired. But I really got interested in this idea of letting people scale themselves because we're all constrained by time. You're either no longer around or you're someone who's very busy, gets the same questions over and over again. And you obviously cannot attend to each person individually in a personalized way. So we started Delphi, which is a digital cloning platform that can capture how you think, what you know, your expertise, and make it available to others in a personalized way so that you can truly scale yourself to infinitely many places and people at a time. We're based in San Francisco. We're six people, and we raised our seed round earlier this year from Founders Fund and Lux Capital.

Now, as we record this, there's lots of new AI tech around and there's a few of these kind of AI bots and things like that. The thing that really drew me, and I know Mark, to Delphi, was it's that personality that you give it. It is something which it learns, personality. But from a host point of view. One of the things which we always talk about Boostly, is when we're talking about direct bookings, is displaying your personable skills, you know, actually being hospitable as a host and that side of things. Well, the drawback to that is we can't be available 24 hours a day. People are flying in from different time zones. People are asking questions in the middle of the night. We can't be available all the time. So how could Delphi help hosts who are listening to this?

Yeah, so as a host, that connection with the person is important and making them feel like you're available for them and they're not just having to find the docs of, like, the place that they're staying at. So with Delphi, not only can it answer questions, but it becomes more personalized to the people that use it over time. So if before someone asked about the pricing of a property, it'll know that later on and can use that to make the information that it provides more detailed based on where the gaps might have been previously. So with a clone, you can put it on your website, you can add it to a phone number. We're going to be releasing clone calling in a couple of weeks, which also allows them to call your clone. It can speak in your voice as well. The goal isn't to trick these people into thinking they're talking to you, but more offer access where there previously was none. And them having, like unlimited access to your brain and trusting that this is an accurate representation of you. That's the challenge that we're solving. Can we create an accurate representation of you digitally?

Nice. And I like that different spin because so many of the other ones are just purposely aimed towards one particular thing. You know, like this will answer questions about a property or something like that. Whereas if we're trying to clone ourselves and have that kind of personable interaction with a guest. And like you say, it's not so much to replace us, it's just you got a, you got to have dinner, you've got to be with your family at times, and there might be if it can handle some of the messages. And one of the things we're always speaking about Boostly is building up an email list and for people to ask questions from that email list. So if you're building your network of guests who regularly come and stay, and these are the people who book with you time and time again, who, you know, ask about particular dates and say, you know, I don't mind being flexible because I've enjoyed staying with you. The idea being is that as long as you're teaching this clone everything you know about your local area, about your, the things you like to do, all of the things that you know, your recommendations for food and all that sort of stuff, am I right in thinking it can answer those questions? If they've got those sort of questions.

For you, Definitely, you can answer all of them. And it improves over time. So if you were to ask your clone a question, doesn't give a satisfactory answer, you can improve it and it'll learn how, the types of answers that you like and the types of formats that you like.

So, yes, definitely, and how much work is involved. Because one of the things that I worry about, certainly as a host, I mean, I'm concentrating on my hosting business, trying to get more direct bookings. How much time and effort does it take to clone yourself?

Anywhere from 30 minutes to a day, depending on how much content you have. So we have integrations with Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Notion, Twitter files, audio files, YouTube videos, podcasts, and we have a very easy interface for you to drag those in and upload it to your clone. And then from there you just gotta decide where. Where do you want your clone to live? Is it Slack, is it a phone number? Is it on your website? And that's it. There's no maintenance from there. We have an analytics dashboard to help you understand what are the questions people are asking. And maybe you can use that kind of data to actually improve your property and improve your communications with your, with, with the saees.

One of the, I actually said to my other half, I'm considering cloning myself. She thought I was crazy. She actually thought I meant like genetically and stuff like that. But AI wise, it does make sense because like, all the reasons we've said about, you know, you're not always available One of the worries I'd have is, what if somebody asked a question that it doesn't know the answer to or that I've not fed in the information? What, what happens then?

So two things will happen. One, we have a field that puts a custom message when the clone is unable to answer a specific question. And we have a strictness score. So if you want high strictness so that the clone only says things that it has been trained on, you can increase that strictness score and it'll say, I don't know, reach out to me at this email and it'll notify you as the clone owner. Hey, someone asked a question that you can't answer so that you can pay attention to that customer personally. You can almost prioritize who to pay attention to based on the questions that they're asking. If the strictest score is low, what we try to do is not just capture the knowledge that you have, but also how you might think about new things. So we try to predict what you might think about a new situation, which may make less sense for hosts and may make more sense for some of our customers who are like doctors or experts, people who provide advice to certain people and their personalized situations.

Brings me nicely on to the next question, which is who is, who is Delphi's typical customer? You know, who are the people who are driving towards this and clone themselves in droves?

Yeah. So at its core, the simplest version of anyone whose time is of high demand or anyone whose demand for their time is more than the time that they can actually supply. But to bring it down more granularly, I would say experts, people with proprietary knowledge, are big on our platform. Coaches, content creators, CEOs especially CEOs have tons of employees who ask them questions on like, how should I think about the business? How should I think about our customers? They want to clone themselves, to scale themselves. And now Airbnb hosts.

If you're struggling on how to get direct bookings and overwhelmed on where to start, then I recommend you go and book in a call with Boostly and our team right now. We can walk you through exactly what we're offering, how we can help you, and give you a portfolio of websites that we have worked with that are matching not only your niche, but could be in your location as well. Boostly has helped over 2000 hospitality businesses all over the world increase their direct bookings. And if you are interested, then all you need to do is go to Boostly. B O O s t l y.co.uk call and booking an appointment with one of our sales team.

Well, I mean that for me as a property manager, I mean, I look after 24 short term rentals and there's loads of hosts who are listening to this who might be just on one, who I think are more towards guests. Me and certainly other hosts are probably thinking, well actually if I can get my operations manual, my SOPs, my, you know, my, my playbook into a clone, then my staff could ask that instead of me getting inundated with loads and loads of questions. And as I'm scaling up, as we're taking on more properties, my time available to tell staff what I would do in certain situations is less and less. So if there is a clone that's able to be 90% accurate over what I would say or drawing people's attention to existing operating procedures, well, that sounds like a win to me. And is that how it can be used?

Yeah, I think it's really applicable for anyone who wants to scale themselves, who wants to do things the way they would do it. So I mean this, this was a unique use case that I found when I met Mark and it totally makes sense because again, it's a thing of people want to access, get that personalized attention and you just can't provide it because time, time is just the thing that you can't beat a hundred percent.

And while you're listening to this, if you listen on the podcast or watching on YouTube, if you want to go and test this out, Mark Simpson has actually done this. So go to Delphi, that's D, E, L, P H I D AI forward slash Mark Simpson. And we'll put that link somewhere around however you consume in this media. But you'll be able to go and check out, go and ask Mark some questions that Mark would, would know or that you'd love to ask Mark if he was actually standing in front of you. And if you do want to email any, any feedback or any thoughts, you can always email me coachly.co.uk just with, with any thoughts because I love this sort of thing. And am I right in thinking the more questions that people ask it, is it learning from the kind of questions? Does the person who's been cloned, do we get feedback of what the questions are being asked at any stage?

Yeah. So in the analytics dashboard you can get popular topics, popular questions. It doesn't currently get better overall, the more questions get asked, but it gets better for that person. So that, that's what I mean by personalized conversations. You can, you can almost have like an individualized relationship with each person who's talking to the clone.

What, what I also like about this, I mean these days, in a world where we use WhatsApp, we use Slack, we use email, we, we use text message, you know, there's, there's so many different channels to, to be able to do that. And actually by giving somebody the link to the bot, well, they can ask it there and we can collect all that data of what's being asked in one kind of place. You know, like, so it's if you're getting the same question 50 times, well, that's your highest priority to answer. If you're a coach especially, or if your staff are asking that question, well, then it's time to write an SOP or you know, whatever your real answer will be. So your clone then knows it.

Which is exactly something that some of our users use the analytics dashboard for is for content strategy. So again, like that top ask question, I could like write a book about this, I could create a podcast about this. I can, you know, write a blog about this because like this is what's really resonating with people or this is what is really spiking their curiosity.

That's cool. Well, like you say, that is the content. I mean we last week within Mark Simpson's got his hospitality community on Facebook and then he's also behind a paywall, got the team Boostly group, which is if you come and buy a website from Boostly, you can get access to all the training. We do a regular mastermind where we're talking about SEO and one of the questions was, well, what, what sort of content should I put out there? Well, if you've got one of these Delphi clones, whatever questions you're getting asked there, that's the content that you could put out on your website, which will help you. Exactly, yeah. And that, that all, all works, doesn't it? Where do you think the future of this? What's the potential? What will the future hold there?

There is so much on our product roadmap and it just gets larger and larger every day because we're constantly coming up with new ideas in, in the short term, you know, know, clone calling, making it, making the voice realistic. And probably a year from now we could also probably do video so you can FaceTime and like have like a real time conversation. I think what, what becomes interesting is when we get really good at predicting what someone might say in a new situation if the clone doesn't know anything about it, when it's predictive. So If I were to clone you and ask your clone a question and ask you a question that the clone has not been trained on, it would say the same thing as you. That's where I think it gets really interesting. We're also working on a ton of monetization levers to help people monetize their clone, because everyone has some proprietary knowledge that some people are willing to pay for or access.

What I was hoping you'd say there is, like, in a year's time, my clone could be interviewing your clone and we could be watching the interview. That would be, that would be amazing. But who knows? That's where it could go, isn't it?

Once we have video, that can definitely be possible. I mean, we, we, we created a website where you can talk to clones of presidents and you can simulate debates between them. So the simulation of conversation or podcast conversations, definitely possible.

I mean, that's, that's exciting and, and a little bit scary. I mean, I know there's people out there who are like, worried about AI, but at the stage where the, the fake becomes as good as the real one, well, you know, this, it's going to be hard to tell, but I'm, I'm personally excited about all of the, the good things. And you mentioned doctors on there. I mean, when I heard, obviously we've got the NHS and any healthcare professionals. If they can get their knowledge to people faster and prevent more problems, well, you know, that's what AI can do for people, isn't it? So what are some of the challenges that Delphi faces? What are some of the sort of bumps in the road that you've either already overcome or that you're overcoming at the moment?

Probably the biggest one is just like high accuracy, authentic representation of the person spent the first six months really nailing. Like, can we capture an authentic representation of a person? Can we give the clone an objective? So whether it's like mentoring or Q and A or just like acting like a friend, and then the reasoning thing that I told you about, so it. Being able to answer questions authentically in new situations, those are all technical challenges that we're in the process of overcoming. And now, like, what we're focused on as a company is we have all these people that like Delphi for your different use cases. What is the most powerful and what, what is the value at? Is it saving time? Is it monetization? Is it analytics? So I'm really focused right now as a CEO on like, what are those levers that are making the most impact on our customers? So that we can double down on those and make this a more valuable product.

That sounds good. And just flipping that up. What has been the moment of the wow moment so far? The moment where you go, do you know, actually we're on something awesome here or something which may be coming up.

I mean we have, we, we've just had so many customers who have given their clones to their fans and their fans are having like full on conversations and value add conversations too. You know, there's a lot of chat bots out there that are like entertainment, talking to girlfriends, you know, things like that. But I've loved to see people actually using Delphi to learn and grow and become better. And it's like a new way of instead of you're reading a book to learn a subject, you're talking to a clone of someone that you respect who's an expert and, and you can continually come back to make sure you're, you've picked up those habits and that you're learning.

Quick break from the podcast to let you know that the two boostly books that we brought out, the book Direct Playbook and the book Direct Blueprint are two of the top rated and the best selling in the hospitality category on Amazon for just two pounds. You can grab both of those books right now. The foundations and the structures that you need to put in place is in the blueprint and, and then for 101 marketing tactics that is in the Playbook. So go and grab a copy on Amazon now just type in Book Direct Playbook or the book Direct Blueprint and we'll see you on the other side.

You think that things like AI and Delphi in particular is going to change the way we educate and also the way that at the moment we pay for information a lot of the time. Whereas from what I can see using things like Delphi it's you can get that information quicker but actually we'll just end up paying perhaps for just implementation instead. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think you know the study Bloom's two sigma effect where the people who have a private tutor their learning ability is improved by two standard deviations. And that's because obviously that ability to learn through conversation and iteration and improvement has a big impact on your way of understanding things. And the second thing is learning from people you respect or look up to who previously you either need to be in their close circles or spend a ton of money to be able to get in the same room for. And I see Delphi as providing getting rid of that friction and just providing access at much, much cheaper level, even free.

And I mean, the more people, the more people that we can educate and help. I'm a big Alex Hoi fan for those who watch these podcasts.

He's great.

He's great, isn't he? And I love what he says, is that, you know, by the time he dies, he wants to have given everything away. So yeah, it would just, you know, given everything away in terms of, you know, knowledge. Well, this is way that you can carry on living past when you're actually alive, can't you? So, which is cool. So one question, as we love to bring these to a close, obviously we need to find out how we can find out more about the product and, and come and come and follow you guys on, on socials. But before we do, just a couple of questions. What do you do for fun? What do you do when you're not involved in Delphi?

To be honest, all I do is Delphi. And that's because I think there is a short period of time to capitalize on the opportunity of this company that we're building. And obviously with my grandpa's story, it's such a personal company to me that I have fun doing this. We have an amazing team that I enjoy working with. And I think if you're working on something that you love and you're working with people that you respect, then it's fine if you're just committing your life to your company for the time being.

And like you say, I think the time is now, isn't it? I mean, this like perfect circumstances to, to really make this, this a big thing. One question, which we're going to have to make sure our clones know which is. And just for fun, what would be your superhero power? If you could pick one of the ones like we're talking Marvel, you know, type superhero power. What would yours be and why?

Oh man, that is such a good question. Can I say two?

Yeah. Yeah, go for it. It's your, your superpower.

One, one is teleportation. Just because I think travel is the biggest time suck and like if I could visit my family whenever I wanted or visit my friend, visit an investor in person, you save so much time, so much stress. I think that would just do so much for, for your like, mental health and how much you can actually achieve in this world and the second is the limitless drug. The ability to learn anything in a second would be amazing.

Yeah, I love that. Great film, by the way. Great plug for the film. That is amazing. So, yeah, Great answer, by the way. I've not had that answer before. And we love just throwing these fun questions in because people buy from people, right? So how do we find out more? I'm going to throw the mic open. How do we find out more about Delphi?

Yeah. So right now we're in beta. So you can sign up on our waitlist on Delphi AI and you can also book a time on my calendar if you want early access to our cloning. We post a lot on Twitter with Underscore Delphi and we're planning to have our big public launch in early December with the calling and a bunch of other cool new features. So stay tuned.

Nice, nice. Thank you so much. And of course, if you're watching this on the YouTube or if you're listening on the podcast, those links will be somewhere around. However you consume in this media leaves us with the last question, which is is there any advice that you've been given which you've really think has helped you along your journey, or is there a motto that you'd like to share with us that that has helped you along the way?

I think advice and something that I've just learned being in the tech space and the entrepreneurial space is that no one, especially the top experts, really knows what they're doing. I think often we put all these experts on a pedestal and we think we can't beat them. And you really just have to be delusional and like believe in yourself and not think that, oh, I have to be this expert because everyone's just making it it up along the way. So I think as soon as you accept that, that the people who created the rules in this game are no smarter than you, you can really unlock so many things in your life.

I love that. And that's so true. People do put people on pedestals. So thank you so much for spending your time with us and for sharing your story about Delphi and you know, your grandpa's story and, and for with us, I'm sure there's going to be people off the back of this who come and find out more, get on that waiting list and ultimately, if we can help even one or two people who are listening to this actually clone themselves and actually have their standard operating procedures or even their guests questions answered and that saves them time, then, then the aim of this is to, to do that. So thank you so much, Dara, and thank you too for listening to this on the Boostly podcast. If you do want to carry on the conversation, you can come and join for free, the hospitality community on Facebook. If you just search hospitality community in the search bar, you can come and join that for free and we can carry on talking AI hospitality or anything you like, really. So thank you very much again, Dara, and we'll see you on the next one.

Thanks, Liam.