CEO Roundtable MasterMind with Munya & Michael - AI Emerging Tech for CEOs Strategic Growth

minutes after start time.

This meeting is being recorded.

Might have 30 to 40 people here, so be nice.

What's going on?

Hello, hello.

Hey, doing great.

Yanni, your, uh, logo's backwards. You got to fix— you got to reverse your thing so it looks backwards in your window.

Oh, gotcha. Uh, yeah, I gotta re— let me see if I can do that right now. Oh man, thank you for telling me. I've been on calls, on Zoom calls for the past year, and no one's ever said that.

I thought it was just part of the logo. I was like, but I saw your, your cap, so—

no, you gotta— it's sometimes reverse, right? Yes, you have, uh, yes, it's like a photo. Go to the video settings. And move it. Did that work? Yes. No, not yet.

No, not yet.

Okay, look at that.

And then I'd also like recommend, if you look at your name on the square, put like your name and then slash I do this, or what your company is specific.

Okay.

There's time for people to be looking at your, your video. Yeah, well, you might as well have it something like Michael Filato slash Full Throttle, right? Like, I—

absolutely.

Otherwise you don't know what Michael Filato is unless I say it. But definitely put your information in the chat.

Your—

put your first, last, title, what you do, and your LinkedIn. Oh, I, I put my signature file in there, and then at the end of the call you can save that text. At least, you know, if you want to network with folks after this, it's— this is a cohort to basically learn trade tips, tactics, strategies. We've been talking a lot about AI today. Um, so the whole idea is just to— what did you learn over the last 6 months that you were like, okay, that worked, or that didn't work? Uh, you know, so Munya and I who are hosting this will start off with some ideas of what to do and what's working and what's not and some learnings. But this is not a sales pitch, uh, roundtable. This is not, um, bloviate for 5 minutes. Keep, keep ads— keep questions or answers kind of concise so we can all kind of focus in on what's working and what's not and kind of let people ask questions, right, of that, that response. It's a really safe spot just to kind of learn from each other, and then hopefully you guys will trade tips and tactics and phone numbers to refer business to each other. Um, it's a good way to kind of build your own top of funnel as well. You still haven't figured it out, Yanni, huh? No, I'm gonna do it after this call.

I don't want to take, uh, again, I'm gonna be fumbling with—

just, just so I can't handle it. Go to Adjust Back Settings.

Okay.

And then I was— let's see, I'm gonna figure this out for you. Video Settings. There it is. Yeah, Video Settings. And then you'll see Mirror My Video. See, watch.

Yes, mirror.

Yes.

See how mine's backwards now?

See, it looks good from my side.

Yeah, no, I just fixed it again, but yeah. Oh, all right. I think we got all the note takers out. Right now. We got like 32 people, which is a good, good, good, uh, number. And then I'm gonna put my information in, in the chat as well. I also host a roundtable around CROs and founders that I do twice a month. This particular one I'm doing today with Munya is a kind of a special one that we use his LinkedIn and my LinkedIn, and we automated outreach to all the people that we know and say, hey, let's, let's mix our connections with each other so that we can basically have a mixture of people we would never would have met. And both people can meet, and it turns into like a 6-degree of separation type thing, you know. So that's that. I'm gonna put in my roundtable that I do the second and fourth week of every month It's on US time of 11 AM on the second and fourth Tuesdays. So if you want to join that, great. But, um, so we'll get started here. I'm Michael Filato. I'm in Orlando. I basically do lead gen automation as a business. So I do a service and I automate LinkedIn outreach, uh, email outreach, and I do roundtable masterminds, events, and stuff like that. So people can basically learn each other instead of selling, and then you basically figure out— it's kind of like a mini discovery call by doing that. So that's kind of why I did this for me personally, but I also help companies do that. Mudia and I are talking about AI and, and agents and different tools that you use, what works, what doesn't. And he obviously specializes in helping companies internationally So, Moony, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us why you wanted to do this with Michael Filato.

Thank you so much. And really appreciate everyone who's been able to make this, this session. One thing that was clear to me is so I've been on LinkedIn for the past 7 or 8 years, and I probably now have about 50,000 followers who actively follow my content. And I start to think about the fact that how do we bring people together in a in a safe space just to exchange ideas. As, as Michael said, this is not a sales pitch. This is really about getting people together. You can find that, you know, if someone is going through the same kind of challenges you're going through, you know, best practices, this is a good way to do it. More interesting for me is that I live in Zimbabwe, so I'm 8,000 miles away from the US. And so we've become really much of a global ecosystem. Uh, the one statistic for me that I just wanna share with you, and which is why I think it's really relevant when it comes to AI, is that 1 in 5 of us will be from Africa, uh, in the next 20 years, right? Uh, let me repeat that again. 1 in 5 of us will be from the continent of Africa in the next 20 years, which means that if businesses are not focused or looking at Africa and, uh, looking at the opportunities that are in that space, it's something just to really think about. And with that comes the advent of, of AI and all of the, the rapid changes that are happening. I'll be honest, from my perspective, it is pretty scary. And so I think when I start talking to Michael, we thought, like, why don't we get together and just have a session? Best practices. What are people going through? How are they navigating? What tools are they using? And hopefully each and each of us will leave with, with some nugget that will help us in our business, whether you're a CEO, even at the level of dealing with the board and making the board aware of kind of these changes. So with that, I'm excited to be on the session. Thanks, Michael.

Thank you. Terry, do you have a question?

I was going to volunteer to go next, if that's fine.

We're not doing intros for everybody. We would have, yeah, we would have 40, we'd spend 45 minutes just doing intros. Perfect. Yeah, put your information in the chat, but you're welcome to, to, to, uh, engage in the conversation. And that's where we're all gonna basically— we're not gonna get to every single person and say— and do—

we're not—

this is not like a pitching thing. Um, obviously, uh, Munya and I are kind of talking about who we are because we are the host, but obviously, um, we want to talk about tips and tactics and strategies. So this makes this a useful time of our spend versus trying to sell our services. So one of the things that I wanted to give a background on, on the whole AI approach, is there's a lot of different engines out there and you got to really learn how to talk to it like a 4-year-old or 5-year-old. So if you're going to write messages and say, hey, I want to attract a certain type of person, you got to say, Hey, please write this in an emotional and strategic voice, no less than 2,000 words, looking at, at people that are VPs of marketing in software as a service that live in the US, and that talks about a leadership approach around the roundtable. That's how you have to really start thinking about how to use AI and really talk to it like you're trying to tell someone how to do this that's either worked for you or someone that's, that has no clue what you do. And if you, if you use the word passionate, emotional, like a 5-year-old, and if you're saying like, maybe I'm going after people that are, um, that love Star Wars or they're CIOs, like put a little flair of, uh, of, of Star Wars and Star Trek in there to make it kind of quirky. And then don't ever export that and put it into a message. Um, you should definitely automate some of that, but don't ever do that without proofreading it. So make your, your content when you're doing outreach with AI, just like when you were saying about like if you're going from Africa to the US, you got to understand the difference between the US customs and language and vice versa. Otherwise you're going to be talking, you're going to be spelling things differently than you're used to. You're also going to be not connecting with them. So that's one thing. Also, a lot of people when they go out with content and using AI, they pitch slap. So if you notice that when we did this roundtable approach, Moody and I did not sit there and go, hey, we want to get on these, get the all you on the call and sell you. We want to basically just talk about what's good, what's not working, what's working. So that's the whole idea is think about when you're talking to people, who cares, so what, why are you telling me this, how does this help me or my business, or how does this help feed my family? And then you'll, you'll basically connect. But if you say Hey, thanks for connecting, John. Um, I'm glad that you did. By the way, I do lead generation and I do this and I do that, and then this is— I, I, I— it's gonna be way too much. So that's one tip I'm gonna give you. The other tip is use— you could go on mute if you're, if you're not talking, uh, Chian. That'd be helpful. Um, come off camera, everybody, if you can too, because this is a networking thing. But the other tip would be On LinkedIn, there's 100 groups you can join. 100 groups. Those are like-minded people, of people that you want to join, but you could send them free messages. Don't just post in, in these groups on LinkedIn and expect to get engagement of people. Connect. Basically, we're gonna have to— someone—

then we're getting background noise from someone.

Yes.

Ben, um, let me see if I can mute from here.

Yeah, I'm gonna look for him because it's getting too much. Where is it? I don't even see him now. Um, anyway, so yeah, the whole group thing is a really nice feature to use, and you can send free in-mails that way. Then the third tip I gotta give you guys is, uh, look at other events on LinkedIn and, and conferences and get the speakers, exhibitors of people that you might want to chat with and take that and go, okay, they're spending money to go to a conference and they're going to a conference that I would go to. Why wouldn't I send them a message and basically get them to talk with me about best practices or something like that? So those are like 3 tips just to kind of fish where people fish or figure out how to get better conversations going without just having conversations to network. Is there any questions on that before I get other people to raise hands about tips and tactics that they like, or strategies, something you've won, something you've lost, something, some AI, uh, tool that you might be using? That's what, that's what we want to do, is just basically trade things like I just did. So any questions on what I shared?

No, but, uh, I'll be talking to you afterwards.

Okay, so, so, uh, is that Evelyn? Is that your name?

It's Evelyn, um, when it's a guy. Yeah, I know that a lot of people.

So where are you based?

Um, I'm in DC right now, but, um, I have my tentacles across the continent. So we're heavily in Nigeria now where we're implementing, um, across, uh, 8 states. Um, yeah, we're in Sierra Leone, we're in Liberia, we're in South Africa. Congo, DRC, and India as well. But this is home. Well, home away from home.

DC, Washington, or BC?

Okay, Washington, DC.

And then you work out a little bit, right?

Yeah, a little bit, you know, and travel a whole lot.

Yeah.

Um, so what's, what's, what's the thing in the last 6 months that you, you saw, like, a tool or tactic something you've won or something that you've lost, you're like, in a deal, or— I mean, what is—

what is—

what do you guys mostly do? Like, how do you help people, your company?

Um, you know, so for us, I mean, um, you know, we, we spread across 5 companies in our group, but the primary thing we do is, uh, train people, um, you know, for BPO jobs and other types of skill sets. So we have a course list of about 820 courses and then we spread that across 60 programs for training people, whether it's AI, cybersecurity, and the rest of it, and the soft skills that go with it. And then we have a program that we've actually set out called ICBM, which is more or less the intelligent capital formula where it's like we're helping people with them in the middle as a 360 view. So in looking at the training that we're doing now, particularly in the case of Nigeria, we're training 50,000 youths and placing them in our BPO centers. So what we're doing is we're training and we're building the centers and placing them as we're going. So we actually just started, uh, so the first two centers are up and running, um, on that. And of course, uh, you talk about doing all of this without AI— in the days without AI, it would not even have been possible to have gotten it this quickly. Yeah, but the amount of speed we were able to achieve by just aggregating AI tools for the pros and cons across which we could use them for has been immense in terms of getting us to be up and running this quickly. And I think the results are showing on the ground. I'm just looking at some of the things we're doing now.

So it's education and, and business process outsourcing, right?

Technology. If you put those two, if you merge those two together, it's like everything in between those two.

Yeah.

How many people are in Nigeria?

So for my— this first seat, we have roughly about 500 now. Um, you know, but we know that that number is— I'm looking at my registrations today, I saw like 1,000 coming in. Like, so like, um, we know we're going to be busy for the next 3 years. It's a 3-year project of which we have.

How many people live in Nigeria?

Over 250 million.

Wow.

Yeah, so awesome. That's huge.

Terry, you got a question?

Terry, I just want to chime in and say an interesting tip or something I learned. Uh, my Wi-Fi is kind of acting up. I'm in an area in Maryland that's kind of new, so it's choppy. So hopefully you can hear me clearly. Goldman Sachs, uh, released a report, and this is helpful for people to know because a lot of times, you know, at least for me, I straddle the US and Ghana.

Can you come off camera so we can see you?

Yeah, just— it might— what I do is choppy.

Okay.

Oh, okay, okay.

Yeah, again, apologies. So that's why I joined earlier. Hopefully people caught a glimpse of me. Uh, see, I'm not AI, I'm a real person. So with respect to just Nigeria, what you said, Evelyn, it's really interesting because Goldman Goldman Sachs has a report. I'll try and find it and share it. But for me, who's stateside, talking to a lot of people where, you know, South Africa and the US are very similar, where people don't leave or travel— so not saying people are ignorant, they just don't know. And so one thing Goldman did that is helpful is the study shows that, or their projections, is by 2075, which sounds so far away, right? But if you think about Y2K, remember that? That's 25 years ago. So over the next 50 years, Nigeria's economy is going to be the number 5 economy in the entire world ahead of the UK, Japan, and Germany. So when you think about what you're doing, Evelyn, it's really helpful to, I think, give people context because even the question I was just asked, how many people in Nigeria, I would lead with this is going to be, and people know Goldman Sachs, right? They don't, why would they lie? What is their incentive to make this up, right? And so for them to say that Nigeria's economy will be the number 5 economy in the entire world, that is something that I think a lot of business leaders and corporations, at least in my ecosystem advising enterprises, They're curious and they're looking to lean into that. They just don't have any context on, you know, how to navigate these, you know, these markets that are inevitably going to have, as you know, Munya said, 1 out of 5 people globally under 35 will be African. You can't ignore that, or you can at the detriment of your business not being viable, you know, in that period of time. So I have to hop, just wanted to chime in and say I'm excited to be joining these sessions and thank you so much everyone for having me. God bless.

Yeah, what do you do?

So my work is a lifestyle, it's a marketplace. And so what I do is I help families and individuals who are doing business between the US and Ghana primarily. So if it's travel, which is usually the on-ramp, right, if you've never been to Africa, you have no context, the first thing is we get executives to go. And then from there, we help them with all things that matter. So go-to-market strategies, market entry, expansion, so on and so forth. Raising capital and things of that nature. So the, I'd say the 3 main areas are travel, real estate, and wealth management. My first career out of college, I worked in New York City as a wealth management advisor in Midtown New York. And so just blending those passions, advising US companies, Airbnb, Delta Airlines, CNN, Watch, I mean, the list is endless, but it's basically the same framework, right? They know there's something happening in Africa. You know, the US media is interesting. We're not told what's happening outside the US as we all see. So when you talk to decision makers, CEOs, you know, chief strategy officers as a company, especially those that are publicly traded, the only way they'll grow is more eyeballs. You think about a lot of companies have saturated in terms of US growth. So I worked at LinkedIn, I was part of the creative management team, and that's the same story there, right? They've pretty much peaked all they can in the US. They need to expand internationally. So that's where, you know, for those who are in the Africa space, that's an opportunity to guide them because they have no context on Africa, right? If I'm living in San Francisco, What do I know about Africa? But if you lead with things like, hey, we've all used or we know a company called Lyft, right? Lyft was actually inspired by Zimbabwe. The founders went to Zimbabwe and they created a company called Zimride. They came back to the US, sold that company to Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and they pivoted to found Lyft. So there's tons of stories that show companies, US-based Silicon Valley going to Africa, battle testing in a sandbox there, and then bringing it back to the US.

It's true.

So thank you so much. I didn't mean to command, you know, too much time. I just wanted to chime in before I have to leave for another meeting. But I've dropped my information and my LinkedIn in the chat, so hopefully we'll, you know, we'll get to connect and, uh, we'll speak more.

God bless you.

All right, thank you, everybody. Anybody have, uh, a couple tips or tactics they want to share or, uh, or, or respond to what we talked about so far?

Yes, my name is—

you gotta make AI. Go ahead.

My name is Jeanine Rowe and I've heard Africa, Africa, Africa, but for those who've been onto the continent, Nigeria is different from Kenya, is different from South Africa. So it's not one monolithic opportunity, but just as you target market customers everywhere, you have to recognize that in Africa there are different cultures, there are different opportunities, And you just have to do the hard work of research, not just think you're going to the continent, but you're going to countries on the continent.

And what, and what, what do you specialize in?

My name is Joanne Rowe. I was the former Dean of the School of Business at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York for over 10 years. Prior to that, I worked in IBM and, uh, federal government here. I also served on the World Bank and was at the Tanzania Housing Bank. For a couple of years. But my energy is for underserved populations to understand that it's not just AI, but emerging technologies that are coming and we need to get on the, uh, we, we need to train. And it is not just the underserved populations. The educational system isn't moving fast enough for the technologies that are being developed and the labor forces, uh, and entrepreneurs that we need to create to meet that demand that's coming in the future. I'm an academician but also a practitioner.

How do you think we're going to get these folks to learn how to use AI to help versus complain about taking jobs? Because there's obviously ways to use AI to make your job more efficient, proficient.

Um, if you're— let me just say this and I'll shut up for the rest of the time. It's about collaboration. It is not man or machine, but it's the synthesis of both of us working together to have better improved living for all. It is not just about the machine. So if you focus on the machine, you've got to focus on the wrong place. You focus on the humans and making human conditions better. I'm done.

Well, can I—

Go ahead.

Go ahead. Okay.

So my name is Chukwudume, but you all can call me Chimzy. I'm the founder of The Charm Effect. We use a framework called Business as a Baby framework to consult with customers that are your business as a baby, toddler, teenager, adult. So let's get to the AI part, right? So I use AI a lot. When I say a lot, I mean, I use it a lot to do research. So I put an article or post, like recently, a couple of years ago, where I was telling people that back in the day, we used to Google, right? Now I don't Google anymore. Talk to your AI like you're talking to— like Mr. Michael said, talk to the AI like you're talking to a kid, right? I talk to you like it's my buddy. I said, look at this. Then I go back, I tell the AI, apply critical thinking. I go back, I say, play devil's advocate.

Yeah, you gotta talk to it the right way.

I can see perspectives, right? And then from there, you can now be able to move forward. It's not about taking your jobs or not taking your jobs. It's about where society is headed. There's an article I wrote a while back, a man that invented, the man that invested in 1,000 horses the year before the steam engine came out, is he a bad investment? Whether you like it or not, that's where we're headed, AI and robotics. So that's the future. So if you're not like, if you don't get caught on the train, you're going to get left behind. And it's not because you're being left behind because you don't know what you're doing. It's just the way society is. It's like the advent of the computers. That's just what's coming. So it's how we can actually use it and apply it to whatever perspective that you're using, whether it's— and another thing is that in the industry, I see a lot of emails from different people saying, we'll build AI agents for you. I just built one for roofing, for the roofing industry, for supplement— supplementary estimate. The thing I'm hearing from a lot of people is that everyone is popping on the wave. The AI industry is in the baby form. I call it baby, it's a baby industry right now. So what you're seeing from people is, oh, you can use AI to do this, use AI to do that. But how is it driving the revenue? How is it actually driving the revenue of organizations? So you got to go back and think, what manual tasks are you doing repetitively that you can actually automate in a very simple way? So when you go back and you backtrack, then you can see how you can apply that. Don't be afraid of taking your jobs or none of that. Just look at how you can use it as— it's a tool, so you control it. You're the strategist, he's an executor. You, you're the general. Yeah, yeah.

So I basically use the whole approach in lead gen. Like, I had my kids be my virtual assistant. Yeah, click the buttons all day and scrape and write and go into website, pulling all the speakers down and putting in a Google Sheet. Now I use a scraper, scrape it. I, I could send out thousands of emails in one day, and then I have them working on human stuff, like go reach out, they responded back, now business date them versus click buttons all day. So be a little more strategic in what you're doing, and you're going to learn a trait of how to communicate with people versus being, uh, someone that presses buttons all day. So there you're hitting it right on the head. Other ChatGPT stuff, you got to load up documents too. Like, load up— here's a— you look at this website, look, here's, here's all— here's their 10K, pull stuff from that. Um, it's just you gotta know how to learn. You gotta really learn how to talk to the—

I'll give you, I'll give you an example, Michael. Um, when I do research, market research, because as a PM, I also a product manager, when I want to do research I go on Reddit and I read because Reddit is the most raw form.

What's it called?

Reddit.

Reddit. You know, Reddit. Reddit is the rawest form of what people are actually feeling. I screenshot all those, what people are saying. I take all the bucket and I put it inside my AI and I say, tell me what the pain points are. I'll still find that information. It'll probably take me like a day or two, but with AI, I'm done synthesizing all that data that I'm doing research with.

Are you screenshotting or are you copy and pasting?

I just screenshot it. I screenshotted it.

Cause on ChatGPT, it pulls the text from the—

yeah, it will pull everything. And I tell, well, what are they talking about? What are they feeling?

Right?

Cause I can still do it. Normally that would take me like a week to do, but now I'm doing it in like 5 minutes. And then I use Fireflies to record my meetings.

That's what I have.

I don't have my Fireflies.

Yeah, I'm mad.

I have it on.

You know what it also does is the unstructured data that I pull from websites. I'm like, hey, take this, take all these data that's all scrambled up and put it in CSV file and just give me first name, last name, and title and company. Then I ingest it into an engine and then I basically say, I see that you're attending for— because sometimes when you scrape, it doesn't scrape the right information.

It doesn't.

Yeah.

And, and those ChatGPTs don't, or Geminis don't scrape LinkedIn very well. They block it.

So yeah, yeah, you know, and I think I think, yeah, I use ChatGPT Cloud and they can go on, they can search online now because I don't always listen to everything the AI say. Sometimes I tell my AI, I was like, you're not making sense right now. What you just said didn't make sense. Can you verify, research? Yeah, because you really have to look, you have to look like, you have to, you have to look like, because some, some things like, and that's where people now actually make a mistake. Then you see some things generated, you're like, okay, yeah, I wrote it, or It's not connecting because they're not actually critically assessing it. That's where the human component comes in.

Zen, would you ask a question?

Hi, Michael.

Real quick one for me. Sorry, I wanted to check, as Sonny had mentioned that you are in the US renters market, $1.6 billion of failed rental applications. I'm really keen, maybe you could just quickly comment on how are you using AI in that context? I think there's some really interesting use cases here, so would love to hear from you.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, thanks.

Yeah. All right. My name is Shio. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Carbo, right? Carbo is a Nigerian language. It's Yoruba. It means welcome, right? So we're welcoming people to their homes. Yes, the AI element. So what we're doing first is creating new data points that allows you as a landlord to be able to verify renters instantly powered by digital ID so that you don't have to rely on traditional credit scores, right? Today, almost every landlord in the US relies on credit scores to verify whether you can pay rent or not, right? But we believe that credit score is not the ultimate predictor of your ability to pay rent, especially when you're trying to rebuild your life coming off the back of a bad credit score, right? It doesn't give you a chance. So what we've done is to create new data points to look at your industry where you work. Say for instance, you're an Uber driver in San Francisco. Waymo is piloting driverless taxis, same as Uber, right? What that means is that it's going to reduce your income as an Uber driver. So our tool is able to predict and tell the landlord that based off of Sean's projected income over the next 6 months, chances are that he might struggle with his rent. He's got 2 kids. This is the cost of inflation. So what we've done is to create a new way to verify tenants as opposed to using traditional methods to screen tenants. And these allow you as a renter to instantly match with a landlord on our platform off of the back of the way it's done traditionally to the way you have to—

Is there a lease? Is there any DISC, like, personality, um, is that legal? And, or is there any type of psychological, emotional ability to pay that you could use? Like, like they do in— like, they— you do DISC to, to, uh, get a job. And if you're a landlord, you might want to have a stable person in that, in your, in your place, because I used to buy homes and Texas and rent them out. And some of the folks that rented places, I wanted to murder them because they were just— they're breaking stuff and they were just not good tenants. So I always want to make sure that what you're saying sounds very interesting, but how could you even take it from, from what type of career they're in, but also emotionally, psychology, and, and personality? Or is that even legal in, in that space? I don't know.

I mean, it's funny that you mentioned that. So on our roadmap, we've, um Got an AI facial recognition lie detector tool that allows you to predict, um, during conversation if the landlord or the tenant is being truthful over a video call, right? Um, but it's in trial mode, right? So we, yeah, we're going to trial it. But, um, off the conversation we've been having with, uh, property managers and landlords, that's awesome to have a tool like that. But again, it's in trial mode. Um, So gradually, this is what we are hoping to evolve into, where renting can happen just like you're booking on Airbnb. Because now, just like you said, you can trust them based off of the result that our AI provides.

Are you going to use this across other industries versus just rental? Because it sounds like this can be used for Airbnb, like you said, Airbnb or job, job applications, anything else.

Um, if it's successful the way we're doing it, we can spin it off as a standalone so that it can be used in other industries. But now we're just piloting in real estate.

Awesome.

Just a quick one on that, you know, because we, in, in, in the breakdown of how we do admissions right now, um, because going through 50,000 applications is a lot for us. So we have a tool that we built called a digital counselor that was actually built part of the DISC model, but also with a professional psychologist and team that we actually use because what we wanted to do was to find ways to shortlist candidates, um, using some agentic means of doing it, but at the same time doing it responsibly where we know that part of what we're assessing is to see how to support the students. Because there's a lot of trauma that people have gone through and we're looking for those. And those tools can actually help a lot in at least breaking down some of those numbers for you and helping those students to actually plan their journey in terms of how their learning works. Because unless you do that, you're going to fall down into a huge trap of everyone just getting excited about learning all the growth tools. And then at the same time, you're going to have a very high dropout ratio instead of learning how to support these students in getting to their goals.

Yeah, just to add to that. So what we've done, even though we were now in the market and in the beta phase, we niche down the product to domestic and international students in the US only because there's good reason for landlords not to ask those type of a demographic for credit scores, right? So it makes it easy for us to train the AI model to only the data points that the landlords are likely to ask this type of people. So just to off of what you're saying that we had to limit it to something that would work so that it makes acceptance in the market easier for us as well. And then we can scale up from there.

I wanted to remind folks that this is kind of a cohort sharing ideas. And if you can't come on camera because everybody's putting their time in to kind of share ideas and tips and tactics. So I want as many people as we can in this hour to share tips and tactics and strategies. And, uh, so please come off camera and, uh, be, be ready to share something that you've learned because it's not the Michael and Munya show today, you know.

I think that—

I think Zen has something. I see him smiling. Zen, what, what, what, what can you share with us that, that you've seen either, hey, coming into America or coming or going international? What do you do? And give us a couple of tips and tactics and strategies or tools that you've used to help your business.

All right, no problem. So I'm Zen, um, multiple serial entrepreneur. I do a lot in impact sourcing, which is similar to what Evelyn does. I'm also in the energy space, but recently I've been extremely excited about AI. Uh, one of the reasons is typically, obviously, I think every entrepreneur here has had a need for somebody, a developer, an accountant, you name it. With AI, you can really just have these people on demand. And I wanted to talk about Vibe Coding. That is the number one— if you guys aren't familiar with Vibe Coding, let me put you on real quickly.

You can go to—

exactly, you can go to a website What's it called?

Divine coding?

No, it's—

the vibe coding is a system.

Yeah, it's a way of, uh, low-code, no-code. You can just prompt and any app or website will be instantly made.

Okay, vibe code. Oh, thank you.

Um, you tell it what you want it to do.

Yeah, so about 2 months—

we stay here in the US, you know the vibe.

No, that's crazy.

So about 2 months ago, I was invited to Jordan by the IFC and the World Bank to talk about job creation. Someone said earlier that, you know, out of 5 people will be from Africa. The truth is right now, guys, the World Bank has shifted from world poverty. They've shifted from world hunger, and they're focusing on job creation.

Awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. In about 10 years, 1 billion people will be unemployed, which creates an incredible threat.

Yeah.

A billion people is a lot of people unemployed. So what they're focusing on is what I—

how many unemployed right now?

I think it's at about 300 million globally, from what I understand.

So we're going for 300 million to 1 billion unemployed.

Unemployed overnight?

Yeah, because of AI or what?

No, no, no, just, just the world, the way the world is going. It's not because of AI, right?

But I would understand what, what's cut— what's the cause effect? I mean, people say this is going to happen. You don't know, no one knows the future. And there's a lot of things that are misconstrued when these people say that, and it's gonna freak out a lot of people in a lot of countries and a lot of markets. So I would love to know where you— where someone got that number and why.

Yeah, so with growth of populations like India, for example, okay, and Africa is very close to India, like you heard Evan say, there are 250 million people where he's from. If you ask him of that, how many of those people are employed right now?

The growth, the fact, the growth factor of the world. Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah, it's inevitable.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

So the cool thing is, for a lot of entrepreneurs, you can actually go to a website and I'll give it to you. While I was in Jordan, I got to meet some people from a company called Replic. So for me, I'm going to let you guys know there's an app called Lovable, L-O-V-A-B-L-E. Just put it in. I won't even tell you what to do.

It sounds like a dating site.

It's better than a dating site.

You think?

It matches you with your dreams. It's incredible.

Really?

I wanted to put everyone on, on that. Once you get to Lovable, Explore the Vibe Coding world. You are still going to need a developer at the end of your journey. But from Vibe Coding, I've created over 15 different websites, 3 functional businesses that generate me revenue today. And it's as easy as if you're a dreamer and you sit there and you think, oh, I wonder if I can make an app that can do X, Y, Z, put that in there and watch it come to life.

And let me just go— let me just add with that a little bit. I'm sorry, I don't want to monopolize. I'm a geek on the other side. I'm trying to restrain myself when I hear all these other stuff. Please permit me. But on the vibe coding, the importance of vibe coding is if you've always wished to want to develop something, but you're not a developer and you just wish like you can actually get it to a certain point by just explaining those ideas and trying to get a tool to convert that idea into a product for you. That's what vibe coding pretty much helps you do. Except that in some of the cases, it can do quite extensive things. I mean, for a lot of the accent training that we do now, we built that application just using Claude and taking that code and giving it to our developers to finish off. So about 70% of the coding, we actually just prompted, vibecoded really, you know, onto Claude and then extracted those codes, give it to our development team, and then they were able to get it to go through. So for a lot of those who are actually trying to do stuff, that is an area that you want to actually, you know, Use your little skills to just play around with it. Nothing, nothing complex. And you don't have to be afraid of it. It's like writing, literally not writing any kind of code.

When you use Lovable, does it give you enough that you can actually use it or you have to have a developer?

That depends on the complexity of your idea. So if you have an idea that requires a payment gateway and you don't understand how APIs work, That's when you get your complete idea. Like Evelyn said, you copy the code because Lovable or any vibe coding app gives you two, two views, the frontend view and the backend view. Copy and paste that. You call someone like me or Evelyn and you say, hey, do you have any developers who can complete a project? We'll tell you, of course. How much are you trying to spend, etc., etc.? And then it's that quick, but it shouldn't cost you more than a couple of hundred dollars. For a developer to help you complete that because it's the— it's all the manual stuff.

Yeah, you have the meat of it.

I got you.

Yeah, exactly.

I'd like to talk to some of you afterwards, but I'm— and the new jobs that I just created, so I have to ask Michael or Munya to send me the list of people who were on because I can't have no way to see and read it.

Who's speaking, by the way?

My name is Tease Ball.

Zoom via—

okay, okay, yeah, yeah.

If you go to Zoom, if you go to Zoom, there's 3 buttons. You can download the chat. Everybody's information is in chat. I don't— we definitely don't want 30 people asking, you know, Michael, look, I'm legally blind.

I'm just not trying to air it.

Oh, okay, I'm sorry.

All right, I will definitely I'll definitely send it to you.

I'm very grateful.

God bless you.

Thank you, sir.

You just touched quickly on the number of jobs that are coming on the other side. So now you're talking DevOps folks are going to be extremely important in this phase of live coding, right? Because in DevOps, once you've developed that, somebody needs to take that application live for you. And these are the guys that are— these are their responsibilities. So those are new roles that you're going to start having more of. Of course, AI might still jump into that fray. But You still need a human in the middle to really perfect these solutions when you want to do it, especially things that are more complex.

When you said that about DevOps, that's interesting because like, there was a client of mine, they actually built a DevOps as a service tool. They don't have to do the work. They automated DevOps because we had given them DevOps engineers to work on their project. It's like, they literally built DevOps as a service.

So even if they actually have somebody behind the—

behind that, I was just like, when you said that, like, it's just, hey guys, I just tried this lovable thing.

What kind of idea did you put in?

I just said spin me up a landing page with full throttle and it's like been here for 10 minutes, man.

Do you know, once you're done with that one, I think you should— it'll be a lot of fun if you challenge someone just to really come up with the Craziest idea. I challenged my 13-year-old what kind of business he would start in Mars, and that way he can leave it to his future generation. He ended up coming up with some company that uses the rocks for construction, and I said, just leave that there, put it in your will, and in 100 years your kids are going to have a very profitable business. And when I tell you Lovable made it, Michael, it made it.

And I, I would love for you to—

could you, could you, could you put the Lovable link Because I'm trying to find it.

Lovable.dev.

Lovable.

The L-O-V, like love.

Yeah, kind of like me, lovable. Oh yeah, Amanda, I want to hear from you, Amanda. Let some other folks get in here. Amanda and Cheyenne, that's correct. What you— what you share some, some lovable ideas?

I'm like, I want to get on top of, on top of this too. It just sounds very interesting, but super pleasure to meet you all. I'm Amanda Esteban-Coles. I founded my firm AG Advisors. We actually work on financial inclusion initiatives. So I'm a financial inclusion advocate. And so AI is definitely a conversation that comes up quite often because not only, I think earlier where someone was speaking to the educational piece, piece, right? We have a huge, large population of individuals that are not even leveraging the, the tool. But it's also assessing the biases and the ethical aspects of AI, right? The data integrity, right? You know, I, I was having a conversation with someone on the wealth management side, and we were talking about the AI commercials right now, right? How ethically some of these pictures and graphics around what AI is putting together. It's just something that we need to consider as we, you know, build a lot of these tools and programs around AI. We just need to make sure we have a lot more diversity and folks being included in these conversations. So I'm just glad to be here and kind of listening to see, you know, what else is out there. Awesome.

I just— so I just got back Lovable. Interesting. I made it, it made like a website for me. Oh, it didn't say Full Throttle Full Auto, which I told to do, but I mean, I like to— I like the boxes here.

This is cool. Oh yeah, this is lovable. I like, I like what I'm seeing. Okay, I mean, who needs—

why would— I mean, to be honest with you, like, I used to use Fiverr and Upwork and stuff. I mean, this is— why wouldn't I use this now?

Yeah, it's just, you're just, you're just gonna need someone to deploy that. Like, that's just pretty much it, and it's good to go.

Yeah.

So I take this and, and I would get HTML code from this, or what?

Let me help you out, Michael. Up on the, on the, on the screen to the top left-hand corner, you see the arrow facing up? Don't publish it. You see the arrow facing up? Left, left, a little bit more left.

Download the code.

That one? That's number 1. And then this will give you a link you can share with your team people and it gives it a complete website. So right now your website is at, you can go live as we speak.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

Do you guys know if this can help like with presentations and things? Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to jump in.

I have a completely different website for presentations. Yeah. That's me spinning up LinkedIn posts. Articles every day.

I'll share that one.

And this is why we do this, guys. I mean, I don't, I don't hear a lovable— I mean, this is something like we change, we exchange ideas, tips, and tactics, and hopefully do business with each other. Hopefully refer business and give each other some sort of referral fee if you can help each other too.

Absolutely, I would love that. So if you guys— I know a good friend of mine, and I'd probably post her link here She's built an AI presentation tool that provides kind of like a talking script. So for example, if you have any future engagements or things that you want to facilitate in terms of conversations to teach folks, you can upload the presentation and it literally pulls together a script. And so if anyone has anything similar to that, it'd be cool to learn. But I can also add her link because it's pretty interesting. Especially if you think about it, we're in a space where we're always speaking to content and putting together, you know, whatever productivity tools is helpful. I think that'd be interesting.

Yeah, I, I used a couple of presentations. I don't know what it was, but it like murdered my, my, my presentation. I'm like, this is not good. So I'd love to see different tools that can make the presentation back, but I just warn everybody, don't go into a deck too fast when you, when you're doing a call. The best question I've learned is— and I should have asked you this, Amanda— like, what grabbed your attention to join the roundtable today? So I asked that when someone gets on a discovery call. It's like, so, Amanda, you booked a call with me. What grabbed your attention? Do you want to talk to me today? And I just shut up, you know. So they tell— they're going to tell me what's going on, why they want to talk with me. Versus me trying to say, well, I do lead generation, and I do this, and I, I, I. So that's one question I learned from a, a boss of mine that was really nonchalant. I'm like, I've been asking this a different way. Like, you know, what's, what's, what, what's keeping you up at night? All these stupid sales ploys that, that people taught you in the '80s and '90s and 2000s. It's like, no, just let someone tell you what, what they're interested in and then see if there's a fit versus trying to fit a round peg in a square hole type thing. So yeah, yeah. Shane, Shane, Shane, Shane, I'm like, I'm murdering your name, but—

Hi, Michael. Hi, everyone.

How do you pronounce it?

It's Chine.

Chine, nice to meet you.

Likewise. Honestly, it's been a very interesting conversation and very, very insightful. I'm just literally here to learn. I'll be very honest with you. I work in payments and I'm still at that point where I'm really, really trying to understand where AI fits in everything payments, right? And I'm not talking about, you know, trying to get the client onboarded and using like the AI tool or, you know, when it comes to like AML and catching things very quickly, you know, when it comes to payments in itself, you know, um, because for me, when I think about AI, I think about the fact that we humans still have to do the heavy lifting, right? Um, we still have to feed it what it gives to us, you know, and I'm still at that point where I feel like if anyone feeds in jargon it will bring out jargon as well, you know, and I'm trying to understand how best we can actually control what the AI gives. I have friends that are so into AI that they actually fight with AI like an actual human being, you know, like, oh no, what you have is wrong. What you just said is, you know, discriminatory.

What you've—

who told you to add this information? Did I give this to you? And then the AI apologizes again like lovers. You know, I'm just like, like, to me, I'm— and that's the reason why I've been very quiet. I've been trying to gather as much information because, um, yes, I know that AI helps make the work easier, you know, by taking out the mundane things and letting you do the actual thinking things that humans should actually do. But at the same time, what happens if the information that the AI picks from is compromised or is not good enough? Where, where do we draw the line between, you know, what's good and what is correct from what we're actually getting from it? Trust me, it has actually really helped me. Like, I've been using ChatGPT for the past couple of months and it's been helping me with some slides. I'm enjoying it. Right? But, um, and I've been struggling with the whole thinking thing. It does a lot of thinking these days, right? Um, which is not bad, but I'm, I'm at that point where I just want to understand what happens if the wrong information is given. What happens if we don't give the information, you know? And how do we ensure that the integrity of the information that we're receiving is actually good and adequate, you know. Um, yeah, so that's, that's actually where I am right now as well.

Yeah, I want to, I want to say something real quickly if that's possible.

Let, let, let me get Chika in here because we got to get other folks to share as well.

Hi everyone, my name is Chika Oke and I am a founder of a payment company in Nigeria, Flex. And I, I, I love what Chineya said. Um, and Chineya, I was in that space where you are trying to understand You know, again, what you jargon in, jargon out. Researcher by trade, and I fully understand what you mean. What I started to look at, however, is using AI as a way to plug a gap. So you understand the start, you understand the finish, meaning you know what your question is, but you know what the outcome, an idea of your outcome, what you're trying to do, and using the AI information as a gap. Then what that helps you do is kind of understand sometimes when that information is not adequate or correct or fulfills the need. But I think what's important too, as part of this whole AI event, is the idea to train people on what the value of the information is. I can throw information at you, I can give you numbers, I can give you data, I can give you codes. But if you don't understand how that can be implemented and what is the value of the information you're getting. So it's one thing to ask questions, it's a whole different thing to get responses and being able to use that response to put it where you need to be. And I think for me, for payments, what I've been looking for here from people too on this, in this group is to understand The biggest issue that I'm facing right now with my business as we're growing very fast and we're doing really well is fraud. And I know the rental piece that was talked about, how you can use AI to detect things ahead of time. Try and implement that same thing in the area of payments where there are ways to understand and anticipate what would happen. You trigger a program, you trigger a path for your business, but you can now, you know, can now use AI to understand What are the loopholes there that you can proactively manage? Pretty much thinking how people think, like feeding it information as far as what has been experienced and trying to use AI to understand how that, the outcome of that will be based on what you're implementing or deploying. That is where I'm at now because it's so difficult. I mean, the landscape of fraud across the world is just something that's just growing very, very much and finding a way to control that, not even eliminating, but controlling it to where businesses are viable still, otherwise can it just pull us all down? So I'm in that payment space as well. I would like to connect with you, but I think the question you're asking is valid. What I did was using AI to plug a hole. I understand my question, I understand what I'm trying to do, and in between that, AI kind of fulfills that. That way I'm not just kind of throwing information around. Plus I'm training my team to understand the value of the information they receive. What is that? You got something back, what is the value of it? And that also helps as well. Thank you.

Thank you.

That's very useful because in the center that we have in Abuja now, that's 350 employees that are dedicated just to a security operations center, both for fraud management and all the other gaps that come behind it. But I think balancing those AI tools with a person in a security environment is basically part of the recipe that you need for that, because that is an ever-evolving field that you're going to need in terms of fraud management.

We got about 5 minutes left. I want to get a couple folks in here. Dan, do you want to go real quick?

Sure. Good discussion. And regarding— is it Shanay? That's how you pronounce her name? Regarding your friends arguing with AI, it may seem kind of crazy, but I promise the best results you get from AI is actually treating it like a human because of how it's generated. The more you give it information and feedback and whatnot, it's just the more refined you get. And even in terms of trying to figure out how you phrase your questions, if you don't know how to simplify your own jargon before you prompt it, you can literally just type out what you'd usually prompt it with, knowing it's wrong, and say, simplify this for me so that, you know, it'll be a good prompt. And it'll actually give you the prompt, and then you can actually send the prompt back to it, and it'll give you what you want. Like, it's really elementary. Like you have sometimes, I'm sure you heard this in business where, you know, people who are like C+ students or whatever, they do better in business than people who are A students. Sometimes you overthink things. Like you have to kind of even like slow yourself down and like get it really down to basics. And I promise you'll get like the best results from AI. Actually dropped also, that's a quick one, kind of wrapping up. I dropped a presentation software, Gamma, in the chat. And there's also another one called Beautiful and like presentations, AI, they're all pretty decent. What else? And I also do the additional development work that's required. Like one of you guys said, he said he met someone from Rippl.it. And he talked about a couple of these guys' tools.

Let me, let me get me to make sure I get the rest of folks here. We got 3 minutes, we got 3 minutes, guys, we're not gonna be able to get to everybody here. Tamo'a?

Yeah, I'll try to keep it quick, but thank you all so much for sharing your insights. I wanted to touch on just a few quick things because based on the information that I've been receiving, I think it's important for us all to remember, and I think someone mentioned garbage in, garbage out, but there is bias with AI. So even when we talk about how to determine if people are lying or things like that, I think it's always important important to keep in mind that, yeah, whatever we're using to build our models has to have the right background data. I think one thing that took me a while to really appreciate is also that AI is not— like ChatGPT is not all of AI. It's just a learning model. And so I really like that you all are sharing a lot of resources that we can use to do different things that will enable artificial intelligence. And then I think if anyone has— because I've seen some lists of different AI tools for different use cases. And so I think, you know, we've mentioned some here, but if you have any consolidated list that you use, I think it'll be really helpful to share. But thanks for organizing, Michael.

Yeah, I tried that TinyURL that someone just put, Zen, and it doesn't work, just so you know. But I'm going to have to let you guys all go.

When's the next one?

I have one that comes up every 2 weeks. It's actually next week. It's kind of a CRO-CEO roundtable.

It's a little—

it's pretty much the same with what, what Munya and I did, but we basically, in this particular one with Munya, we used a lot of his contacts because that's— that was kind of the, uh, thing that we were doing is like, let's use our connections that we both have that we've never talked to. Um, the one that I do every 2 weeks is kind of a set one that goes on every 2 weeks for— it's for founders, VPs, executives only. It's not like for like the AEs and get to get in there and sell and stuff like that. So that's kind of what that is. And so pretty much everybody on this call is welcome to join, um, and that's kind of every 2 weeks. It's 11 AM Eastern time, and there's an Eventbrite link in the chat. Again, go to— for the people that need Help email me and I'll save the text file of the chat. Or we'll also— I'll probably— I'm probably going to post this video, um, on my LinkedIn because I think we had a really good discussion that there's nothing that can't be shared that was too, uh, controversial. So sometimes I don't post if we have really inside talk, but I think this was a really good roundtable. Thanks, Munya. Um, and, uh please join the roundtables that are coming up. And then we'll— if you need Munya or myself to help you with any type of services that we do, like obviously what I do is the Legion Roundtable Mastermind, email, LinkedIn, all that stuff. Well, spend more time selling, less time hunting is what I do. And then, Moody, do you want to throw in your, like, a little why to reach out to you before we go?

I just want to spread the love. Africa is the future, so anything around Africa, I think AI is critical. So share. If anything I can do to help, um, or even put people together, that's what this is all about. So thank you.

God bless everybody. Be safe, be safe, and take care of your neighbors.

Thank you.