Leveraging AI

112 | How to Actually Deploy Generative AI in Your Business with Chris Daigle

• Chris Daigle, Isar Meitis • Season 1 • Episode 112

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Are you ready to transform your business with generative AI but unsure where to start?

Join us for an engaging live session where we’ll break down the process of integrating AI into your operations.

Unlike other sessions that focus on the tools, we'll guide you through the essential steps of planning, starting, and managing AI deployment within your business. Learn practical strategies to ensure a smooth transition and maximize the benefits of AI.

Chris Daigle, a visionary in the field of AI with an impressive track record, will share his insights and experiences. Chris has helped numerous organizations successfully implement AI, making complex concepts accessible and actionable for business leaders.

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If you’ve enjoyed or benefited from some of the insights of this episode, leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and let us know what you learned, found helpful, or liked most about this show!

Isar:

hello, everyone, and welcome to another live episode of the Leveraging podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. Now, I think maybe the number one question I get asked all the time The most about AI and as an AI educator and consultant, I get asked a lot of AI related questions, but I think the question I get asked the most is how do you get started? Because there are a million people to follow each and every one of them has a thousand tips, which is like a billion tips that you need to follow. And it's moving really fast. And it's just really confusing. And people don't know How to get started now, before we dive into this really amazing topic of how to get started. I want to share something about our guests today. So every now and then I run into somebody who is like my brother from another mother. And Chris Daigle is one of those people. And I'll explain why we both have serious experience in running companies and businesses before the whole AI thing started. We both had grown businesses to significant size and had exits. We both. Each AI courses, two business leaders teaching them how to do it right. And we both are really passionate about helping people understand this AI thing and implement it successfully. which makes him literally the perfect person to have this conversation with, about how you actually get started with AI, because I'm sure we'll have a blast just between the two of us geeking about this topic, but the fact that he has serious business experience, as well as he's currently the co founder and CEO of Chief AI Officer, which is a company that does what it sounds like. It teaches people how to run businesses with AI infused into them. Again, just makes him the perfect. Person to talk about how to actually get started with AI in your business. And he's going to share with us his framework that he's teaching in his courses, step by step on everything you need to do. This is again, maybe the number one topic that people are asking about. So I'm really excited about the show. Chris, welcome to leveraging AI. Thank you so much, brother. I'm honored to be here. Thank you. Same here. you and I ran into each other literally face to face before we met, anywhere else. yeah, Chris was here in Orlando and somebody said, Hey, I think you guys should meet. I don't remember who that was, but it was Sean David. Oh, Sean David. Yeah. So another brother from another mother. Sean introduced us. We got together for lunch. we had an amazing conversation and we've been exchanging ideas and sharing stuff since. And so I'm really happy to have you here. Let's really get started with maybe a high level of why like this is important, like why should people get started right now? And then we can immediately after that dive into the how.

Chris:

there's a new paradigm that exists in business. And a quote that I love is from Buckminster Fuller. And he said, you don't win by competing in the existing paradigm. You create a new paradigm that makes the old one obsolete. There is a new paradigm of business. If you are operating in the old paradigm, it's horse versus car. It's a different category of business. If you're not leveraging AI or exploring how to get started with it, you are riding horses and we're in Ferraris. I'm in a Tesla,

Isar:

but whatever, like I, that's, I wish I was in a Ferrari, but I'm in a truck. for those of you, by the way, who are joining us, either here on zoom or on LinkedIn, and there's a bunch of people on both platforms. First of all, thank you. So much for joining us. We appreciate the time and we appreciate the fact that you choose to spend, the next hour with us, but also it will be nice if you a tell us where you're from. put a, little message on again, whichever platform you're joining us on. So we know where people are joining us from, as well as if you have any questions during this episode, please And I will bring it up, as much as possible and bring it to Chris's attention so he can provide us answers. by the way, I agree with you a hundred percent. I don't know if you follow, Christopher Lockheed, the godfather of category design. And he talks about exactly these kinds of things, right? the way to win is to shift into a new category where you can be one of the leaders. Versus trying to compete in a completely vanilla kind of environment where everything is the same. And a hundred percent. So I got people from Vermont and Chicago and Dallas and South Carolina and the UK. Awesome. And New Jersey and Tulsa, Oklahoma, Philippines. Oh my God. So people literally are everywhere. This is absolutely awesome. Seattle. So Chris, yes. we agree. This is important. Let's really dive into your framework. So people understand the how, and again, it's, I think the biggest question people have,

Chris:

and the reason that I chose this topic is ours, because we have professionals, they're inquiring about the chief AI officer certification and I ask them, so what's your experience? And a lot of them have gone through some of the, The higher priced remote education experiences through MIT and Columbia and Cornell and all that. So what'd you think? And they say, man, they were great. I learned a lot, but I didn't learn what to do. And for us, we focus very much on practical application of generative AI into a business. So like it was a natural progression for anybody's education, for them to come and learn. You learn the theory or you learn the strategic side. Now come and learn what to do. So that's what I'm going to share with everybody today. can I go ahead and share my screen?

Isar:

Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead. Share your screen for those of you who are listening to this podcast after the fact, first of all, come join us on Thursdays. We do this every single week and there's always going to be like an amazing person like Chris sharing something specific and then you can see it. but we're going to share everything that's on the screen. So if you're driving your car, or walking your dog or doing the dishes or whatever it is, and you can't watch the screen because it's a podcast, then it's perfectly fine. If you are in a place that can allow you to watch a screen, you can always go and watch this on our YouTube channel as well. But, and the link for that is in the show notes. So you can always find it on your podcast player if you don't know how to find it. But with that, Chris, go ahead. The stage is yours.

Chris:

=Great. So we're going to talk about how to actually deploy AI in your business. We don't necessarily what I'm going to share. If you are at the enterprise level, certainly applicable. However, most of our attention isn't focused there. We feel that enterprise is well addressed by Deloitte, Capgemini, like all the big consultancies. However, if you're a small to medium business or mid market below, you're on your own. There's nobody coming to your rescue. So it's very important that you pay attention to this and that you follow this framework. If you do, in fact, want to be that champion of AI within your team, your business, or heck your industry. So we'll start with, What I believe is the number one impediment to enablement. And, before we get into that, I want to bust some myths. You might be thinking that the barriers are technology, cost or expertise. Maybe you're new to prompting. Maybe you've never led an AI deployment before. but while these are the challenges, I wouldn't say that they are the main challenges. You can be the best prompt engineer in the world and still not be able to provide a company with success. And without this one key ingredient, you're looking at, Let's say let's call it at least a very challenging business environment. And some have even called it enablement or extinction, right? So winning is easier at AI. if you have a plan now, no big reveal there, but I'll tell you, I'm an entrepreneur. I know that entrepreneurs planning doesn't seem very sexy. It's let's just get in there and let's start digging the hole or whatever. Let's start selling. But I can tell you that if you want the true impact that comes from That is possible with generative AI being introduced into your business and workflow. You're not going to do one thing. it's a series of efforts of compounding and stacking, turning this process into AI powered process, turning this process. And it's That repeated, iteration of, optimizing this, optimizing that you turn around a week from now, a month from now, a quarter from now, and you're like, oh my gosh, where did all this bandwidth come from? And that's only going to come with a plan that's been developed so that each of your activities is. There's intelligent design behind it because you know that it is going to synergize with the other processes that are part of your deployment plan. So this quote has stuck with me since. I don't know. I was young. T. Boone Pickens, billionaire here in the U. S. This quote, I would rather invest in a fool with a plan before I'd invest in a genius without one. That changed my life when I realized that's how important planning is. So that's what we're going to talk about today. What does your plan look like to actually implement AI into the business?

Isar:

Yeah. Perfect. I'll add one thing to this. and again, obviously I agree with you a hundred percent is at the end of the day, it's a change management process. And change managers and processes do not just happen because somebody knows how to prompt or because they have the right license. It's exactly company wide strategic process that

Chris:

requires a plan. As you just said. So one of the first things that we recommend that you do in our framework is that the leadership team, they know that they want AI quote unquote, but they don't really know They may not know what that means. So one of the first things that I like to do is I like to go in and I like to get all of the decision makers and the leadership team together and do a one on one. And I know Esau, you've got a number of frameworks that, you did an episode on recently with the four ways that you approached the, like the deliverables when you're doing the live. Loved it. so in our case, what we want to do is we want to sit down and we want to just make sure that everybody's at least got that, that, That baseline understanding, not so that they can go out and get tactical, but so that as a leader of the business, they can strategically consider generative AI's application into their business. Now, here's one of the reasons why I find this very important. If you're going to be that person who's leading it, whether you're an internal resource for the company, you're an external resource, a fractional chief AI officer, AI expert or whatever, I've found that in my consulting career that a confused mind Always says no, it's safer. If I don't understand something, it's just safer for me to say, no, we're going to, we're going to stick with what we've got. So that's why I find it so important to get the leadership team, on the same page, as far as what's possible and why we want to do this. And I think that what you'll also find is once that conversation gets started and you're in the boardroom or you're at the offsite or whatever, you're going to realize. There's a couple of people in here that really know their stuff. They're paying, they're listening to podcasts like ESARs, right? And then there's some people that think they've still got some concerns about Terminator, Skynet, whatever. So it helps everybody just. start rowing in the same direction. They may have talked about leveraging AI, but they usually don't know enough about the capabilities or the limitations to really have a clear, precise group definition of what a successful application looks like. Now, once we've done that, once we've got everybody going, okay, I usually start to sense the excitement. Oh, this is interesting. The next step that I want to do is, especially with a leadership team, there's a quote that I learned a long time ago, and that quote was, arithmetic is not an opinion. If I can show them the impact of the small projects and extrapolate that out over the larger set of workflows, these numbers, Really start to add up. And these executives like to see these potential gains. It makes it an easier yes for you. Maybe you don't know, maybe you've never walked into their business before. Chris, how do I forecast ROI? What I usually tell chief AI officers or the AI experts is that you can safely, suggest that a forecast of a 20 percent impact on any metric that gets AI ified is pretty good. that's a safe forecast. Now the reality is once you get into the mix, you're going to find some are 2000 percent improved or infinite because you don't even have to have resources do that anymore. But you can't start there that hyperbole is going to have, it's going to have people raise up. They're eh, I don't know if that's possible. 20%? I couldn't believe it. They believe it. And when you run that out over the whole business, each department head that's there, if they go, Oh, 20 percent improvement, 20 percent production increase, whatever that is, they get even more excited. And it's, again, it's not an opinion. It's the, it's arithmetic, it's the math, it's the data. And it's hard to argue with that data. I want to add

Isar:

two cents, one to the education piece. I think there are two aspects of the education piece. And I agree with you a hundred percent. Like it has to start there. I always like to break it into two. One is like initial alignment, get everybody to a certain level that they can have an educated conversation. And the best way to do that is to send everybody to a course or do a workshop of two days for these people, or something like this that happens in a condensed way and gets everybody to level X. So you can even. Again, break those fear barriers and have a conversation of what's possible. And then the second thing is ongoing education, right? How do you make sure that people in the organization and especially leadership positions continuously learn by following the right people, getting reviews every week, whatever the case may be. So that's one thing as far as the ROI is concerned, I think what's very helpful and you might get there. I don't know what your framework is, but. If you start with one or two or three small projects that you can do very quickly within a week, they can be up and running and they don't solve big problems. They solve small daily problems, but they now save for these two, three, four, five, 10 individuals, two hours a week, every week. That is the best proof that this thing is working because this is not, Oh, let's throw a number out there. This is, it's happening right now in our organization. Jody and Sam are now Working two hours less every week because the AI is doing this thing for them and they are free to do more valuable stuff.

Chris:

Yes, we're very much aligned with, your thesis on this. because for us, the next step is to actually establish an AI coalition and internal AI leadership, whatever that is. And this isn't necessarily the executives. This is the team members within the company who already have the most interest. And aptitude for being involved in this. So I mentioned change management, there's individuals out there and you may be one of them listening to this or whatever, but you've got some concerns about AI's introduction into your business and how that's going to impact your economic viability, your career for those individuals who are in possession of those fears, what I would suggest. You don't want them on the coalition at this point. Reason being they're the confused mind. They don't understand what's happening. And for them, it might be easier to just, let's make sure this doesn't work, right? So you want to make sure that the coalition is made up of people who are going to go the extra mile to really put in what's required to make this win. Because these people are going to be your proxies. These are going to be the ones, who are Enthusiastic about ongoing education, and they're going to be able to come back and bring that to your team. Now, what I like to do is find that individual, ideally in as many departments as we can and include them in the coalition, because as they're learning, they're walking back to their office, their team saying, Hey, how'd it go? And they said, I can't wait to show you what we just learned or what, here's the exciting news. And it really starts to, they become the evangelists internally who raise morale. About the application of a I right now. where do you start? Maybe you don't have a big company or whatever. I can tell you that in my experience, you want to find the people who are on the teams who are already using it and hint. Start your search in the marketing department. They tend to be Early adopters of the new paradigm, whether that's, analytics or whatever. And in this case, it's AI. and as I mentioned, just make sure that you spend some time with those individuals to if they're already at home, working on their developing their prompting skills, or they've, whatever. Those are the people because they're gonna be excited about doing this. Now, once the coalition has been started, the first things that we want to do is we want to identify, as Esau said, that low hanging fruit, those easy wins, that momentum will start with some quick wins. You won't starting with an ambitious, pilot project is going to result in, delayed gratification for the leadership team of the decision makers, right? Where we suggest is known pain points within a department or role. yeah. have conversations with a team, find out what that looks like. And I'm going to show you what we do to do that. once you've got that list from each of the teams about potential places for you to get started, what we teach is for you to prioritize those on a couple of things. We're looking for high impact, low cost, low resource costs, low risk. So if we have a high likelihood of success, high impact and low risk, That's where you want to start. Now we use a formula called fire. We've got a little tool in our thing. That's almost like a calculator where you identify what the project, the potential project could be. And then you're going to score it. You're going to give it a numerical score based on four categories. The first one, again, we call it fire. the first one would be frequency. Like how often is this task being performed? Is it daily, weekly, monthly? that's going to matter for this pilot project. The I stands for what type of impact or, investment is Depending on the tasks, some will be impact focused. Some will be, it's going to require, three people to work two hours. We want to measure all these things. The next one is going to be if successful, what is the return for this effort into the company of this pilot project? this process becoming an AI powered process. And then the third one is going to be, or the fourth one is going to be, a factor of how much effort, how many departments are required, how much time, how much, Technology resources are going to be required for this pilot project. Once you go through that scoring, it's very easy to the best. Possible pilot projects will rise to the top and guess what we're going to do. We're going to start there. So that looks

Isar:

go ahead. I want to pause it just for one second. I do something very similar in the courses that I teach with my clients. and it's, I would just want to add some small details. People like, okay, but how do we know how to get started? what do we put on the list? And what I tell people that the tool that I have and feel free to steal that and use something similar if you want, it's basically a list of all the activities in the company. So what I ask people say, don't now stop what you're doing for two days and write this down, but have a centralized place for me. It's like a Google sheets that has a very well structured thing that then has a scoring tool, very similar to yours that basically said, when you do something. Write it down and there's drop down menus for departments and subtasks and tasks just to organize it in a more organized way. But literally what you ask people to do is when you do something, go to this file and write the thing that you're doing and what that creates within two weeks without anybody making. No special investment. You're going to have a list of 613 things that people are doing in your company. Yeah. And then you take the people from the different departments that are part of the committee that can make that scoring because they know what's happening in the actual department. And they can say, okay, this is high frequency. This is high risk. This is low risk. And so on. The other thing that I want to. How people quantify is that ROI, right? Okay. So how do I know, like what is it going to do? And there's, first of all, two ways to look at it because there's two ways to gain in a business. One is this can increase the top line, right? If we do this, I can drive more marketing, which means we're going to get more clients, which means we're going to make more money, how much more? I'm guessing because I can do 20 percent more posts where we'll get, and they're going to be better. We're going to get 10 percent more leads from that. You know how to do the math because you know how your funnel works. okay, we have 10 percent more leads. This is how many, qualified leads we're going to have this, how many sales we're going to have. That's going to increase our top line by X option two is how much time is this is going to save? if this works, as you just said, if this works, then these two people don't have to do this task or they have to do this task. But instead of taking them six hours a week, it's going to take them two hours. So now they have. For hours, these people cost X amount of money per month, four hours a week times four weeks, 16 hours. You know how much money that's going to save the bottom line to the company. So on both these aspects, you can look on the ROI equation and say, what's the actual benefit to the company. There's always that. intangible benefits that you can try to quantify, which is taking away tedious tasks that people hate to do, or succeeding in something that people tried 17 times in the past and failed, or, just getting momentum in the company. but these are harder to measure and they always like just a nice to have add on to the other more tangible ROIs.

Chris:

So we do something similar. We actually use The next slide was, where do I start? We, I use a tool that I learned. I got certified in a program called EOS, which is, it's a framework for operating your business. And like from a strategic and tactical, clearly designed plan. Okay. So an EOS, they have a tool called delegate and elevate. And it's very similar to what you were explaining where the individual writes down the things. You can do this right after we, as soon as we get off the phone, you can actually do your own delegate and elevate exercise because it not only helps us identify the workflows to start on, but it gets immediate buy in from the users because we start by addressing the tasks that they don't like doing. And the strategy behind that is if I can get those off of your plate. Morale about AI goes way up. They start, they can't, I can't believe it. I don't have to do that anymore. So the delegate and elevate, if you wanted to create your own, you can go online and download like Google EOS or use perplexity, go to EO and type in EOS delegate and elevate, and you can find a PDF version of this, but if you have a sheet of paper in front of you, just draw an X, Y, or like an X, Y matrix, draw a line down the middle and a line across. And then what we want to do is we've got now four quadrants. The main quadrant that I'm focused on. It's the bottom right quadrant. That's the area where we're going to start to list the things that the individual doesn't like doing and they're not good at it anyway, but it's a, it's an expected deliverable from their role. Okay. I call it the crap corner. That's the stuff where nobody wants to do that anyway. Now, if we can start in the crap corner. Is that

Isar:

a professional term, the crap corner? Crap corner

Chris:

TM. I'm going to trademark that one. It

Isar:

is

Chris:

now. It is now. Yeah. But the idea is that we're looking for the, okay. So on a day to day basis, what do you do? I do this. Okay. Is that something you love doing? You like doing it? Like we get them to categorize it, but again, I'm mainly focused on. That bottom right corner, if I can identify a few potential pilot projects that they don't like doing and they're not good at any way, we can get those off the plate. That person feels a great sense of relief and they, they become converts like, Oh my gosh, if you can do this for others in the company, the morale goes to the roof. So that's all we're looking for. not all we're looking for, but that's a great place to start is for you to do the same thing. What are some of the things that you're expected to do in your role that you don't like doing and you're not good at them anyway, please start a list there. And we're going to look at how we can turn some of those into pilot projects. So we get the double whammy. Of, Hey, we got a quick win, but we also get that morale boost that comes because we've taken the stuff that they don't like doing. I'll

Isar:

add one thing not related to that, but related to EOS, all these tools, whether you're using Claude or Gemini or Chachapiti, they know EOS very well. So you can use. Any of these tools as your EOS advisor, regardless of what you're doing, like literally you can say, okay, I have this issue in my company right now. This is what's happening in that department. This is what's happening in that department. This is what's happening with that client based on EOS. What's the best way to address this. And it will give you the actual step by step how to do this based on the EOS infrastructure or frameworks. And so just. side discussion, but just because you mentioned EOS, it's an extremely powerful consultant for EOS for absolutely free.

Chris:

Yeah, for free. That's the big key there. so once we've identified those, the next step is we're going to, we're going to start building the list and it. Now it's time to go to work. And in our way of doing things, we look at three options when we've identified, okay, I don't know what that could be. Maybe it's creating the daily update. I was actually on a call earlier with somebody that's marketing and cybersecurity. When a cyber threat comes up, he has to stop what he's doing and create a report and send it out to all of their clients. He said, it takes. In and out throughout the day, a couple hours a day. So perfect example, he doesn't like doing it. It interrupts his business, but it's in critical deliverable from his role. So what we did on that call was we identified each of the steps in that process, right? It's process mining process mapping. I'm going to show you how to do that in just a moment. But once we've done that, we're going to look at each node. In that process. And we're going to ask ourselves, can we automate this? Can we augment this? can the tech support a human in the loop here? Or is this a straight AI play? Can we AI ify or some combination of the three at each node in the process? Now, at this point, what we've done is we've architected a solution. Now we didn't build it, but we've at least architected what that AI powered process will look like. Now for us. In order to determine which approach you're going to take and what has to happen for that approach to be successful in adding AI impact to that process. we have an eight step process that we look like, identify the task that was done in the. Delegate and elevate. And then in the scoring of the pilot project, step two, if you've never done this before, you want to define the start and end points for the process. These are going to make sure that if you've ever heard of scope creep, right? these are going to make sure that you are, focusing on a discreet issue and not sucking in all the issues of the company into this one. Pilot project, step three. List out all the steps and don't worry about the order of those steps necessarily at this point. Just capture every decision and every like action that's required for that to occur. oops, sorry, step four for us is to confirm with the process owner, the person who's actually doing it every day, ask them, is this correct? Just get confirmation, but we don't want to build an AI powered process. That's inaccurate. Next step. We actually want to use, some tool mermaid. js is what we use, but we actually want a visual. And again, this comes from EOS and EOS. They call this a proven process. We want to get a visual representation of each node decision making action in that process. Now, once we've done that, we're going to go back and sit with that process owner and say, okay, here's what we've got. Here's how you defined it. Are these steps in order? are there any details missing? Are there any, other decision makers that are required for this next step? Just confirm that we've now created a discrete container to focus on. Step number seven. Review it and refine it. So we're going to go through the map again, after we've gotten that feedback and then it's time to go to work. It's time to test that process. Now I've gone through these steps quickly, but I want to show you the shortcut that we use. If you want to do this for yourself, for your team, for your business, for a client, whatever the case might be, here's what I'd recommend you do. Use loom. If you're not, I was literally

Isar:

about to say that. And then you just, so I said, we think very much alike. So we're

Chris:

vibrating at the same frequency. For

Isar:

sure.

Chris:

So if you're not using loom for SLP creation and documentation, you're not doing what we call thinking in AI. So if you're going to be somebody who's going to be leading the charge for AI in your business to roll or for client businesses, process mining and process documentation is going to be a big part. Without knowing what you need done, you can't really introduce an AI or automation solution. So for this, it's a very simple process and a huge time saver. So what I do is I will sit down with the individual. We've done delegate and elevate. We identified a handful of tasks. We scored those tasks. We know exactly where we're starting. Who's responsible for this task? Oh, that's Jane. Okay. Jane, let's sit down, turn your computer on, turn on loom and show me what you do. And Jane doesn't have to worry about doing it. that'd be any fancy way. She can just do what she's always done and record that process. And I can ask questions. All of this is being caught on audio. I'm getting the visuals as well. And then at the completion of Jane walking me through that process, I'm going to take that transcript. We run it through a custom GPT. you can, there's probably plenty of them already out there for you to do this, but we take that transcript and we put that into the custom GPT that's designed to build an SOP from. Jane's rambling and my intermittent questions throughout that process and that output now becomes One of those steps that I just shared with you. It is the thing that we're gonna review with Jane Hey, here's the SOP. Does this look right? Oh, you know what? I forgot to mention blank. Okay, great We're gonna update that once that's done. That's when you're gonna go And do that triple a the. Okay. So let me pause

Isar:

you just for one second. for those who don't know loom is just a screen recorder that allows you to record what's happening on the screen or screens. If you're working with more than one. And it records the audio and even your face in there as well. You can do this remotely with zoom. Like you can literally just interview somebody who was sharing their screen. If you can't walk to their desk, but the trick here is really recording what the person is doing as they're doing it and explaining what they're doing. So I'm going to the software. I'm going to grab this. I'm going to do that. I'm sending this to this. I'm copying like literally all the processes that you're doing. And as Chris mentioned, it doesn't have to be structured. It's not as if they're teaching, they're literally just walking you through what they're doing. the other trick that I found very helpful. That saves you some of these cycles is just asking three or four people who do the process. If there are people like that to do it, and then you send all of those recordings to the AI, and then it finds all the missing pieces because different people, share it in a slightly different way or do it slightly differently. So that's one thing. The other thing that I will say that is very helpful. Is you can actually go to that visualization, that flow chart. These tools usually are really bad at creating flow charts, but they understand flow charts. So as an example, you can ask it to create a VBA code, like a visual basic code that will run in Visio. That will create the initial flow chart for you. Now it's never perfect, but it gives you an initial flow chart in Microsoft Visio without doing anything like you have step now you can massage it and finesse it, but it saves you 25 minutes of creating squares and giving them names and moving them around.

Chris:

This is uncanny. the parallels between your approach and our approach. it's. We must be onto something here. I think

Isar:

so.

Chris:

So for us, we don't use VBA. We actually have, cat GPT or whatever model we're using. Give us that code and mermaid. js. And from there, I can copy that and then go to mermaid. live, which is a website, paste that code in there. And on the right hand side of the screen, you'll see, this is the output. Is it fancy? No. However, it takes seconds for you to do this. Now, I want to just show you the difference between, okay, we've done this. What does this look like for a customer service situation? Um, we run through it and this is the typical in an environment where customer service is, especially it's a, bigger business or a business is getting a lot of inquiries. This can really add up. And the reason I chose this example, it's universal. If you're a solopreneur, you're still servicing customers, right? And so these are the tasks to handle a, a new ticket and get it routed in a manual, in the old paradigm. Remember we talked about new paradigm, old paradigm and the old paradigm. This process could take 11 to 17 minutes. And you know what you may say, our team's faster, whatever, plug your own numbers in here, but regardless, it's not instant. If you've got humans that are doing most of the heavy lifting on this discreet, one little process, this is what to expect. There's it's taking time. Now, the comparison, once you've done that, you've mapped it out. And then you do the triple a, the, can I automate, augment, or AI ify the step? Boom, boom. You do that through all the steps and you end up with that architecture and you build that The result is, surprise, a lot faster. Now, okay, great, Chris, you saved us 10 minutes on a customer service ticket in this example. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about extrapolating that out over an entire day. How many tickets does your company get? depending on the size of it, of your company and the number of queries that you're getting, five to 20, a low traffic environment, if you can save an hour a day for customer service. What are they doing in that extra hour? And here's the thing. Oh, maybe I can get rid of people. I don't suggest that you fire people because just because now there's an AI powered process that can do it better or faster. I want you to keep this consideration in mind. What I tell people is that the hard part of generative AI in your business, it's not the tools are easy to learn. The hard part is knowing where to use them. An individual who has domain expertise, not just on their role. But on their industry and your business in particular, they had that, that took time for them to know that we do it this way. Oh, this word means this thing. Oh, Terry has the keys. Bill doesn't work on for all that context within your business. Gen AI doesn't know that stuff. So what I would suggest is that as you're creating this additional bandwidth, you don't exclusively look at. Oh, now I got to get rid of people. You say, now that this person, they have domain expertise in my business, where else can I deploy them and that domain expertise? That's a better way to look at it. And that. And in the change management conversation that puts people at ease, it's not going to be some blanket firing that's going to occur because generative AI is being introduced into our business. And I'll just show you a couple more examples here. that's awesome.

Isar:

I'll say one thing about what you just said with the people and the extra time, even in, and I'll go back to your particular example, but it's true in every department, in customer service, every customer service department on the planet is sliced in and does not provide the kind of service they want to provide. Period. I've seen that in the companies I ran. I've seen that in companies I work with. And I see that with my clients right now, there's never enough people. And it's the same is true in finance. The same is true in marketing. Every year. And so this gives you the ability to reprioritize and re define how you provide better customer service, because now you have several different people who have an hour a day, which means they can spend time with your Spending more time with them, helping them solve bigger problems faster, which means they're going to stay longer and pay you more money. So there is, there are many ways to turn this around from, Oh, what do we do with that time to, holy crap. You actually were looking for that time for the last decade and now we finally have it and just find the best way to apply. Like you're saying, the expertise, the connections, the network that these people have. For the benefit of their company. And instead of doing tedious, annoying work, like you said, they're doing something that really provides value to them and to somebody else.

Chris:

A hundred percent. So just to make this easier, we do something, we create these things called smart cuts. And to us, they're like AI powered shortcuts or AI powered processes for your business. And at chief officer, I think we've probably at this point mapped out about 80 pretty common, business applications. they're not huge. Processes, but they're micro processes that exist within the business. And if you've never done this before, I would say, look at, smartcuts. io. You can go and get, I think we've got, maybe we give seven or eight of them away for free. Might even give more away for free. but they're going to give you an idea. Even if you don't, if it's not a process that you do in your business, I want you to go get those and look at how we do it so that you can have some examples of what an AI powered process would look like. In this case, we, train AI to write like you in one prompt. So we run you through what that prompt looks like, how to, calibrate the output with the prompt, a number of things so that you can look at that now, instead of you having to start from scratch and scratch your head and go, Oh man, what was that tool? He's at loom. Just go grab a smart cut and map that out in your business. We provide these to the chief AI officer so that they can go in. And just like ISAR said, you want to get some quick wins. They can go in, they can have these conversations with the team. Once they've identified some of those top pilot projects, then go back to the smart cut library and go, boom, here we go. Team let's build this before lunch. If you're able to come in and get that kind of. Again, it doesn't have to be completely transformative to the entire enterprise, but if you can come in and you can demonstrate your ability to understand the process and leverage the tool to get the new paradigm worth of result, the AI powered process, and you can do it quickly there, it's all green lights for you at that point. There is very little resistance from the leadership. Again, the change managers, a whole nother conversation. but. This, it makes it easier. look guys, if you have any questions, You can reach out to me at cheapaiofficer. com. again, smartcuts. io. Those are free. I think, like I said, we give away seven or eight. Just take a look at them. you don't have to pay for anything. We're not going to blow you up. we're actually not that great at marketing. So, you might not hear from us again. No, I don't mean that, but, it's very like low risk, low commitment. If you're, we're not looking to force AI down somebody's throat. We want to make sure that when somebody's ready, that we're there. and in the meantime, we do stuff like this. We educate. We, just like ISAR, we put a lot of energy into making sure that you have resources where you can, Hey, is this a dumb question? But I need to, no dumb question. Bring it right. So with that, sorry, if we've got some questions, I'm happy to answer. I know that There's a timeline on this I don't want us to run over.

Isar:

Yeah, there were no, burning questions in the chat quick recap on what you said, step one is education and start at the top, right? You want to educate your Top leadership to understand, what is AI, what's the impact that it can have, what's the potential ROI, how to approach it. So people have a initial level of understanding on how to do this. Step two is you want to, start mapping your processes and start identifying low hanging fruits within those processes based on what Chris said, a things that provide value that are low risk. And that are high frequency, but also stuff that is tedious that just nobody wants to do period because then you win both on the warm and fuzzy side of things, as well as on the ROI, map the processes using AI as well. So just record the actual, what people are doing as they're doing it. I'll add one more thing to that. A lot of companies are not digital companies. People doing actual work somewhere. You can't go to their screen and record, just ask them to open their phone, maybe mounted to the little swively arm when they're doing the thing that they're doing, unloading the truck, installing a TV, putting inventory into the warehouse, whatever it is that they're doing, they can literally record themselves and talk to the phone, explaining to a virtual person what they're doing, and you can use that for the same exact thing. So math, the processes. Create a detailed process, with a flow chart that you can show the people what it is, and then go to these steps, or maybe in some cases, the cool thing with AI, you may jump three steps instead of just one, because AI knows how to do all these three things. So out of the four things in the process, three are can be done by the AI in one. Swoop. And then the fourth thing will have to be either augmented or done by the person, but look where AI can either replace or supplement as many steps as possible and then start implementing, show the ROI and move on to the next projects. and as Chris mentioned. Start building that database of processes that in the beginning you have none, and then within three months you have 10, and these 10 are gonna save you 20 hours a week, which is half an employee that you get for free and then you keep on going and going. So Chris, this was absolutely awesome. Thank you Za. you already shared. where people can connect with you. I assume LinkedIn is another great channel, right? It's a great place to find me. Yeah. Awesome.

Chris:

For sure.

Isar:

I really appreciate you taking the time sharing this process with us. It's very well thought after, as I mentioned in the beginning, you and I think very much the same on how to approach this, from a structured, perspective, and I really appreciate you taking the time and being with us. My pleasure. Thanks, everybody. Good luck. Everybody who joined us a great conversation on both LinkedIn and on the chat on zoom. And as I mentioned, if you want to, join us, feel free to do that. We do this every Thursday. Just follow me on LinkedIn. You'll get the links on how to join on either of these platforms. And again, thanks again, Chris. And thanks everyone. Have an amazing day.

Chris:

Take care.

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