Wealthy AF Podcast

AI in the Business World and Beyond (w/ Justin Simpson)

• Martin Perdomo "The Elite Strategist" • Season 3 • Episode 498

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Unlock the secrets of AI mastery with Justin Simpson on Wealthy AF, where we make bold claims about the future of work and technology. Explore how embracing artificial intelligence can make you indispensable in the job market, as we highlight the divide between those who welcome AI and those who shy away. With insights into AI's potential to enhance productivity and creativity, this episode promises to arm you with the skills necessary to thrive in an AI-driven world.

Picture a future where language barriers cease to exist and businesses, no matter how small, engage seamlessly with diverse communities. We highlight real-world applications across industries, showing how AI is making this vision a reality. From legal practices to small businesses in bustling San Francisco, AI is revolutionizing how companies interact with their clientele, offering tools that translate and communicate with ease. Listen as we share practical tips for using AI for everyday tasks, creative projects, and the latest must-have apps to transform your life and work.

Business owners, the AI revolution is upon you, and we’ve got strategies to help you harness its power. We delve into AI implementation, from identifying tasks ripe for automation to fostering a culture of innovation in your organization. Find out how AI is shaking up the real estate industry, offering advanced tools for property valuation and virtual tours, and learn about the balance between technological advancement and job security. Stay ahead of the curve with our insights and prepare for the inevitable impact of AI on industries globally.

CONNECT WITH JUSTIN!
Here.Now.AI.
https://www.herenowai.com/
https://x.com/JustinHereNowAI
https://www.linkedin.com/company/herenowai/

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Speaker 1:

This is Wealthy AF your ultimate guide to understand what it truly means to be Wealthy AF. Joining us is someone who has a true talent for taking the complicated and making it simple. Today's guest is Justin Simpson. He specializes in demystifying AI, breaking down those complex concepts into bite-sized, understandable pieces that even your grandma could get. No tech, just clear, relatable explanations. We'll be diving into real-world examples of how AI is already transforming everyday life from boosting your career, streamlining your daily tasks to even enhancing your downtime. Our guest shows you how these technologies can work for you. Let's welcome Justin Simpson, sir, welcome.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, Martin. Great pleasure to be on the show and thanks for having me. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for coming on today. I want us to have today's topic is going to be skills for tomorrow, what you need to succeed in an AI world. I'll start with this In November of 22, that was when chat GPT first came out, right? That's when it was made public. You remember that, right? So there was this great big hype, and so my team was not aware of it yet. So I go to my team, I'm like hey guys, I discovered this thing. This thing is amazing. It's going to make us more productive, it's going to make us no-transcript.

Speaker 2:

Well, martin, two things. One is you are a brave pioneer, and there are too few brave pioneers, even all these months later, after the release of ChatGPT, which is a revolutionary technology being made available to everybody, that the world is divided into the pioneers who are diving in and hopefully more every day and that's part of what I'm trying to achieve and those who are scared. And one of the professors down at Stanford who's been doing AI for a very long time said you shouldn't worry about AI taking your job, but you could worry about somebody who knows how to use AI taking your job. And I think that underlies a lot of the opportunity here which is taking those folk on your team who legitimately said I don't know what this thing is, but I fear that it's coming for me and making them as excited as you are about the potential that can be unlocked by taking advantage of some of these skills. And it was at that moment, as you were discovering that and saying to yourself what can this do for me and for my business?

Speaker 2:

I was saying I've spent my whole life as a banker, as a humanitarian diplomacy guy, a banker as a humanitarian diplomacy guy, explaining concepts that were complex to people in ways that I hoped they could understand and could use. And I love this AI stuff. The mathematics behind it, the ideas behind it are just tremendous. But really you don't need to know any of those. You don't need to know how to understand an internal combustion engine to drive a car. All you need to do is get in and turn the key. And AI is like that, and if we could just get more people excited enough or at least comfortable enough to try and understand that potential, they will see how they are like you, the pioneers that can make their lives better, more efficient, faster, sometimes more fun than sitting back and waiting for AI to come and do some damage to them.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so the end of that story, justin, is that the team about 80% of my team jumped on board and the other 20 did not, and I had to literally sell them on the idea of and I like to get your thoughts on this statement that the jobs of the future are not going to be replaced. Not all jobs of the future are going to be replaced by AI, while there will be some that absolutely will. They just will, whether we like it or not. Right, they will. For me, the statement was it's not whether it's going to replace you or not. Statement was it's not whether it's going to replace you or not.

Speaker 1:

You bring value to our organization by how efficient and how skillful you actually are at prompting AI and utilizing these AI models. You become more valuable and you become actually irreplaceable more valuable than the AI, because the AI does not act on its own. So it's like hey, learn these, the more value. I believe in the statement of the market rewards you according to the value you bring to the market. Right, and that's what I preach to my team the market rewards you according to the value you bring to the market. Hey, if you're doing the same old things and you're not bringing new value. You're going to be less valuable. These machines then will replace you, but if you master these machines, then you bring more value to the organization and the organization now sees more value in you. And while these things are good, but you're more valuable because I'm not going to sit here and run all of these different AI models what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 2:

I think that's exactly the right way to think about it.

Speaker 2:

I started here.

Speaker 2:

Now AI, which is this publication that's trying to persuade people to adopt AI or at least experiment with AI, with the idea that if we can just get somebody to get on the computer with a task and use AI tools and say, wow, did I do that more efficiently or did I get a better answer, or was that helpful to me in leveraging my own skill set, exactly as you described, then they'll slowly become more adept is so incredible that if you don't start now, effectively, you're going to get left behind because you won't really understand what the improvements in scale and professionalism and competence of the models are across a number of different fields, which I hope we'll talk about in the next few minutes.

Speaker 2:

But the basic idea that these things are tools to leverage the human, as you described but the human is not just going to sit there and be leveraged. They need to dive in and engage themselves, whether it's at work, as we're talking about making yourself more productive for your professional career At home. There's already AI coming into that sort of sphere and, as you mentioned briefly at the beginning, for fun, there's some really engaging ways to look at your artistic side in sound, in visual arts it's in movies, uh, and an experiment, uh, and and show your creativity in a way that wasn't just the just wasn't possible a year or two ago is what advice are you giving to those people that are super fearful?

Speaker 1:

look, I went to an event in 2016, to the event called Business Mastery, and one of the questions that was asked there was what business are you in and what business should you be in? But the root cause of the question was and this was 2016, 2017, right, I mean, we're talking a few years ago this AI was not mainstream at all, right, not even close, right. The question was what business are you in, what business should you be in? Because what business and this was at the time we were actually discussing. I guess the host knew about AI. He's a very prominent person and what will be replaced by computers in the future was a question. Are you in the right business? Where's the puck going? What business should you be in? Where are things headed to?

Speaker 1:

Doctors is one of those things where that was a discussion we had. The robotics attorneys was another thing. That was like hey, why would a corporate company have an attorney where you have computers, where everything's there? And we talked a little bit about AI and it's like holy smokes and we, you know insurance. Why would I need an insurance agent where I can go online? And there's going to be an AI that's going to just shop it for you. These are careers that could be in jeopardy. Clearly, to me they look like they could be in jeopardy. I like to get your thoughts to. What are you saying to those people that are full of fear about, you know, ai replacing their careers?

Speaker 2:

So if you break the sort of world of AI into robotics as you describe, which is very mechanical, and then the rest, the rest you could summarize as thinking about people as knowledge workers. That's kind of what we do. We take ideas, we work with them, we try to communicate them, we try to leverage them into business, et cetera. In the knowledge worker sphere, most jobs have a component that is rote, repeated, sort of boring, kind of administrative, and then a component that really requires knowledge and judgment, and all of our jobs, mostly in the knowledge worker sphere, are somewhere on that spectrum. So somebody who is just doing a job that is wrote and repeat, wash, rinse, repeat over and over again the same day, that person should be fearful that AI is coming for their job. But instead of saying, well, I need to do a different career completely, they just need to say, well, how can I make myself more efficient? How can I jump in and be the person who helps AI automate that boring, repetitious part of my day and frees me up to do more creative stuff, more thoughtful stuff, more value-added stuff, depending on what the context is. So I'll give you. You used the example of lawyers. I think it's a very good example. Legal profession has a huge amount of just wrote research preparing a contract based on contract law, based on previous examples of contracts, based on that sort of stuff. You can get the first draft of that contract for free on the internet. Using an AI, you can upload a contract that somebody gave you and says now tell me quickly, is this biased in my favor or in their favor? What would you suggest I look at? What would you suggest I change? So a large portion of that attorney's work you don't need to pay an attorney to do anymore, but at the end you want that attorney's judgment Before you sign a big contract. You'd kind of like to know I'm buying a house, doing something material in my life Is this the right way to go? Because I'm not 100% sure that what I got from the AI is correct. Because I'm not 100% sure that what I got from the AI is correct. So the attorneys who are adopting AI and there are a number are saying great, I'm all in, let me automate the 70% or 60% that is wrote, rinse and repeat stuff and let me focus on where my judgment adds value.

Speaker 2:

And so a friend of mine, for example, is an attorney who has an expertise in bankruptcy law, so he's written something called the 11-Bot, which is for chapter 11. So if anybody is approaching bankruptcy, they're fearful, they're anxious, they have a lot of stress. They could spend a lot of money talking to their lawyer about how do I wind up my company in the correct way, how do I come out of it with a restructuring. Well, they could go online and go to his 11 bot. It's called, and 11 bot will give you the basic answers.

Speaker 2:

You're not going to act on those answers, but you're going to come into your expensive attorney's meeting with a lot more information and a lot more preparation, or somebody whose job it is to help you, let's say, get publicity for your podcast, and how are they going to do that? They're going to maintain the social media presence for you. I don't know exactly where you choose to put your effort, but you're going to have somebody out there engaging with whether it's X, twitter or Instagram, facebook, et cetera. That person could say, well, my job is done because AI can write the stuff for me. Or the person could say, wow, I can write this copy much more quickly and much more effectively by correctly prompting AI, getting a good piece of output and then working on it to make it in the style that Martine likes, that I know he's going to want to see, and that person is now faster, better at their job because of AI rather than out of a job now faster, better at their job, because of AI, rather than out of a job.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that's the whole point of AI. Do you think that we're headed to doom's world, where AI is going to run humanity aground? Right, because there's folks out there that believe that. I personally think there's a flavor of that. That could happen. Right, there is a flavor of that. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, martin, I think that you know it's an inevitable question the more you ask, where does it stop? But I have a fundamental optimism about the human brain and human creativity and I think that AI can be, and will be, extremely valuable and extremely important in the economy, the knowledge economy in particular, but also in robotics, et cetera Obviously not my particular expertise, but in the knowledge economy it'd be incredibly important over the next 10, 20 years. But I really don't see the scenario into which humanity surrenders itself to an AI. I don't know if you remember Isaac Asimov, but a number of folk who enjoy science fiction read these stories that he wrote, starting in the 1940s and then up to the 1980s, 1990s, and they were all science fiction stories.

Speaker 2:

But he was a guy who understood deeply what robotics was, what artificial intelligence could be, and wrote these hypothetical stories about how the world might change. Wrote these hypothetical stories about how the world might change, and in each of them there's this kernel of truth. Of course, as robots become more intelligent or machines, artificial intelligence becomes more thoughtful. It's going to become smarter than us in the IQ sense. Already we have publicly available AI systems that are operating at the level of a PhD student, and most of us are not PhD students, so you could say, from an intellectual standpoint it's operating up there. But this individual spark of human creativity, this knowledge, this relationship is, I believe, so powerful that I'm not one of those sort of doomsday scenario folk who believe that AI is out there. I do believe that AI is going to infect every one of our lives and so, therefore, we might as well embrace it and get ahead of it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, technologies here is coming and it's nothing you could do about it. I had someone on my team that it was literally the conversation like hey, man, you literally have to get on this boat because it's coming. Whether you like it or not, it's, it's coming. And this particular person was feeling threatened that AI was taking over their creative genius. And I was like no, this is this, is you manage it you? This just speeds up your process for you and now you take it and then you put your flair into it. But it's just, some people are just not embracing it. That was my experience with this particular person.

Speaker 2:

So, martin, I think you're absolutely right and I work with small businesses here in the Bay Area, san Francisco, and a lot of them are obviously busy running their business. They don't have time to investigate and learn a lot, but they're also fearful of AI. And what I've been trying to say and with some success, but not universal, because people are people right at the end of the day is AI, for example, for a small business. If you're running a small business, ai is the most democratizing, powerful force that is going to be unleashed on, or is being unleashed on, the small business world, because now, as a mom and pop business of some of some sort solopreneur, small business you have a full-time publicity department, you have a full-time copywriter, you have a full-time social media coordinator. You have all these things now at your disposal with a relatively small amount of effort on your part that make you able to communicate, of effort on your part that make you able to communicate.

Speaker 2:

We're here in California, in San Francisco, a wonderful panoply of diversity of community, but that also means that there's a panoply of diversity of language.

Speaker 2:

Roughly a third of folk speak English as their first language.

Speaker 2:

Roughly a third speak Spanish as their first language, and then the last third of Asian languages of varying sorts Chinese, obviously important, vietnamese, it's Tagalog, philippine language. Well, if you're running a business, wouldn't you want to speak to your customers in the business that they understand? Would they be more inclined to attract if you could and that was virtually impossible for AI the cost-expense, complication of trying to present your even in two languages, nevermind three, four, five. Well, now you can do that. If you put out a website, you can have it in multiple languages. If you put out a newsletter, you can have it in multiple languages, again with relatively little impact. And so for a small business trying to sell coffee, whatever the OS, if you're an online business, to be able to address their customers in their own language, I think is phenomenally empowering. And those are the sorts of examples where I'm trying to tell people look, spend a little bit of time, it's not going to do it for you, but with a relatively small investment you can leverage these skills.

Speaker 1:

For someone with zero tech experience, justin, where's the best place for them to start with AI? Right? So, like a grandma right, not a grandma, but you know someone like my grandmother, someone that's just very un-tech savvy. What's the first step to bringing AI into their daily life without overwhelming them? Because there's a lot of it out there. Now. There's a lot of it. I mean, we just bought a new CRM and there it was AI. I'm like what, how am I? So I click on the button and it tells me all of the tasks that my team is doing and who's doing. Like it sums it, it has a discussion with me, right? Like it tells me like who's doing what.

Speaker 2:

What's doing it sums it up, it has a discussion with me. It tells me who's doing what, what's doing, who's engaging the most. It's amazing what some of these tools can do, how some companies are using it. So where would someone start to not get overwhelmed? The pioneer that I'm trying to encourage more people to become? Because you've got a basic understanding and now when you see a more complicated approach, like the button in your CRM that pulls together a whole lot of information and crystallizes it for you in a way that you can see and understand, you could only use that button effectively if you've already played with the very basics. So I would say where to start for everybody, your grandmother included, is to get onto ChatGBT or the equivalent on Google or Meta. If you're in Instagram, you just have to type up at the top of the thing. If you're in Google, you put that Gemini. There's very easy ways to do that that folk can see online. But play with it, ask it questions, ask it to write something for you. There's apps which will help you draw pictures. Again, meta AI Draw me a picture of a unicorn riding down the main street of a town in 1920s noir style.

Speaker 2:

You pick your ridiculous problem and watch it happen, or a sound one. Write me a song about my granddaughter that I'm going to visit on Sunday and who likes fairies. And once you begin to understand how powerful this is but how responsive it is to what you ask it, you begin to get this notion, first of all, of the inherent abilities of the tool, but second, of your control. If you ask the same question three different ways, you'll get three different answers and that responsiveness to your changing the tone. Write that for me in a funny way, or write that for me in a more formal way. Write it like it was a New York Times article or a BuzzFeed article and see what the differences are. You begin to develop that capability and now, when you come into a more complex situation like the one you described with your CRM, you've got an inherent understanding. So my newsletter, for example not to plug it, but that's exactly what I'm trying to do. Every week I show three or four different applications.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing. That is awesome. Why don't you go ahead and plug it in now? Go ahead and plug that in, because I think people need to. That's awesome. I'm going to sign up for your newsletter because I'm all about just AI and just staying up to speed on what's the latest technology as it pertains to AI. Just staying up to speed on what's the latest technology as it pertains to AI.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you. It's called HereNow AI and you can get it at wwwherenowaicom. And that name was chosen because I don't want to talk about the long-term future or philosophize or talk about the deep tech underpinning AI. I want to talk about what can I do as a reader today, here and now. I want to talk about what can I do as a reader today, here and now and those apps three or four every week in the newsletter. It's a free newsletter and it's not for commercial purposes, etc. But it will show people how I can use AI at home, at work and, as I say, for fun, because I think the fun part of it is remarkable. I'm artistically challenged. I can barely draw a stick figure, but I can go online and creating realable photorealistic pictures or artistic pictures I can. My daughter asked me how can I write a song for a party that's coming up that had to do with a very obscure thing at work, and I was able to send in a few minutes, send an example and have a play with it. So the creativity side, I think, is fun as well. But the at home and at work pieces are important and every week we try to highlight something. One of the popular pieces last couple of weeks. It was a very good example of what AI can do is an app called Lumona, l-u-m-o-n-a AI, and Lumona is pulling together all of that information.

Speaker 2:

If I want to decide, should I buy, should I upgrade to the new iPhone? Well, how do I research that? I go on and I look online and I try to see articles, et cetera. If I really want to know, there are other places to go where people, for example, on Reddit communities Well, lamona AI said should I upgrade to the new iPhone 16? And it goes and does that for me and presents me with a whole lot of here's the pluses, here are the minuses, and, in each case, here's where I get that information from and here's how I've synthesized it together. So I'm going to give you an overall view.

Speaker 2:

That sort of stuff is easy to experiment with, but also gives you a sense of the power. I think Google will probably evolve Google search, but at the moment there's an AI app called Perplexity, for example, which I encourage anybody who's listening to try and use, and Perplexity AI is a natural language, so you ask it exactly what you want using the words that come to mind, and you can even do that by pushing a microphone button and talking to it, but Perplexity will look at the web. Now Some of the AI models are focused on managing language, but they have a cutoff of information. Publixity doesn't, and so you can ask it what happened yesterday with respect to the hurricane that landed in Florida or anything that you want. That's contemporary and it will come back with an answer in that same natural language, but it'll give you sources so you can see exactly where it's getting the information what's the name of that?

Speaker 1:

what's?

Speaker 2:

the name of that one. Next, perplexity, uh, perplexityai. Are these apps or are these websites? These are websites, um, and in most cases now they have a phone app as well, because, even though I don't know about you, I'm more a web sort of person. I have a phone, obviously, that I use for a number of things, but people are, I think, now approaching 80% of use on their phone. So if you want to have something accessible to people in a way that they're using, you need to have an app. So, chatgpt, perplexity, all of these things I'm describing to you have a phone app as well.

Speaker 2:

But these are ways that folk can get an understanding. Well, first of all, they can be useful, right Synthesizing information like should I buy an iPhone, and that is useful. But it also gives a sense of the power of AI and how it can fit into your daily life. And so, coming back to the newsletter, every week I put three or four things, and if every reader experiments with just one, I'd consider that a victory. And one week, a few weeks ago, I put out some very useful business stuff about how to think about your career or resume, but I also put in an app that takes a photograph that you upload and returns it to you as a Pixar character. And so if you think about uploading pictures of your family members or work group or something like that and they come back as very recognizable, very cool Pixar characters, and so many people said to me you know, I know I should have done the other stuff that was more important to my career, but I spent so much time uploading all of my family pictures.

Speaker 1:

Is that one a free one? Is that a free one? That's free. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

What's the name of that one. Um, I apologize, I'll have to look it up in my okay, my newsletter and send it to you.

Speaker 1:

But, uh, but it's free and it's fun I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask us, I'm gonna ask a selfish question here now because of uh, uh, this is more of a something we're, we're, we're, we're going through. So I just hired a new um video editor, content producer for the company, right For the podcast and for my personal brand and the company, and one of the requirements literally I had to put this in the requirements of the job you have to use AI for video editing. That's not negotiable. That is not a negotiable period.

Speaker 1:

In a story, I'm giving my editor the freedom to pick which one he likes and we kind of honed down in one. It's a paid version, obviously, because we want the professional, we want the most professional and the best product we can put out. As it pertains to content, what are you recommending for any content creators out there or someone that wants to create content? I believe that every business should be putting content out. Very few people are doing business with businesses that don't have some presence on social or online. What do you recommend for that, for that video editing right now?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a great question, and video is just in the process of AI right now. So I'll tell you what I think today, but it's important to stay on top of the stuff because it's changing so fast. There's an app that I've played with called Descript, and so D-E-S-C-R-I-P-T, and Descript is a very powerful AI editor, and let me give you an example for your listeners. Is that a video editor? Video editor? Yeah, with a very heavy AI component. We all make mistakes or hum and whore or interject with ourselves in video. So you upload your video which is imperfect, and Descript will go through that, and, first of all, if I say it's a good video editor, it'll take out that, um. Then, second of all, if I say this is important that you listen to it next Tuesday oh, I mean next Wednesday in the transcript of the video I'll see those words Tuesday, oh, next Wednesday, and I'll take out the Tuesday and Descript will reconnect that video without that mistake.

Speaker 2:

So the ability Wow that is powerful, is very powerful. The ability to look at the transcript of what you said and amend the transcript and then have the video catch up with your amended transcript, I think is very powerful. But if I could just mention, martina, a couple of other things that you talked about content creators, and I agree that pretty much every business should be out there on social media. You can literally, using AI, you can literally create your social media content calendar. And if you're not sure what you should put out, ask it. I'm a small business. I'm a plumbing supply company. My market is the greater Philadelphia area. I want customers to think of me first when they think of plumbing supplies. Help me craft a digital present. And try that a few times. Use exactly those words, your own words, describing your problem, and ChatTPT or Gemini or whichever model you're using, will come back with a suggestion. You say, okay, great, now turn that into a calendar for me. And it will say, okay, I want you to post on X on Mondays and Instagram on Wednesdays and LinkedIn on Fridays, whatever the case may be. Now you just have to think of the topics that you want and again, if you're not sure, can you suggest some topics for me for my posts on X Great, Can you write me draft topics? And now you've got your draft posts and ultimately you want them to be in your own voice so you can automatically take what the AI says and put it online.

Speaker 2:

But I think there's a lack of authenticity and there's a risk that people will see that your content doesn't sound like Martini, it sounds like ChatGPT. So I always recommend take the human step of looking at it and making it your own and then posting it. But it's possible to do it without that human step, and now there are also tools that'll do all of that for you. So you will start once a month and you'll allocate for the month of November. Here's what I'm going to do, here's the topics I want and here's my schedule of posts of Instagrams or whatever the case may be. And so the risk is obviously that you lean into those tools too heavily and you begin to sound inauthentic, you begin to sound like a bot, and then people don't really value your content anymore. So you've got to make sure that what you're doing, you're a funny guy, make sure your tweets are funny, otherwise we're all going to sound the same and and instagram or facebook are going to be very boring places very soon yeah, that this is a really, really good point.

Speaker 1:

I literally, as we were, as you were, you were sharing, I was taking notes in my, in my, my CRM and literally sending it to the team. You're a very evolved guy, monti. I learned something from a YouTube video I watched. I don't remember the guy's name, but he was teaching something on when you learn something and he goes input output. So I got a bunch of notes here on paper. Input output meaning, when I learned something, I take it in and then I put it to work. Take it in and I put it to work, and then that's how you actually master it and you'll get better. So, as I'm learning from you, I'm taking notes and I'm putting it out right away so I could put it to work right away. So, thank you so much, justin. I got another question for you In organizations creating a culture where AI literacy is crucial, like mine, right?

Speaker 1:

So for my organization, it's a must. Like you, either get on the boat or you're not going to be on for this ride, because this is I believe, justin, I am a believer of and I know that may sound a little bit, maybe a little bit harsh, but it is what it is right. We live in a capitalism society where my competition is going to use the technology, and if I don't use the technology that's made available to me, then I'm going to get left behind. So we have to be constantly adapting. And how can we be more efficient?

Speaker 1:

But for organizations like that, where AI literacy thrives and is crucial, what are the best strategies for fostering this kind of environment amongst employees, this kind of environment amongst employees? How are you telling small business owners to, to, to get their employees to embrace it as an owner? I just got to tell you I absolutely love it as an owner. It's like to me. It's amazing, because when you're a small business owner or you're a business owner, you're constantly thinking about so much I have to hire this person, I have to hire that person for this, I have to hire. Like all of that stuff just comes all out of the brain and you put it into a machine that gives you answers. Oh, that's a great idea, let me do that. But no, I don't like that one. Like how do we create a culture where everybody is embracing it?

Speaker 2:

So I think, once again, you're pretty far ahead of where, I would say, most small and medium-sized enterprises are, and the statistics always are changing dramatically in this field, so using statistics is always a little bit dangerous. But the most recent work showed something like 30% of small and medium-sized enterprises have thought about AI as a company, as a strategy. What should we do as a company? But if you ask the individual employees, the numbers closer to 75% that are experimenting with AI in some way perhaps a small way, but in some way at their work, so there's a big disconnect 70,.

Speaker 1:

so let me get that right 75% of the employees in all the small to medium-sized businesses are experimenting with AI In the survey that I looked at.

Speaker 2:

They're playing around with it in some way.

Speaker 1:

But only 30% of the business owners are actually thinking about wow, that got it.

Speaker 2:

Okay, that's really big this connect is where the risk is. So if you were a business owner who's uncertain, as opposed to you, who's already embraced the technology and now I'll come back to your problem of once you've embraced the technology, how do you get it into the organization as a part of the fabric? But if you're one of those owners who's not sure you've heard about it but you haven't played with it yourself your employees are probably beginning to play with it. So what you want to do is get a handle on the whole structure. And so, for example, I run workshops for corporations in that size to try and help think about what does AI mean for my business? Not every task should be delegated to AI. There are some things that are going to help leverage me, make me more creative, make me more efficient, but there are also some things that are dangerous, because AI is not perfect. It's not for running rocket ships, it's for engaging in natural language. So I want to think quite carefully and also, if I invest a huge amount of time in automating a process with AI but the time saving is minimal, is that really worthwhile? So I try to help break down into tasks where there's an efficiency gain from AI or a productivity gain from AI? This is not. And where there's risk, this is not. And of course some corporations are dealing with confidential data and there's an issue about putting if you put stuff into ChatGPT without any constraint, it's going to take that data to learn from to make ChatGPT better, which in aggregate is putting a small drop into a very big bucket. But if it's very confidential data, you don't want to risk that in the risk that it gets used somewhere. So, again, ways to address that, but it's just worth thinking about. So the one is where should I focus on AI? The second is as opposed to new technologies. So in corporations, larger-sized corporations when Windows releases a new software update or something like that, it's typically historically been a top-down thing. Somewhere somebody says, okay, we're all going to move to the latest Windows operating system, so all of our software is interoperable. This stuff is very much driven by the creativity of the people at the bottom. So there's not just a top-down. I'm going to tell people to use AI and they're going to do it. It's really encouraging them to start at the bottom and see for themselves what it can do for them in their job and that means more employee engagement.

Speaker 2:

So, again, these workshops can involve sitting down and asking people okay, let's set a challenge together, let's write a podcast script or a blog post about something, and then let's go through it in different ways. Write me a blog post about the impact of the hurricane on plumbing supplies. You're going to get a very anodyne answer. Well, then you say, well, okay, now let's break it down. What is the audience I'm trying to address?

Speaker 2:

Tell the AI that who do I want to sound like? Do I want to sound like a formal, serious authority or do I want to sound like? Do I want to sound like a formal, serious authority or do I want to give it a slightly more relaxed tone? What is my intended objective? Do I want people to come and buy from me or do I want them to just view me as an authority?

Speaker 2:

And as you build through that with employees, it takes a while, but at the end of that, they've got a prompt which is now showing them the different pieces of how to prompt effectively. What the result is in the beginning, which was a pretty straight you ask a straightforward question. You're going to get a straightforward answer. You give it a more subtle, thoughtful question. You're going to get a more subtle, thoughtful answer and you say, okay, now you know how to do that. Well, that took a long time, right, I could have just written the piece in the beginning, but now I know how to do it, so the next time is going to take me less time, no time at all. And so you're building a way of thinking about framing prompts for AI, and employees will mostly see that value. And, of course, in any organization you're always going to have, as you mentioned, a couple who are just absolutely resistant. That's been the case since business has become business, and you've just going to deal with that sort of resistance in the way that best suits your organizational culture.

Speaker 1:

Last question what are the most effective AI tools for analyzing market trends and making smarter investment decisions? I'm going to just say in real estate, because I'm a real estate guy. Another selfish question is you're the AI expert, so I want to get it. You're the AI guy, so I want to learn as much as I can and get my edge as much as I can, and a lot of my listeners also are real estate people.

Speaker 2:

The real estate sector is interesting because there are so many parts to it. It's quite a distributed business. So once you say somebody's in real estate, they could be in Could be an agent.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they could be different things they could be in… Property manager, and so there isn't really one AI that I would say at this point does it all, and that's probably good right, because if there was one that tried to do everything, it'd probably be mediocre at most things. But if you look at the individual piece of what you're trying to do, there are AI tools available and in fact I can share with you and you can choose to pass on to your listeners. If you'd like sort of a guide to AI in real estate as it is, I'll send this to you after our show. But let me give you a couple of examples. If you are in the business of looking at house prices, try to make a value assessment based on what's going on in the attributed market. There's something called House Canary. Try to make a value assessment based on what's going on in the attributed market. There's something called House Canary, and House Canary is exactly as I just described.

Speaker 1:

It looks at With an I or Canary with an I or a Y Canary with a Y. All right, dot AI. Is that HouseCanaryai? I think it's dot AI. I apologize, that's fine. That's fine, we'll find it.

Speaker 2:

Listeners, and I and my team will find it. We'll find it Great. If you're in the process of selling real estate, one of the things that's become necessary now is floor plans, and so there's a Get Floor Plan app, which uses AI to help make your virtual tours more appealing. If you want to show a space that is either under construction or needs refurbishment, et cetera, and you want to reimagine it how this could look if you did certain things to it there's reimaginehomeai. But generally, you could start with one of the general AI tools.

Speaker 2:

I mentioned perplexity, for example. Go to perplexity and say suggest to me AI tools that are appropriate for such and such an aspect of my real estate. As I say, I'll drop you a line with what's out there at the moment, but the important thing is not that you focus on a particular tool, but that you focus on the capability because this sector is being disrupted so quickly and the power of each subsequent release. We're kind of used to, yes, the release iOS 17 versus iOS 18. Yes, it's got some nice features, but it's basically the same thing. The speed with which the power of AI is being unleashed is quite extraordinary, and you need to sort of get on the bandwagon in order to understand, when the next thing comes along, how different and how much more important it is.

Speaker 1:

100% my friend. Thank you so much. Learned so much from you. If folks wanted to sign up again for your newsletter, people wanted to follow you on social media. They wanted to connect with you, maybe to consult with you. Maybe they're a small business that they like. Hey, I need to bring someone in to consult with us about this AI stuff and how we can use it. How can they find you? Where would they connect with?

Speaker 2:

you, sir. Yeah, thanks, Martin. So first of all, to sign up for the newsletter wwwherenowaicom Also on that page there's a little button that says advisory, which will allow you to book a free information session with me to talk about some of this stuff. I'm on LinkedIn and I like and use LinkedIn, so that's an easy way to connect with me. I'm not hiding, I'm trying to be easy to find On Twitter. It's at Justin here now, ai, perfect. Thank you Many of your listeners to reach out and connect with me.

Speaker 1:

Perfect. Thank you so much, mr Justin, really really appreciate it. We're just really grateful for you sharing all of this wonderful information. I, for one, am super excited about AI. I think it has its dangers, like anything else, and, with its dangers or not, whether I personally, my thought is whether I think is dangerous or not, or has its dangers or not, it's coming guys, it's here, it's not going anywhere. Whether we believe it's going to take our jobs or we don't, whatever your belief is, one thing's for sure is that it's here and it's here to stay. It's not going away. It's only going to get better, more sophisticated. It's not going away. So you might as well learn it and use it to your advantage.

Speaker 1:

I actually have one more question as we're talking. It just popped in my mind before we wrap it up. As you recall, there was a strike with these workers that bring in the supplies from other countries. You remember that we had to strike. I can think of the dockworkers. Strike the dockworkers. Yes, that's it, the dockworkers.

Speaker 1:

So I read, I was reading an article in a newsletter that I get every morning and a lot of they said it was about the income, blah, blah, blah and all of this. But there was one really important thing that they were negotiating for and I don't know if you read this or not. You remember technology. They wanted to make sure that technology was not going to replace their $140,000 a year jobs, and they wanted to. They wanted to put a clause in there that the technology and again to the point I was making to you earlier that a lot of people are fearful. There it displayed in the worldwide stage how people are fearful, because AI is technology. Right Out of how it literally displayed, they said it was income and this and that, underlining all of it, though, they want to make sure that technology, that their jobs are going to be protected against technology. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 2:

So I'm not an expert on automation in the physical sense. Automation in the virtual world, in the knowledge world, yes, but in the physical sense I don't know. But I would say the following it's a political statement. We're in a capitalist environment where obviously there's going to be the force of capital trying to drive efficiencies and there's going to be the force of human labor and endeavor trying to drive decency, decent wages, et cetera, and those two are always going to be in conflict and that conflict is going to shift.

Speaker 2:

So if it's possible for Amazon to run an Amazon warehouse with three people and a whole lot of little robots whatever it is running around doing stuff, it almost feels inevitable that that will be the ultimate solution and therefore it's incumbent on Amazon, if it wants to be a good employer, to make sure that the people who are going to be trained out of doing that have options and alternatives, as we said, higher up the value chain. But I'm not an expert in labor law and negotiation so I wouldn't want to comment specifically on that. But I would say that the inevitability working, for example, in 100 years' time, never mind in six months or in next year. If you look at some of the ports in Asia, for example, that are run largely by automated machines. You can see where the trajectory is going, and there's this challenge about how do you do that in a respectful and thoughtful way for the humans that are currently being affected.

Speaker 1:

I think my advice, if you're one of those guys, would be again. It's kind of the same advice I gave to my is you got to spend to my employees? Is you got to spend some think time as to, okay, this is coming. Guys Like this is coming. If I'm it's coming, it's here, it's not going anywhere.

Speaker 2:

Guys, this, is coming, it's coming, it's here, it's not going anywhere. So, martin, I'd like to make a final comment, because you are embodying exactly what I believe executives of small and medium businesses should be. Of course, large businesses have their own challenges, these huge enterprise, and they should be thinking about it in their own way. But for the small and mid-sized business, you are that person who's understood the potential, who knows that it's going to profoundly affect their organization, who is insisting that they think through for themselves and their organization what it means and who's pushing that down the food chain to make sure that every employee is engaged in thinking about their own role and how they can add value. And if there were more business leaders like you, we would be adopting this stuff a lot more quickly and effectively and reaping the benefits. So if you can model yourself to other business leaders that you come across, I think that's exactly the right way to think.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, thank you for that. I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff. I spent a lot of hours looking at AI videos on YouTube and learning and, of course, you know, when it first came out in 22, when it was first made mainstream, I was like all over it, and I'm not as involved right now, but hence why we have you here, because I want to continue to learn more and more and more about this stuff. I spent hours. I spent, I spent a lot of time thinking about what and how this will impact my business. Like, hey, how will this, could this replace me? And the answer is yes, right, could this? Yes, okay.

Speaker 1:

So if this could replace me, what is this going to do in the future to my, to my margins, to my profit margins? How can I get ahead of it? Like, how is this going to impact, I believe, rents, I believe the cost of rents. I own a sizable portfolio of real estate where we rent a bunch of doors and I believe rents are going to come way, way down because of robotics, because of AI, I think robotics over time. I had a guy here a couple of years ago and he's a developer and he was telling me, all of these really cool technologies that are coming out robots, painting, and all of the and I'm like whoa, this is pretty awesome Robots building foundations and that's going to drive the cost of construction down, which is going to drive the cost of real estate down, which is going to drive the cost of rents down, which is going to drive and I'm thinking strategically like, okay, what impact this is going to have?

Speaker 1:

How can I be ahead of this? Where's my opportunity? Like? I'm constantly spending time in these things, looking for my edge and trying to anticipate Exactly, and that's where you should be yeah, trying to anticipate. Now we're a few years out from that. And will the powers be allowed this? Who knows? I just know that I got to be thinking for myself. Like you said, I got to be anticipating for myself and I got to be.

Speaker 2:

I can't hide under a rock and say this is not going to happen to me, because I'm old enough to know that things change, just like that, and we're in a world in which that pace of change is increasing as well as becoming faster and faster, which is why you need to get on now to understand the changes that are coming. If you're one of those resistant folk now who said I'm not going to look at this, I don't want it, it's not for me, then you're going to be that much more surprised when the next iteration comes around and starts knocking on your door.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, well, sir, thank you so much, really, really appreciate it guys. Remember here now at AIcom, here now AIcom, to sign up for Mr Justin's newsletter on AI. Thank you, sir, again for coming by. It was a great great, had a great conversation here with you about this topic. This is a really interesting topic to me. To me, this is just such a fascinating thing to discuss and see where things are going. I'd love to have you back maybe a year or so from now and just see where things are and how far things have evolved. I'd love to do that again. I just love having these conversations and keep learning about these.

Speaker 2:

That sounds wonderful. I'd love to come back and compare notes with you and thank you very much. It's been a wonderful conversation. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I hope it's been of some use to you. Thank you, sir, I really appreciate you.

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Martin Perdomo

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