Ep 23: Harnessing AI: Strategies for Contemporary Marketers

When we get to that world, I mean, we're already at a world now where, I mean, my son, who's 18, has no time for social media, is not interested at all because it's so. He's in a place where coming out of the educational system, it's so full of crap and negative that he doesn't value it almost at all.

And LinkedIn was the safe place. But then last weekend they started just randomly putting horizontal streams of videos in the feedback.

Yeah.

In multiple places. So that's gonna go a similar way.

It's fascinating. Fascinating that you could literally have just a brand.

You basically come with an idea. You don't even need to start with a brand.

No, no.

You have the brand created too.

Yeah.

Don't worry about pixels and orientations in logos and color schemes. You have it all based on the gap within the market.

That's incredible. So does that mean we're gonna reach a point of saturation where everything that's potential will be realized? Just because there's a gap in the market doesn't mean there's a market in the gap. So we're going to have these waves of young entrepreneurs just filling every gap in the market, taking a shot at.

One prime turned up from nowhere and dissolved overnight, didn't it?

Hi, I'm Freya. Welcome to the Skynet Business in the AI Age, the podcast that dives deep into the world where artificial intelligence meets business business. Join us as we explore the latest trends, challenges and opportunities in this ever evolving landscape. From innovative startups to established enterprises, we'll uncover the secrets behind the successful integration of AI technologies. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back and get ready to unlock the mysteries of business in the AI age.

Well, good morning, Alan. Welcome to the Skynet Chronicles. It's great to have you here with us.

Morning.

So where do we start? Let's start with how we met at BNI national conference.

Yes, you. You were everywhere. Your brand was very impressive immediately. And as somebody who's been around brand for a long time, I remember seeing the colors of the brand and thinking, I like that already because it's bold and it's not the same rubbish colors that people use for their brands. No offense to anybody using the colors I'm about to mention, but we don't need any more blue. Blue is fine, but we can get.

Away with neon pink.

Neon pink, automatic win.

Because who doesn't like neon pink?

Anyone with automatic pink. I want to speak to them. Just because if you're brave enough to do that, you've obviously got something meaningful to say. And you did. And I remember fleetingly getting about 10 seconds of your attention at the stand because you were awash. Because there's nothing more exciting to business at the moment than AI Because I'm not just saying that, but generally it is the. As I just drummed on the desk and realized that probably sounded like a waterfall, you know, short of the Internet. 20 years ago, 20, 30 years ago, this is probably the same emotions that I'm feeling now as I felt then. And so I just remember thinking, oh, somebody here talking about AI this is going to be interesting. And it was.

Well, for me, getting into the Internet was interesting back then, but I think the level of excitement I have now is just off the charts because there's so much going on so quickly.

Well, the speed, the speed to market now and the speed to adoption and the speed to education now. I mean back in the early days of the Internet, you know, I had a 14. 400. 14? Yeah, 14, 400 modem, I think I had one. Yeah, I think I had one less than that. I'm sure I had a, I can't remember. It was painful, you know, tape loading.

But those heady upgrades when you got there, oh, 28 and then the 56.

I remember I got a computer with a turbo button and it went from 8 MHz to 16 if you press the button. And so the speed to learning and growing and doing anything then was like days. You know, I'm watching Star Trek Next generation with my 18 year old and I'm just marveling at how we can go from episode to episode to episode. It took me months, years to get through a series because you couldn't get hold of them and then you had to, somebody recorded it. So the speed to everything now is what's impressive. So not only is AI landing well, it's landed years ago for many, but the speed to moving into it now is not like the speed to moving into the Internet era. The speed to moving into the Internet was painful. You had to get a modem. You then had to have somebody explain what on earth was going on. There was no resources. You could buy magazines, maybe go to the library. Does anyone remember libraries? Are there any libraries left? I have no idea.

I think they've still got those magazines from the 90s.

Really? Yeah, Internet magazine and. But now, I mean, my son uses chat GPT, like a search engine. He's not interested in searching anything anymore. He's, he, he calls it a solution engine because Google, you type a Question in. And if somebody else has written something about it, it'll bring it to you. Yeah, but chat GPT, and it's myriad of cousins. You type any problem in and it will solve the problem. How do I do this with that? Or how could I make this more interesting? Or what should I do to make that more successful? Unbelievable. And that's. And we're at, you know, an Internet equivalent. We're in probably 1992, you know. Yeah.

We haven't even got the holding signs with the robots.

Nscsa, what was it? Ns. Ncsa. Mosaic hasn't even been unveiled yet. We're still using links. You know, people are still basically fundamentally, you could chatgpt, that's basically links browser without the green screen. That's how it feels to me. And you know, it's all text. I'm just starting to get into voice, so I've hurt my left hand, so I can't type as much. I've got a bit of tendonitis, probably from typing too much. And so all of a sudden I'm having to push into voice. And it's actually really liberating. Of course. Why would I type? I mean, how. Okay.

And especially when you're not on the computer. Well, you can be out with headphones and walk with the dog and just having a conversation with an AI, solving a problem.

I know. I mean, that's another world. You bring it into everything you do. Whereas with the Internet, you have to be in a place to use the Internet. And so it's so radically different. I mean, the speed everything's moving at is incredible. And at the same time, so many other disruptions are happening. You know, a mission to Europa just launched. Despite Arthur C. Clark's warnings to leave Europa alone. We're going to find out whether he was prescient or just full of it. One way or another, you know, we've got that happening. We've got Musk unveiling robots that aren't anything to do with iRobot.

Look a little bit similar, don't they?

Well, they're always going to be anthropomorphic, aren't they? I mean, they're not gonna. He's not gonna build a robot that looks like, I don't know, a dog or anything. That's darpa's job.

I still want Johnny Five.

Used to watch.

I want Johnny Five.

Oh, Johnny Five. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think a disruptive robot might be worth more, more trouble than it's worth, though. I'd like a compliant robot. I want one that behaves, that observes the laws.

Which laws? Asimovs.

Yes. Sorry, I just drummed again. Very conscious of my impact on the surroundings here. Terrified. It sounds like, you know, a bear stampeding through woods. Yeah. So I think, you know, I'm again, would you have a, a robot in your home?

I've already got lots of robots in my home. Yeah, I mean washing machine.

Yeah, that's true.

Robot vacuum, robot lawnmower.

Okay, but would you have a robot that's plugged into AI without limitation and control? You probably would.

You've already got Alexa in your home, which is pretty much.

Yeah, I do have Alexa.

But if, if you could for say £500amonth.

Yeah.

Lease a robot that could do all of your washing, cleaning, ironing, gardening.

Yeah, yeah.

Clean your windows, fix your.

And even if there's the accidental homicide occasionally you kind of put up.

Hopefully not in my home, but. Well, no, but you say you want this week. I'd like that room to be blue. Actually didn't like blue.

Yeah. We will put up with lots of failure points. I remember watching Bicentennial man, which is a phenomenal under watched Robin Williams film. And the, the failure that we're prepared to accept and put up with for convenience is astonishing actually. So actually, yeah, what am I saying? I can't wait.

But I mean, how many people die on the roads every year because of cars?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

We don't ban those, do we?

Well, I mean, look at the multiple causes of people's pain and suffering in the world. I think robots will probably be really far down the bottom for a long time because you can mitigate those risks pretty quickly because it's just a software upgrade which is done almost instantly or overnight. You know, everything will be. But then it does. You know, you do think about things like iRobot don't. And then you think, well, what if a rogue, you know, Blofeld esque character takes over? Then we've all got their robots in our home. But then you think, you know, I mean, I've always thought Elon Musk is either is either going to be the greatest salvation to humanity or he's going to be a Bond villain. Basically he's a furry cat away from being a Bond villain, isn't he?

Yeah, but fairy cat stroking is fine, isn't it?

That furry cat stroking between friends. But back to AI. I think you're absolutely right. Our lives are filled with automation and robots and devices. What's the most curious device you have in your home? I think you told me Once you had quite a few different.

We got the Rabbit, little AI device when it first came.

Oh, the Rabbit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was a waste of time.

It's quite hardcore techie because I. I didn't go to that level. And you need to kind of know what you're doing. Like you can. What could you do with it? I vaguely remember.

Well, not really that much you couldn't already do with the phone, as it turned out.

Oh, right.

It was the large action model that was behind it that was appealing. The ability for it to do things as opposed to just come back with words or pictures.

Right.

But it hasn't been that well implemented. They built this thing called the Rabbit. I think they called it the rabbit hole, where you could program in how to take action. So instead of you using apps, you kind of showed it how in a browser to do something. It then remembered that and could do it.

Isn't that just make. Or if this. Then that.

Well, it was basically puppeteer. So I think it was just using a simulated web browser behind the scenes to carry out the actions. Didn't really get a very good job of it.

No.

The device had a battery that lasted about five minutes. I mean, it was cool because it was orange and it was light and.

You know, I mean, south by Southwest has to have. And I think that's where it really landed. I might be wrong. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong. But, you know, those events have to have a darling, you know. And I remember Twitter was a darling. So was Uber. And so these matter events, you know, obviously end up. There's sort of a herd mentality of, oh my God, this is so exciting. You can't possibly agree because then you're not exciting. No offense to everybody who is going to now immediately give me a hard time for calling them out in that way. But there is a bit of a herd mentality in tech sometimes where people, you know, it is a bit empty as new clothes sometimes. Oh, look at this amazing shiny thing. Everyone buy it immediately. And then a year later I was like, oh, no, no, no. We move past that after about five minutes.

The Microsoft CO plus laptops that have got AI embedded in their neural processing unit that can be used for almost nothing so far.

Do you remember a couple of years ago there was a chatbot released by Microsoft? And I kind of, you know, I remember hearing about this and then it all disappeared. The whole chatbot thing disappeared. And then. And then ChatGPT got released and the same thing didn't happen. But what happened was Microsoft. I'm sure it was Microsoft and if not, I'm sure an army of lawyers already designed on me. But I'm pretty sure it was Microsoft where they released a chatbot and after about 40 minutes it went full Nazi because it was being trained by the interactions it was having on the Internet. So they released it to the world and people started speaking to it about awful things. And within about an hour it had learned that that was because it's just, it's just a learning model, isn't it? And so the more you fill it with rubbish, it becomes rubbish. And within about half an hour, you know, they had to take it down because it was just like, no, no, no, no, no, no, let's wind this back. And that all disappeared. But you know, and then things like ChatGPT are completely nowhere near that behavior. So I wonder what changed.

They separated the processing.

Right.

So instead of it having the ability to learn live, it's effectively a pre trained model.

Right.

That is just answering the question that is shared in the prompt.

Right.

So it's not building up that knowledge and history.

Interesting.

And they're able to then filter the interactions before they use that.

So you can control it, not control it in a negative way, although potentially.

They basically broke that feedback loop so that it doesn't have the dynamic feedback at runtime. They're able to break that, gather up all of the data, then use that.

For additional training and then release. It's interesting because I remember a really long time ago, because I've been around forever and I remember this isn't, this isn't a technology problem. This is fundamentally a human problem. And the way humans behave with technology, that Skittles, I mean this must have been 2003 or 4. I mean this is really like ancient, which I can't believe is 20 years ago now. It doesn't seem, doesn't compute real, which makes the 80s, 40 years ago, which is really concerning. I think there's a problem in the system there. But Skittles decided to disruptively market themselves by letting everyone take over the homepage. And as soon as I heard that I immediately thought, oh no, have you met everyone? Like, this is not going to end well. Because I'd been in marketing for arguably 10 years at that point, even through uni, had been running projects and doing stuff on the side. And I just remember thinking, don't let everybody take control. How's it going? What do you mean? Every, Every everybody. And of course within about 20 minutes, what they'd done was they had just. Actually, it must have been 2006, it must have been later. But I remember being in a certain office, so maybe it wasn't through Twitter, but they set up a hashtag integration to their homepage and all you had to do was attach the hashtag, tweet the rainbow. Yeah, taste the rainbow, which was their tagline, and it would automatically filter you and put you on the homepage. Well, within about five minutes, nine page had to come down because of course, absolutely every scumbag on the planet had gone, oh, brilliant. You know, whatever negative thing, slash, taste, taste, rainbow. And it just reminds you that, you know, it's a bit. And I don't wish to pick a fight with either side, but it's a bit like, you know, gun control in the us it's not the guns that kill people, one side will say, it's the people that kill people. And it's the same thing with tech. It's not the tech that's the problem, it's the people using the tech. How do you think that's going to play out over the next five years? I mean, are they going to release. Are we going to have a chat GPT model that is public and live and learning constantly or where they're just not going to.

Whether it would be a chat GPT model, though there will certainly be a model by somebody that does like, goes down that path again.

Interesting.

I think we're going to have huge amounts of disinformation generated by these models.

I think we already do.

It's going to increase.

Yeah.

When you think that it can be truly deep fake so you can't tell who's saying it, where it's being said.

From and volumes of it and scaled and scheduled and yeah, it's interesting because you already see that on social where, you know, and to disclose. I am a subscriber to X because for various reasons, but obviously I'm extremely aware and I'm competent enough to critically think for myself. So I can. I feel like I can determine right from wrong pretty easily. I mean, at age 52, if I can't, I've got other problems. But, you know, if you look at what Musk has done there and rightly or wrongly, under the banner of free speech, you could see someone like Musk doing that because he's kind of got the cojones to just release something and not and feel like it's a positive.

But yeah, I don't think it'll be Musk. I think the XAI Vision of effectively finding the answers takes that risk away. If it's a truth finding model, it's designed to inherently seek out what's most likely to be real as opposed to something that's being used to generate.

That would be interesting if it could sift through. That would be. I mean we'd all find that incredibly valuable if there was something that actually had the capability and power to community note itself and ascertain. Okay, well this is, this has got an 82% chance of being conspiracy theory, this has got a 17 chance of being untrue, or this has got a 92 chance of being true because it's backed up by these credit, you know, but then it gets into credibility of source and then we don't. We always end up at a place where some 90 year old is maintaining an index somewhere of, you know, approved sources. I mean, how do we ever get away from. How do, how do we take the human out of the process? In theory we should be able to, but can we get there? Can we take the human out of the assessment process when it comes to information?

Ultimately, without doubt, I think we'll get to a point where as we're now stretching the inference time, the amount of time that they're thinking before they come back with an answer, their ability to review the vast amounts of information, to come up with hypothesis, to test those hypothesis will produce fantastic outputs. And I'm, I'm less worried about the sort of social crap content creation.

Yeah.

Because I think the benefit is in medical bioscience, understanding of the mind, understanding of materials, how we can move those things forward are going to make such a huge shift. Yeah, a little bit of.

Yeah. The benefit far outweighs any cost from a. Yeah, I agree. And I think also when we get to that world, I mean, we're already at a world now where, I mean, my son who's 18, has no time for social media. It's not interesting at all because it's. So he's in a place where coming out of the educational system, it's so full of crap and negative that he doesn't value it almost at all.

And LinkedIn was the safe place. But then last weekend they started just randomly putting horizontal streams of videos in the feed in multiple places. So that's gonna go a similar way.

Well, I blame Vaynerchuk for what happened on LinkedIn. And Gary, if you're listening, I've met you, I've loved you for a long time, but you have to stop landing on good social networks with organic reach. Because every scammer and spammer follows you. So please, if there's another network where we actually are enjoying ourselves and benefiting, just hold off, just gives a couple of extra years. Because the minute you landed on LinkedIn, Gary, it just, it all went to crap, frankly, because you're such a leader, you led. But you have to understand your impact since then. I remember prior to or before gv, bgv, that should be a thing, shouldn't it? Before gv, you know, Organic reach was great, message responses were great. Now, I mean, good luck, you can get engagement and response, but the algorithm has to fight. You have to really fight the algorithm now. And so I think, I think we're growing a generation of kids that are actually going to be post social media. And that's interesting because then you think, well, where will they get their information? And I think they're getting it from. So my son will use Reddit because it's got an upvoting system. Now. What's interesting about what Musk is doing on X is, and this all ties together, he's clearly creating an authentication system that will allow him to build a platform like WeChat in China, which I think is his ultimate goal, where you can do everything, you can buy, sell.

Whatever, Community town hall.

Yeah, And I think authentication is probably the next big challenge because if we had authentication, you know, that's why LinkedIn was so valuable for so long when the other networks were less valuable, was because you really, I mean, you. There are obviously lots of fake accounts on LinkedIn, but the, the default setting is this is who I am. Whereas Facebook, insta, anything else, be whoever you want to be. And then I think to the 90s and what having social media like that in the 90s would have been. You know, people were just making stuff up all the time. I mean, I remember going out to bars with mates and we would decide what we were going to be. One week we were helicopter pilots and one week we were. You know, because there was no. It was all a laugh. There was no. Who's going to fact check you now? You know, if you, if you tried to do anything silly, there's already. I mean, we're what, three years away, if not less, from glasses that will.

Well, you've seen the Harvard demo. Two lads at Harvard put on camera glasses. I haven't seen them with a disguised camera, so you couldn't tell that it was recording.

Wow.

They walked around and it was connected to a back end system which then processed the photos of people's faces. To find other images of those people online, pull back their social profiles, all of the information they could find about them and then approached them and had conversations with them about their shared experiences. I think you were at such and such with me.

Wow.

So that's, that's possible now with today's technology which is.

Well that's where Google Glass wanted to be and they never got there. But, but even. Yeah, I don't. And, and who did I see recently someone did a tie in with Ray.

Ban Meta, Orion, Meta have done a.

Tie in, haven't they? So we're almost certainly a single digit number of years away from intelligent glasses. There's privacy implications there. But then those privacy implications are quickly fixed. Yeah. By just, by just, you know, putting a setting on your profile that says maybe.

But I mean we've seen Google fail. We've seen Snap fail.

Yeah.

Is this going to be the successful one? Yeah, but Google wouldn't rubbish against Apple.

I wouldn't but Google Glass was rubbish. I tried it and it was genuinely all right. Yeah, it was, it's one of those south by Southwest. Wow. Actually is really crap. And, and the Snap glasses were even worse because they just had one function and that was to, you know, they were selling 10 of them. Getting a thousand people to cure. It was just a PR job. I mean that was brilliant. Fair play. But you know, how many glasses were even produced? I mean not enough. Apple or Facebook I think will crack it because Facebook's got the graph. But the difference is the trust isn't there with meta. No offense Zuck, but Apple will come to it.

Privacy first.

Yeah, yeah, because that's their values, you know, I mean look at what they've done. They've single handedly, I mean Apple have done more to change privacy on the Internet just by saying cookies. Nah. You know, and who else could do that? I mean I. Cookies from day one and Apple just come along and go whoop, get rid. Just take that off the table. That's incredible. Lists have disappeared overnight. You know, people relying on cookies and pixels just crying into their soup, you know, I mean they're just oh my God. But I've spent ages curating a hundred thousand people. Well, Apple valued privacy. I agree. I think Apple will be the bet. Although having said that Apple have been very underwhelming. No offense Apple, but you know, I'm still using an iPhone 11. Shock horror. Because why, what did I need to upgrade for? You know, having said that I'm now upgrading because I'm at a point of this Phone is feeling almost archaic. After five months, you're going to get.

One with Apple intelligence built in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll go the full. I'll go all the way now. I'll get the 16 with the. Yeah, because I'll probably have that for another four or five years.

Yep.

So Apple keep winning because even without Jobs, they've still got enough in the tank to be innovative even on, you know, even on a bad day. Apple's innovation still, even without Steve Jobs still outweighs everybody else. That must make everybody else feel really rubbish. I mean, Facebook are killing it trying to be innovative and Apple not even entering a trot, are just like sort of speeding past them. All right, Nodding at them as they go past. All right, innovation department over at Meta, how are you doing?

But they pivot so often, don't they? I mean, Meta are doing some amazing things with AI now and they're open sourcing it on a ECMA open source because it's with caveats, but they've got some great capabilities.

I mean, I remember all the Google products again, I'm old enough to remember Google Wave, Google Circle, Google. I mean, there's millions of them. That debris littered in Google's past of brands launched mostly through Google time, which were brilliant ideas for about 10 minutes. And you know, Meta's no different. I mean, Metaverse alone. Is anyone using that? I mean, is it. Does it become anything? I mean, it changed the company name because of it.

Well, and then changed. It didn't actually change to AI, but only because Musk beat them to it with Xai.

Yeah, but I mean, you know, you think. Well, I mean, for me, if I'm honest, I, I see Facebook as the sort of that wannabe Google, let's launch loads of stuff and yeah, all right, 90% of it will tank, but 10% will stick. But I'm not even seeing the stuff that sticks. I mean, for me, Matter is just still a social media platform. I don't really see them moving in any other direction. I mean, I might be wrong. I'm not, you know, a 10 out of 10 tech head, but I'm pretty adaptive and early adoptery and I haven't seen anything that's exciting me. The only thing that remotely excites me are the headsets. But I remember watching the original Meta. Mark, Nice play. But the original Meta, if you remember before Facebook was Meta, there was a company called Meta which had spent years in development building mixed reality, augmented and virtual headset without, without a cable, totally wireless and the headsets existed and they were stunning. I mean, you literally, you know, you dragged over your desktop. All right, select Google, started typing. I mean, yes, give me that now. Who wouldn't? I mean, I, you know, love that. And I think the new glasses from. And I think it must be meta. Or is it Apple? Actually, no, it's the Apple glasses. See, Apple have done it again. Meta. Just. It must be. That's why he's becoming a mixed martial arts fighter.

Well, he's had an amazing rebrand, doesn't he? From tech villain to surfer dude.

It's incredible. And you know, and do you remember a couple of years ago, he was trying to visit every state in the US and everyone was like, oh my God, he's going to run for president. And you imagine that just like now the biggest phone brands in the world are Apple and Samsung, arguably. And you know, 20 years ago, the biggest phone brands were probably Nokia and Motorola. And in 20 years we'll probably have Zuck versus Musk for the presidency. Although I'm not sure because I don't.

Think Musk can because he's South African.

Yeah, but they can always have a, they can always change the constitution for that country.

Just become president of Mars.

He could. And then invade. That'd be funny. But you can see them, you know, it's a strange world, isn't it? And you can see them. But, but fighting the election out in the octagon. So whoever wins a BJJ match between the two of them wins the presidency. I think it's genius. Pay per view, obviously.

Yeah. I don't think that what's gonna happen.

No.

So, yes, we are both part of the wonder that is BNI as well. Me as a member and currently something on the lt. You have a more senior role within your organization, actually helping to get people to attend and to grow chapters.

I'm a director consultant, which means.

Fancy name, isn't it?

It is a brilliantly fancy name and it reminds me of every job title I was given in lieu of a pay rise. But I do love the role because it allows me to help more people. BNI has been great for me. I mean, I, I, it's grown me, it's shaped me. It's an anvil that I've been beaten into shape on because there's no hiding in bni. You meet everyone every week. Yeah. So if you, if you're full of it, you just won't survive. And that means you've got to build a business. And as a marketer, I, I was just Time for money. And so for most consultants, it's a really B and I is a great place to be if you're a consultant, because you will be forced to turn it into a business, proper business.

Absolutely.

And being a DC means I get to train people and help people. I love it, really.

And I think the sorts of businesses that are generally in BNI are these sort of SMEs who have high potential, but quite often not a lot of process, not a lot of consistency in the way that they approach things. So for you as a marketeer. For me, from an AI point of view, there is so much potential to help businesses. And that's what I really love about bni. It's the fact that we can go out, talk to people and help them on their journey to become more technical, technologically capable.

Absolutely. And the vast majority of them, I find are coachable and open. And as am I. As are you. I mean, we kind of take our own medicine. We're learning from people all the time. I mean, literally, you know, every day is a learning day. It's not just a cheesy, it's quite a cheesy statement, but it's so true. And in bni, I'm constantly being pushed to think about something in a different way and also to grow as a human. You know, when I joined bni, I was. And anyone who knew me in my pre BNI existence, I apologize because it turns out I was a little bit reactive and a little bit not. Not mastering my emotions. It was a little bit kickoff. I was very passionate. And actually one of the things BNI has given to me is this ability to, you know, breathe. You don't have to react immediately. And all of the stuff, you know, that we carry into business from ourselves, from our personal lives, from our emotional lives. You know, one of the great things about BNI is it's really helped slow me down. And you've been in meetings with me. I'm an extremely passionate creative fellow. I come up with ideas faster than we can write them down sometimes.

That's why we have voice AI recording.

Absolutely. That's why I thank God for call recording there. But, you know, BNI has to take a lot of credit for that sort of emotional maturation as well, which I think a lot of people in business, and I don't mean the many disrespect don't have, they're just people trying to earn a living. And whether they're in the trades, whether they are B2B, you know, it's, it's a massive journey. And, you know, we say bni, that we're developing people and businesses. It's really true. You can't grow your business until you're prepared to grow as a human. And so the ability to help other people is built in. So I love it for that as well, you know, and it's awash with so many different types of businesses and business owners, people with different backgrounds, different experience. It's just without this being an ad for bni, it's just, you know, fundamentally.

The AI mastermind course that we're putting together at the moment happened because of bni.

Absolutely.

We wouldn't have met, we wouldn't have had the conversations that we did and we. I don't think we'd ever have got around to it.

No. And I think also one of the core values of BNI is lifelong learning. And that's the whole point of any mastermind. This isn't anything other than how can we help people arm themselves in the simplest possible way without giving up the day job and becoming a teacher? You know, this, this is the only way you can really do it when you're running a business at the same time, you know. Yes. You know, it'd be great if you could just stand on space. Any. Everyone wants to stand on stage all day and I don't just educate well. No, I, I'm. I agree. I actually enjoy my business and I, I don't want to get to the point where I'm so not involved that all I'm. I'm just wheeled out, you know.

No, I want to be involved in the building a little bit, even if I'm told to just back away by the developers so they can do it properly.

Yeah. And with all due respect to. Again, to Mr. Mr. Musk and. Or Messrs. Musk and Zuckerberg, you know, they've kept their hands in, which is quite. Respect. Respectful, you know, it drives respect for me because a lot of people can't wait to get their hands off. And actually you spot the true passion when you have to drag them away from the keyboard and they're sort of scraping their nails on the floor. And I think that's the same for you. Me, I can't get away from what I do. I love it. It's almost a drug. I find it addictive to help people and solve the marketing challenge. And you obviously, in your world, helping people solve the challenge around how to accelerate the business. Solve a challenge, you know, using it's fixing problems. Yeah.

It's fundamentally, it's just going into a business looking and going, well, that's the problem here. Have you thought about this? And if you click these building blocks together, that problem solved. And then all you just need to do is review the output and then we can make people so much more productive. So it's not replacing people, it's making the people in the business achieve so much more.

Absolutely. I mean, that was the first big sort of AI trope, wasn't it? We're all going to be replaced. It's going to take all of our jobs. And then I saw somebody say, it's not going to take your job. The person who learns how to use AI in your job is going to take your job.

And for time that will be true.

Yeah. I mean, that's true with any tech, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. Jobs change. They've always changed.

Yeah. If you could use email, you were probably out of a job fairly quickly. I mean, it's the same with any tech. So, yeah, I'm not worried about that. I don't think anyone should be. I think it's an opportunity to grow. Yeah, everyone should be absolutely. In any job should be barreling towards how AI is going to change their world.

Only yet so many people haven't even started or they've tried a couple of prompts in ChatGPT and gone, oh, that was all right. Did you ask the right question? Did you ask it the right way? Have you thought about how if you connected that question that you're trying to ask and baked it into part of your repetitive processes, that you could solve a problem? I had a stupid little thing the other day. I couldn't remember how many visitors I'd had and who they were coming along to the B and I sessions. And I've got automatic sweep on Outlook that puts all the BNI stuff into BNI folder, so I don't have to worry about it because there's a lot of traffic because of my role within the chapter. And I just set a external piece of automation to look at that folder to filter the emails based on the body of the email containing my name, and then had a GPT call who was the visitor and what was the date, and then populate those into a spreadsheet. Took five minutes to build the automation, 10 seconds to run it had a spreadsheet with a list of who came on what day and then I could reach out to them and ask them if they wanted to come again.

Yeah, nice.

Nothing complicated. No super, super simplistic automation. Just using that. Okay. So what's in here? And you could have done it with regexes and hardcore traditional coding, but I didn't have to, I just had to say, who's the visitor passing in this variable, Review it, pass it on. And so you can daisy chain these capabilities in incredibly simple ways to solve a specific problem. And then when you look at a wider business and go, okay, you've got people who are monitoring emails and categorizing those emails and then they're then passing them on to somebody else to do something about them, take that person off that job, put them on something valuable. Because we can auto categorize, filter, respond to the emails, we can have AI call them back if you want, just depending on how far you want to get into the technology as it grows.

It's interesting that when we were talking about business owners and dabbling and trying chatgpt once and then kind of thinking, oh, that was rubbish, I don't want to use it again. And then into business owners, the biggest problem I see, and I think the mastermind really addresses this nicely if, if people are open to it, obviously, and that is that most people don't have any context of even what's possible. So, for example, I remember when I first used Chat GPT and of course I was one of the first to give it a go once it was publicly released because I test everything, I mean, I, you know, I mean marketing, why wouldn't I? Yeah, and I typed something in and you know, just got back a pretty rubbish reply. And I think I, I tried a few more times and then I sort of now give us another go later and fairly unexcitably walked away and thought, oh, and probably didn't go back to it for a couple of months until, until I heard the, until I heard the word prompt for the first time and, and then somebody was talking about prompts and I thought, what's a prompt? So then I started looking up prompts and I started to realize that prompt engineering is a thing and that actually if you ask the right question, framed in certain ways, blah, blah, blah, that actually chatgpt had power. And then of course that was the rabbit hole. That was the top of the rabbit hole and I've never been out since. And I think that's the problem in business and in AI, in any tech, is what can you do with it? Yeah, okay, how will this change my life? Why is this important and any business owners listening to this? If you don't know how a technology is going to be important, you've got A choice. You can either wait until everybody else has figured it out and then copy them, or you can be one of the first through the door and be one of the people that figures it out and gets ahead of everybody else. Is that simple? The name is Early Adopter for a reason. And it comes with some pain because you're early. But already AI is speeding up my business and I'm not even scratching the surface, really. I'm just dabbling, you know, I, I'm, you know, I'm looking forward to the mastermind because I want to see how, you know, over 12 months, you know, with one topic a month where I can just focus on that and, okay, well, how can I change finance in my business? How do I currently do hr? And HR doesn't seem like much to a company like me because I don't employ any staff. But even if you don't employ staff, if you're working with freelancers, if you're working with anyone and you don't have associate agreements in place that determine what the rules are, and one of those people decides to petition a tribunal claiming you're their employer, well, you'll thank me now for getting ahead of that. Right, so even if, you know, people don't think they need HR because they don't have any employees, absolute rubbish. HR is about human relations. It's not about staff relations. And so that's, you know, how can I use AI to speed that up? Well, already it's obvious before I even ask the question. It's a process that I can put in place so that the minute I agree with someone to become an associate of any kind, whether it's sweeping my email immediately, my AI assistant could say, hi, Jenny, I've just seen Al's email to you. Can you click here to check out the associate agreement, come back and let me know. The AI can then follow a set of rules to let me know when that's signed off, can then onboard them into if I'm using Monday or any system and activate them. I mean, there's just thousands of things that I'm not even aware of yet that could speed up my business. And one of the biggest things that I've been training myself to do over the last three months is literally almost as far as possible, take every task that I'm doing and give it to someone else. Because that's the mindset that will, when I, when I fully understand AI, take every task and give it to someone else.

Or AI, you won't even need to break it down to Those detailed tasks, they'll do the dissemination down to detailed tasks and allocate out to the individual agents that are solving.

So they'll basically be ahead of me.

Yeah.

Wow.

Well, the. The levels of AI AGI as OpenAI defined them, level 5 is a fully autonomous organization. So an organization, a company with no people.

Wow. And, you know, 10 years ago, I remember discussing with someone, that's the future of business. That's the future of business. Somebody somewhere owns a brand and that's it. And everything else is done. And at the time we said, it's outsourced and all you've done is.

We were freelancing everything. I was working with upwork. We had a great time, great model. But as soon as we launched Project Rising and we're looking at those tasks that were being delivered by the freelancers, we're like, okay, how many of those can we offload to AI? How do we generate the task list dynamically so that instead of that being hard coded as a template for a project that is automatically created based on the variables? Something you said earlier just got me thinking. You said human relations, hr. When do we get robot relations as a department with an organization?

Well, and I just realized it's not even human relations, it's human resources. So when do we get robot resources, you know?

Well, we've got robot resources.

Yes.

I mean, when you don't centrally control.

That's what I mean. When do we have a formal recognition, you know? I said, what did I seeing? Something about. I can't remember where it was, but I'm sure I saw something about, you know, robot rights in the last few months. Oh, actually, funny enough, it was Star Trek Next Generation. It wasn't a few months ago. It was talking about something to do with Data and his. And his right to be considered a lot, being alive. And I. I don't think we're far away from meaningful discussions about what is a robot? What is a robot entitled to? Does a robot have any entitlement? It's a bit like animal rights in the UK are different from human rights. Do robots have rights? Never mind. Do they dream of electric sheep? Do they dream of HR tribunals or RR tribunals? And interestingly enough, I don't think it's going to be a matter of time, even if we take the glibness out of that, where I may have some kind of meta function or meta AI managing the other AI. I mean, I'm not trying to be funny there, but genuinely, someone will create. Perhaps Project Rising already have the Ability to oversee and, and, you know, manage to a set of rules, a whole suite of other functions.

You know, we'll have to come back to that one.

Perhaps you saw where that was going.

But it's the extension of Bordley.

Well, inevitably, yeah. I mean, it's not, you know, it's like you said, who wants to run a business? Well, no one really wants to run a business. We run businesses because they're a means to an end. Because A, they keep us busy, B, they, we find them interesting and see they make, hopefully make us money. But. But, I mean, if you could do anything in the world, would you run a business? Dunno. If you didn't, if you, if you had plenty of things to occupy your time and you had plenty of money and you didn't need money, would you run a business? You'd probably run a foundation.

Ask lots of the people who've retired.

Right.

So stopped working for a reason.

Yeah. So they do other things with their time and their money. Right, so. So in 20 years, you know, I'm saying to my son at the moment, my son's had a really interesting journey and he's been homeschooled for the last five years and so he's completely out the education loop and he's not interested in that world at all. And he's starting to realize I've said to him, just come to come at me with a business plan and I'll fund you. The first three business plans you give me, I'll fund and then you're on your own, so I'll help you screw up and figure stuff out. And he's starting to think, you know, okay, I can literally do anything I want. I don't need to go anywhere, I could be anywhere, I could build a business. You know, he's getting into that world and I wish I'd have thought like that, you know, 25 years ago, but in 10, 15, 20 years, especially with the way the UK economy looks like it might head, and global economy aside from, you know, kids are not going to leave home in the way we did because they may or may not be able to just enjoy getting onto the property market the way 20 years ago a lot of us did, a lot of them will, you know, just sort of follow the sun and go from one economically tempting zone to another, whether it's Dubai or Malta or Thailand.

Or Portugal, are just about to get rid of income tax.

Well, there you go. And so, you know, and, and, you know, inevitably that's going to happen. And so we're going to have these waves of young people just, you know, entrepreneurially pushing their way around the planet, setting up businesses failing. Setting up businesses failing. Using AI to do an hour a day, just running stuff and then hopefully making money, which is what I'm banking on. Obviously, the retirement plan is in, basically, but it's fascinating. Fascinating that you could literally have just a brand.

We basically come with an idea. You don't even need to start with a brand.

No, no.

You have the brand created too.

Yeah.

Don't worry about pixels and orientations in logos and color schemes. You have it all based on the gap within the market. What's nobody else doing at the moment? You saw the launch of Liquid Death, where they launched a can of water that's called Liquid Death with some aggressive branding on it. It's water and it appeals to people because it's out there and different.

That's incredible. So does that mean we're going to reach a point of saturation where there's everything that's potential will be realized? I mean, you know, Theo Paphitis, my favorite Dragon, said, just because there's a gap in the market doesn't mean there's a market in the gap. So we're going to have these waves of young entrepreneurs just filling every gap in the market, taking a shot.

Prime turned up from nowhere and dissolved overnight, didn't it, Prime?

Yeah. And whatever you do, don't listen to KSI's new song. It's terrible. I listened to My Son yesterday. It's one of the worst things I think I've heard and I'm sorry, KSI, I can't. It's not just me clowning on you, but is everyone. So, yeah, a bit of a busted flush there, but yeah. I mean, prime just was obviously leveraging their brands. If it wasn't for their brands, it wouldn't have gone anywhere. But I think you're right. I think you're right. I mean, as a marketeer, how do I feel about the notion of brands just springing up without any human intervention? Well, I like it because, first of all, it'll put more pressure on brands. It'll also sort out wheat from chaff and also it will surface brilliant new ideas that none of us have never really had the courage to think of, because we won't go down every rabbit hole, whereas AI can go down a thousand rabbit holes an hour in parallel. Yeah.

And I think when you think to. We're seeing such a shift in terms of the release of products that new capabilities are Coming thick and fast. Currently that's technology based. But when we're using AI to generate products, to generate branding, to generate the marketing, I think the duration of products in general, the lifetime will come down. And that will apply in the same way to companies. You'll have companies that spin up, they're successful, they'll always be transient and they'll shut down because that opportunity is no longer there and the owners will have started up other things. You'll have some that will fail obviously, but I think we're going to have a lot more short duration ventures.

Yeah. And lower risk as well. I mean the knock on from that is the need to raise capital will drop through the floor because there won't be any people involved. It will just be a really cool.

It'S cool if you're in that space. It's not cool if you're in a traditional company that's been going for 40 years and you're looking at how you continue to be successful. And that's the people we need to help.

Yes, but, but that's absolutely correct. But you can only help people who want to be helped. So if you're listening to this and you are, you know, you've taken over the family business, you, you know, being on an ANI, an A& I, I'm thinking of BNI being on an AI for business Mastermind is a pretty good shout because someone's going to take away your lunch. You know, I've been saying this, you know, as a marketer talking about disruptive technology for 25, 30 years and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Either you're gonna, in fact, the argument in marketing is, the principal argument around disruption is look at what the market's doing, what does the market depend on? Pull the rug out from underneath them and do it in a different new way now before they do that to you. And that's the only choice you have. The choice isn't to sit there, sort of plug your ears and la la la la, pretend it's not going to happen. Absolutely. Definitely it's going to happen. The question is you're going to do it or somebody else is going to do it. And so anyone listening to this, you know, the more traditional business you are, the more, the more reluctant you feel, the more triggered you are, the faster you need to run. Because everyone in your industry will be feeling as reluctant and as triggered. And that means it's a bigger opportunity. That means they'll all be really slow because they'll be feeling just like you right now. So the harder you run, you're going to outpace them in a flash. And if you can get the business shifted and repointed before they even notice, well, the probability of you buying them just went up. The probability of you surviving, you know, And I joined the publishing industry in 1998. That's the industry I chose to go in because I knew it was about to be massively disrupted. I knew it was going to be decimated. And it has, I think, for 10 years. 50% of publishers went to the wall year on year. That's how. That's what disruption really looks like. You know, the whole market just disappeared. So whatever industry you're in, the more you think it can't be touched. Hold my beer.

Absolutely. And what a place for us to stop. So it's been a fantastic conversation, Al, but in the interest of timing, let's hold it there and have the rest of those conversations offline and maybe in a subsequent podcast when we finally start talking about.

And in the Mastermind as well, I'm sure.

Mastermind. Absolutely brilliant. Awesome. Thank you, Al.

Sa.