Welcome back to AI in action. I’m Eric Hirsch with fast Slow Motion joined as always by Zach Terry, FSM director of AI. Zach, how are you doing today? You know, it’s been a busy week and I so I’m doing really good. Got a lot of thoughts swirling around but yeah, doing great. Good to be here. Yeah, we’ve definitely got a lot to talk about.

We’ve also got a special guest today, FSM founder and CEO John Burnett. John’s going to help us break down one of the most important conversations in AI right now. And that is AI readiness. How to make sure your business is making the moves to thrive in the age of AI. So today we’re kicking off part one of an actual four part series, will be unpacking over the next several weeks.

And we’re going to start with strategy. Welcome, John. Thanks, Eric. So glad to be here. Zach. It’s honor to work alongside you. And so maybe contribute a little bit here, but I’m excited to hear what you have to say and, learn from you. We’ve been kicking off every episode talking about what’s new this week has been no exception.

Lots of just groundbreaking news, probably at the top of the list this drop. Last night, OpenAI officially released GPT five, and they made it available to everybody that has a GPT account. Zach, what’s up with that? Yeah, well, we could just say this this week in AI news, every week is a lot of news. But this week was an exceptional amount of news coming out.

OpenAI I mean, there’s at least three different things to talk about with OpenAI. And so far GPT five is definitely the biggest. It launched yesterday. You know, today is Friday August 8th so launched yesterday on the seventh. And it’s their latest frontier model. It’s really it’s better. It’s faster. It does some things like intelligently switching you to the correct version of the model.

So, you know, if you wanted to use a model for deep thinking or reasoning versus something for a quick answer. Now instead of you having to go in and like specify which one you want to use, it’s going to automatically switch. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. I think if you’re, you know, really wanting to fine tune those responses, you might miss that capability.

But I think for a lot of users, it’s a little bit more intuitive to not have to understand what each of those different models is best for. So that’s kind of a nice option that they’ve they’ve added to the system. It is generally faster. And so I just got access to it last night. So I haven’t spent a ton of time on it.

But at least anecdotally, it does seem to perform quite a good bit faster. Does a really good job with some coding tasks. Overall I think it’s really exciting. It’s it’s available to everyone. So of course there’s limiting, right? You can’t just get on the free tier and start using it forever, but you can get in there and start messing with GPT five today.

It’s it’s been rolling out across, you know, all of the different tiers. And so yeah, really great opportunity for for anyone who’s been working with ChatGPT or if you have yet to dip your toes into ChatGPT, a great opportunity to work with the latest model without having to get on a subscription. So yeah, frequency of new models keeps coming out.

And, you know, Ethan Malik, who’s kind of one of my favorite guys in the the AI space right now, he put out a whole review of GPT five yesterday. And the headline is it just does things. So it makes a lot of inferences and just kind of, you know, figures out what you’re asking and can do it.

Is it perfect? No. Does it still hallucinate? Yes. Does it hallucinate less than it did before? Also, yes. So, you know, making more improvements over time as these models, you know, get better and hallucinate less. So I’m excited to see where it goes. I, I’m thinking about paying for it myself now, you know, getting back on that pro tier, I tend to kind of go back and forth and, you know, switch between models.

But yeah, now, now I’m excited to get started. But where is the loyalties at cover man you got to go all in on okay OpenAI leading the the AI arms race. It feels like right now announcing an 8.3 billion with a B dollars raise at a 300 billion valuation. That’s crazy man. Yeah. The money is really just flowing into AI.

We know that as we see it every day. There’s a there’s a New Deal acquisition every day. It’s unusual if there’s even just one right for a single day. So there’s a ton going on. And just for some context, open AI is ten years old. So it started back in 2015. It’s actually less than ten years old technically.

So it started at the end of 2015. For comparison, it took Amazon 16 years to get to just $100 billion. Just $100 billion, right? 16 years took Microsoft 20 years. So we’re talking OpenAI at a $300 billion valuation in ten years. Less than ten years. I mean, the the scale of this race in AI is is kind of unprecedented.

It really is just wild to see how much money is flowing into this and how quickly these companies are reaching these valuations. Another breakthrough this week, OpenAI released their first open weight model since GPT two several years ago. What’s the benefit of an open weight model and unpack that a little bit for us? Yeah, this is kind of more of a a direction back into open source.

So OpenAI, I mean, the the name of the company, OpenAI, kind of implies that they value open source. And for a long time they did. And then they kind of went back into these models that were no longer open source, no longer open way. And so now we’re seeing a release, another open weight model for the first time in about six years.

And really, the benefit of these models is they run locally, they can be run offline. You have to have a powerful machine to run them because, the numbers on these two models, there’s one is called GPT OSS, and there’s a 20 B and 120 B in those represent the number of parameters. So if you’re on, let’s say a newer Mac, maybe an M4 processor, you could run the 20 B model.

I can’t run it. I don’t have a powerful enough Mac. If you want to run the 120 B model, you’re going to have to have probably some additional processing power just to be able to run that locally on your machine, but that means you’re not reliant on online. You can run it behind a firewall if you have some, compliance type of requirements where you’re not allowed to, you know, do the online models use the the API or anything like that?

So, yeah, I think it’s a really good step in this direction for OpenAI to to go back to open source and some of these open weight models. I’ve seen some mixed reporting on it, some people saying it’s a little bit overhyped and underwhelming, but, you know, you have to think about it’s essentially like, oh, three, some of the older models that they have, which are not that old, maybe a year or two old.

So is performing in that way. It’s certainly not performing as well as, you know, for or certainly not GPT five. Right. But it’s the ability to have that on your machine and not have to rely on an internet connection and not have to risk any of the communication that you might have going out to those other servers over an API.

Yeah. I read, Dharmesh, his newsletter, the day after this came out. He loaded it on his MacBook Pro. He was testing the limits of it at John. We we got to get Zack a better machine and. Come on, he can’t even run open source. Alas. All right, let’s talk about the government. We’re talking strategy today. The government is now thinking about strategy two.

They’ve announced, their AI action plan. On top of that, there’s a lot going on with this AI action plan. I’ll just cover the basics, but you can, of course, go find this and pull down the entire plan. It’s all on the the white House website, all that good stuff, but it really addresses things like the overall innovation in AI, safety and AI, ethical considerations around AI deployment, and getting AI into the hands of citizens.

The highlights here are really a very big focus on deregulation. So, really making it possible for companies to innovate at a very rapid pace. There’s a big focus on infrastructure investment. And so that would be putting the resources and the capital in place for things like data centers and advancements in chips and things like that, to make sure that we’re able to support the continuing AI boom into the future.

There’s a goal to export American AI globally. And so, you know, you think about kind of the leaders in the AI space. Most of these frontier models are based in the United States. And so the idea is how can we continue to export all of this globally? We want to be the leader in AI development and AI deployment sort of across the globe.

Right? So there’s a big focus there. And throughout it, it’s really claiming kind of a human first approach. And so the goal, I think, with the government’s influence here is to approach it from a standpoint of let’s let businesses build, but we want to focus on keeping this human first. So we want to make sure that, we’re not doing things at the expense of humanity.

So anyway, I would say go read it, draw your own conclusions. You’ll see those themes kind of throughout it. But the main thing is, how can we position the United States as the global leader in AI, continue to lead as far as developing these tools and deploying these tools and exporting that across the globe? Yeah, really, everyone should go read it, see what the government’s doing to support it.

We’ll link that report down in the show notes, that that resource down there so people can take a look.

All right, let’s get into our four part series on eye readiness, starting with what we think is the foundation of it all. And that’s strategy. John, you’ve been leading the charge internally on how fast slow motion prepares for and embraces AI. From a founder’s perspective, from a strategic standpoint, what have we done at FSM to start integrating AI into the business?

And what are some of the behind the scenes moves that have helped us get traction? Yeah, I think this is super important. I think it’s a lot of times we get it and just doing and using and reacting and all those types of things. And I think as a leader of an organization and today’s world, with AI becoming more and more pervasive, you need to have a clear strategy.

And a plan doesn’t mean you have all the answers. It doesn’t mean you know what to do necessarily, but you need to start with defining success, and that will give you the path you need to know whether you’re winning or losing, whether this is working or not. It gives you the freedom to say no. So you say yes to the right things and know the wrong things.

So from our perspective, we’re looking to implement and use AI to take advantage of a lot of short term AI opportunities that exist. We are in a special place where not only are we using AI internally, but we’re helping our clients use AI, and there is a tremendous amount of opportunities around AI for us to add value to our clients.

So we want to be positioned well enough to take advantage of that and help our clients adopt and use AI well. I want to also position FSM to be able to take advantage of whatever opportunities exist in the next 24 to 36 months. All I know is AI is going to be pervasive in all businesses. I have no idea what that means or looks like, but I want to upskill our company.

I want to position our company to be able to take advantage of what the new world is going to look like when it exists. And then finally, the third success factor for me as CEO is I want to elevate our team members to be extremely valuable and extremely marketable in the new world. That will exist with AI, because I will replace jobs, but it also create a lot of new jobs.

And so I want to make sure our team members are positioned to add value no matter what those new jobs are. And they’re not in a place where what they used to do on a day to day basis is no longer needed because AI is doing it. And so those are our three success factors. So I think any CEO or any business leader, first and foremost, when they’re creating a strategy around AI, they need to define what success looks like.

And then a real strategy is nothing more than creating clarity and intentionality for your business. Once again, it’s not about necessarily being right, it’s what you think the plan should be and sticking to that plan so that you do things with intentionality. You can clearly communicate that to your team, and everybody is moving in the same direction. And if you end up going in the wrong direction, you can move the company together and not kind of be all over the place.

So I really encourage our team is to take an AI first mentality. So what does that mean? That means to me is like every time we’re encountering challenges and opportunities, our processes need to be improved. We’re hitting stretching points around capabilities. We need to look at it not from okay, we need to add people. We need to adopt or adapt our processes to do things differently.

We need to think about, okay, how can we use AI to start solving these problems? And we may end up needing to add people or whatever, but we need to have that AI first mentality, because AI is going to be pervasive in all business processes and business models in the future, and we need to start doing that right away.

The other thing I’m doing, which I think is extremely important, is creating a strong sense of urgency around AI. AI is nothing more than technology and tools. The big differentiator, the big difference between previous innovations and technology, information evolutions, revolutions, whatever you want to call them, is the speed at which it’s happening. Zach and and you talk about this all the time.

Things are changing very, very fast. And we have a saying here and I don’t know who coined it, but this is the worst it’s ever going to be. And it’s already remarkable about how well this technology already works. But it’s changing literally in days and weeks and months versus years and decades. And you need to get on the train now because you’re going to be left behind.

If you can’t create a sense of urgency around this because the technology is adapting so fast and it’s so powerful, another thing that we do and have done is dedicate team members and align leadership and that and the team with that leadership around pioneering and innovating around AI. So for instance, like Zach is our director of AI, our CTO, Chad Seals is taking point on all AI initiatives internally to make sure we’re doing things the right way, considering the right architecture, running some of these skunkworks projects, that kind of stuff, so it doesn’t distract the core business is going on.

But we have very senior leadership who’s owning this and is accountable to it, and implementing that AI first mentality, and then rolling it out to the organization in a very systematic and process driven approach. So that’s very intentional. And we’re not just jerking the steering wheel when a new model comes out or new technology comes out. No, this is the plan.

This is the way we’re going to do it as we evaluate the different opportunities that exist around here, so that clear ownership and defining clear use cases is super important. As you start rolling out your strategy to hit those success markers that you’ve put in place. And then I would say also to is you got to stay focused.

Like I said before, the headlines are changing every hour. Seems like now Zach went into all the news. It’s just remarkable. It’s all coming out. You can’t just like, oh, we’re using cloud one day, we’re using ChatGPT, one day we’re using Gemini. One day we’re using copilot, one day. No, you need to kind of stick with the plan.

You need to evaluate all the different models and all the different technologies out there. But don’t start announcing to the team, hey, on Monday we’re doing this, and then on Tuesday we’re doing something else. It’ll drive the team crazy. You’ll never get anywhere. And you’re not creating clarity. You’re creating chaos. So it’s okay to do that in your skunkworks projects as you’re evaluating different things.

But as you roll things out, you need a lot of consistency and clarity. And then one thing I often like to think about is like you need to play offense and defense. If your strategy is to sit back and to see what happens, you’re going to be back on your toes and I’m back on your heels and not be able to respond to what’s going on, and you’re going to be reacting to the environment instead of taking advantage of being a thought leader in kind of the forefront of your industry, which is, I think, extremely important right now, because the reality is there are companies starting today in your space that will be competitors that

have a huge advantage. They can build everything with AI first. They don’t have all the people and the processes and the sunk cost and all all the things that you have. And because they can fail fast and they can move fast and be very nimble, you need to focus on disrupting yourself instead of being disrupted by by somebody else.

And I would say with that, you need to look at it as a fully integrated approach. It’s not just one part of your business. It’s all parts of your business that need to be leveraging AI. And then, you know, just focus on those those those use cases and start rolling them out iteratively, to get to where you want to go and what you’ll find, especially because of the way the technology is working, you’re going to see exponential improvements as you iterate and roll this out for your organization.

So finally, we’re we’re heavily investing in AI because we’re convinced it’s going to be pervasive. And we want to be at the forefront of that. We want to disrupt ourselves. We want to play offense instead of, defense. So we’re investing heavily in education and trying things out and, upskilling our team members to use it and making them aware and telling them the truth about, hey, I know you may enjoy doing these kinds of things, but the reality is AI is going to do it and do it better than you.

And if you don’t upskill yourself and take advantage of the new opportunities exist, you’re going to be left behind to. And that would be horrible for team members, especially at fast. So motion from my perspective, to kind of be left behind because they ignored it, they put their head in the sand and didn’t pay attention to what was happening in the, in the marketplace.

It’s like you’ve been helping our clients bring these strategies to life on a day to day basis. Tell us what we’re doing and what does that look like? Hey, we’ve been doing a lot of work with, of course, Agent Force and the tools that HubSpot has to offer. And sometimes it’s directly, hey, how can we leverage something like Agent Force within your business?

But other times it’s more generic. It’s just, hey, have you thought about AI at your company? Do you have a strategy? What do you think about it? Right? Where have you been using this in your day to day? Where have your employees been using it in their day to day? Because I guarantee you, people are already doing it, even if you don’t have a strategy behind it.

Right? People are using these tools. So that’s kind of just at the highest level. Let’s talk about some problems that we can use AI to help solve. And one way I like to think about it. Yeah, there’s there’s the efficiency argument. Where can you plug AI in to do something more efficiently. But really the way I like to approach it is what are some things you hate doing in your day to day job that I could offload so that you don’t have to focus on doing that task?

So I’ll give you an example. Something we did yesterday. So I was working with Michael Johnson, who’s our director of growth. He does a lot of outbound sort of prospecting and gathering and cultivating relationships and working with either current customers or potential clients, people that are interested in exploring these ideas. And we’re really trying to come up with, hey, how do we how do we leverage AI more in that process?

Right. Well, typically, if I was going to go and evaluate that myself, I’d have to go and do a bunch of research on all the tools that are available and where different tools can plug into different parts of our process and our workflow. Instead, I just went to Gemini and I said, hey, listen, this is this is what we’re trying to solve for.

This is where we’re at today. These are the goals that we want to hit. I need you to go and analyze all of the tools that are available on the market today. We’re looking at AI, power tools. We’re looking at things that can plug into this process and not just evaluate the tools, but also think about where they fit into this workflow.

Come up with a recommendation of which tools we should use at different price points and for different processes within that workflow and give us recommendations. Right. And so it did that. It goes out, it finds all that information. It gives us recommendations. And these are some tools you can consider. And this is why you would pick tool A over tool B and the pros and cons associated with it.

But then you can take that a step further. Great. I’ve got a 35 page research report. What do I really want to spend a whole lot of time digging into that. You can but you can also say, hey, great, let’s take all the information that you just generated and let’s create something that is very visually easy to digest.

So then I said, all right, let’s go and create process diagrams and workflows and recommendations around these tools. Let’s create an ROI calculator around, hey, when does it make sense for us to invest in at what level in each of these tools? And it is a matter of minutes. I have a piece of code, just HTML, that I can stick on a web page and distribute and say, hey Michael, check this out.

Go check out these tools. This is what we’ve identified and you’re talking something that would have taken days to do that is there’s 30 minutes from beginning to end and it’s it’s good, it’s accurate. It’s pulling in good information. Currently available tools in the market. And so that’s something that I personally I don’t love spending my time just spending a bunch of time researching tools.

Right. So let’s let I go off load and do that. And then we are able to work from that information and iterate on it much more quickly, because instead of me taking three days of my work week, working through all of that, I’m spending 30 minutes and most of that time is just spent waiting on the prompt to finish.

And I’m working on other things. Right. So a great example of just, hey, use AI to do the things that you don’t want to do are things that take up a lot of time. So that’s sort of the approach that, that I really like looking at. And that’s a really great way to identify use cases in your business is just think about the things that that you don’t enjoy doing.

Another piece there is it’s always important to keep that human in the loop. You know, as good as these tools are, you know, we mentioned the whole AI today is the worst that it’s ever going to be. There’s a really great anecdote that I saw on I think it was on Instagram earlier this week where, you know, two years ago, you type into one of these AI tools.

I need you to create a Hello World app for me. And it does it. And it’s like, wow, that’s amazing. And now you can say, hey, I need you to create the whole front end of Netflix for me, which like, is it going to do that? No it’s not, but but I mean you can you could do some pretty incredible things like that.

It could generate entire front end and websites and you know, yes, it’s not perfect. And you’re probably going to need a developer to actually do anything. But the fact that you can prototype that so quickly is just remarkable. Right? But you still need that human in the loop. You still need to evaluate the quality of it. You still need to understand what, pitfalls there may be.

And it’s not limited to code. It can be really anything you’re generating, right. So if I generate that research report, I need to actually understand and look through the sources and make sure it’s calling real tools. And it’s not hallucinating some made up tool that doesn’t exist on the market. So keeping a human in the loop, having an expert is still extremely important.

And that’s where I think we’ll see some of these new roles develop in terms of, how I will affect jobs. It’s going to change how we do work. Right. And it already is. My workflow today is completely different than it was a year ago, because I’m using AI to help do the things that I need to do day to day.

So yeah, I think it’s it’s also about the business value lens. That same example is, look, we’ve got a budget. We need to understand if this investment at this budget level is going to produce that ROI. And so let’s do some analysis on, well, how many leads do we need to get and how many of those do we need to move into the pipeline in order for this to start making sense?

Right. So should I make this investment decision based on the numbers that we think we could start generating? So really looking at the ROI lens, does it make sense for us to invest in these tools? Some of them are expensive. Some of them are not. But making sure that you’re looking at it through that ultimate value goal as opposed to just getting AI for the sake of getting AI.

There is some value in that, just to be familiar with it and understand how these tools work. But when you’re evaluating a solution that uses AI for a business process, ultimately you’ve got to tie value to it. So you have to understand, well, what is the outcome I’m trying to achieve, how will I help us achieve that outcome?

And ultimately, do the numbers make sense? So beyond that, it’s also about building for scale. So making sure that whatever AI tools you’re going to be implementing or the work that the AI is actually putting out can scale and it can grow with you. So that’s another thing to consider. And then there’s just, of course training your people on how to use these tools.

And John talked a lot about that. But it’s, it’s hey, what do we do as an organization? How do we approach it? What sort of compliance rules do we have? What tools are you allowed to use? What’s acceptable use? What’s not acceptable use having a really clear understanding of what that is. And that is also not something that you create today and you don’t touch that changes every day.

And more than I think any other parts of a business, this sort of AI strategy side of things is liable to change much more often. And so this may be one of those things that you have to maintain more than other parts of the business, just due to the sheer velocity of what is being put out on a day to day basis.

Yeah, we talk about that every week. Just the pace of change in AI. So definitely not something that businesses can set and forget. Always, you know, having somebody, you know, like kind of like we do it with single threaded ownership, that that can really own, the deployment of AI and the management of it within the business.

Zach, you brought up a couple good points that I’d like to highlight. One is part of your strategy is being super clear on what tools your team can use and the data privacy around how you leverage data in AI.

And I think that’s a that’s a point that a lot of people are kind of ignoring. But you need to be especially like in our world, there’s a lot of worlds, especially regulated environments like health care and financial services, wearing, consulting. So we’re seeing and having access to a lot of protected data. And we’re signing India’s and we are under confidentiality agreements.

We got to be super careful how we leverage large language models to use that data. And so, so much of like what we’re doing from a strategy perspective is putting guardrails in place to protect our team, to say, you can use these tools, you can’t use these tools. Now, the teams that are exploring options, they have a little more liberty because they need to figure out what what is good, what’s not.

How does the data security work well, how does privacy work. And then we’ll roll that out consistently. But if you don’t have I mean like today, you need to put that in place for your company. Otherwise people like Zach said they’re using AI and they’re going to be all over the place and you’re going to wake up one day and somebody shared a customer list or some privacy information with the whole world accidentally, and it’s going to be showing up on a Google search.

And that’s not going to be a good day for you. And so you need to make sure you put those guardrails in place to kind of protect you and the team, to make sure you use AI wisely. And, Zach, another another thing I was thinking about when you’re using the Hello World example, I saw the news release from Google, I believe it was, this week as well.

We didn’t talk about it, but now they have the ability to create virtual worlds automatically with an AI so that they, you know, like robots and all these different kind of scenarios. You can go out and train the robots and things of that nature to work inside of a virtual warehouse before they actually roll it out to the real warehouse and stuff like that.

So not only are I, you know, creating Hello World long time ago, they’re actually creating real worlds that are training grounds to develop, processes, systems, rules and things in place before, technology is rolled out to the real world. So I thought that was a kind of a neat, full circle in the the world creation scenario.

Yeah. That tool is absolutely wild. I mean, if you think about video games, right, like a few years ago, somebody put out a video game that was a whole procedurally generated world, right? So everyone’s experience with that game is completely different, which is a crazy concept because typically it’s a code base and you get the same world, and that’s how it works, right?

Well, they generated this whole thing that’s absolutely, completely different for every player, right? Every world you go into is generated on the engine. Right. Well, that’s what I think about with this world building capability that that Google’s come out with is you can go in there and have it create these sort of simulated environments for you. Right. I think that the possibilities for what we could do with that, but we don’t even really know yet.

Right? It’s an incredible feat to be able to look at and say, hey, we can do this, but I think we’re going to see some some pretty cool applications of this technology over time. And then again, it’s the the very beginning of it. This is kind of the first tool that really does this in that way. So I imagine that we’re going to see some some pretty interesting applications in the future.

John, let’s shift gears for a minute and do a little mental exercise. If you had to start fast, slow motion today started from scratch. Knowing what you know about AI and how it’s disruptive and change in the game, what would you do differently? Yeah, I think this is a great question that all business leaders should ask themselves because the reality is, as I mentioned before, there’s businesses starting today that is going to be your competition in the future, that is starting on a foundation that is way better than when you started your company.

Now you have huge competitive advantages, but they also just don’t have all the baggage, so to speak, of that you’ve developed over as you’ve built your company. And so I think explore the idea of like, if I was to start my company from scratch all over again, given today’s world, what would I do differently? And I personally would like for our company would do everything with AI from day one.

So I would have that AI first mentality of like, how do I leverage AI for my delivery methodology, my sales methodology, my marketing methodology, my hiring methodology, and then implement those processes in AI and then hire and develop people to live on top of that so that they can do more and and do more honestly impactful work instead of the rote work that, you know, you had to do when when we were starting the company from scratch in the early days.

And so that’s a you know, it’s a strong message to like, just realize that there’s going to be companies that’s going to disrupt your business and they’re going to do it fairly quickly, and you can choose to be disruptive or you can do the disrupting yourself, similar to how Netflix did and with the DVDs, and then go into streaming before streaming was even really kind of known at that time.

And so it’s a really important mental exercise, and I think it’s a good foundation to start. If you don’t know where to start, just start there and it shouldn’t be scary. It should be exciting. Because you have a huge competitive advantage right now over those start ups, and you have the opportunity to leverage these tools just as well as they do.

But you can also do it in a, you know, kind of a protected environment. So one thing that we’re doing, and I alluded to it earlier too, is we do project based consulting work. And so we’re we’re we’re very careful not to mess up what we’re doing today because what we do works today. And you know, we’re very good at it.

We’re very successful at it. And frankly, it’s not broken, but it will be broken, very soon when AI is a lot more pervasive and doing a lot of the road task and all that kind of stuff. So we want to disrupt ourselves. So what we’re doing is saying, okay, we’re going to implement this project like we normally would.

We’ll spin up a skunkworks team that doesn’t interfere with the current project, but would take that AI first mentality to see what’s possible. And what we’re finding is a lot is possible, and it’s very, very remarkable how much we can get done with AI much faster, much more efficiently. And, and honestly, it creates a nice little arbitrage scenario in the short term for you because the market hasn’t adapted yet to the new cost structures and things like that.

So you can still charge whatever you’re charging today, even perhaps a little bit more, because you can do it faster for your cost structure to implement and do whatever you do goes down a lot with AI, because you’re not spending as many man hours on that work, and it creates a nice little short term, you know, arbitrage scenario for you.

But if if you don’t start doing that now, you’re going to be left behind is the reality of it all. And so I would encourage everybody to have a, you know, like an excited, positive attitude around, we’ve got a really unique, awesome opportunity about what’s about to happen in the future. And we can take advantage of that by just like thinking differently and having a different mindset, along the way.

And, so that’s what we’re kind of thinking about. And that’s kind of the mindset that I’ve had is like, okay, I was just to start completely over what would I do differently? And frankly, we’re 11.5 years old. I think the older you are, the greater the gap there is. There’s a lot we would do differently because the world is drastically different 11 a half years later that, you know, than when I started the company.

I love that you mentioned Netflix. Basically what I’m taking away is don’t be blockbuster. Yeah. Because if you look at that whole idea, right, it’s like in the moment, blockbuster probably didn’t really understand the magnitude of what was going on. Right. And why would they? It’s an earlier internet. It’s totally different. They’re a long winning incumbent with a certain business model.

And then ultimately technology and a process built on that technology completely disrupted them. Right. So I think if you’re if you’re looking around and you’re saying, well, how do I know when that type of moment happens? Well, you don’t, but you can kind of sense it. Right. And so you can choose to hedge against it, or you can dig your head in the sand.

And if you dig your head in the sand, like maybe you pull it out later on and everything’s the same and you’re still there, but that’s probably not the case, right? So don’t be. Blockbuster is what I’m taking away. Yeah. Is that, you can’t stop progress. There’s. And there’s no such thing as an AI proof business, right?

Everybody’s going to have to deal with AI. Everybody’s going to have to address it. So, John, John, knowing that there’s no such thing as an AI proof business disruption is going to happen, what advice would you have? For folks kind of thinking about that? Yeah. The reality that the reality of this, the world right now is we’re all going to be blockbusters unless we change.

And that’s my prediction. And I’m 100% right on it. I can’t tell you what the new world is going to look like, but I guarantee you every business is going to be affected by and it’s going to be as pervasive, if not more pervasive than smartphones, laptops, the internet, that kind of stuff. Grandma, you know, can use the iPhone just as well as anybody in the world.

She’s going to be using AI just as well as anybody in the world in the next 2 to 3 years, just because it’s just going to be everywhere. And as we talked about earlier, right now is the worst it’s ever going to be. So there’s tremendous opportunities to take advantage of that. I don’t think it’s wise to kind of think through the thoughts of like, what is that world’s going to look like?

Because I don’t think I don’t think that’s healthy. I don’t think any of us really know. We just know it’s going to change and be different. And in my opinion, and I’m pretty sure I’m right about this, I think it affects all businesses. So you may say, hey, I have a, you know, a lawn care business, right? It ain’t gonna touch my business is going to touch your business.

Let’s start with the back end. Right. The things that we do around scheduling appointments, finding new customers, doing accounting, hiring talent, managing talent, managing schedules. All AI is going to be very, very good at that. But as we talked about earlier, you can create a virtual world and test out your robotic, lawn mowers that don’t even need humans, very cheaply.

And do those kinds of things. So who knows what’s going to exist in the next 3 to 5 years. And I have no idea what that timeline is, but I guarantee you it’s going to affect your business. And we’re in a unique time in the world where we get the opportunity to control how we’re going to be able to compete in that new world.

So I always just tell people, control what you can control. Like you can’t predict what the world is going to be like. But if you pretend like it’s not going to help it affect your business, you’re 100% wrong. And to me, it’s very exciting too, because, you know, I don’t know about you, but there’s there’s a lot of things I don’t enjoy doing, and I’m glad to outsource to other people.

And I’m going to be glad to outsource to, to to AI and not have to worry about and do those kinds of things. And that list is really, really long. And so the law of comparative advantage applies here, just like it does, and always has since Adam Smith came up with it, you know, hundreds of years ago.

It’s just on steroids now. And we have other tools and technologies that can really elevate humans to do more impactful work. As they do that. And so I encourage you to build margin now and, and flexibility now so that you can take advantage of those opportunities. So start investing in it now. Start using it now. Be the thought leader.

Be the Netflix, not the blockbuster. And position yourself for whatever this new world looks like. And is it just a reminder? I think the most dangerous move is doing nothing if you’re ignoring it, scared of it, all those kinds of things, you’re not stopping any of that. And you can’t. You can’t control any of that. So you better get on board.

Are you going to be left behind? Yeah. And just stay there for a second, John. For that CEO that hasn’t thought about it yet. That hasn’t started yet. What’s your message to them. Yeah. Well I if I haven’t created a sense of urgency for you yet. I’m not doing my job. But I think you’ve got to create a sense of urgency around AI.

You got to face the facts. And you got to tell the truth. Like, tell the truth to your team. You saw this in the world, with the fortune 500 companies. Early on, they were like, oh, it’s not going to replace jobs, you know? And they’re kind of dancing around all this stuff, and then suddenly all of them are coming out.

It’s definitely going to replace jobs. AI will replace jobs. It is replacing jobs exactly right now, but it’s also creating a lot of new jobs and a lot of new opportunities. Just like any the industrial revolution. Did. You know, just like the Information Age did? It creates a lot of new jobs that we don’t even know what they’re going to be, there.

So, you know, if you remember Andy Grove’s book Only the Paranoid Survive, I had a friend of mine recommend that to me. Again, I reread it. It’s ironic in a lot of ways, because Nvidia totally did what Andy was telling Intel to be wary of. Which is kind of ironic when you read it because he wrote it in the 90s.

So it’s a fun read from that perspective. But, you know, he talks about all these things about as these technology changes in these things innovate, you have to be paranoid about it. You have to think about it. You have to address it. And that doesn’t mean scared. It just means I have a sense of urgency around it.

I know the world is changing and I’m going to play offense instead of defense, and I’m going to be excited about it. I don’t want my team to be scared about it. I’m on their side. I’m trying to create jobs and roles is going to be marketable for them no matter what the new world looks like. But I am not going to be a CEO that keeps my team static, and they’re basically replaceable by I because I didn’t do my job and I wasn’t a good steward of of of being the leader of this company.

And so once again, our goal is to long term position ourselves to take advantage of whatever opportunities take place, while in the short term, take advantage of these arbitrage scenarios that exist where we can charge the same amount of rate and our cost structure is way down because we can do it faster, more efficient, and honestly take on more work and do more things with less, which is it’s a fun time to kind of take advantage of those opportunities before the market catches up and starts pricing in that efficiency that AI brings to the marketplace.

John, Zach, thanks so much. Wonderful conversation today. For our listeners to help them take the first step, we’ve put together a resource, just for this episode. You can get it in the show notes. It’s called 50 Ways to Apply AI in Your Business. Get that from the show notes. Start mapping out your strategy. And if you’re serious about this, really want to get AI right in your business.

From building internal alignment to actually implementing solutions that move the needle. We’ve done this. We’ve done this for dozens of companies. So far. We would love to help you head over to Fast emotion.com/ai and connect with our team.

Yeah.