Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

Small Businesses Need AI Too with Chris Daigle

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Episode 314

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast! Hosted by best-selling author Jonathan Green, this podcast explores the innovative world of artificial intelligence (AI) and its application across various industries, focusing on how AI can create new revenue streams and make money while you sleep.

In this episode, we welcome Chris Daigle, a visionary who believes in the power of AI to transform small businesses. With a background in enterprise with Accenture and expertise in business frameworks such as EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), Chris has witnessed firsthand the inefficiencies and overpricing in large-scale consulting. His passion for making generative AI accessible and beneficial to small and medium-sized businesses led to the founding of Chief AI Officer, a platform dedicated to educating, training, certifying, and providing AI software for non-enterprise sectors.

Chris and Jonathan delve into the potential of AI for small businesses, debunking the misconception that AI is solely for large corporations. They discuss how AI can serve as a force multiplier in various business functions, such as marketing, sales, and human resources, and emphasize the importance of adopting AI to stay competitive. Chris also shares insights on the common mistakes businesses make with AI, the significance of AI use policies, and the exciting possibilities at the intersection of AI and blockchain technology.

Notable Quotes:

  • "Generative AI is a force multiplier for SMBs, capable of compressing the results curve across different scales of business." - [Chris Daigle]
  • "Being intimidated by AI is probably the most common mistake businesses make right now." - [Chris Daigle]
  • "The competition doesn't need to be an AI expert. If they're using this and you are not, they have an unfair, unmatchable advantage against you." - [Chris Daigle]

Connect with Chris Daigle:

  • Take the AI preparedness quiz: https://chiefaiOfficer.com/aiq
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doctordaigle/

Don't forget to grab your free copy of "Chat GPT Profits," the missing instruction manual for mastering ChatGPT, available for a limited time at https://artificialintelligencepod.com/gift.

Connect with Jonathan Green

Jonathan Green: [00:00:00] Small businesses need AI too with today's special guest, Chris Daigle. 

Today's episode is brought to you by the bestseller Chat, GPT Profits. This book is the Missing Instruction Manual to get you up and running with chat g bt in a matter of minutes as a special gift. You can get it absolutely free@artificialintelligencepod.com slash gift, or at the link right below this episode.

Make sure to grab your copy before it goes back up to full price.

Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you wanna make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now. Then you can come to the right place. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. You will learn how to use artificial intelligence to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep.

Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by bestselling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.

Now, I'm really excited to have you here today, Chris, because Thank you, Jonathan. I was thinking about a lot about what you said about how. Everyone's focusing on enterprise. And every time I talk to a small AI company who has a product, I like that, I go, oh my gosh, this would be great for my customers.

Small business. They go, oh, we're focused on enterprise. And it's like this brass ring everyone's chasing. And I always think about something I saw and one of the many investing TV shows I said, which is, you don't want any one customer to represent a huge percentage of your business because then you're an employee.

And it, I feel like a lot of. Companies, that's what they're chasing without realizing that it actually makes you super vulnerable. So I love your approach to small business. Thank you. I'd love to know how that became your passion. How did you decide that that's gonna be your laser focus? Let's start there.

Chris Daigle: Sure. I've got experience in enterprise. My first, like real j, my first real job was working with Accenture. Big consulting firm and I got to see what that side of the consulting world looked like. And do I put this diplomatically? It just, there was a lot of waste and there was a lot of misrepresentation of talent and things like that.

And I think the companies, they ended up overpaying for the quality of. Service that they were getting a result, but they were paying a premium for it. When AI came on, generative AI became accessible to, everybody that could log onto the internet and go to chat GPT. I really quickly realized that obviously there's a huge opportunity as a force multiplier in smb small to medium business.

I had been doing a lot of consulting I started as an EOS consultant early in my career, which if you're not familiar with that, stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System. It's a framework for scaling and managing and running a business without it being terribly chaotic. I learned Vern harnesses scaling up model, the same thing.

So I had taken an amalgamation of these frameworks that I had learned, and I was working with small businesses to provide that same service. And when I saw what Gen AI could do combined with that. I realized that there's an opportunity to really compress the results curve, whether it's a big company, small company.

But what I started to think was, listen, this is so new. The people who really possess this knowledge, they're trying to penetrate enterprise. It's gonna be a long time before they exhaust that. So the SMBs, the small business owners are gonna be having to figure it out on their own. 'cause there's not really like a.

A Deloitte for small business or a McKinsey for Small Business, and our approach with Chief AI Officer was to address that gap in the marketplace and to find those business owners, ambitious employees, coaches, consultants, whatever who weren't enterprise focused. Get them skilled up on how to, not only the tools and the tactics, but also some frameworks for deployment and start addressing that gap in the marketplace.

So that's what we do at Chief AI Officer. We educate, train, certify, and provide software for those folks who are going to lead those deployments in ai. 

Jonathan Green 2024: There's a lot of misconception that people have about what is that role of AI and how it should it be, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what things should cost and what type of implementations.

A lot of companies are saying, I need AI and I need it now, but I don't know what AI means. And good point. It's the same thing that happened. I always talk about in the early two thousands, every company said, I need a website. Yeah, I don't know why, but I've heard I need it. My kids told me I need it. Or even before that was I need a MySpace page.

Right? Yeah. Every band had a MySpace page. Then you needed your own website and No. And some companies, sure, but not every company needs it. And even now, a lot of companies, I. Don't really know what AI means. They know it's hot. Yeah. So they know they want it and they have no sense of what it should cost.

Like I got approached a few months ago by a really large enterprise consulting company to come and work on a project, and they never had me sign an NDA, which is a, and they gave me all of their stuff and I was like, this is all in my book, aren't you? At enterprise level, they weren't doing anything I don't already know other than charging a hundred times more.

And it's the same thing. I talk to a lot of people. I say, your vendor is just selling you via chat, GT's API and just doing a 100 x markup on you. If your, oh yeah. Overhead went up in the past year. Something is wrong. Mine went down 90% ai. Yeah. Yeah. If you're if you're costing more, because there's such a dominant pressure on the market from open source tools that.

That's why ChatGPT is $20 a month. So if you're paying an enterprise company for their custom version of chat GBT thousands of dollars a month and all they've done is limit it, they've just gated it by putting it behind their prompt windows. And it always, it fascinates me the. Poor decision making at that level.

But I really wonder how can someone at the small business level even figure out if they're the right type of business where this makes sense, where they should even be looking AI yet, or maybe they need to get their first thing fixed. So let's talk about that decision process. What's the first thing you look at and go, you don't need AI yet, what are you thinking about?

Chris Daigle: Yeah. So I would, the first criteria would be is your business is, do you do knowledge work? Are you. AI gonna help the, is generative AI gonna help the woodworker the roofer in the operation of their, in, in the knowledge work elements of their business? Yes. Dealing with customers follow up, stuff like that.

However, they wouldn't necessarily be the primary beneficiaries, let's say you are. Anything brick and mortar, e-com. Course creator, there are certain activities in any business, whether you're General Motors or you are the small business. There's certain activities that are universal marketing, sales, human resources, those things doesn't matter if you're big or small.

Those are gonna be. Functions in those business. So what I would look at is I would look at businesses that were looking to get more outta the staff that they had, or maybe they don't have the resources to get more staff and identify. What we always do is we say, look start with the things you don't like doing.

Like we, we do a process that I learned from Eeo s called Delegate and Elevate. And we ask the business owners or the employee or whoever to draw an XY grid on a piece of paper. And then in the bottom right quadrant, those are the things that you don't like doing and you're not good at.

However, they're part of your, they're an expected deliverable from your role or your business. And usually the reason that we like to start there is because two things happen. If I can come in and get quick wins. ai. If I can do something that you already like doing and take that off your plate, that's helpful.

But if I can take something off of your plate using this tech that you didn't like doing, the enthusiasm, the morale, the interest goes up and hey, can we do more of that? Can we get more of this crap? The work that I don't like doing off, and we typically will start there I don't know that there's too many businesses out there that wouldn't benefit from the.

Learning how to think in AI is what I call it, right? Let, so let's say that you're not necessarily ready to go all in on AI if you're not using chat, GPT or Claude, or whichever your model, your favorite model is for things such as ideation. I. Strategy. There's no consultant. There's no like thought leader in the world that you don't have access to.

Now, hey, act as Elon Musk. I have a small bakery. What would e you know like anybody has access to the thought frameworks that have been, signatures of Steve Jobs Warren Buffet, you name the business icon, or the coach, bear Bryant, whatever your approach to business is, if you're not using that tool, the tools for ideation at least, or strategy development or collaboration, or, Hey, I don't know a lot about doing my books.

What, as a small business owner, what should I know? The models are there to support you in those things. Can they out, can you automate things and build out processes that are AI powered? Absolutely. However, a great place for you to start would be just getting used to using the tool as, Hey, got a quick question, Hey, I'm not sure about this.

Just look at it as like the, the wise old mensch that's sitting in the corner doing the crossword smoking, the cigar, waiting for you to ask it a question, if you can picture that. 

Jonathan Green 2024: No, I like that. What would you say is the most common mistake people are making right now with ai? 

Chris Daigle: Being intimidated by it.

Probably just, here's what I'm seeing is that everybody, like you said, everybody wants AI and they want it now because there's a narrative in the marketplace of you are going to be left behind. Jonathan, you use ai. I use ai. I can tell you that individuals who are like, nah. I'm not, a website who needs a website like they did in the late nineties and early two thousands.

If you take that approach with ai the result cycle of you rejecting it and the impact, the negative impact on your business or career is rapid. Much more rapid than it was with any other technology that we've had in the past. So I think that the mistake would be to think that, we'll wait and see what happens.

There's, it's happening, there's nothing to wait for ai. Generative AI is [00:10:00] having the impact. Large business, small business solopreneur, dog walking business. I don't care what you do. The competition, they don't even have to be an AI expert. If the competition is using this and you are not, they now have an unfair unmatchable advantage against you.

They. They will get more done at a higher quality and they'll get it done faster than you can in the old way. The old way of doing business. The old paradigm, pre generative ai. 

Jonathan Green 2024: Now, there are some people who in their minds or believe there should be emerging of AI with blockchain stuff. Do you see the intersection there?

Chris Daigle: I think that you're going to see a combination of that. It's already happening for sure. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of merit to that, certainly with the security element that, that blockchain provides that would address a lot of the privacy concerns that I think that.

New and experienced users of generative AI are a little concerned about like, where's my data going? What's it being used to train? How do I know it's not a hallucination? How do I know that this is not a deep fake video or whatever. And I think that blockchain would certainly mitigate effective use of blockchain would certainly mitigate a big portion of that.

So it's coming. 

Jonathan Green 2024: Yeah, I just think about. Everyone said that about NFTs three years ago and how many hacks and security things and oh, we accidentally, they got control of too many nodes and now they control the entire network. So when I think of blockchain, I don't think of it as secure because every story you hear is, whoops, someone stole and it's an insane amount of money with, yeah, we forgot to close the door.

We forgot to change this code, or we forgot to secure a node or this thing. So I think about that, which is either it's centralized or it's decentralized, right? And each has different security flaws. Like everyone was like, you'll replace your, all your contracts with smart contracts. And it turns out it didn't work.

So when I hear that, I get, I just think all of the negative thoughts, if everyone got burned on nft, it's oh no, AI NFTs, I don't want it anymore. I feel like that talk, that's how I feel about it. And I. Here what I, the one thing I wanna bring up, which is good, is about security. Yeah. A lot of people use AI without any thought towards security, for example.

Yeah. I know some people at a certain embassy were using Google Translate for top secret documents. Sure. And it's that's not secure. That's the most broadest website that steals everyone's data. Yeah. Like they put ads in your email. So people sometimes think get so used to a tool and for example, I tell everyone, I say, if your competitor is Microsoft, don't use chat.

GBT or one of their products use a different ai. 'cause the only way to have a truly secure AI is to run it locally into laptop. And at the end of every day you hit it with a hammer and you melt it. But when I suggest that to people, they never wanna do it. Because it's the only way to be secure, right?

It's to stop it from a physical and a digital attack. Aircraft computer, kill it at the end of the day. New computer tomorrow. Nobody wants to do that. Obviously. It's very expensive. So you at some point you have to choose between security and convenience. Yeah, and it's thinking about that. There's also companies that have gone all the other end and said, AI is banned from the company.

We don't end using chat GBT for security concern. Where do you think is the middle road? Where is the right balance for a smaller business to be between security 

Chris Daigle: and convenience? So I think before you let your team loose on using the tools, there should be a discussion and that discussion should look like some training.

I, a podcast, I listen to a lot. The Marketing AI Institute, Paul Royer and his partner, his chief content partner over there. They, this is, they bang the drum on generative AI use policies, privacy and all that type of thing. And I have to agree with them. The protocol that we recommend is that let's define what a use policy looks like in your company, right?

Let's educate. The users of AI in your company on what it is, how it works, what the risks are before we let them start using the tools and the performance of their job, their processes or their workflows. That training combined with a clearly defined set of guidelines that generative AI use policy is a very good first start for companies.

Now, I would imagine if there's not already, there probably are that there's going to be, providers who specialize in making sure that your AI use is compliant and that it's secure. So first step business owner executive ambitious employee is get educated on this. Don't just go in there and start using it.

Understand what the risks are. Two, define what use policy what usage guidelines look like in your company. Once that's in place. Number three, it might not be a bad idea to two things if you can't find that. That human vendor that can come in and take a look at what you're doing in your processes and they specialize in evaluating risk and data breach opportunities for use of ai If you can't find that person.

Go to the models. Here's our guidelines, here's the training that we use chat, GBT, what are some security risks? How can I improve my my data environment, my data security environment for use of AI in the company? Leverage the models as the proxy for that human expert. But I think if you do that, most SMBs, yes, we've got data, we've got customer lists, and we've got things like that.

However the data science side of ai. Most SMBs, they're not ready to extract business intelligence from their data at this point. They're looking for, how can I get home to the kids earlier? They're looking more for those types of solutions. And I think if that's where you are as an smb, that you're looking more for, how can I create more time, create more revenue, and an exponential growth and the enjoyment of my craft.

You're gonna, you're gonna be okay with the AI use policy and some training for your team.

Jonathan Green 2024: A lot of everyone's so focused on AI can generate, AI can do these things like outward, like I can write more blog posts, I can make more content. I. I, my approach is always focus on what comes in. The biggest time suck for most employees and most businesses is communication, meetings, emails. So the first thing I talk about, yeah, my opinion is I use two big AI tools.

One that filters the news. 'cause I have to stay update on AI news constantly. Sure. And I don't need to know about fundraise. There's so many fundraising press releases, I don't need those. So filtering those out, save me so much time. The second thing is with my email, the better my AI filters for my email.

'cause I have emails that I need to know about. Yeah, emails that I just need to keep a copy of, and then emails that I need to respond to, which is a very small percentage. Yeah. So out of every thousand emails, I probably need to respond between five and seven. That filtering saves me huge amount of time, and that's always been on my mind ever since I read a study that said employees spend six and a half hours a day doing email.

And I was like, what's the other 90 minutes lunch? That's a, yeah. Terrible worry. But when I think about it, when I work for a large organization, people at, we either email open all day, and it's the same reason I work for myself, and maybe this resonates with you, is I don't like being in meetings where I don't need to be there.

And I've been to so many meetings where there were. Was it about something I was working on? I'm not gonna talk. There's nothing for me to listen to. And if I go to the bathroom, someone's gonna go, Hey, where do you think you're going? Yeah. And I'm like, why are you paying me to be here? It's such a poor use of resource when I have my employees.

I was like, minimum team meetings. If you don't need to be there, you don't need to be there. Yeah. And I swing very far in the other direction. So what do you think about. Like the first approach, the first efficiencies a smaller business or solopreneur can look at, like should they really work? Look at, oh, I can do all these new things now I can start a blog in addition to everything else I'm doing Now I can start a podcast.

Now I can start doing video. I try to, my thought is let's limit how much is incoming and try increase your time first. Let's take what you're already doing and do it faster before we add in new things. 'cause people get so distracted by what's new 

Chris Daigle: and cool. It's a great approach. So what we do is we, the first thing that we're gonna do, let's say a client wanted to work with our definition of a chief AI officer.

We train that individual to come in, sit down and say, okay guys, where do we wanna be in five years, three years, a year? We're looking at that, that further goal, because if all we're doing is reacting in the short term, that's, uh. You're fighting fires all day long. You're not really moving towards anything bigger.

So we identify a longer term goal. You define what long-term is. Maybe for your company it's 10 years. Then what we do is we start working back. Okay to get there, we need to be here in three years, in one year in this quarter. So what we're doing is we're getting very clear on a set of activities that result in a larger goal as compared to a set of activities that maintain the status quo.

So in that case, what we're doing is we're getting we're making it very easy for even employees to have kind of a binary filter of, is this moving towards the goal or away from the goal or neutral. If it's neutral or moving away from the goal, it's probably an activity they, that they shouldn't be focused on anyway.

So we're looking at how do we accelerate the velocity of achievement for an activity that supports. And we don't leave it up to the individuals to guess. We make it very clear in these processes. The frameworks I shared earlier they're very specific on how you assign measure output from any contributor to the bigger picture.

A similar [00:20:00] stat that, that I saw about your email stat was that a knowledge worker spends about 20% of their day searching for the information to work with. So if you can simply think about that okay, I know that it's in a Google drive, but I've gotta get that in info. Which, which drive was it in from her?

Which folder, all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of wasted time that's occurring there. So some sort of environment that, there's some new tools that we've been working with that are they're not LLMs, they're more rag. Architecture that they sit in your stack. And I'll give you an example.

There's some tools that they integrate with your G Drive, slack, clickup and a bunch of other, like whatever your operational stack is, that's very similar to what we've got. And these tools sit in the middle of that and you can use the tool and you can say, Hey, I know that we had the framework for a generative AI use policy.

Where is that? Instead of me hunting, and this is all usually we're interfacing with this in our Slack group. And it's that. That traffic cop in your business that knows where everything is 'cause it's gone and indexed all of your chat histories and all that type of stuff for internal communication.

That might be a great place for an SMB to start even just like getting access, even if you're not gonna be more efficient with your planning or you don't have a big strategy or anything like that. Just having a generative AI tool that had indexed your internal. Communications and knowledge about your business would be very helpful because it's gonna start to shave time off of that 20% of, the knowledge worker looking for that work.

That'd be a great place to start. I'm very interested in that email angle, man. 'cause Jonathan, at this point, if I were to look, I've got over 10,000 emails and probably all of my inboxes and I, it's just 'cause I gave up a long time ago, right? And I had, I've tried assistance and I've tried VAs. I'm using Superhuman now.

It's good, but man, I, if somebody's got that AI solution, man, I wanna hear about it because, 'cause that's a channel. Don't even email me like, mom, sorry, I didn't get the email. I'm not looking at anybody's emails. It's just a big time suck for me. So I wish I had a better solution.

Jonathan Green 2024: That's really interesting because it's, I feel the same way about your file management thing. I think about, this is where I think the biggest opportunity in AI is it people get so distracted by what's cool. And I always say I buy a lot more toilet paper than I do stereos. The real profitability is in the boring.

What do you do every week? Yep. And I was thinking, how much time do I spend searching for files? I'm always reorganizing. How much time do I spend? Trying to remember who people you are, people are, and certain things that used to be really hard, like creating transcripts now. Too many things create transcripts.

I have seven transcripts of every meeting. Yep. Because every tool is creating transcripts and it's fine. It's useful, but then exactly organizing it and finding it. I was thinking about this a lot over the past week. 'cause I use tools to help me remember who people are. 'cause it happens all the time.

I can't remember who one is. I meet too many people. It's not personal. I can't remember every guest I've had on the podcast. I've had over 300. I try my best. Yeah. But I have a thing that helps me. I can look at a picture, look up a name, and then I have a chance with an ai. That's very interesting. And I think this, I think you've dialed into exactly what I really like, which is the biggest opportunity is, and increasing those efficiencies for things that you don't even realize are time waste.

It's like when you start working with a dietician, the first thing they say is take a picture of everything you eat and then you're shocked. You go, what? I didn't realize I was eating 17,000 calories a day. This is a very good idea because it's the things, because I, a lot of people say things like, oh, I, I'm replacing myself.

And it's please don't let the AI do something unsupervised. You always end up regretting it 'cause it's something crazy always happens. You will get in the news. Eventually 'cause something so bad will happen. You know what I mean? Yeah. But that's the wrong mindset. I always say push yourself into management, which means you're spending less time doing and more time checking its work.

That's where the efficiency is. And I really like what you're talking about. Yeah. About organization. 'cause I think that's where a lot of small business owners get stuck is lack of organization. And I always think about, for me it's the 80 20 rule. Yep. 20% of what I do generates 80% of my revenue. 80% of what I do doesn't matter.

It doesn't help the business at all. And I always have to reassess that and move some parts around to go, this part of the business isn't working. Give up this thing, give up that thing. This isn't working. Give up that thing. And that's, sometimes those are hard decisions 'cause it's usually the part of your business you love the most is the part.

It's the one that's making you the least money and making these decisions. Sometimes in the same way they go, you don't realize where the time loss is happening because I'm a. There's also a balance. 'cause sometimes people are always, they're so focused on efficiency. All they do is efficiency. They never get anything done.

They just get everything done faster. So I'm always trying to find that balance too. I love what you're talking about. I think that people are, thank you. Really good. Like your style. A lot of what you say aligns with what I talk about, but it's from a very different perspective, which is why I we're having the show today.

I know people are gonna love this. Where's the best place for people to find you online and connect with you? I know we've chatted on LinkedIn. Obviously they shouldn't email you 'cause you'll never respond. I get it. Sorry. 

Chris Daigle: Where's the best place to find you? Best place to find us. So we encourage people to get a baseline of how prepared are you for ai?

And what we do is we tell people to go to chief ai officer.com/aiq. It's a clever little blend of AI and iq, but it's a seven question quiz and it just, it's gonna give you a score and you get an idea of it. Will those quick seven questions will help you. Very quickly identify gaps or areas that you just hadn't considered about AI preparedness for yourself or your company.

So that'd be the best place. Chief ai officer.com/a IQ on LinkedIn. Really on all of our platforms we put out a lot of content. This is a passion a project and a. Topic that we're very passionate about. We're active practitioners. We're working with businesses in all industries. So we're coming up with, not coming up with, we're experiencing like breakthroughs and ahas that we love sharing with AI enthusiasts and AI curious.

Plugging into us there or catching us on social, it's probably a great place for you to plug into what we're doing, what we're talking about. 

Jonathan Green 2024: Awesome. We'll put all the links below the show notes. As always, thank you so much for being here for another amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

Chris Daigle: Thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Green 2024: Thanks for listening to today's episode starting with ai. It can be Scary. ChatGPT Profits is not only a bestseller, but also the Missing Instruction Manual to make Mastering Chat, GBTA Breeze bypass the hard stuff and get straight to success with chat g profits. As always, I would love for you to support the show by paying full price on Amazon, but you can get it absolutely free for a limited time@artificialintelligencepod.com slash gift.

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