TJ Walker and Rob DaCosta discuss AI video clones for coaching. Rob's clone captures natural hand gestures and lifelike movement, with audio that can be re-recorded separately from video. Early success comes from selling site licenses to companies: one client is provisioning Rob's clone for 60 staff members.
Questions this video answers
ask.dacostacoaching.co.uk (spoken/spelled out in transcript).
60 staff.
About two dozen people per day (≈24).
Chapters
But like I say, they're principles that apply to all businesses, really.
Back to your clone. I found a lot of things very impressive about it, but one thing especially intrigued me, it was the movement and the hand movement. Now, I am immediate by profession. Most of what I've done traditionally in the last 40 years has been media training. So when I coach people how to appear their best, if they're going on the BBC or CNN or doing something live on Zoom or something like this, or even make a video, I stress, move your hands. You look scared, stiff, nervous if you do so. In my initial videos that I was using to train the very same system you're using, I was moving my hands. But what I noticed was when the person was talking, when the user was talking to me and I'm doing this, my hands were moving and they're like, this is crazy. What, is he hand signaling someone else? And I don't know how you did it. I hope you can share that with our audience. But I tested. I tested earlier when I was talking. Your hands didn't move when you were talking. They did move in a way that I thought was completely consistent with what you were saying. That made you look supremely comfortable, confident, real conversational and relaxed. I did five different versions to the point where, you know the company we use, so we got to charge you another thousand dollars if you want to do another version. How did you get it to do that?
Oh, well, first of all, thank you for the compliments. I wish I could share some insightful strategy that you can implement, but I don't know, Chance. I think naturally I am very gestural. But of course, when they. Everybody and when they tell you how to upload the video, they are kind of telling you not to do that because I guess, like you said, it will be unnatural. I guess I just recorded it and I did it a little bit when I was talking. And somehow the AI has interpreted that to work quite well. I've noticed, and I'm sure you've seen this, because I know you've looked at a lot of the other clones that are available on Delphi, that some of them look quite good and some of them look very stilted and upright because they almost didn't move and they look robotic. And so I'm glad mine doesn't do that. I think the other thing that I've learned is that if I was going to record mine again, I probably need to be more animated in my intonation, because the clone somehow dims that down, doesn't it? And it makes it a bit more.
Well, that's the audio. I mean, you can redo audio recordings anytime you want. It's not tied to the video.
No, but. Yeah, but the way that. Yeah, that's true, I guess. But I also hope that the tech that is working in the background is going to keep improving so that the, you know, the video, our videos improve as well. But I, I can't say I've got something clever to tell you about how I managed to do that.
Okay. Our guest today is Rob DaCosta, internationally renowned expert on marketing helping agencies run their business more effectively, and the proud owner of one of the very first fully interactive digital video clones in the world, which I do want to, I do want to share with people again. They can, they can go here and try it out anytime. Now the best URL for that is to go to Dacosta Coaching.
No, just go to ask. Ask the costacoaching.co.uk so ask.d a c o S T A.
Okay. And we posted, we posted all those links in the show notes and the description as well. So a lot of good stuff here. Now I'm noticing that you have a button that says call again, which the video or chat. Have you hidden the audio only version or. How come I'm not.
No, if you go back, I guess if you click on the left arrow on the top left of your screen, you should be able to go, no, no, no. Down, down, down, down, down, down.
That one. Gotcha.
Yeah, you should be. Yeah, you should go.
There we go. Okay. And it may be that when I took grab the URL, I messed it up. But in general, I've, I've used it a couple of times and the video stopped coming. It does seem really very lifelike and conversational. The audio is good. The video is good. I really have to pick your brain as a marketing expert. It's a challenge for you and for me. How do we market these things? So it goes beyond a mere curiosity. Now I'm getting, I would say, two dozen people a day into my clone. You may be getting more. And I can tell they seem to really get a lot out of it. The video ones where they're, they're saying, hey, tj, I'm lacking confidence. I've got a big job interview. Can you help me? We're going through it, we're practicing. It's giving feedback. They seem to really get value from it. But I'm not seeing people want to come and rehearse before every speech or every interview or come and get daily tips on personal development. What do you think it's going to take for people to really value these digital coaching clones in the same way people already value going to a therapist or a personal trainer or an executive coach? Which people do all those things on a weekly basis? Sometimes a daily basis, yeah.
Such a good question. I wish I knew that answer as well because I suspect, like me, you're kind of wanting to shake people and say, hey, this is such a fantastic resource and a fantastic piece of technology. Go and use it. See this as a way of democratizing coaching because it makes it available to everybody who couldn't necessarily afford to hire your services or my services. But I'm having some of the same troubles and the biggest success I've had with my clone so far is to integrate it into my coaching program. So I have a group coaching program. I've created an AI version of it. So instead of having live calls with me, every lesson or every module has the coach embedded in with specific questions that they can ask the coach about lessons. And I found success there. And the second piece of success I've slowly starting to get is the idea, and I guess this works well, it should work for you as well is selling a site license to people. So I have a client I'm doing some training with next week around account management skills and they are going to make, I'm very excited about this. They're going to make my coach clone available to their 60 staff. So that means that after the training everyone can carry on having conversations about the training and all get consistent advice. Because we all know that with training there's a notoriously poor implementation rate. Like someone will learn something, but they go back to their desk, they get busy and nothing happens. So now I'm saying, well, actually you can carry on having conversations with your coach or AI coach and you can dig into the topics we covered in more detail or you can be reminded of it. But selling it on its own, I haven't been that successful with. But selling it like $20, well, I'm impressed.
You can sell it as a, as an add on to an existing client and giving them rights to use it on their, their website. So that sounds exciting. And let me ask you, how do you sell that? Because in my own experience of I've traditionally sold day long public speaking workshops, media training workshops and you know, over the years it's gone from, you know, $1,000 a day 25 years ago to now, you know, 10, $20,000 a day. So I found I really can focus on this live experience, I can charge more and more.
