21: Using AI for Chatbots & Business Strategies with Arvell Craig

In this episode, Chris Daigle interviews Arvell Craig, AI evangelist for VAgents and author of "The AI Strategy Playbook." Arvell shares his extensive experience in digital marketing and chatbots, discussing the evolution and future of voice AI, and providing practical insights on AI adoption for businesses. They delve into the compliance challenges of using AI in call centers, explore the cost savings and efficiencies it offers, and highlight the importance of integrating AI into existing business processes. Arvell also discusses his book, which outlines actionable strategies for leveraging AI in marketing. This episode is packed with valuable advice for business owners looking to navigate the complexities of AI integration and stay ahead in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

📣 Find out more about Arvell Craig by visiting https://arvellcraig.com and https://vagents.com to learn more about VAgents.

📕 Also, check out Arvell’s book: "The AI Strategy Playbook" here: https://wheredoiai.com/ai-playbook-order

Further reading from this discussion:
➡ Marketing AI Institute's podcast: "The Artificial Intelligence Show"
➡ Ethan Mollick's Substack newsletter: "One Useful Thing"
➡ AI Exchange newsletter

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Arvell Craig
01:06 Arvell Craig & VAgents
05:24 AI Compliance Challenges
10:32 AI Cost Savings
14:33 AI Strategy Playbook
18:11 AI in Various Industries
24:45 Staying Updated with AI
27:08 Future of Chatbots
30:13 Business Fundamentals with AI
36:19 AI and Human Balance
40:10 Speaking Engagements & Conclusion


Be sure to download this week's Smartcut/s:
🔸 Simplify Social Media Management — https://smartcuts.io/21

And check out the related prompts at: https://PromptVault.studio

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:52

Welcome to another episode of Using AI at work. One of the areas of AI I'm particularly interested in using at work is voice AI, and our guest, Arvell Craig, is as deep into it as anyone in the space. In addition to that, we unpack the future of chatbots, discuss AI adoption timelines, and share insights from Arvell's recent speaking engagements at events like LeedsCon and Digital Summit. This episode is packed with practical advice on AI and call centers, compliance tips, and readily applicable tactics from Arvell's book, The AI Strategy Playbook. Whether you're looking to cut costs, boost marketing performance, or navigate the complexities of AI integration, we've got you covered. Now, let's get started with this week's episode. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Okay, and this is the episode with Arvell Craig. Arvell, welcome to the podcast. Um, and before we get started, why don't you just tell everybody a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Got it. Thank you, Chris. Hello, hello. My name is Arvell Craig. I'm AI evangelist for VAGENTS. We are a conversational AI startup helping cost centers, contact centers cut costs and scale their calling. My background is 20-something years in digital marketing. I've always been a nerd and a geek and a hustler trying to use technology to make money, help people better out in small businesses, websites, and SEL, shift into automation. Chatbots in 2016-2017 was a real strong niche. I thought that was like the second coming of email marketing. That was the way I could bring all my stuff and automate my life. I did that for four years and I love chatbots. And then COVID happened, business died, took a year off. Now I'm back in this AI world. You know, it's different, but it's chat, it's AI. So I'm using all my experience of like marketing and chat and conversational marketing, apply that with AI to help companies um figure this out, you know, help people figure it out. And I'm also an author and a speaker as well on the AI topic. So that's a good overview of me.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

I want everybody, we're going to talk about the new book and just what it's like speaking to all those people about AI. But first I want to dive into what you're doing at VAGENS because um voice AI is very intriguing. You know, you see some demos. And now, were those real demos? Were they doctored demos? I don't know. But you see some of that and you're like, wow, this is this is the next phase of like this is really intelligent stuff. Can you give us maybe some examples of who would be a good client for v agents and what would be the app like what's the the ideal use case for this type of tech that you guys have built?

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Gotcha. Yeah. Thanks for the tea up to talk specifically about my company or the company I work for. So our company is the parent company is in the lead generation space. So in the world of lead generation, when companies are not just hiring agencies and marketers to do work, they're just buying the results. Give me a hundred leads a day, a thousand leads a day, and the higher volume of scaling that operation, sometimes the quality isn't always there. The manpower to like call because speed to lead is such a critical thing. What companies have done over the past five, 10 years is begin to outsource call centers near shore, offshore, even in the US. But the idea is that you have to talk to those leads as fast as possible and qualify them in order to make sure it's a good lead. And it's worth it with the budgets that companies have, it's worth it that a Legion Raising company partners with a cost center to qualify them in order to give them that lead. And so what our company does, or the parent company does, realized that there was a the AI and conversational AI and things to technology was getting really, really smart and really, really good. Like we were doing $100 million a year. They do $100 million a year in selling phone calls. But we realized that AI could help out with the quality assurance. That's kind of a sister product. We started with a quality assurance that would listen to the calls to confirm it was good. But then the agents was built to actually use understanding telephony and phone calls. Honestly, but you got to understand TCPA and the FCC regulations, automated technology. And I technically, when I mentioned my background, that step after chatbots to now, I spent a year and a half in the compliance space of call-centered compliance. So I understand what's legally required to make high volumes of calls and tax both nationally and on the state by state, because there's a lot of different laws you have to deal with. So what our company focuses in on, we're not like integration for a startup. We're not gonna, we're not the ideal use case for somebody who's just doing, you know, a couple thousand dollars a month in ads and the AI. We're looking for people who are already have in spending money with 10 to 50 to thousands of um cost center agents. We're looking for those people with a higher volume. And then they can start with us a minimum, you can call it 10 seats or 10 agents or 10 phone numbers, however you want to call it. That's how we start. So we're not again, so it's not like a startup. We want to make sure they have volume already. Again, they understand TCPA and compliance, things like that. And what we do is we listen to their call record. We find what their best salespeople are doing. We create a script, but the AI is not really a script, it's more of a prompt, guidelines, you know, how AI prompting works. You give it an identity, you give it like a job description, you feed it information, some FAQs on the company, and we give it like your use case or your job is to find these couple questions. People ask you things outside of scope. You can only kind of cover these FAQs, you bring them back and you make sure you answer five, six, seven, eight questions. And the one, if they answer all the questions, if they meet the criteria, the AI would do a warm transfer to ideally to the main company's licensed agent, their tier two agent. You know, the real sales closers who don't need to waste time fishing through the leads. So that's our core use case. Again, that's the minimum scope. Again, a lot of our uh our industry is in either insurance, solar, mortgages, financial services, some um mass or legal. So some of those high volume companies are the most likely candidate to get immediate benefit from what we're doing.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

This is fascinating. Have you uh run kind of like the back of Napkin how much money that would save your 10 agents or whatever you want to call them, 10 inbounds, versus that same uh class B office space that's full of 10 agents with cubicles and uh drama and all that other kind of stuff? I I ran a I ran a 40-seat call center that was full of all of that, the drama and the learned a lot. Now, if this would have been virtual, my life easier. Yeah but what is the cost savings for something like that? Have you guys like do you have a ballpark of what that would look like for company?

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Yeah, I mean, ballpark, because again, some problems if you're going overseas, you may not be spending a lot per agent. We're definitely we're right around a thousand dollars an agent per month. So technically you could you can maybe spend less overseas. In the US, you definitely initially, but there's multiple layers, and I'll I'll get into it. It's not just one-to-one comparison. If it's a US person, there's four or five thousand dollars a month. We're definitely 75% cheaper. But as you mentioned, there's not just your staff, there's your um offers, your office, your supervisors, recruiting, your training, your your turnover churning. So there's all those different costs are are are all factored in. Again, we we provide the phone number, we we provide the DID, the deliverability, and make sure that the numbers stay clean. We kind of provide all those things in our platform. We just connect to the to their um to your CRM. So again, I would say you could at least say 80, 80, 80% is a good ballpark on the 10 agents. It's huge. Yeah, right? It's huge.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

If it was 20%, it would be huge. Now, um, one thing you didn't mention was that I'm assuming that for a thousand dollars a month per agent, they're also working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Gotcha. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 9:22

That is a yeah, that's a huge factor. But again, back towards back towards compliance and legal illegalese. If somebody calls in, we can leave the we can leave it open, definitely for inbound. Again, if you understand FCC regulations and state laws, you're definitely going to want to, yeah, we're looking, we're we're definitely always pricing it from that, you know, from what 8 a.m. East Coast time to you know, certain time west coast. So we're looking at still 10 to 12 hours a day, I would say. Um, five days a week at a at the most conservative setup. But again, we're not, you know, legally required to control what you're doing, but I'm always advising people just to stay safe because all this stuff is still new, right? People are wondering, can I even do it legally? Can an AI talk to me? All those kind of things. But again, if you understand TCPA and how the regulations deal with auto dialers, it's going to be very similar. If you think about code calling, you're not going to code call with an AI, the thing where you shouldn't code call with a dialer. So again, there's there's other nuances that people need to be understanding.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

So this is primarily going to be for inbound use. So if somebody's got a big national campaign or a regional campaign that's generating a lot of inbound calls, this would be a good solution for them.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Yeah, no, exactly. And it's inbound and outbound. And outbound. Yeah, yeah. But the outbound, you just want to make sure you have some type of certification that you legally have permission that they want to call, even for customer service, even for like again, you got your new for onboard, like you mentioned, somebody can be a new customer and we can follow our customers and clarify, make sure they're actually using the service. There's all kinds of use cases that do include outbound as well.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

So for the listeners, if you're not familiar with the the compliance requirements for using a telephone and commercial activity, they're big. And the fines for you not complying with things, like us as consumers, we have protections that us as business owners, if we're not um doing it the right way, the fines can be six figures, seven figures for even for a small business who's got some small uh infractions. So it's very important you do this compliantly, as Arvel has made us, you know, clear for us for sure. Now that's very fascinating. I hope that uh any of you who are listening who are interested in finding out more, um well I'm we'll add whatever contact info in the show notes for sure, Arvell. But where can they go? Is there a place like right now v vagents.com? Vagents.com. Nice, just like the third. So go check it out. And then because this this is a if you can dial in this voice AI, it's hard to have an edge now, especially if your competition is very AI immersed, right? Right. Voice AI is one of those areas where you can, if you dial this in, you could like I see that as being a big advantage. So it's very cool that they're doing that. Now, yeah. Um you let me know that you had released a new book, and I was very excited about it because it was specifically addressing common use cases that most of us would encounter in our business and some some AI effication that could occur to those. Um tell us about the book. No, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

So the book is called the AI Strategy Playbook. And I wrote it like in this year, three or four months ago, I was doing workshops every week to my email list, to my audience about AI. How do you use it? How can you use AI to replace one task per week? That was my hook that I was doing. And again, man, the biggest thing that was happening, people just again, because we're nerds, we kind of are more into it. Most people just like, I don't understand what can AI can do. They just weren't wrapping their heads around what I can do right now, not just a theory, not Sora and all these fancy things you see online or Twitter that are not reality yet. But most people, I wrote the book. So the subtitle is 21 Marketing Plays to Cut Costs, Increase Performance, and Increase Adoption. So the goal was just very, very simple. It's written for the readers, marketing leaders. Again, most people I know, they're too busy. They understand it from a distance. They're reading the headlines, they're either scared or they confuse, but in reality, they're just doing their regular work. And I think you're fine. You you're not going to be the nerd, but let me do the nerd for you. So what the book does, it just shows you this is what you could do to plan out your marketing campaigns. Here's some plays for planning. Here's some plans for like production and producing content, content creation, which is the main thing we hear about. But this is what AI can do. When I say AI, I mean generative AI, which I mean it's claud or open AI's AI. And then say, here's what AI can do to personalize your marketing.

unknown 13:54

Right?

SPEAKER_00 13:54

So broken up into five seconds. And I got I gotta give credit to Paul Raitzer in the Marketing AI Institute for these five P's of marketing AI. I got the categories for him, but plays are just my own plays. And then, like, how does once you have your content, you get your strategy, your plan, your content, personalize? How do you promote it? How do you get it out there? There, that's the promotion category. And I give, I just give some ideas. If you don't know what it can do, this is what you can do. And then lastly, how do you tweak the performance? How do you optimize? How do you look at spreadsheets and data and analytics and let AI teach you what you don't do, your business intelligence, things like that? So those are the five categories. And I give three or four ideas for each one, like V agents is in there. If because if you have a call center, and I and I always preface, if this is a situation, then this is something you may want to consider. And every chapter or every play, that's all it says. If you don't have a good, irresistible offer, you don't know what's the tip, people aren't converting. You may want to look into how can AI help me increase improve my offer. So I reference Alex or Mosey. He's got a great book on offers. And I say, and if you haven't read the book, AI can teach you the book. Or you can find a YouTube link or a blog, put it in AI and say, using this framework from Alex Rmosey, how can I make my offer more irresistible? So theoretically, I would increase my conversion. So I give the idea, I just want people to think with a group. And then when you're done, when it's time to execute, where then you figure out, say, you either come to me for a referral, I can teach you some of these things, or I can connect you to someone, or I can connect you to a tool because you may not need to try to figure out prompts yourself. You may want to get to an organization such as Chief AI officer if you want to just enroll in a full comprehensive training, but kind of give just a framework in the book, and then I point to different resources, we'll be ready to take the next step.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

So I I saw some social posts, you had been speaking somewhere, and I guess that um you had handed out some of the to some of the attendees copies of the books, their reactions, you know, when your friend writes a book, you're like, oh, congratulations. But honestly, I've gotten a lot of like first um, what do they call those publisher prints or whatever? Love my friends, I'm a busy man, I can't read them. So, but to see that these people like at the event were going through your book and were like so engaged with it that they were making social posts and excited about the information that was in the books, that's great. So you get a chance to speak a lot, right? Yeah. And give me some idea of kind of the maybe a random sampling of some of the places that you've spoken or will be speaking, just so that I kind of get like how broad the spectrum of audience is.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Yeah, I mean, of course, AI is such a hot topic and it's everywhere. So last week I was at LeedsCon, which is the largest lead generation conference, I think, in the country. Three to four thousand people are there. I was on a panel talking about AI's opportunities and threats. The week before that, I was in Chicago. Uh, digital summit is a series of regional marketing trainings all around the country. I was there two months ago. I'll be there in Kansas City. In May, I'll be there in Atlanta. In October, I may be there. So it's a series of for marketers. So I'm there, and then here I live in Arizona, and so I've got some events with some community colleges next week. This week I was speaking to uh a trucking company's organization, their national or their business meeting. So there's a lot of very there's a variety of places, whether it's a big event or a small event, you know. Again, it's because it's moving so fast, there's no way you can stay up to date. And for most people, it's a waste you can't keep up. You don't just want to know what's new, you want to know what's relevant. As again, how can I use AI at work today? Because the more you use it today, it's like a muscle that you have to exercise, whether or not AI looks like it's gonna look like this in the future. So I'm always so there's just so much value. Go to an event, find an expert, find out what's happening, and apply it as soon as possible so that you can again work that muscle so that you can navigate when things speed up even more. You know, great point.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

So that was a good answer about the audience, because the next question, I I didn't want it to be like, well, I only talk to doctors. Well, you what input you give me will only be related to them. But because you talk so many different um like business backgrounds, yeah, what are the commonalities? Because I I know I've been a speaker at the end, if people like it, they run up and they get, hey, I got a question. Hey, I gotta get that little group around you, right? In in those in those instances for you, are you seeing commonality of the questions that are being asked? Like is there a general few questions that you're hearing over and over? Actually, no.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

Again, when I was doing things earlier this year, if there was a common theme of questions of I don't understand what I can do recently, depending on if I'm talking about V agents, if I'm talking to call centers, concept centers, if I'm explaining how I think it's Klarna has an AI that does the work of 700 people, which is great, 2.3 million tickets, it's solved. But the the other half of that picture is 700 people no longer have a job. Some people are coming to me and asking, I don't, again, not everybody's living to fire people. Some people like, how do I maintain? So there's some leaders last week was was talking about how do I keep people? Or someone say, you know, what's what's gonna happen? What do you think, what jobs are gonna be gone? As you know, they're kind of wanting some prediction about for their own self-preservation of their jobs, those those, there's there's those questions. And other times that, you know, it's more like the risks. A lot of the speculation, what do you think is gonna happen um when it comes to you know what's what's gonna happen on a more of that negative side?

SPEAKER_01 20:38

When people ask you about what do I do with my my staff that now AI can do it better, faster, stronger. Like, what do you tell people? What what about how do people mitigate that with their staff that's no longer necessary for that role?

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Yeah, again, most people haven't got there, but they're they're worried. So to me, you gotta just you gotta crawl before you walk. There's just two things that's gonna happen. I think I say number one, you want to be transparent with your staff and your team because you want to get them involved and not fearful and not sticking to their calculators when there's the internet. So you want to create an environment where they feel comfortable. You want to have some kind of policies and some advising on what you can and cannot do. So there's those kind of things that will come up. And again, I think it's still early before most jobs are going to be affected. But as you experiment more and as you see what's going to happen, and if you're honest and open with your people, I believe there's going to be a need, this, I think there's gonna be new opportunities. Not for everybody, but if your company no longer has to do A, B, and C, it's not just gonna cut your cost. But if you're an entrepreneur, you're a business owner, your mind is still racing. You're gonna be able to see things that you've never seen before. And there's a lot, I want to just help them to leave some room for that opportunity to experiment, to evolve, and to figure out what new opportunities you can come up with. Because again, your staff of 500, if all those 500 have an AI helping them, your your your next quarter, your next season of growth could be keeping the same people all managed instead of adding another 500 people, you can keep those people. And so that's I think there's a lot of nuance to what the future will look like. And if you're flexible and fluid and open, it's not just less and less and less people. There's going to be some kind of new new opportunities and new things that they think do as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Hey, um so I got a question. With the people that you were talking to at the beginning of the year, where you you seem to be getting more like discovery type, and now the conversations tend to be more it almost sounds like people have had a chance to evaluate it. Now they're coming up with that next stage of question. Oh, does that mean this or that? Do you think that the people that you're encountering in you know April are already more AI literate than the people than that same person was in January? You think that's what's more okay.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

Yeah, interesting. Definitely. And I've I've tried to again, I'm I'm not just speaking, I like being specific and practical, but I'm also trying to give people the right way to think about it, the frameworks, the paradigms they can see. And one of my biggest things back in January, I was telling, I was realizing, again, maybe, maybe again, those are probably smaller companies. They were trying to use AI to do things that they've Never done before. Like, oh, I can do this now. Yeah. And I'm like, that's cool. But I'd recommend do what you already are good at. Do what you know really well. You understand the frameworks. You can analyze it. You can judge it. So that was something that I kept having to run back towards. Like, you're not doing it now. So this is, I'm always kind of leaning back towards find out what you're already doing. Learn AI to manage that faster, cheaper, scalable before you start to use AI. AI is going to make phone calls and do code call for them. They're like, are you making code calls now? Well, no.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

Figure it out. Yeah. I hadn't considered that perspective that people, because here's what happens. If you apply it to your existing business, you end up creating more time. And with that, once you've got that, with that more time, then maybe you say, well, we've never had the horsepower to do content, so let's explore it. But great point. Don't the shiny thing today at the expense of your existing operation, how you keep the lights on, right? Like get that dialed in with AI and then explore some uh more, I guess, like second effect uh use cases for your business. So great advice there. Let me ask, how do you stay on top? How do you stay uh like in the loop of what's happening? Because this stuff happens most pass tools change, tools like evolve rapidly. How do you stay um on the edge?

SPEAKER_00 25:14

Yeah, yeah. So I used to stay look on Twitter, follow a bunch of people, sign up for a bunch of newsletters, the AI newsletters. Those that was number two. Number three was podcasts, and number four was some slack communities, which means you aren't a couple of them. It was all four. I have definitely, again, the past four or five months, decreased most of those. I listed maybe a podcast one per week, one or two per week. One as you as compared to daily. And then I also try to go through my Slack communities for their update a few times a week. Because that's the thing. I think that the challenge, even the thing about AI is like, and this is where I've can I've had to, because there's never been anything in the world that I know of, this in my 20 years of being a professional, an adult, as sexy, if there's ever been a shiny object syndrome, this is the worst ever. If you ever struggle with that, this is the worst ever. Yep. But but with that, the need to reinforce the foundations of your life, of what is success, of what's what's what's economically and the business valuation, this gonna, to me, that's the challenge. And I've so I have been reinforcing my commitment to fundamentals. So even like AI, somebody told me, because man, I was in chatbots for you know three, four years, and I thought it was oh, okay, nobody wants a chatbot, COVID's here, the road's ending. And it's like, if you're too early, and I realized like a lot of this base, there's a lot of success in the boring, and this is I'm learning. There's a lot of success in the and the and the the fundamentals, and that's where I am challenged. And that's when like when I speak to audiences, my main talk when I talk about how to use AI to get a breakthrough to really change your business. 80, 70% is all about the fundamentals of your business, of your processes. And only when you really understand the business fundamentals, the value proposition of what your company does, the needs of your customer, most of that does not relate to technology. Technology is not your limiting, technology is not the thing that keeps you where you are in your business. And that's why so it's it's kind of weird, not weird, but I'm I'm checking myself. I want to talk about AI. I do it a lot of time. The goal of AI is to make my life happier, to make more money, to provide for my family, and to make an impact. And if you really make the those things, happy, money, impact, whatever, the thing that keeps you from making an impact of touching people's lives or doing whatever may or may not be a tech, techie AI related. So you have to you have to control yourself. And that's again, so that's really the the second half of my message is always to balance and to reinforce the foundations of what's really makes a difference, what's meaningful, what's gonna be most impactful, because AI may or may not be the thing that you really, really need right now to get to the next level. So let's just be be honest about it.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

You know, I I talk to people and I say, listen, well, if you don't have a plan for your business all and it's already chaotic, AI is just gonna allow you to be more chaotic faster, right? It's not gonna, it's not the solution. The fundamentals without those, start with the fundamentals and then say, okay, now that I've got that mapped out, where can AI plug into that? But don't do it the other way around. You got a great point there.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

Yeah, for sure. Um so are you uh just to get back to podcasts. So, folks, there's a part that's I like a whole lot. And it's called the and now it's called the artificial intelligence show, I guess. Paul Roy. Is that the one that you were talking about? That's that's everybody I talk to who is serious about uh like exploring AI and applying it, that's the number one podcast they all listen to. So for the listeners, that's like an inside. I mean, they got more than just me and Arvell listening to, of course, but uh they do a great job. Um, what about are there any YouTube guys or you know, do you do you not fool around with TikTok? Because TikTok now, it seems that there's a pattern, and it's here's my 100 shitty prompts. Here's you know, like the bunch of it's almost like a bunch of um like hucksters almost that they're I don't know that they're doing a service for establishing the legitimacy of what generative AI can do for a business. Um, but I don't know, maybe I could be wrong. Are there any social profiles that you tend to follow where you're getting good intel?

SPEAKER_00 29:52

The only other resource, I mean, there is the AI exchange is definitely and the people in there, just that that other Slack group, mother, and she has a she's on TikTok. Um that's right. So Rachel Wood. Yeah, so these yeah, highly so just her and her community. She's all the people that she's connected to in that group. Yeah, but the biggest one lately to balance um is um Ethan Mallock. Yes. So I just bought his book, Co Intelligence. Yeah, um, I'm listening to I think I'm halfway done. So him, he's he's lately, and his one useful thing is this Slap Stack group, Slapstack on channel or newsletter. So he's like a core person that I again, him and Paul Ratzer are the two that I'm pretty much committed to taking my time because they don't just give you the highlights, they give you the business fundamentals or or the ways to think about the adoption and the policies and uh and Ethan Mollett's talking about how to use it even in a university and how to have a heart of curiosity and experimentation and this it just it's just but those two are like my main content sources that I'm on the track of. Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 31:09

Senator listening, I'm gonna put those in the um the show notes because I think it's interesting that Arvell obviously knows what he's doing. He's talking to crowds all over the country, soon to be all over the world, I'm sure, about this topic. This is this is like this is probably what he dreams about. Me too. When I'm walking the dog, I think about this stuff. And for both of us to to endorse the it's the marketing AI Institute, but their podcast is called the Artificial Intelligence Show. And for both of us to say, heck yeah, Ethan Moloch, M-O-L-L-I-C-K, he has perspectives that are worth consideration. I would say for you listener, whether you're pro or not at this stuff, if those aren't on your radar, get them there. You're gonna you will get a lot of value out of. Um very cool. So the what is the benefit of the speaking for you as a business? Is it on behalf of the agents? Is it is there an interest in being like a much more active speaker?

unknown 32:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

No, thanks for asking.

SPEAKER_00 32:11

I mean, honestly, it's both. Again, five, six years ago, when I was on chatbots and nobody was talking about it, that became my number one way to get in, because I was mainly partnering with marketing managers and at SMBs, being a consultant. So that was my main way to get in front of people. And I actually I like speaking. So those things went together. As I've gotten more into it, speaking has become the door opener for most of like my current job. My speaking, my brand, my personal brand, or whatever has helped me get in the door. So is I am 100% always representing the agents currently and their products. I'm always talking because it's very practical. Conversate, it relates to my chat bot and conversation AI. But me as a human, the next 20, 30 years, I do plan to continue to get better at the craft of speaking. That's again, that goes back towards, I just want to throw it out on the AI thing. AI is as it does more and more and more, how do you as a professor become more and more and more yourself? And as far as I can concern, who I am when I speak is I'm never gonna have an AI do that for me because it's it's like an art. It's not just the results. I actually like the experience, I like the human connection. So I think um, again, you hit them. I just want to jump on that topic because when AI does more and more and more for you, what's the future gonna look like? I think individuals will need to like develop. If you don't know what you love to do, I understand work is about work and work is about money, and that not everybody follows their passions, but it wouldn't hurt to know what your passion is because if you again you're delegating more and more stuff to AI, leaning more into it. So speaking is definitely a passion. Um, you know, I used to just speak for free. Now I get paid to speak, and it's just evolves. And I'm studying the craft of speaking, the craft of education and entertainment, and all those things go together. So it's definitely a commitment for me.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

I guess that that leads to an obvious question. Are you using AI in your speaking preparation, speaking practice?

SPEAKER_00 34:16

That's a great, great question. The answer is no. But a few months ago, I was trying to get on this TED talk, and the guy who was kind of coaching mentioned he had an AI that would evaluate your delivery. So it was a way to wow, and yeah, to just to monitor the sound and the fluctuation of your and your your content. So that is something that's on my back of my mind because I'm always thinking, I'm talking about AI. I I never feel like I use it enough, but that's one that I'm I may look into. And one other thing that again, I haven't there is the way AI can make presentations, there's certain I think is maybe beautiful or whatever, but the way you can make decks, I am challenged to use it more for decks. And then thirdly, I'm challenged to use AI to research and to keep me updated on the newest facts versus me again looking at all the feed and studying founding people if AI could do 90%. So those are the three things where I would I'm I'm curious and interested in using it, but for the most part, I don't use it a lot, but I do want to add in more in the in those areas.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

Yeah, using it, like finding that perfect AI powered uh pitch deck creator, I'm on the hunt for that as well. So if I find it, I'll let you know for sure. Sure. Awesome. Thank you. One thing I want to circle back to is you mentioned that you so chatbots well used. Um actually I prefer them in a lot of cases for customer service. I'd rather just get the answer than wait for the human. So chatbots aren't today, they're not like uh exotic. But when you first started messing with them, you were early, as you mentioned. Now and like early to the point to where you're probably like a a couple of years at least early to the the chatbot really getting traction. With AI, do you think with with the tools that you're building at VAGENTS and this the topics that we're talking about, do you think that we are still exotic early in generative AI and small business? Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 36:21

There's there's it's like chatbots came out and there was NLP, there was natural language processing. It was like it could pick up keywords, and it's like people oversold it and they tried to make them do more than they could. And so users were kind of frustrated, and I think things dipped. And then I felt like live chat kind of came. Maybe the live chat's been out was out first. It's always live chat, but who wants to staff that? Chatbots come out, and then it goes back. I think I think live chat kind of came in, and now with AI, the main thing I feel like that's that's limiting the chatbots is like it's gated. It's like, let me capture that lead, give me your name and email, qualify yourself, push these buttons. It's not yet really fluid, it's not really helpful, it's not dynamic based upon the page. And so there's a lot of opportunities that I think where yeah, where it's more integrated into the website experience. I think there's going to be developments and advancements there. And maybe it's more when it's more audio and it's more maybe connected to the hardware. Maybe if if there's a dynamic connection between Siri and the website, but there's there's something, but I do think there's a lot because there's there's still friction, and you don't get what you want fast enough yet. And I think, yeah, but but again, that's but the pick the mindset is like lead gen. The mindset is like I gotta protect, like, why didn't you even name an email? Like, it's taken, like, there's no you don't need to gate your your chat bot. Everything, yeah. So there's I think this, but that's a paradigm that's just fine from an in-bound marketing paradigm or uh or a demand paradigm that's applied to chat versus if you're at a human at a trade show, you're not gonna say, wait, give me your email, drop your card in a bucket, and then I'm gonna talk to you. So those paradigms of how we're because we're we're using that other paradigm with chat bots, and I think that limits its effectiveness, and eventually it's gonna be trusted enough to be more nuanced, more open, that um, when that goes away, people will just go to the website and just start talking. And there's gonna be, I think it's gonna be something like there's something there. I don't know, I'm just brainstorming.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

And it's pretty fascinating, like, because that kind of sends me off on some wow, so now, because you could I would imagine it'd be pretty easy to set it up to where it was text to voice or voice to voice through a bot. So like I use Pi sometimes when I'm walking, I'll uh and Pi's been pretty good at mapping out automations, believe it or not. Like if you say, I want to do this, this, and Pi will say, go to Zapier and anyway. For geeks, that's uh an insider tip. But like um, I'm used to engaging with an AI via voice-to-voice. As more people do that, I would imagine that they're gonna want to see that on-site experience for support or questions or whatever, yeah, to be also um congruent with their off-page experience, which is I mean, like, of course, you can type into ChatGPT, but for those of you who don't who don't have the ChatGPT mobile app, you can do voice-to-voice. You can talk to it, it'll say beep, it'll respond to you in voice. Pretty fascinating stuff. It just started started me spinning a little bit. But one of the things that I wanted to also talk about with that being early in the bot space was the the distance between the gap between early and now more relevant was a number of years. With AI, I think that the distance between early and like obligatory, I have to have it, it's not a couple of years. We're talking about literally like maybe in measured in one or two quarters of a business's lifespan. Because if a business is still on the fence in 2024, either your business is gonna moderately like you're not that serious about your business in the first place. I don't mean that derogatory or or negatively, but some of you may just want a lifestyle business and you might not want to push the edges of optimization and all those things. So I just think that that it was an interesting because bots are bots back then were okay, bots now, I'm interested, like show me some tech. But that was a couple years, and now I thought I was late because I didn't start messing around with ChatGPT until like March of last year, and it came or yeah, and it came out in November I thought I was late back then. Yeah, right? Like, oh damn, but so what's your thought? Like uh for the is is there a a legitimate urgency for businesses to start figuring this stuff out? Or is it because you and I live in a um like at the tip of the spear that it seems that way?

SPEAKER_00 41:11

Good good good question. I mean I say AI and it's it's inevitable, it's going to it's I mean you can't you can't be too fast with it right now. I mean again so we say if it's 1993 and maybe the internet is out, but but it's not widely adopted. Like you said, but that time you're you're you're saying your argument is that the time that it's gonna take for it to be influenced your market is gonna come really, really fast. Um you got a point, yeah. Yeah, so I I I would agree that the the acceleration of whatever the curve is, it's gonna be unlike anything we've ever seen in history because of the technology and the processors.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

Um and I guess honestly, like what's the why why would you hesitate if, even if it was one use case like the V agent environment, why would you hesitate if if the the the tech was established, the customer said, hey, I'm okay either way, I prefer fast response, and they're getting it from the technology. There's no for the listeners, there's no benefit to you saying I'm gonna maybe before you transform your entire business, perhaps, but there's certain things that you could do right now that there's it makes there's no logic behind waiting before you implement it, whether that's customer service content, uh, voice agents, whatever the case might be. So uh I don't know. We'll we'll we'll close on that perspective. Yeah. I um I love these because I get a chance to talk to people who are more than casual users, that people that are, as Ethan Mollik talks about, those three sleepless nights. Like once you until you've had three sleepless nights because you're considering, wow, does that mean generative AI can do this and this and this, right? That you haven't quite had your aha moment is what he mentions. So I don't get a chance to talk to people who have had those three sleepless nights and are really thinking about deep edge case application and business of these things. So sometimes I ask some random questions.

SPEAKER_00 43:16

No, I like it. I know it's a it's a good question. There's another quote Uthemonic thoughts about advanced, something like disruptive technology can only be too slow or too early. And in regards to your question, there is a lot of unknown. And just the fact that I think AI is so much associated with uncertainty, as compared to any technology in the past, from mobile phones to the internet, there was no fear associated with its growth. AI has a stigma where there's fear associated, so people are going slower because it isn't just all positive. There's other things associated, and I think that makes more people slower to quickly jump on it. Um, but the but that is the truth that you when you're too late, you're gonna be, you could be too late. But not that you can't recover from that, because I always like to end on a positive, even if you fail and you have to start a new company, which I recommend. Why would you do that? But yeah, you would it would just start. I say be positive, be transparent, have a culture of experimentation, and don't worry about failing. I mean, those are some of the things I kind of lead off on if you're completely not dipping your toe in there. Um, anybody can see the negative, anybody can see the fear. The only thing, the only thing evil about AI is the humans who drive AI. So don't worry about that. Be positive, be proactive, experiment, and be transparent with your team and your customers. And that's a good place to kind of get going.

SPEAKER_01 44:48

It's a fantastic way to end this. So listen, I want more people to hear more of what you've got to say. So where can they go to? I'd love for them to be able to get the book for sure. Um, if they're interested in v agents, if you want to just kind of give us some uh contact info, all of which, if you're a listener and you're driving, will be in the show notes. Please go to the show notes to access this.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

Yeah, no flicker. Yeah, so yeah, vagents.com. You know, we'll have links there. I will say call comply is our other AI that has quality assurance. Again, if you don't know what the AI is talking about, you can use a habit product to listen to our AI to listen to the AI. That's again, my name is Arve Craig. So RVCraig.com has information on my speaking. Um, my I'm I'm on Sebstack and publish every week now, finally consistent, publishing a newsletter on AI workflows for wealth. That's kind of the the the title there. Um besides that, I'm on like I'm on most follow posts and read it, mainly Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. You can find me anywhere. And um, yeah, we'd love to chat with anyone more who's got more questions and things like that. Cool.

SPEAKER_01 45:53

So they can get the book at Rvelcraig.com. Yes. Okay, great. Guys, um, based on the feedback that I saw almost real time from uh some of Arvell's recent speaking engagements where the book was distributed, people like this book and they like the use cases. So um I would encourage you to grab a copy of it. There's there's nothing um better than having a roadmap of even if it's just the ideas of areas where you can start to apply this, uh, very helpful. So, with that, all right, everybody, thank you. We'll see you uh next week. Thanks, guys.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 46:31

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