Eric Housh

Welcome back to AI in Action. I’m Eric Housh and I’m joined, as always, by Zack Terry, Director of AI at Fast Slow Motion. And today we’ve got a special guest, John Burdett, CEO and founder of Fast Slow Motion. John, thanks for being here, man.

John Burdett

Happy to be here.

Thanks for inviting me.

Eric Housh

Pretty exciting stuff we’re talking about today. Significant announcement.

Fast Slow Motion is now officially offering AI implementation services. So what we’re talking about here is Anthropic’s product Claude as a full standalone platform, not just features inside Salesforce like Agentforce or HubSpot Breeze. And I wanted John here because this wasn’t a decision that happened overnight. It came out of where we as a company, Fast Slow Motion, where we’ve been heading for a while, and it directly affects what we can help businesses do. So John, help me set the stage.

John Burdett

Yeah, there’s the short version is this our why hasn’t changed at FSM. We exist to be a blessing to business leaders as they grow and scale. What’s changed is the how and the way we do that. That’s evolved over the last 12 and a half years since we’ve been a company. but we solve business problems, not just technology problems. And AI is now one of the most important levers available to businesses to work with.

So it made sense for us to build a practice properly and offer that the same way we offer Salesforce and HubSpot services,

Eric Housh

So, Zach, from your seat, what does this service addition actually mean in practical terms? What are we doing now that we weren’t doing before?

Zack Terry

Well, if you gotta take a look at what we’ve been doing. So we’ve already been doing a lot of AI-related work inside of Salesforce and HubSpot for quite some time. So that’s Agentforce and Breeze and AI-powered workflows, that kind of thing. So what’s new here is we’re now implementing Claude as a standalone platform. So what does that mean? Well, that means we can help businesses set it up properly, connect it to their data and systems. Maybe that is helping them create some custom MCP servers to connect to

of their other platforms and ensure that all of that context can be unified inside of the Claude platform. We can build workflows on top of it. We have a development team that is up to speed on how to build agentic loops and creating sort of custom agents that can work with your business data, whether that’s inside of Claude or whether that’s autonomously in the background. Essentially we we know how to do this and we’re excited to get to do this with some other businesses. So

I think the main thing here is there’s really no shortage of consultants who can tell you what AI could or should do for your business. That has become a really common thing in the ecosystem. And I think it’s important for us to all just acknowledge like this is still really new. We’re all still figuring this out, right? This is not a well-established technology paradigm. That paradigm is forming as we are talking about it right now. And so for us, we’ve had some experience doing this for the past few years, and we all

use Claude ourselves, right? Like this is something that we have implemented at Fast Slow Motion. It’s something that we use every single day to help deliver and to help our teams ensure that they are sort of being the best possible versions of themselves and the work that they are doing. And so it really kind of comes down to we’re set up to do both. We’re set up to help with the CRM. We’re set up to help with those specific AI tools. And we’re also set up well to help position Claude as the AI platform of choice.

So we have more than a decade of experience configuring the most common context layers, which is really, I think in most cases, it’s gonna be the CRM and those connected tools. And so it’s sort of a natural progression to say, look, we know these tools, we know where your context is, we can help you establish that context in a way that Claude can really make sense for your business.

Eric Housh

Yeah, John, we’ve been doing this for the last twelve years, right? It’s we’re a Salesforce Summit partner, a HubSpot Elite partner. we’ve helped 1,500 businesses execute 3,000 of these transformational projects. Stay there for a minute. How does AI fit into that story?

John Burdett

Yeah, like with our original story of how we built our own business, really the only thing we do is teach clients how to do things like we’ve done it and learned all those lessons. We started about 18 months ago disrupting and transforming our own business. And we did that first to learn all the lessons. And it’s been transformational for our business, and we’re still continuing to do that. So it’s a natural fit for us to offer this to our clients.

Because we’ve got all that operational experience from what we’ve been doing for twelve and a half years, but also the recent experience of transforming our own business. I challenged our team to was like, we’re gonna disrupt ourselves. We’re gonna not allow the market or a competitor to come disrupt us. We know where the market’s going. As Zach said, this is all very new. We don’t have all the answers. We just know this is here to stay. It’s gonna transform businesses, and we wanna be the forefront of that.

So, underneath all of that, obviously, is clean data, defined processes, integrated tech stacks, all the things that we’re good at and know how to do. And now we’re overlaying that with our AI expertise that we’ve developed by doing it for ourselves and also helping other clients do that in conjunction with CRM software. And so that’s the foundation that we bring to the table to help businesses get to where they want to go. And so

You know, really businesses, what we’ve experienced so far is they’re they’re they’re trying these things. They’re not getting the most out of Claude right now. A lot of them just signed up or say, Hey, go figure this out, and it’s kind of all over the place.. And we want to help consolidate that knowledge, bring professionalism to them, clean up their data, build out the contextual workflows, build out the MCP servers, and provide that business consulting they need to do it the right way. And so that foundation.

of connecting AI with the context of their business is really what we’re all about and what we’re bringing to the market.

Eric Housh

Zach, let’s get specific with this. When it comes, when it when one of our clients, a business comes to FSM for help with AI, for AI implementation services, what does that look like? How are some ways that we can help them?

Zack Terry

So practically there’s there’s a lot of different ways that we can look at this. And they’re gonna run the gamut from just business consulting and general business process and moving into actual technical build-outs, right? And so first and foremost, it’s AI strategy and governance. And so this is things like your acceptable use policy. What tools can your employees use and what should they avoid? And how should they use those tools? And what kind of data are they allowed to put into those tools and what should they avoid? And so it’s kind of like establishing some guardrails around the AI tools that you use.

It can also include things like risk management, executive advisory, decision frameworks. This is really how leadership can move fast without creating problems that they can’t undo. So then the second piece is the AI platform foundation. And so when we’re talking about Claude, this is things like setting up Claude, setting up the back-end administration, setting up single sign-on, admin policy controls, user provisioning, the enterprise version of Claude. So if you if you haven’t used the enterprise version and you’ve only been on

Let’s say a personal plan or a pro plan or a max plan, the enterprise version is very different. It is much more of a platform, like John said. So it has a lot of this administrative capability. So maybe you’re used to administrating Salesforce or HubSpot and provisioning users and setting up controls. Same idea, not as complex, right? Not quite as robust of a platform in that sense, but there is a lot of sort of technical consideration in terms of making sure that things are set up correctly. And so this is really all about.

Getting that platform stood up so that it is it is secure and scalable from day one. And then we have what we’re calling AI productivity at scale. So this is helping your teams set things up like Claude Chat, co-work, and Claude Code, managing provisioning through that Claude account because you can essentially give people access to certain things. So if you don’t want certain team members to have access to code, but you do want them to have access to chat, basically setting up and provisioning things correctly. So this is how you get a team using AI consistently.

As opposed to sporadically. We mentioned this earlier, but we can also build custom AI agents and workflows. And so this is business process automation inside of your organization that involves AI. If you’re familiar with Salesforce and HubSpot, you know what we’re talking about, but this can expand beyond that. So this could be using other sort of connectors like Zapier N8N or even custom development to hook those things together and work for you.

It’s Claude skills, Claude Projects, MCP servers. This is where you’re really building things that run automatically. So this is where we’re truly kind of moving from Claude as a chat interface to Claude as a business process automation tool and plugging that into sort of the finer details of your business. And three more, and then I promise I’m done with the list here, Eric. So we have AI plus your data. And this is critical. We’ve talked about this just so many times.

On this podcast and on the Fast Slow Motion podcast, but data and context is so important to the quality of your AI output. And so this is all about connecting your system, your AI system, to the all the platforms that it needs in order to gather that context and understand how to carry out whatever its job is. Right. So this is the piece that really makes your AI outputs grounded in your actual business instead of just generic responses that you might be used to if you’re just using sort of a personal plan.

And that’s that’s really key to making sure that not only are your systems connected, that’s one piece, that’s that context engineering, but it’s also making sure that the quality of that data is good enough to get good outputs out of your AI system. So then we have what we’re calling AI review and remediation. So maybe you’ve started using something like a Claude Code or a Lovable or a Replit, and you’re building enterprise applications using vibe coding techniques.

That’s awesome. That’s great. But there’s some things that you probably want to make sure are happening. You want to make sure it’s secure. You want to understand how to scale it. How do you provision it out to your users? How do you actually deploy it? Is the code good or is it bad or somewhere in between? So this is our development team coming in and auditing your code. So you build an app, but you want to make sure that it is working correctly, that it is set up in a secure way, that it can scale and that it’s not going to

Break when you know you onboard the next 10, 20, 30, 40 users, right? This comes up a lot. We see a lot of teams that are doing this. They’re building something that works really well as a demonstration or as a proof of concept, but then they’re unsure about how to bring that to production, or maybe they tried and it just didn’t work, right? So this is a great opportunity for us to bring our highly experienced developers in who understand both AI and how to build custom software and just make sure that what you have built is.

Going to scale and it’s going to be secure. And so we’ll come back with a set of recommendations based on that. And then finally, and this is key, and this is hands-on training and adoption. So this is role-based workshops where each person is taking their actual work and we are helping them understand how to elevate that using their own data, their own standard operating procedures, using a tool like Claude. And so it is truly, hey, let’s bring some actual things that you’re working on.

And let’s think through how to use Claude to help you and we’ll actually put hands on keyboard and walk you through how to

Eric Housh

So it sounds, Zach, like no matter where a business may be in their AI journey, we’ve got a service offering that can kind of help them elevate, help them get to the next level. John, let’s stay on that last piece just for a minute, the training piece. That’s curious to me. Why is that part of the offering?

John Burdett

Yeah, I was thinking about this, and AI is so powerful. It’s like onboarding an a thousand new employees tomorrow. even more than that. And not only that, they’re experts. I mean, they’re rock stars. And so no business, let’s just say you’re a hundred employees, would onboard a thousand new employees without planning for it, have structure in place and have that foundation in place on how to do it. But really, the technology is that powerful. And

If you don’t adopt it the right way, you don’t plan for it the right way, you don’t put the firm foundation in place, and you don’t hire experts like us to come alongside you to do it the right way, you’re probably going to implode your business and you’re going to create more chaos than less chaos. And frankly, we’re seeing a lot of that in the marketplace where they’re just turning it on and

It’s the Wild West and everything. So, you know, technology without adoption is just overhead. And we’ve seen it happen in

CRM implementations over and over and over again. The thing that’s different about this is it’s so easy to turn on. It’s so powerful that

it happens so quickly that you’re not gonna you’re you’re gonna see all the the downside very, very fast versus a longer CRM implementation where you have time to plan for it. So we want to build into that training and that adoption and structure that the right way so that you don’t implode and you adopt it the right way. And so these tools are very open-ended. You have to meet people where they are you have to show them what it means for their specific role and let them practice with their own work.

And that allows the change management and the behavior management to change at the right pace so that these things are developed. And at a leadership level, you want to make sure AI is used consistently within a safe environment.

Because it you need to professionalize AI across the organization. So once again, that you adopt it the right way and you get the results that you want. Because there’s a lot of power in this tool, and it can be very scary if you don’t think through it and adopt it the right way, just because of that power and how easy it is to use and adopt.

Eric Housh

John, let’s let’s make it easy for the listeners. I always say put the cookies on the bottom shelf. Like, who are we talking to here? Who is this actually for? And what problem does it solve for?

John Burdett

Yeah, it’s our what we call our ideal customer profile. It’s these growth businesses. It’s the people that want to get to the next level and they’re struggling getting there and they have a real business. So it’s typically you’re in the five to fifty million dollar range. Those are just proxies, but you’re growing. You’ve got customer, you know, market fit, you got product market fit, and you have real operational complexity.

multiple systems, real data, real teams. And you’ve probably experimented with it at some point or some form. Everybody has more than likely at this point. And so if you’re using Claude here and and you want to do more, but it’s disconnected. It doesn’t understand your business. It’s not adopted consistently. You frankly don’t understand how it works, but you know it’s powerful and you want to do it. And there’s that gap of okay, I see what’s possible.

And I need the help to get there to scale my business the right way. And I know that’s where it’s going. And I know my market’s going to be disrupted. I know my processes are going to be disrupted. We’re that, we’re that solution. We’re going to be your tour guide to take you on that journey. Make sure you do it the right way. Not make sure you don’t make all the same mistakes we have made over the months and years that we’ve been doing this and help you do it the right way to get the right outcomes that you want and expect.

Zack Terry

Yeah, and I would say we definitely see a common pattern across a lot of businesses that we work with where they’ve tried generative AI in some form and they’ve probably gotten something interesting. Or like I mentioned earlier, perhaps it’s a it’s a demo or a proof of concept, maybe it’s a one off use case, but they haven’t quite been able to get it to stick across the team or connect it to the right systems that actually run the business. And so I think it’s it’s really a kind of a gross plumbing problem.

Right. Like it’s it’s the infrastructure layer. You know, I kind of describe it to people as AI is really cool, but there’s an entire unsexy part of this, which is making sure that all that plumbing is connected correctly. Right. And all the plumbing is getting the data, the right data to the right place at the right time. Right. It’s all that context. And so really I think it’s generally the platform works great, but it’s all about making sure that you have connected it to something meaningful. It’s that missing context, and that’s that’s the piece we really want to be able to help.

Eric Housh

Stay on that context for a minute, Zach. The businesses that are getting this right out there right now, what do they have in place?

Zack Terry

So it’s nothing we haven’t talked about before. So this is going to resonate for anyone who’s listened to previous episodes of the podcast, but we’ll start with good data, right? I’ve said before it doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be perfectly clean, but it does need to be reliable and it does need to provide enough context to be useful. Then there’s defined workflows. I’ve described this as being able to articulate your business process. that process needs to be defined and documented. So if it’s stuck in someone’s head or it’s just, you know, always been done this way.

probably not good enough, right? There needs to be some work to extract the process and get it documented. And beyond just getting it documented, there are also some patterns that make that documentation most conducive for generative AI models to be able to work with it. And so there’s not just the aspect of extracting that information and writing it down, but it’s also making sure that you’re following practices that are going to allow generative AI models to work well with that information. And then I would say the third thing is just having

Leadership being willing to make a decision and lead by example. And so this really comes down to the whole adoption side of things. So the first two are very specific to the data and the process and how that AI is actually going to work. But then this last piece is, well, nobody’s going to use it if you are not leading by example, right? And so you have to be willing as a leader to move beyond experimentation and proofs of concept and make decisions about how this tool, how this technology can work within your business, and then

Do it in a way that actually is useful. Right. And so you have to be able to prove that, hey, this is how this works and this is why it is worth investing your time and learning how to use this. so short of that sort of leadership guidance and leading by example, it’s gonna be really hard to get people to adopt these tools in a way that’s gonna scale across the business.

John Burdett

Eric, I want to chime in here because I love the concept of what Zach said around focusing on the non-sexy stuff. That’s been our mantra from day one. We I’m a big American football fan, and we’re the offensive line. There’s nothing sexy about the offensive line, but those of you that understand the game understand that the quarterback and the running back and the wide receivers cannot do their job if the line is not blocking. And the line, it’s very technical, it’s very hard. They get no

Eric Housh

Yeah. Yeah.

John Burdett

recognition, but you are fully aware of them if they’re not doing their job. Because the quarterback’s running for their life, it’s chaos, and you’re definitely not going to win the football game there. So we want you to be the quarterback. We want you to be the hero. We want you to be the wide receiver. We want you to be the running back to scoring those touchdowns. And let us be that offensive line to handle all those dirty details that need to be taken care of so that you are able to run your business. You know your business better than anybody else.

But you don’t need to be focusing on the offensive line. You need to be focusing on that quarterback play, that wide receiver play, that running back play to score the maximum amount of touchdowns there. And so it’s really cool to kind of see the evolution of our company where that was one of our core principles and core kind of things we’ve always done from the very beginning. And now we got even more powerful technology to allow

our clients to score more touchdowns and to get more wins and to do more things and to recruit better talent and do all the things that are necessary to win in the marketplace while we focus on those non-sexy things.

Eric Housh

Yeah, I I love that angle on it. We’re the offensive line. That’s that’s very appropriate. Zach, somebody’s listening right now. Obviously, if they’re listening to this podcast, they’re curious about AI, they’re a business owner, they’re an operator, they’re someone that may be affiliated with operations in their business. what’s the move for

Zack Terry

Well, I’ll I’ll give you the classic consulting. It depends. So it’s gonna depend on where you’re where you’re at, right? So if you’re early, maybe you’re curious about it, but you haven’t really started yet. So you’ve heard enough about AI to know you should be paying attention, but maybe you’re not quite sure where it fits into your business, or maybe you don’t you don’t know what it would cost to do it right. that’s always a big question too. That’s a great opportunity to just have a conversation with us. We can help you figure out whether your foundation is even ready to start pursuing this.

what a practical first implementation might look like. You know, we’ll encourage you to start crawling before you can walk, before you can run. That is something that we have found to be a fantastic methodology for iterative development. And that definitely applies to something like AI. So in other words, if you’re just sort of approaching this but you haven’t done much yet, let’s have a discussion. We can sort of help you evaluate that and determine if this is something that you want to invest in so that you don’t spend money in the wrong direction. Now let’s say you’re somewhere in the middle. You’ve tried something, but maybe it hasn’t stuck.

Let’s say you’ve gotten Claude for the enterprise or another AI tool. Maybe it’s ChatGPT, maybe it’s Gemini, but nothing has really materially changed in how the business operates. It’s just a bunch of individuals kind of using it as a glorified search engine. But we can help evaluate your systems, right? Take a look at what you’re doing every day, your systems of record, those business processes, and determine sort of what’s going on and help you get the right context connected so that we can build something that actually provides value.

So again, that’s have a conversation. Let’s let’s discuss and figure out kind of what your business is doing and see what opportunities might be there and sort of present to you some options that we think would be worth pursuing. And then let’s say you’re a business that’s a lot farther along. You’ve built something with AI. Maybe you have a proof of concept or even a production application, but you’re just not sure if it’s built right. Maybe you’re unsure how to scale it.

Maybe a team member has spun up some kind of an AI workflow and it seems to work great, but we’re not really confident that it’s secure or scalable. That is exactly why we offer the AI remediation, the review of those applications to make sure that things are looking good. So that’s that’s where our experience development team can come in, look at what you’ve built, and just be really frank and honest and say, look, it’s doing this well. There’s a bunch of things we need to fix to make this secure, to make it scalable, to make sure it’s not going to break at volume, right?

And so that’s a really great way to get involved, to get a second set of eyes on something. And again, if you’re if you’re already building applications, I mean you’re you’re farther along than a lot of businesses, right? but we can really offer you some experienced development practices to come in and say, Hey, here’s some things that you need to consider from a security perspective. Here’s some things you need consider from a compliance perspective. And you know, when we’re building software, we want to make sure that’s gonna scale well.

So I would say if that’s you, have a conversation, we can we can have our developers come and take a look and make sure that you’re building things that are going to be secure and scalable. So wherever you are on that journey, it all kind of comes down to we would love to help. We’d love to have that conversation. And so you can visit fastslowmotion.com slash AI to start a conversation with us anytime.

Eric Housh

John, final thought. What’s at stake? Why does this matter for the businesses listening?

John Burdett

Yeah, the businesses that win with AI won’t be the ones that necessarily move first. They’ll be the ones that moved with intentionality. And so that means getting the foundation right, connecting AI to the systems that actually run the business, ensuring AI understands that business, and building something that scales.

So we started, once again, Fast Slow Motion over 12 years ago now to fulfill this mission. That hasn’t changed, but we’re just very excited about offering this new service line to our customers to meet them where they are with the technology that’s available today to get them to where they want to go so that they can move very quickly, but most importantly effectively and get the ROI that they deserve.

Eric Housh

Yeah, a lot of excitement about this new service offering here within FSM. Again, because we’ve seen how it’s transformed our own business in the last 18 months. So again, that URL, fastslowmotion.com slash AI, really quick way to get in touch with us. we’ll get you connected with our teams and have a conversation. Zach, bring us home.

Zack Terry

Well, I would say what’s been true at FSM since day one, and John mentioned this earlier, but I’ll repeat it again. We’ve always been in the business of solving business problems and not just implementing technology. And I’ve heard John deliver this line for years and years and years. And that is, hey, we are not just order takers, right? Like we are a group of people that happen to all be at this business, but we all have diverse business backgrounds. Several people have started businesses, several people have worked in technology for quite a long time.

And so if you’re looking for someone to just take orders, that’s not us. We’re here to truly listen and understand your business and truly be a valuable consultant, right? And so now when we talk about generative AI and all the things that are important, well, it’s those business fundamentals, right? And so when you’re looking for a consulting partner, I think a consultant that is able to understand business processes and consult from a business perspective is going to be more valuable than an order taker. And that is something that

we really pride ourselves on. And so we’re ready to help build that foundation into something that can provide some really quick time to value.

Eric Housh

Well said. John, Zach, thanks for joining us. Everyone, thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next time on AI in Action.