Episode 293: Harnessing AI for Growth with Daniel Metcalf

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. This podcast will give independent insurance agents all of the tools to grow your business and live life on your terms. Wherever you are today, if you're starting with nothing or well on your way to the success you desire, with the right people, processes and promotions in place, you will be unstoppable. And now I'd like to introduce your host, Mike Stromsol.

Have you ever had a situation where you're at an event and you hear a speaker that everybody's talking about that changes the game with their topic? That just happens to be a timely topic that's on everybody's mind? And beyond that? Well, such a thing happened last November at our UPB Grand Mastermind. We launched a new format where we had breakout sessions and we had a panel of experts. And one of the gentlemen who was in one of those breakout sessions was teaching. And when he was done, everybody was blown away. Everybody was talking about him, and they were talking in the halls about everything that he shared. And it feels like after that, for a couple of months, that they just couldn't get enough of them. And now he's got that issue going on in his world. But I am grateful because I've been pursuing him for a while and I finally corralled him for a few minutes of his valuable time. Happy to have on the podcast, Mr. Daniel Metcalf. Daniel, welcome.

Oh, thanks for having me. I'm very honored. And thank you for that wonderful introduction. That was kind of you.

Well, it's true. And you know, we talked about you going to the Networks alliance event. You went there, they were blown away with what you shared there. I heard through the grapevine, if you will. So great job, and you're just doing great things. And our theme for the podcast this year for 2025 is everything technology, automation, AI. Because it's on everybody's minds. And I heard you say something recently. Independent insurance agents are drowning in features and starving for benefits. So I'm going to pull out of your head and your heart as much as I can about that, because it's absolutely true, in my opinion. But before we get started, who is Daniel Metcalfe? Tell us a little bit about where you are, who you are, et cetera.

Sure. So, yeah, thank you again. I'm Daniel Metcalf. I'm the co founder and President of Cyberfin. I'm a serial entrepreneur, cybersecurity expert, AI evangelist. I have 15 years of experience in the independent insurance industry space spanning everything from marketing and sales to IT cybersecurity and now AI all around. The idea of trying to help small to midsize agencies simplify very complex and unscalable it and make it really simple and make it really relentless so that they can focus on what makes them best, which is helping people with their insurance protection and their financial protection. I have the honor of having a beautiful wife and two children that keep me very busy. And I'm an avid curler for those that are out there that might know some of the winter springs. So, yes, I go indoors to throw, to go on ice and play a wonderful sport.

Got it. And you're in an area of the country where it does get cold in the wintertime.

So I am. I live in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. We migrated south for the winter, if you will, and now we live in beautiful St. Paul, Minnesota.

Wow. Migrated from Ontario down to Minnesota for the wintertime. Very interesting.

So cool. Fantastic. And I add the opportunity to meet Janelle. Awesome gal, no surprise there. And do you have a favorite kid?

No, they're both my favorites.

I know that was. That's kind of an inside joke, everybody. But that's the right answer, Daniel. So let's dive into it. Fifteen years in the IA space, you've learned a ton. Now you have expertise in cybersecurity and AI and we want to dive into talking about all things and helping agents. But, you know, one of the big things nowadays. And let's just talk about security for a couple of minutes, because one of the things that I heard you say at the Mastermind was, you know, chat gbt, if you will. It's not secure, right?

Correct. I mean, it's only secure as much as you want to make it secure. From the standpoint of that if you don't have a premium license and you still even have to be careful if you do have a premium license, you toggle off everything. You'd be very careful on what you feed into the large language model, even though they say they're not going to teach their AIs to it. But there's plenty other. Other models out there that are pretty clear on. You put information in it, and it's our information to use whatever we want from it. So. And again, there's very little control that. That even the developers have over these AI tools that we have to be very, very clear with.

Yeah. A recent podcast that I did in this series, same conversation. Have you read the terms and conditions and what you just said? I want to make sure everybody hears that clearly once you put the data into their system. It's theirs to do what they please.

Correct. No matter how much time you tell them not to.

Right, exactly. But I mean, how much time and money and agony and loss of focus is that going to cause? So, you know, be careful with your data. Everybody is the bottom line. You want to put it into a proprietary system, but you also want to invest in having a proprietary system that is protected, a protected environment. And that's one of the things that you do at Cyberfend, correct?

Correct, Yep, absolutely. Yeah. Cyberphone was born out of that frustration. Mike. We started with, you know, our co founder. He had a life insurance wholesale company that knew he was going to be regulated in 2019 and he needed somebody. He thought he was pretty smart when it came to technology and he thought he put everything in place and he noticed that he wanted a second set of eyes on it. And my experience with cybersecurity when it came to banks and credit unions, at the time, I said, yeah, sure, I'll take a look at it. And his frustration to find out that, that the rules aren't very easy to understand. He had spent $30,000 in 90 days thinking that he put together this complex and ready to go cybersecurity.

Protection into his company. And what did he find out? He was neither protected nor compliant. And he just kept running through the whole idea that existing solutions were either too complex or extremely expensive or completely fragmented. And a lot of independent insurance agencies, they're IT strategies are out of date where they try to piece it together to protect it themselves. And they're leaving these huge dangerous gaps based on all this different fragmentation because again, they didn't go to school to be cybersecurity guards. They didn't go to school to be AI experts or try to figure out how to be data infosec protectors. And so we decided that the best way that we could create something different was to create cyberfin, which we could specifically make protection and compliance for independent insurance agencies. And now we've even been able to tailor it so that they can provide it to their customers, which also makes it a game changer for them where they can drive additional revenue and differentation by working with cyberfin with their customers as well.

Yeah, that one had escaped me. Thanks for bringing that up, I appreciate that. But bottom line is, I mean, and let me just handle that right now. So I know there's some of our members as well who heard you say that at the mastermind and they said, what a great idea. And they move to engage with you and introduce you to their circles in the various states to teach your customers who are in business to better protect themselves. That's a great little add on opportunity. So thank you for mentioning that. That's a great idea. It's a huge unsold opportunity within the business insurance segment out there, but bigger than that. So as independent insurance agents, I mean our job is to protect. That's what we do. We protect people and everything they work so hard for, their assets, their risks, et cetera, et cetera. We're not in the cyber protection business. So that's what you're doing is to make sure that we are protected so we can serve them with the right insurance protection at the best value. So great, great stuff. So if somebody has any further questions about, you know, how to completely, you know, put a fence around their entire IT enterprise, you can help help them by having a conversation with them, correct?

Yeah, absolutely. That's where the, the don't miss, don't skip service that UPP provides that we've spent, you know, many hours trying to work through. Right, Mike? And making sure that people get access to it is our cyber resilience self check. Right. So in 30 minutes we're going to do a guided review of their agency and all their tech platforms and find where all the hidden vulnerabilities are. And then we give them the recommendations of what they need to do in order to put that fence around their organization, their data, and how to protect not only themselves, but protect their clients. And so by having that time together, we can again give them a roadmap of how they can become more cyber resilient, whether they work with cyberfin to make that resiliency or they do it on their own or with someone else. And that's all at no charge to them because of our relationship here with upp. And we can provide a link or something in the show notes Mike, to so that they can sign up for it however you see fit. Awesome.

Appreciate that, very generous of you. Thank you. So cyber resilience, just giving you the information to help you make the right decision for you and that's fantastic. So protect yourself is the bottom. I mean, we're in the protection business. Right.

And I heard something recently a couple of weeks ago in an industry forum, we help people manage risk, but we're not willing to take any.

As agents. Right, right. Just a different twist on things. We're in the protection business so we should lead by example and protecting ourselves.

Right. And the number one financial risk, and I'm not the one that came up with it. Allianz did. The number one financial risk to an insurance agency today is the cybercrime. You know, that's think of the amount of data that you need to collect, store and move in order to make money. And the bad guys know it. And the bad guys have found ways to make money by being the interrupter of that data and of your age, of your agency and its productivity. And so now it's become that number one financial risk. So not only is it the number one financial risk to them, but then you have to also remediate. You've got all that. You got hipaa, you've got NIAC model law. Depending on what state you're in, you've got FTC rules. I mean, if you're in the state of New York, trying to follow those rules, even as a cybersecurity company, is one of the darndest things. So trying to see, you know, an agency owner who's responsible, it is. I mean, how would you like to try to figure out how to report something within 48 hours and follow all those rules, depending on the exceptions that you are? That's why we got in this business to help read through some of that.

Yeah. After I talked to you recently to coordinate this show, you were ripping off everything going on in all these states. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, just save it for the podcast. But telling somebody from New York about that, and they didn't use the same words that you use, the darndest thing. They were.

Yeah, I'm trying to keep the show pg.

Exactly. We want to keep it available show. So anyway.

That's right.

But it's reality out there. And so, you know, we are, you know, wherever we choose to operate, we are obligated to stay in compliance bigger than that, just to keep our business protection and keep that fence around it.

Right.

So great stuff, great stuff. Thank you. Cyber resilience. Make sure you're protected. I want to dive into the other topic. I mean, you've been hanging around the IA space for 15 years. You've learned a ton. You've learned a ton about not only security, but AI. And so go ahead and expand on this and give us a beginning conversation level. Independent insurance agents are drowning in features.

When we say features, what are you talking about?

So drowning in features, you have hundreds of different AI organizations and things you're seeing in the news or in your social media about all these different features. They can have AI do that. You could.

Look at adding more tech Stack to try to increase your productivity. You can add this special AI to read all of your policies for you or do some research for you. You can have all these features when it comes to helping manage your calendars and your emails and all.

All these different areas, or replace people you're struggling to hire. So you can replace people. And so there's all these different features, right? So there's all these features that AI can do. Like you can have it write this for you and personalize that for you and save you time over here and over there. You can automate all these things. And so there's features, right? Those are all features. And your AMs are coming out with those new features, your CRMs, your, all these other third party tools. But then they see all these features and they're starving for benefits because they are seeing all these features thrown out them and it's becoming overwhelming. They know they need to get an AI. They know that they have to use AI to help elevate themselves to become more human. Right, to scale themselves as humans. They understand that. But okay, how do I get the benefits out of AI? How do I know what to pick and how, what should I be aiming for so I can start getting benefits, whether that's feeling more successful or hiring better or becoming, you know, having better empathy and work with my clients more things like that. Those are the benefits that they, that they're, that they're looking for, but they're starving to get.

Okay, so you talked about just the beginning of the features and you know, tech stack I think is, shall we say, just a little bit of a buzzword in the agency business. You know, my tech stack has this and I've got this and I've got this and I've got this and you know, the common question is, all right, out of all the items in your tech stack, which ones are you using to more than 50% of their capacity?

Right.

And that's generally the answer I get. Silence, right?

Yep, absolutely.

Because they know as well as I.

Know, but they're not. Right.

And they're not a measure. Exactly, exactly. So they have all these features, but they're not using them to its highest and best use. So starving for benefits. What's your suggestion of anything in the tech stack? And it has AI features. Let's back up on AI for just a minute.

Sure.

Give me your best thoughts on. First of all, AI, it's not artificial intelligence, it's additional intelligence, Right?

Correct.

It's a co worker. Its goal is not to replace humans, its Goal is to enhance the productivity and efficiency of the human beings working in the industry. Would you agree with all that?

100% agree. It is not here to replace insurance agents. It's here to make them more effective and to scale what they're able to do. And becoming more human. Right?

Boom. Becoming more human. I like that. All right, so they have all these features, but they're not using them effectively. In fact, they may not know how to use them effectively. And then you say starving for benefits. Let's expand on that. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so we're starving for benefits. We're looking for again, we have to identify what you do a great job of this. Explaining within your program is like, let's look at what are the major things that are going to make my agency go and grow and be a better steward of insurance. And so when we're looking for better, it's like, okay, your benefits could be return on investment, could be return on time, could be.

Hiring a players. It could be right, those are the benefits. So they're seeing all these features of how they could be used AI to help with, you know.

How can we look at automating repetitive tasks that a computer could do faster, better without getting tired? Right? Because that's the beauty of AI. They don't doesn't get tired. It can work all day or it doesn't need breaks, but it should be items that only a computer could do it. That allows me to free up more time to spend more time with finding a players. That would be a benefit, Right? Spending more time to bring on more clients, spending more time with our clients to make sure that they're getting the right insurance coverage or the additional coverage that they need or being there for them when they need the insurance coverage and how you can help with the community. That should allow you to differentiate yourself because you got a robot behind you working on all those repetitive tasks that you don't necessarily need to hire somebody for. You could just do automation and AI to be able to do it.

In the same aspects of that. We're starving for benefits by features of like, well, how can all of these AIs help me enhance my service or reduce my risk? Right. What can I do to use AI to give myself an edge, a competitive edge when it comes to the ability to write or the ability to communicate or to be able to reach out to as many people as possible throughout the entire day, rather than only when I have the couple of minutes to think about what I want to send out. Those are Benefits. Because now you can spend more time doing the things that you need to do on building up your agency, being a better agent, even being a better customer service rep or whatever else part of the agency you are. We need to start looking at, okay, what can we take off our plates or what can we do more of that helps us do what makes us more different or better as an agency. And from that standpoint, great stuff.

And I hope everybody's catching this. If you missed anything that Daniel said, I strongly encourage you to pause, go back and rewind and listen to that again so you can take notes. But I'm sure there's an AI tool that's already taken notes for you.

There's many of them out there. So with that being said, I want to dive into the bots. And you're familiar with the Gentek AI as well.

Correct.

So I want to dive into that in just a minute. Give you a heads up on that. But I recently heard at a conference with very high performing agents that one of the agencies there was talking about the fact that 65% of the service work in that agency. Okay. Was done by people and 65% of the activities that they were performing were the same seven activities pretty much on a daily basis. Repetitive, repetitive, repetitive. Right. So 65% of the activities were those seven activities. And they identified that of those seven activities, all of them could be done by a non licensed person.

Shall we say mic drop moment for me? And I quickly wrote that down and verified it. And yes, that's an example of how we might be able to start.

Thinking about how we can use AI and technology to become more efficient. In addition to that, to build on that. Recently studying another agency where that agent who's very niched in.

A type of insurance that applies to both personal and commercial flood insurance, who said, I rebuilt my agency with AI first down to VAS and then to license people. He reverse engineered the whole thing.

Yeah. And that's ultimately cyberfin did the same thing. We've been AI forward in the same format since we started as well, knowing that that's the best way that we could get our mission completed as best as possible to protecting everybody we possibly could.

Let's talk about that for just a minute. So this agency said their productivity and efficiency went through the roof. So let's just use the cyber Fin model as much as you can. Share.

You guys did the same thing you reinvented with a reverse engineering philosophy mindset, starting with AI back to maybe VAs and then to the expert people Correct. How can an agency do that?

Yes, we have to look at those items that again that we have to do as part of day to day business. And that's what we looked at. We identified all the tasks that we'd have to repeat twice.

And you mentioned, I think it was seven items that they have to repeat over 65% of the day. How many of them have an actual human touch where there needs to be a human touch that's actually going to drive value and drive it forward. We identified all of those different tasks and we looked at AI and automation to look to say can those tasks be done with AI and automation? And if they can't and needs a human interaction between each one of those steps, then we used a VA or fractional talent from that standpoint to help us manage all those different processes and even help with some of the human touch if we needed to, if they had to reach out to a client or had to reach out to do a human conversation with it. And then that allowed us to free us up to bring in the real experts, the cyber experts, the AI experts that we need, the ones that understand the. Remember we've been in Insurance for 15 years. We wanted to make sure their differentiating value is. They had to know about insurance agencies, how they work with tech stack. We're back to the tech stack word, right? The tech stack that they use. What are the different types of, you know, VoIP systems and different like we had to have, we had to have those eight players to be able to provide the necessary and the trust of those insurance agency owners that we weren't going to be another cybersecurity company that just bogs down their system and makes it more complicated and doesn't understand how all the different, what an AMS is versus a CRM versus a voip versus Right. We had to bring in those experts. So that freed us up to focus on those A players because remember there's not that, not a lot of cybersecurity and AI experts out there, if you will. Right. That know that type of thing. So it freed us up to be able to find those, bring those in the organization and then make sure that we can, we can provide the utmost value and service to our clients.

Fabulous. So it really starts with identification.

Always, always starts with I always say, you know, you know, we always, you talk about journaling, we talk about journaling ourselves. Like if we, if you can just take a week and write down all the tasks that everybody's doing that is repeatable over and over and over. And over again, then that allows you to assess, okay, which are the. Okay, now I can look at AI tools and I can look at automation and find out where I'm going to get the most benefits. Right? Because then I can see these are repeatable things over and over and over again that I don't have to hire for or try to find somebody, or it gets a role that gets churned quite a bit because it's repetitive, it's not creative, it doesn't drive a lot of internal intrinsic value. So now you have tools that don't have empathy, that don't really care. Right. Don't get tired that you can then have this. It's very still important work. Right. But it's repetitive. We can have a tool and a robot do it for you, for them instead.

Great stuff, great stuff. Thank you. Boy, so many thoughts are going through my head.

I recently was asked by an agent, give me some practical how to's on all this. And I said, let's keep it simple. Your agency management system probably has an activity log of some kind, does it not? And they said, yes. I said, go back to that activity log. Carve out a week period by individual, right? So Monday through Friday of any given week and print out the entire week of activities by individual and sit down and spend, you know, a good five to 15 minutes with that activity log and start identifying the individual activities and then start with that. And I said, I want you to come back to me and, you know, I want you to let me know if that's a good idea and if it worked. And the good news is they came back to me and they said that was a great idea. It's just experience. But here's the other nuance that you need to be thinking about. And if this is not your agency, then that's a whole nother conversation. I learned years and years ago if it doesn't appear in the agency management system, in the agency, in the insurance agency business, it didn't happen.

So if your team's fingers are not on the keyboard on every phone call with their headset, then that's another issue that you need to update before you might get too far into this. But it's right there, the data is right there for you to work with to begin all of this process. Great stuff. Daniel, let's jump into bots, agentic AI. I mean, if you start to reverse engineer with AI and automation in the front, down to VAs and then to, you know, highly skilled licensed people, what's going on with agentek AI in the agency business. I mean, are there a lot of people that are aware of what it is?

You know, and agentic AI gets a little bit confused based on the difference between agents and agentic AI. So I'll just take a brief second and talk about the difference. Right, so we have, the agents are like what we've been building our team at cyberfin and some of the other agencies that we work with, which are custom GPTs. Right. So again, we're a fan of OpenAI so we can create a custom GPT that can, you know, today we've already, we just launched our Cassie, the cmo, right. So, you know, we gave her a personality. We taught her everything about our marketing and our branding and she's now our strategic resource and she does some marketing coordination, if you will, and development and content development as an AI agent. AgentIC AI is where we're trying to get to, where it's combining automation with AI together so that there isn't a human interaction in between the AI working with the automation. Right. So it goes. That's what agentic AI is, which is we have an agent and we've made it agentic because it can run those tasks autonomously all on its own. Right. And it can, as it gets from each task, it can then.

Follow through with the next task without having to have a human get involved or another prompt or some other type of connection. We can start to create some agentic AI with by combining automation tools and those agents together, we can start to create that. But more or less you're still going to need a human in the middle to be able to get it. Now, insurance, AMS platforms, third party tools, they are getting dangerously close to having some fantastic agentic AI that you can use within your organization. Again, remember, I'm the cybersecurity guy too. Be very careful. We want to make sure that any of this remember because you're giving it to its own autonomy, if you will. What data do they collect? What data does it have access to? What is it? Where is it prompting? Do I have the ability to review those prompts before it goes to the results, before it goes to its end person? What else access does it have? Am I. So my employees have access to it that might have data that we don't want to share, like salaries and commissions and things like that? Right. That might be a detriment. We want to start thinking through that. So as much as I love AI, we use it, but I also want to talk about the pitfalls. Pitfalls that. Okay, so if you can be more efficient and you can be scale yourself as a human, guess what? Bad guys can do the same thing. Right? They are now using it to become even better criminals. And I can go and spend a whole nother podcast talking about all the new AI scams whether, whether it's to a business or to an individual. But also think about how AI is going to affect your compliance and your policies and procedures. And the data, right? The data is what everybody wants. We talked about it earlier in the podcast. How are we making sure that not only do the bad guys don't get the data, but the people that we don't necessarily want to get the data should have access to? Right. We don't want to be sharing people's policies out there. Right. People just think, oh, I'm going to have them check two policies really quick. And it's all within my. Within my agentic AI that I got from my, you know, XYZ company. We better double check to make sure. So I have a new rule. I used to be. And Mike, you might want to correct me if maybe this is too out there. But we used to say trust but verify. Right now in the new AI world, it's zero trust verify. There's no more trust in this. There just isn't. We have to have zero trust and then verify. So find out ways within the sygentec AI or whatever you're adding to your agency. Where can I watch the prompts? Where can I watch where the data is going? Where can I insert myself or somebody is still responsible for the outputs of this AI technology.

Great stuff, great stuff. I got two things very quickly. Once I started listening to you, which I recommend everybody does now. I am extremely cognizant of the information that I put into the AI AI world, regardless of where I'm at, GPT, Claude, limit.com AI perplexity, and a whole host of others. Right. I'm. I think twice just. I was listening to you. I try to be a good husband, but over the years, one thing I've learned is to pause and think about what I'm going to say before I actually say it. And it's worked out quite well actually.

Versus just saying it. And it's the same thing maybe as far as what you put into AI. Right, right, absolutely. Think about what you're going to put in there. You talked about commissions and salaries and data and policy data.

Correct.

If you don't want that put out there in the world, you need to think about that before you actually put it in there and protect thyself and your customers, which you are, from a fiduciary standpoint, obligated to do.

Right, right. It's just so easy not to. Right, of course. And we can't control everybody. So my next tip on this, too, from a. If we're staying on this theme, is if you think that you're going to get away from not using AI within your organization, I'm telling you right now, everybody's already using it. So we've seen plenty of examples where organizations have said, you know what? Nobody uses AI. We haven't put a policy in place. But I'm just telling everybody I don't want using AI, you know, with our customers around in the organization. And then we find out that some of their employees have gotten their own subscription to AI, have a separate computer. They're running it all off the separate computer or off their phone, and they're forwarding themselves the outputs from what they've been using AI and then making themselves inside the CRM system or AMS system. And they're actually connecting things to AMSs and CRMs and things so that they can make their lives better or whatever, make themselves more effective. What happens is because you're not on the forefront of it, you've lost control over it. So my next tip is, instead of saying, closing our eyes and ears and saying, I don't want to be involved in AI, get ahead of it and put policies in place, start saying, we are going to be an AI agency, but it's going to be controlled, it's going to be centralized. We're going to work on it together. We're going to make sure that we have checks and balances in place. So you are not allowed to use AI outside the agency for anything that touches the agency and make sure there's a policy around it and everybody signed off on it. We always forget that part. Start the train and then sign off on. And then we are going to then utilize it together as a team or work on a team so we can learn from each other. Learn what? You know, make sure that we don't make any mistakes. And from that standpoint. Right, because it's going to. We should have more time because it's automating a lot of those repetitive tasks. Mike. Right. That we don't need to have done anymore. Should be saving our time from that standpoint. But now we can look at it and start working together on what we want the results to be from the AI. What comes out of it.

It 100% agree. And you know, the bottom line is just ask AI. I mean the pro, the, you know, I say a lot, the question is the answer. Part of that, I would say the better the question, the better the result. Nowadays it's the question is the answer. So with regard to AI, in many situations the prompt.

Is the answer, right? Just go out to AI and ask it, hey, help me create a robust cyber use policy for my top performing independent insurance agency business that will protect our data, that will train our people to properly use AI and to maximize our efficiency.

And start with that and it's going to turn around and start saying, would you like me to do this? Would you like me to do this? Would you like me to do this? If you didn't catch that, you can pause, go back and write that down. But that's what I do. I mean I come up with the best question for it and it leads to greater thought and expansion of the thoughts in my mind. Right? It expands who we are.

Yeah. And the most successful business owners out there, right. That we always tell them is to be a successful business owner you have to ask wonderful questions. Right. You have to be the best question ask individual on your entire team. And that's all prompting really is, is asking questions, right? It's asking questions, it's being creative, it's thinking through the, through the problem, but then using a robot to help us think through that problem. Right? That's that co, CEO, co strategic mind that you can create using a custom GPT and you can start to use it in that, in that standpoint. And it'll help you in many ways. But at many ways and at the same time though, zero trust and verify, make sure you look at the results before you hand it out to everybody and sign off on it. Because it only wants to do everything it can to please you. And that's where the hallucinations come in place. Right. What that term really is, is it is, remember, it can't think of anything else other than to complete the task that you've given it, answer the question. So it will put lies, it will put whatever it possibly can to be able to give you the prompt or to answer the prompt that you've given it. And that's where the hallucinations come in. Because remember, a human had to train the thing in the first place, right? Dumping in trillions of pieces of data in order to train this. It also is a human that's asking the questions. And so there's going to be this idea where there's going to Be hallucinations in there that we have to be mindful of.

Wow, AI drug.

Yeah.

So anyway, I heard about it back in the 60s and 70s. I don't know anything else. So anyway, let's get back to the matter at hand. One of the things that. When I first learned about agenda AI and clarify this for me, please.

Because I was very familiar with bots at that point and I've been playing in the bot environment and my, my view of a bot, to keep it very simple, it is a piece of automation, you know, powered by AI that runs in the background in an agency. And, and you can design it and create it to do whatever you want it to do, like, you know, monitor cancellations and reinstatements and to put certain documents in certain places and to set up audit processes and to design the beginning of a renewal or account review program. And you just prompted to do all these things to a certain point and then bring it to the human to finish.

Correct.

So people were building bots in their agency and there was people that I'm very close to that have four or five different bots operating their agency. Then agentic AI came on the scene. And my quick initial take of agentic AI was I don't need these other bot companies to build these bots because agentic AI can help me do it myself. Is that accurate or even close to accurate?

Well, I leave the analogy of, think about the idea of like, I always have to give more of an analog experience, right? So you've watched movies or in commercials where you see.

An auto place that's going to create a car, right? Where they're going to build a car for you. Right? An auto manufacturer. And you see all the robots going through and it's so remarkable that the body shows up and all of a sudden they've got all these different arms going through and they're putting everything in the right place based on what it's designed to do. That's what a bot is, right. That's what the bot's able to do. And it's feeding in AI to say, to be able to identify, oh, it's this car versus that car, right? So now they don't have to send the same model over and over and over again. It can identify, hey, this is this model versus this model, but in the same family, the Ford family or whatever it might be. Well, that's the different. Now we have bots that can use AI to kind of push buttons and do different things that you've trained it to do. Agentic AI is that we've already pre trained it to do a number of different things. Right. And it's going to learn and learn on its own learn based on the results that it gets every time it runs that car through the process. Right. So the agentic AI doesn't necessarily replace the building your own bots necessarily if you really like what you've already built in place. Right. It's custom to your scenario, it's custom what you like to do or you can go the agentic AI route where it's going to become custom them over time. So it's totally up to you on which, which direction that you want to go. But if it's already, I'm always on that. If it's already working and not broken, don't, don't fix it.

Totally agree with you there. That brings me great clarity. Thank you for clarifying that it becomes custom to me and correct me if I'm wrong. So that makes it a really a component of the LLM, right?

Correct. I mean the large language models changes the game when it comes to AI. And that's, you know, people think that AI just started in 2023. It's been around. I mean we were using machine learning AI when I started my, my marketing agency back in 2015 and so for buying ads and things like that. Right. Same idea. It's bots and learning over time through, through data to make a difference. LLMs change the game. Right. And the amount of data that it can collect and how fast it can do it and identify things quickly and move, move from one end to the other. That's really where it's going. But if you don't want to get too far into the space future of Magentic AI and you want some practicality we've already mentioned a few times, start with even just creating your own co CEO. Right. A custom chatgpt. It's a great first step. Anyone can do it. We've been doing workshops helping people create their chatgpts in a simple one hour webinar to help them kind of go that route. And then they can start to play with AI and see how it works and then they can start thinking in their mind. Okay, this is how I can automate this. Right. I can start to think through how I can automate. You can ask your co CEO what are the first, you know, you've learned more about my agency now. What are the first things that I should be using bots for? Or what are some of the first projects that I can do to try to become more efficient. That's why we start in that create your co CEO first because then they can start to lead you in that direction. I love my 8:30 mornings. People are going to make fun of me now, but I love my 8:30 in the morning with my co CEO to say okay, you've seen where our goals are. You see what we're trying to accomplish. Here's the results from last week. Tell me what you know. Should we be changing our project plan? Should we be changing our strategic direction? Whether I accept the answer or not, at least I have someplace to go to try to make sure that I'm staying on track myself as a business owner to that effect. That's why we say start there because that's going to be your, that's going to be the nebulous around how you're going to use AI and automation.

From there, use your create your AI co CEO. I'm gonna get right on that. Okay, I like that. That's going to be my number one takeaway from the podcast. Thank you Daniel Metcalf. Compliments. Thank you for sticking around to the end everybody. See by sticking around and continuing to learn, you get those gold nuggets. Daniel, I, I feel like we could go on for hours about this subject. You've dropped so much wisdom on our audience. Thank you for that. As we wrap up today, is there one thing that we haven't talked about yet that you're you think you should share with the independent insurance agency audience that's out there listening or watching to this?

Yeah, we, we've briefly touched on a lot about what it comes out of AI around cybersecurity. But let's still stay to the blocking and tackling of cybersecurity that I want to make sure that we end everything on right. Especially at cyberfin. We don't just sell cyber security, right. We manage cyber security and we make it simple like nobody else. The reason why I want to bring that up is we haven't even talked about the fact that if you haven't put the 360 degree protection in your agency, AI is only going to make the attacks more deadly. They're only going to be easier to get in because remember, they're becoming scalable and more effective. So if you have any doubts in your mind, if the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up at all to say I'm not quite sure we're prepared for an AI attack, I'm not quite sure, please take advantage of the cyber assessment that we have Put the cyber resilience assessment that we'll get all the information to Mike so that you can see that cyberfin is here to help you manage it, so you don't feel like you have to. Right. That's why we put this together. We knew that if we were going to hit our mission, which is to eliminate cybercrime in the insurance agencies, independent insurance agency space, I know it's a big tall mission, but we feel we can do it if we can help people manage it for them, provide them the right tools and to make sure that everything's built in so that they can go on their day and do what they need to do instead of them having to do it for themselves.

100% agree. I want you to slow down when you say this. If somebody, and there's agents in this audience who I know are like this, they won't be able to pay attention long enough to go to the information that we might provide around this podcast. So go ahead and say it. If somebody wanted to get in touch with you, how should they do that?

Yep. So I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. So again, my name is Daniel Metcalfe. You can find me on LinkedIn. We put a number of different educational resources and ways to do the cyber assessment right from my LinkedIn page. Cyberfin.net is our website. There's plenty of places that you can sign up for many of our different resources there. And then if you want to use my email address that I look at every day, it's protectmeyberfin.net protectmeyberfin.net There you go.

Three ways to reach Daniel. And Cyberfin is C Y B E R. Be like boy E R F I N. Correct.

Correct.

And net net net. So cyberfend.net so Daniel Metcalfe, thank you. Thank you for being everything about cyber protection and knowledge about the advancing.

I don't even know the proper terminology. Faster than I can describe advancing AI platform out there around us and in the world. It's moving so stinking fast. And money and success, Love, speed and money and success. Never sleep. So like Will Rogers said, if you just sit there, you're going to get run over. And we don't want anybody to get run over. We want everybody to be aware of everything that's going on around them. And Daniel Metcalf has dropped multiple gold nuggets for everybody out there. So please take advantage of this information, this knowledge, this experience and everything around that to make sure that your agency is positioned to be the very best it can be. And that's why we all exist, to help you be the very best you can be so you can grow and scale and get to your goals. So, Daniel, thank you.

No, thank you. It was an honor to be here. I appreciate you having me.

No, it's an honor to have you. And so hang on for just a minute. Hey everybody. If this is your first time on the podcast, welcome. My name is Mike Stromse. I'm widely recognized as a leading author, speaker and coach for the independent insurance agency industry. You can learn more about what we do at upp life. That's upplife.com and everything we do is all designed around our 36 plus years of experience as a proud independent insurance agency. And we give you all of the information to help you grow your business, create wealth and have more freedom. But bigger than that, we want to help people via the information shared on the podcast. So if this is your first time, go to Unstoppable Profit Podcast.

Go up to the top and click subscribe. And as important, take Unstoppable the link unstoppable profitpodcast.com share it with somebody else that you know that you care about so they can also have access to this incredible information to help them grow their agencies, create wealth and have more freedom. And thank you, thank you in advance for doing that. And I can't wait to continue to bring episodes that are going to bring great value for all of you.

You.

And as far as the podcast is concerned, it's out there on all the channels. Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon. Just search Unstoppable Profit Podcast. You will find us and of course our website, unstoppable profitpodcast.com it's our honor and pleasure to support you in your pursuit of being the very best agency that you can be. Thank you for this opportunity. I will see you in the next episode. Daniel, thanks again, buddy.

Thank you. Have a great day.

All right, everybody. Hey, there's only one thing that's going to get you to your next win. Exactly. Action. Go do it. I'll see you in the next episode.

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