#Clockedin with Jordan Edwards

#202 - AI in Action: Boosting Efficiency and Productivity

• Jordan Edwards • Season 5 • Episode 202

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What if your business could harness the full potential of AI to stay ahead of the curve and avoid obsolescence? Join us for an enlightening conversation with John Munsell, co-founder of Bizzuka, as we discuss the explosive growth and future potential of artificial intelligence. John shares his fascinating journey from the financial sector to web development during the internet boom, ultimately leading him to the transformative world of AI. Learn why embracing AI technologies is imperative for modern businesses and gain insights from John's experiences with technological innovation, including the pivotal moments that shaped his career.

Travel through the evolution of technology with us, from the days of direct mail marketing in the late '80s to the revolutionary advent of the web in 1997. John discusses the creation of Bizzuka and how it enabled real-time marketing experiments, highlighting significant technological leaps that have shaped the digital landscape. Discover how AI is now streamlining processes like podcast production and why it's essential for everyone to experiment with emerging technologies to stay relevant. With personal anecdotes and expert insights, John underscores the importance of staying ahead of the tech curve.

In the final chapters, we explore how AI can revolutionize business efficiency and employee productivity. John delves into the strategic benefits of utilizing AI to compress time, accelerate revenue growth, and transform employees into high performers. Learn about the importance of prompt engineering, scalable AI practices, and embedding an AI-first culture within your organization. With practical examples and a special offer for his upcoming book "INGRAIN," John equips listeners with the tools and knowledge to integrate AI seamlessly into their operations and thrive in the competitive business landscape. Don’t miss this compelling conversation that highlights the necessity of adapting to new technologies for lasting success.

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Speaker 1:

Hey, what's going on, guys? We've got a special guest here today. We have John Munsell. He's a co-founder of Bazooka, an AI consulting firm focused on artificial intelligence strategy and implementation. John, what is all the hype around AI? Is this stuff even like? Are they taking over the world? Are robots coming? Should I be scared? What's going on?

Speaker 2:

The end is near Jordan. No man, hey look, I appreciate you having me on the show. I love your work, I love what you're doing. I loved our pregame call. So I love the fact that you're in Tampa, where I spent 16 years, so this is going to be a lot of fun. But, yeah, so AI is to me, it's the next frontier. I think everybody recognizes that. I was in it when the web came out, right. I was in financial services for 16 years and when the web came out, I was like, wow, this is where the world's going. So I quit what I was doing and started a new company focused on web development, software development, all that stuff. We gradually became a digital marketing agency and I sold that off two and a half years ago because I could see that AI was the next frontier. But it was moving way faster than the web and was going to change things, and so Than the website.

Speaker 1:

Than the website, portion I'm sorry, and so then the website. I'm sorry you're saying faster than the website portion, because I feel like most people weren't even trying to get emails or like receptive to any of that.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, look, I was working for Northwestern Mutual Life when email really started to come out and I kept having. I would do speaking gigs for our regional office and I would tell people look, if you don't get an email address soon, you're going to be wishing you did, but you need to get one. And I'm like I don't know. And then all of a sudden they're like, oh crap, I need to get an email address. I'm like John, how do I get an email address? And then, when the web was coming out, I was like, dude, this is where everything is going. Commerce is going to go there. There's going to be massive disruption in every industry, and so that's when I quit and started this company.

Speaker 2:

But the web took off and it was moving really, really fast. But AI is moving an order of magnitude faster. And so that's why I sold off the web design company and the digital marketing agency two and a half years ago, because I thought you know what, if people don't hurry up, this isn't going to be one of those things where oh, you know, you may have missed a little wind in the sails. This is one of those things. If you don't figure it out now, you're going to be unemployed, you're going to be dusted. There are so many businesses that are going to go extinct if they don't figure this out fast, and I know that sounds dramatic, but it's so true of the stuff that it will do. Just the stuff that was basically launched in the last two weeks just is making my head explode. It's insane. And then if you start to do the math on what's going on, then you can figure out just how incredibly disruptive this is going to be. You got to figure it out quick, is all I'm saying. Absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

But saying absolutely, absolutely. But let's back up a little bit. So you're starting to see the leading indicators on email and web and all of that. And what caused you to realize that this was a big thing? Because every time I talk to people they're like, yeah, sometimes it's here, then it's there and it's like how did that even happen? Now is it that it's coming along periodically, because obviously there was the webcom boom and there was all of that. There was a lot of up and downs with all of this and there's so much change going on right now. So it's during that time. Let's get an understanding there and then we can move into AI and how that really you saw the opportunity, or seeing the opportunity, and how others can take advantage of that later on yeah.

Speaker 2:

So I mean, if you want to go all the way back, my first job out of college was the year ibm came out with the pc and they slapped it on my desk and said figure out how to use this thing and then teach us right. Oh, wow, this is really cool. Um, so that was really interesting. And then then the spreadsheet came out, then lotus one, two, three came out and, uh, I helped our bank build a spreadsheet that analyzed commercial financial statements so we could make good lending decisions. And then I moved to clearwater, florida, to work for another bank and they didn't have any tools to analyze financial statements. And so I created that spreadsheet with another buddy of mine at the exact same bank in Baton Rouge, and he happened to move to Orlando. And so I called him up. I said, dean, you still got that spreadsheet. He goes, yeah, and I was like send it to me. So I modified it, automated some of the stuff, showed it to our CEO and his head blew up. He's like, oh my God, this is so much faster and more effective than anything we've ever done. I did stuff to create board reports and all that junk, so I've been a bit of a propeller head all along. And then I called my buddy, dean, up I said, look, man, I just made this spreadsheet do a whole lot more. Why don't we go sell it to banks? And he's like great idea. Because at the time and this is cool, jordan, you get a kick out of this because I am so much older, it's so sad to think about.

Speaker 2:

But anyway, at the time there was this company called Parsons Technology and they were selling these little bitty applications on these floppy disks. You don't even know what a floppy disk is, I'm sure, but on these disks that you could plug into your computer. And I just called them little mini programs, like it could be an amortization schedule, it could be a recipe book, it could be stupid stuff. And they were like selling them for $69, $59, cheap. And the guy was blowing up and I was like, oh, we could take this spreadsheet for banks and we could probably make a fortune selling to banks for $49. You know, competition was selling for $2,500, right? So I'd never done any marketing. I have a degree in finance and marketing, a double major from LSU, and so like kind of weird combo, but it's always been fun for me. So I thought, ooh, I'm going to go learn about marketing. So I bought this thing called your marketing genius at work, which was a series from a guy named Jay Abraham. You might've heard of Jay Abraham, so I just binge read this stuff and he taught you how to test pricing, test headlines and all this stuff.

Speaker 2:

Keep in mind there's no email, there's no web, there's no nothing, it's all direct mail. Yeah, so I had to write a letter, create an envelope, stuff it in the mail, send it across the country and wait to see if the post office, a, delivered it and, b, if a check showed up in the mail coming back, right. So you didn't know whether the post office delivered it. You just kind of sent it out there and then you just kind of like would wait and wait and wait and next thing you know, envelopes would come in the mail with checks in them. It was, oh my god, that's where the mailbox money comes from, right, it was the coolest thing. But here's the fun thing. We tested pricing, because that's what Jay was emphasizing Test your price, test your price. I'm like, okay. So we tested. What did we test? $49, $79, $149, $249, $349, and $549. So we tested all these.

Speaker 2:

So we shot them to different parts of the country, you know. So we would step on ourselves right. $249 outsold the rest five to one. We thought we were going to sell it for $49,000. So we not only 5X'd our price, but we 5X'd the number. We sold at a 5X price. So it was the biggest lesson in marketing I've ever had in my life.

Speaker 2:

And keep in mind this is somebody writing a check back. We didn't accept MasterCard or Visa or American Express. There was no merchant processing, like you got right. There wasn't any of that stuff and I didn't know how to set it up, even if I couldn't, and the last thing I needed was a bunch of slips of paper with somebody's credit card information on it. So I had to like, just send me a check. And they did. And so, anyway, you know, there's just two of us working out of an apartment. You know putting these things together. We created, you know, packaging and all this junk. And then this was back when the computers ran on a thing called DOS, and then Windows came out and I was like, oh, I don't want to rewrite this. So we just blew it off. But we had a formula down. We knew that if we spent $1,500, we'd get $5,000 to $6,000 back in the mail three weeks later.

Speaker 1:

And this is like I love this because this is such an example for everyone listening of like just testing, just trying something out, just seeing how it works, seeing what it is. And like Just trying something out, just seeing how it works, seeing what it is. And like, today, this is the normal day of Facebook ads or Instagram ads or any of them. The problem is, today you get real time feedback. So it's yeah, you're in the machine on and off, so you got to sit there and go OK, do I trust myself to sell? Like I think it's where it's a little bit different, but I I love stories like that because it it shows the direction that everything was going.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, no, it was, it was. It was such an eye-opener and that's why, when the web came out, I was like that. That was so when the web started to come out in 97, that's when I built my first website and we did this experiment in 89 and 90, I believe. Okay, so a full seven years had gone by since we did our direct mail. We'd shut it down, it was just fine, but when the web came out, I was like holy crap, this is so much easier and so much more effective than direct mail. I can get instant response.

Speaker 2:

You know, of course, back in 97, they coined the term web surfing, because you really didn't have a directory. You just literally would go to a website and at the bottom of it they would have this page called links, and then you'd see other websites you could go to and you would just go click on some of those links and find out what else was interesting. Right, so it was a weird time, but you could just see okay, this is going to get organized and it's going to get big, and that's why I quit to start a web development agency and it gradually, we built a content management system, because none existed back then, and so, instead of people having to write code to write web pages, we built a system to do that and we moved that technology over into the company that we now call Bazooka. So it scaled up from there. But that's where it became really interesting, because I could do marketing experiments in almost real time. Especially as social media came out, that became really really cool.

Speaker 2:

Of that, if you've paid the price of the slow version and then you get a glimpse at the fast version, you go holy crap, I need to jump over here, right, because you're going to save time. Every one of these is an incremental savings of time, right From direct mail to waiting for the checks to come in three weeks later to now a faster process where you've got a website, you've got email that came up before the websites, and then you've got websites, and then you've got e-commerce and then you've got social media. All of those become incrementally faster. Ai enters the world and it's insanely faster. I can ask AI to write the code for a website now and I got code in seconds.

Speaker 1:

And the craziest thing to me is that if you're not putting yourself in these situations, because if it doesn't impede your day-to-day like AI is not going to go food shopping for you. So if it's not something that you're doing on a day-to-day, the amount of people that just aren't even approaching it, they're like I don't know, it's a little scary, I don't know, not really comfortable with it, I don't know. But you sit there and you start to realize that this can drum up documents, this can do so many different things. And for me, the AI was kind of introduced because I was doing the podcast and we were actually talking about this before, john where the podcast was going the slow way where it's.

Speaker 1:

I had to write my own descriptions, I couldn't edit the clips, I had to send it to someone else to edit it. I had to do all of these different things and there was so much friction that it got to the point where, like when I started the podcast, I go. And there was so much friction that it got to the point where, like when I started the podcast, I go how are people doing podcasts before this? Like, how did people even do this stuff? And you start seeing the enhancement and the enhancement enhancement to the point where it's like whoa, I can do so much more and this is so much better. But the thing is most people don't even open their eyes to these things without doing it with the slow version, because they sit there and go no, that's too easy, because you can't do it without the experience.

Speaker 2:

So this is a call to action Everyone, get some experience, try something new, play around with that, because the thing that I've always tried to do is when I see something, you know some kind of nascent technology like the web, and I see how it operates, and then I'm instantly going, oh, if this gets better than this happens, and if that gets better than this happens, and if that gets better than that happens, and all of a sudden you're like I need to learn it now because I know where this is going to go. Right, I need to learn it now because I know where this is going to go. I need to learn the web now. Back then it was literally you just click and you'd see stuff, and we had modems back then where you had 33.6 baud. So think of it this way To load an image that was no bigger than a postage stamp would take about 30 seconds.

Speaker 2:

My first experience with bandwidth when we opened up our company, I bought what's called a T1 line. So instead of dialing in at 33.6 or 56K which is 56K, not megabits, right K I bought a T1 line which was a little bit over a meg in bandwidth per second. Right, it cost me $1,500 a month. Oh my gosh. Yeah, $1,500 a month for one meg, all right. And I'm sitting here at home with a 100 megabit connection that cost me $49 a month. That's how different things are, right. We're sitting here watching each other on video. That was a $20,000 a month process back when I started my company. We're doing it for free. Okay, so crazy, crazy. That's what opened me to doing the podcast. We're doing it for free, okay, so crazy, crazy stuff, but you can see it happening.

Speaker 1:

That's what opened me to doing the podcast, because I saw that the friction of recording was so low that I'm like for $15 a month. Are you kidding me? Like that's crazy.

Speaker 2:

No, it's nuts Now. You said something a minute ago and I want you to think about where AI is going. You said it's not going to go grocery shopping for you. Yeah, I'm going to put the word yet on there. Okay, because next year it will. It's already essentially there. That's what's called an AI agent. Okay, you can literally like this. One thing I got delivered is called a rabbit. It's in a. It's still in the box that it came in. I got it. I messed around with it. Not like. This is a waste of 200 bucks, but the good news is I got a one year subscription to Perplexity Pro out of the deal, so that was a breakakeven proposition for me. But anyway, the Rabbit R1 was supposed to be an agent, essentially, where it would do that stuff for you, but the stuff that it would do was so benign and it looked to me like it was more of a keystroke logger than anything else, and I didn't need my keystroke logger. What's an?

Speaker 1:

AI agent. Let's slow it down, john. You're so smart. Let's slow down what's an ai agent and what are the people to see in the coming years with ai? Because, like the way I think about it right now is, it can help me think through tasks, it can help me edit words, it can help me grab examples, it can help me with all these different things. What do you think of when you think of AI current day, and then we can see what you think of going future.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so you know again, what I try to do is figure out what will it do now and if that gets better than what, and if that gets better than what and that. And it's moving so fast that I'm just going holy crap, I can't believe it's doing this already. All right, so let's take what you know right now. You know probably ChatGPT, you may know Claude, you may know Perplexity, you may know Gemini, you may know Copilot inside of a Microsoft product, but let's just stick with the one that most people know about, which is ChatGPT yes, a Microsoft product. But let's just stick with the one that most people know about, which is ChatGPT. Most people know oh, I can go in and I can ask it a question and it'll spit out a response, way cool. Then most people start farting around with it a little bit more and they go oh, it can actually write some copy for me. And then you start playing around with it more and you say I can influence how it writes the copy, because right now it writes, if you don't know what you're doing, it sounds like AI, it writes words like skyrocket and delve and I hope this email finds you well and just redundant crap like that. But if you know what you're doing, you can make it sound like you. You can calibrate the voice of the AI so it sounds like you. You can make it do research for you and find stuff and write some pretty good copy and come back. Then they came out with this thing called a custom GPT, where you could actually load a bunch of your own information in there and then ask chat GPT to write something. But you want it to reference your documents and your data first, as it's writing it. So that's kind of like your first step into an agent, right? So inside of it, let's say that you uploaded everything about your products, all of your pricing, all of your information about who your target audience is, what's going on with them psychologically, emotionally, financially. You got all that stuff in this GPT. You got everything about the history of your company in there. You got all of that stuff. Then you say I want to go write a blog post about topic X. All right, so you go, instead of you going into plain old chat GPT and say write a blog post about topic X. You go into your GPT and you say I want you to write a blog post about topic X. Tie it into the problems that I solve for people and at the end I want you to make a call to action, to schedule a meeting with me if they want to learn more about how I can help them solve that problem. Right, so it's a bigger prompt, but at that point it knows everything about you.

Speaker 2:

You would do the same thing for a proposal, right? Like we were just talking earlier about using Fathom to record these Zoom meetings. Imagine you're using Fathom to record a discovery call with a client or a sales call with a prospect. At the end you just take the transcript, you paste it into the custom GPT. It knows all of the information that we just discussed about your company and now the GPT makes recommendations to your prospect about the products and services you sell and cross-references with them with your prospect's own problems. It does it in seconds. Now it becomes closer to an agent or an assistant.

Speaker 2:

Now imagine if the agent is now tied together to other applications, to where? Maybe it's tied together to Microsoft Word, maybe it's tied together with your website, whatever it might be. You just would go in and you'd paste the transcript and, because you have the prompt engineering behind it, it knows that you just pasted a transcript. It analyzes the transcripts, figures out you're about to make a proposal, turns around, writes the proposal, shoves it into a Word document and then shoots you a Slack message that says here's your proposal. Try to take a look at it. That's an agent. Make sense Now when I'm talking about grocery shopping. You could literally take a picture of what's in your refrigerator and it would already have history on what you typically eat during the week and it would place the orders for the stuff you're low on because you're you're planning on cooking x, y or z over the week that's coming wow, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

because when silly me, I literally thought I was like, oh, we'll go to the store and it will do the thing. No, it literally just places the order in Instacart, someone picks it up and then it shows up at your house and you're all linked. And now we have people who don't even go anywhere.

Speaker 2:

Right, exactly, that's the sad part. Right, I'm good, but you, literally you could. You could tell it in your AI agent. If you've got a ritual staff meeting at your office at 1130 on Tuesdays, your AI agent could be looking at your calendar and going okay, I need to go ahead and place an order at Zoe's kitchen for these specific meals. Make sure it's delivered in time for the meeting to start. It would automatically do all that. You don't even have to ask.

Speaker 1:

Basically, down the line, most remedial tasks could basically be eliminated.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, quite a few.

Speaker 1:

That's why everybody's terrified and excited at the same time yeah, because now the, so I mean we can look at both sides of this, because I feel like for small business, this is an opportunity to be even more nimble and even more efficient than prior. And the big, like people who are very gluttonous where it's you have way too much employees or you have way too many um, just too many people doing not that much work.

Speaker 2:

It's like there becomes opportunities with that so this is why I'm really trying to get people to move quickly, because your competitors are moving quickly and if you don't figure out how to use this at scale right away, then your competitors are going to get the advantage of lower cost internally right, because they're far more efficient, they're getting results a whole lot faster, they're getting to market a whole lot faster, they're getting proposals turned around a whole lot faster, they're getting financial information a whole lot faster. The more you wait, the better off they're going to be and the leaner they're going to get right. Or what will either happen is they'll increase their market share without having to increase headcount because everybody's so efficient. And then you're going to figure out wow, how in the heck do I compete with their growth or their margins? I got to figure out AI, but by that time it's going to be too late. That's why you have to figure it out now and that's why and what we do is a training program to make sure they can do that right absolutely, and even it's.

Speaker 1:

It's just even getting exposed to these kind of things because, like, we're going to give ourselves, like maybe this isn't the right time for anyone, maybe it is the right time for people to start looking at, maybe it will help you out, or maybe it's just getting exposed to these things and starting to feel comfortable in these different areas. So, john, for you, you're like you ended up finishing this marketing firm two years ago, so you were like early 60s right when that happened. Yeah, so what? How are you so different than everybody else, looking for new opportunities? Because I feel like that whole concept of you can't teach an old dog a new trick, like some people feel that way. But you obviously are very different. You're young, um, and you're out there like what, what are people supposed to do and how to kind of work for you, to kind of take on these new endeavors?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, great question. I've always kind of been wired this way. I'm like ADD to the hilt, right, and I just love technology. You know, I've always loved technology and I love tools that make life easier and make things go faster. So for me, you know, my philosophy has always been to always be learning and I can't stop right. I'm just I'm wired this way and I mean, like I said, when I was in college I had to learn a programming language called Fortran, which I don't even know exists anymore.

Speaker 2:

We had to use punch cards to create programs and you'd have to stack of cards where each card is a line of code. So imagine going up to. You had to literally go to this machine and type in what the code line was. It would punch it on a card. There's one line. So you could go up to.

Speaker 2:

There was this desk where you had to give these guys your deck of cards and then they would feed it through this thing and then they would spit out your report to see if it worked. If you tripped and dropped your deck of cards, you were effed. I mean it was really bad. So the last year of college they came out with this thing called the widget was. It was basically a white screen where you could now it was well, it was a black screen with white letters on it where you could type in your lines of code and see all your lines of code, and then you could push send and then it would send it up to the processor to write oh wow, and see all your lines of code, and then you could push send and then it would send it up to the processor. Oh wow, instead of you having to carry cards all around.

Speaker 2:

But that's why it was so interesting when the next year the pc came out. You know, because everybody was running on these giant mainframes and then the pc came out and I was like, oh, this is very fun, you, you know very fun. So, um, I would, I would build applications on the PC that that made workflow better. And you know, to me that was it's some people like crossword puzzles, jordan, you know, because it keeps their brain ticking and it makes them solve problems. I like technology that solves problems. I like figuring out how to use technology to make that process faster. You know it gives you an edge mentally and it gives your company an edge financially if you know how to leverage technology 100% and if you're leveraging it in the right areas, because there's just so much of.

Speaker 1:

If you have a real resistance to technology, like even before when we were talking about this like I I do the podcast, I do a couple of things on technology, I do social media, but I'm not the techiest savviest person to continue to learn and be uncomfortable. That you finally grow from that and I share that, just so that the audience can realize that even if you're listening to this and you're like what's going on? What's the AI? How does this all work? I don't understand. The more exposure you have to listening to stuff like this, the more you're growing your mindset and the more you might hop on a chat GBT you might learn a little bit more that way. Like it's always just putting yourself in these situations.

Speaker 1:

And the main thing I think people need to realize is that a lot of the stuff John's talking about is not instant return.

Speaker 1:

Like, unless you really have a business and you have a need and a thing, that's instant return, but 95% of the time it is not instant return, in which case there's a discovery phase where maybe you take a few weeks, a month, a year to learn about these different things and then you start to go, oh my God, we might not need this person as much, because maybe we can utilize this, or maybe we can have this one person and we're thinking about hiring someone else, but now this person, with their new skills, with the AI agents, they can take over multiple jobs at the same time.

Speaker 1:

So it's this starting to realize that you need to expose yourself to these things, to be open to them and, like I've seen this throughout my life through travel and all of these different areas where you have to just put yourself out there. So, john, what do you think is the importance of understanding discovery and not being so? Hey, I need revenue right now, like you know what I mean. Obviously, that's important, but there is a component of the openness and discovery and because you have way too many technologies to not be a discovering person like, yeah, well like.

Speaker 2:

So here's the thing you said it won't give you a return right away. Ai is different. I will give you a return in an hour, right, if you start messing with it, I guarantee you you'll find a way to compress time inside of an hour. Oh wow. And what will happen is the way I look at it is let's take it from the vantage point of a business and a business owner Right, because that's who we work with. At an individual level, it's mind boggling what it'll do there, but let's just talk about the business aspects of it. If you dabble around with AI just a little bit, you're going to see that it will compress time like never before.

Speaker 2:

Now, if it compresses time with one aspect and we could take marketing Okay, what everybody seems to be test driving first how do we do this at scale in our marketing department? Now, all of a sudden, you take a task that somebody was doing, whether it's an administrative assistant or a copywriter or a graphic designer or just a creative in general designer or just a creative in general, they'll be able to produce. And we've done this over and over again in our mastermind group, where people come to me and say what you just did in 20 minutes took me two weeks last week and you did it better. All right. So think about it. A two-week operation I just compressed to a 20-minute process. Now what did you do with that employee? That employee is now taking literally four, six, eight weeks of work and they're going to do it in a day, maybe a week, right, you've now accelerated their abilities and you've compressed time.

Speaker 2:

So what does that do? You could either lay off the employee which would not be a good idea, because that employee probably knows your culture better than anybody. They've been around for a while, they've been loyal or you could give them more work, right. So how do you give them more work? You have to sell more, right. You have to reach new markets, but because they're more efficient in what they do, they can produce more ways for you to accelerate revenue growth, right. And so now you've got the compression of time and the acceleration of reaching out to a market and reaching new markets. So now you have an advantage of scaling revenue and decreasing time with the exact same workforce. And if you're the guy that does it before your competitor, guess who wins. If you're the guy watching your competitor, guess who loses, right. So you've got to figure it out.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, and if you give them the chance to truly think. And if you give them the chance to truly think, it gives people, because there's a portion where I think about it, like when employees are too inundated with operational work, then they can't properly think, and this happens to people with their finances and different things. The idea is, if you're able to give your employees this additional time and you go, you prompt them with a question of how can this chat GBT, or what can you do to provide more value, the employee will come up with something. It might be a good answer, it might be a bad answer, but they will come up with something that you would have never thought of yourself, because now you're empowering this, this task taker, employee that might be a lower level one to now self-manage themselves to create new revenue streams, to create new opportunities and to create new ideas that you may have never, never about.

Speaker 2:

So now, you're Another example okay, yeah, every company has a mixture of A, b and C players. If you've got D players, you've got a problem right. But sometimes you need C players because they just get work done, you know, and it's hard to find A players, but when you get them, you keep them. What AI allows you to do is take any B or C player and make them an A player, and the way you do that is, you know. First of all, you know, learning how to use AI is a back and forth and back and forth, and back and forth, and you could take months before you really learn how to master it.

Speaker 2:

And what we do with people is we compress that learning curve into days or weeks so we can take a B or a C player employee, make them produce A caliber work in a fraction of the time, because we've taught them all the stuff that they would potentially take six to 12 months to learn. But we compressed it and we teach them how to do it the right way, right up front, and we teach them how to do it in what we would call a scalable way, right, so that it's not this back and forth. So we've helped people engineer prompts that they have. You know they got six, seven, they have. You know they got six, seven, 800 words in or more and we've compressed it to maybe 50 or 60 words and we get better results faster. Now think about how much time it took them to write a 600 word prompt.

Speaker 1:

If we could get it to 160. Just explain the prompt really quickly if people don't know what a prompt is.

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean, a prompt is just really you're asking AI to produce something, whether it's a question that you're looking for or you're telling it to create something. Whatever. That's a prompt. There are a bunch of ways to teach people prompt engineering, but most of the training that I've seen out there I would say probably 98% of it teaches you how to create paragraphs to instruct an AI, and they basically teach you just what we would call a word vomit prompt people. How to do is to understand everything that the AI needs up front, organize it in a scalable fashion so that you can have what we would call hot swappable variables, so that I could structure a prompt for marketing that the guys in HR can look at and go oh, if I just swap this out, I can use it to do this, Like, for instance, in marketing. Oh, wow, Okay, so you can translate for all the different areas.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, for instance, in our AI skills builder, we teach everybody in the organization three foundational layers. So we teach them how to use security, safety and ethics. Then we teach them how to use what we call the AI strategy canvas, which helps them speak a common language. So everybody in the organization, if they're an IT person or an HR person, they understand AI at the same level. So you don't have an IT guy really confusing the hell out of a marketer, right? So we teach them the AI strategy canvas and then we teach them how to do this process I was referring to as scalable prompt engineering. Then we teach them how to do this process I was referring to as scalable prompt engineering. Once everybody knows that now everybody's literally speaking the same language, they've been taught the same way, and so there's no, you don't have 50 people who are all self-taught doing things their own way.

Speaker 1:

They're in different understandings.

Speaker 2:

Then we break them into silos where we teach them practical applications for their job discipline. So we would have a skills track for HR, a skills track for marketing, a skills track for sales, for legal, for HR, for operations, right, customer service. We have 10 skills tracks and then we have an 11th one where we would train the trainer. So we teach somebody in the organization how to train everybody. If you have a really big organization like you, have thousands of employees. This is the ideal way to do it. If you have a smaller organization with you know five to 20 people, same thing. The more people understand how to do it the right way, the faster you're going to become at delivering excellence at every level in your organization. Right, and that's why I say everybody's got A, b, c players. Imagine if you have the world's smartest machine behind you and with just a little bit of instruction, you teach a C player how to use that as their second brain. Now, all of a sudden, that c player has no choice but to be an a player.

Speaker 1:

Right, they, they well, I mean if you take the example of two weeks to 20 minutes. Like how can that not improve someone? Like how can that not be better?

Speaker 2:

like that's, that's, that's insane well, not only that, but the caliber that it puts out if you know how to engineer the prompt the right way the caliber of output and the caliber of logic is amazing. And so, literally, you you take a c player and the stuff they're putting out, like if, if their grammar was off or if their thought processes were off, like this new release of chat, gpt, um, gpt 401 preview, which is a fifth of what it's going to be when they roll it out in a couple of months the logic behind that is insane, and the way it it actually spells out how it's making these logical progressions through its exercise, it's amazing. So, so you now have the ability to take, like I said, I hate to keep calling somebody a C player, but I'm not calling them to their face, but you have the ability to make them. Essentially, it's like taking somebody who's an average performer and having Elon Musk sit by their side and coach them to do their job better, right.

Speaker 1:

Well, yeah, I mean, if you really look at it, they're talking about having startups that are worth a billion dollars with one person in 10 years time, because it's just like there's no, like you can do so much more with all of this. So where do you see this going in the future? Like what should the regular person be able to look out for? What should the business owner be able to look out for? Like what do you see for the future to entail?

Speaker 2:

well, agentic ai is is here and it's accelerating, and that's using AI agents. So building AI agents is critical. That's why, if you're not into AI right now, my strong recommendation would be that you put your people through some training so they understand just how much of an accelerant this is and, instead of you waiting for your competition to start using AI agents, you're going to be in a position to do that almost right away. Right, but you need to know how to manage all of your data. You need to know how to do it safely and you need to know how to manage the AI, your data. You need to know how to do it safely and you need to know how to manage the AI tools that are out there.

Speaker 2:

So, once you upskill think of it this way it's seven times more expensive to replace an employee than it is to just upskill somebody. So everybody says, oh, you won't be replaced by AI, you will be replaced by somebody that knows AI. I don't know about that, because I know how expensive it is to train an employee. It takes you about a year and a half to get an employee really used to your culture, your processes, your SOPs and everything else, to where they become productive If you lose that employee. You know, would you really want to? You know you lose a five-year. You lose a five or ten year employee just because somebody knows how to use ai. When you can teach that employee how to use ai better than the one that you might recruit, you can teach that person in three to six weeks. Dude I'm. I'm spending three to six weeks to upskill, so what do you think people can do to learn?

Speaker 1:

obviously you said train in ai, but obviously there's different avenues. Is there a free avenue? Obviously, there's your different options. But how can the regular person or someone toying around with it, how can they learn?

Speaker 2:

Well, there are plenty of ways You've got online courses from places like Udemy Coursera courses from places like udemy. Coursera universities have online courses that the the problem that I always have with a coursera and a udemy is there are thousands to choose from. They're typically going to give you stupid things like the history of llms and all this junk that doesn't get you anywhere. Um, but it's. It's a good idea to get you some really basic stuff. Like for free on YouTube you can get some interesting information.

Speaker 2:

When you want to get your entire employee base understanding it at the same level, then that's where we would come in, because what I don't want is in a, you know is like for instance, at our peak I think we had 40 some odd employees. We've been in the same office space for 21 years and and somebody bought the building and and uh, ejected us. Uh, which is why I'm sitting here in a bedroom right now. But, uh, yeah, but with 40, if they're all doing things a different way, then they're pretty inefficient, which is why everybody creates standard operating procedures. So when you onboard somebody, you teach them how to do their job.

Speaker 2:

What you don't want is an employee coming in and saying five years later. Well, you know, we've always done it this way, so I'm going to keep doing this way when technology's changed right? So you need an employee that's going to be thinking about the process and helping you improve the process, but you still need documented processes, right? But to have everybody doing something differently is inefficient, and that's why it's important that people understand AI the right way and they learn how to operate it inside of a business context in a way that helps the business and everybody in the organization excel at their jobs and deliver excellence. The organization excel at their jobs and deliver excellence. That's the cool thing about ai you can deliver excellence at every step.

Speaker 1:

Rather, than mediocrity. You know, yeah, I mean it's fascinating. It is fascinating how everything can be produced faster and clearer. And even I, just our discussion, like there's so many of these different ai tools like chat, gbt, and even if you just log onto them and play around with them, you can start to learn.

Speaker 1:

Or like, if you're doing a lot of zoom calls like fathom AI, like I learned that from John, where I added fathom to my zoom, started giving me overviews and it started telling me like hey, these were the key takeaways from the group, and now you have a summary page that you can share with everybody and it's it's just absolutely fascinating what's coming down the line and what, what there is to find out, because so many of us are so resistant to change and I think that's one of the biggest travesties, because change is the only constant in this world, so we have to be open to that. So, for you, john, how have you always been so receptive to change? Because obviously, like obviously, ai is a huge topic all of it is but it's really being open to this idea of change, which it seems like something you've mastered yourself.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you have to. In the business world, you have to adapt and you have to innovate if you want to excel, you know? Yeah, so in most businesses, there's usually an entrepreneur, who's typically going to be an innovator, and then there's going to be what's called an integrator. That's the person that makes everybody gel, right. So you need that. If you're familiar with the EOS model, there's a whole lot to that, but I've always been that guy. I've been the idea guy, the innovator, the propeller head that loves change, you know. But you need to balance it with somebody that is the process person, right?

Speaker 2:

That's going to slow you down so that you're not changing the focus of the company every two weeks, right?

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And my original partner. He was the process guy and I was the idea guy and there were plenty of times when he was like okay, too many changes we're moving too fast.

Speaker 1:

We gotta keep the order right, uh, but it's just, it's important. It's the dichotomy of life, like you have to realize that, like change is necessary, but also building a standards and a culture is necessary. So it can always be challenging for us to accept new because we might be so standard, standard, standard. But you need someone on the team who's looking at changes, who's looking for these opportunities.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's all about adding value, and if you, if you find ways to add value to your team or add value to your customers and you find better ways to do that, that's fun, right? That's all, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

Because then people want to work with you. Yeah, yeah, they stay and they retain. Absolutely, john. Where can people learn more about you? Where can they learn more about Bazooka? What are the different opportunities?

Speaker 2:

here. Well, yeah, thanks. Well, first, you know big fan of yours, big fan of Tampa, where you are, absolutely, and hope you stay safe with this hurricane that's rapidly approaching. But so our website is bizzukacom, bazookacom. I'm in the middle of writing a book called InGrain, which teaches businesses or people how to embed an AI-first culture in their organization, from strategy all the way through execution, and so I'm teaching them some of the principles that we just discussed, like our AI strategy canvas, like scalable, prompt engineering, like using it to develop strategy, to learn how to identify initiatives, et cetera. What I'd love to do for your people if they go to bazookacom, slash ingrain, i-n-g-r-a-i-n and they just say they heard it here on Jordan Edwards' podcast, then when this book comes to print and it's going to be a, it's going to be a print, not a digital Well, we'll probably have a Kindle version, I'm sure, but I'll send them a book for free.

Speaker 1:

Oh, wow, that's awesome.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think I. Hopefully I'll have about a hundred of them I can give away, so fantastic for your listeners.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, that'd be awesome. Yeah, so, guys, it's gonna be bazookacom slash ingrain and I'll put that in the show notes and then just do jordan edwards podcast or hashtag clocked in, whichever works out better. And, uh, john, you've been awesome I really appreciate.

Speaker 2:

It's been great, a lot of fun.

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Jordan Edwards

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