09 | Supercharge Your Business: Discover All the AI Tools You Need for Immediate Efficiencies 🌟 with Adi Vaxman, CEO of Sheba Consulting

0:00Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host. And in today's episode, we're going to host Adi Vaxman. Adi is an experienced CEO. She's also a tech and AI enthusiast who has implemented multiple AI tools for various use cases in her business and for her clients. And in this episode, we're going to dive to multiple of them. She's going to share probably the most important shopping list you can have right now, the exact tools you want and the exact use cases you can use them for.

0:35Right now, most of them are either free or almost free, so you better open your notebook and be ready to take some notes. But before we dive into the episode with Adi, I would like to share some updates of important AI news that happened this past week. This is part of my way to educate you and keep you up to date with what's happening in the worlds of AI. The first piece of news I want to jump into is the news from Google. Sundar Pichai announced that DeepMind, one of their research groups, has been working on AGI development for a very long time is joining forces with the brain team from Google Research to form a new group called Google DeepMind.

1:13And the goal of this is to combine all their talents and resources and efforts in acceleration of AI implementation and obviously to fight the big success of ChatGPT and OpenAI together with Microsoft. My take on this is I think they feel for all the right reasons that they maybe have better technology, which I truly believe they do. But I think they messed up the implementation and they feel the train left the station and now they're playing a very serious catch-up game. And I think by combining resources as a huge company as Google with the amount of data and technology they have, I think they will catch up to open AI and Microsoft.

1:55In parallel to this happening, Google is in the middle of a very interesting period where they already announced in January that they're laying off 12 ,000 employees worldwide. Some of them are even working on different AI initiatives. So I definitely think that Google is in the process of reorganizing around this new idea of a more centralized strategy to implementation of AI as a way for them to be more competitive and run faster in this race to what kind of AI tools we're going to use and how many of them are going to come from Google. a very interesting next step in this race between Microsoft and Google.

2:34Another announcement from Google that happened this past week is that Google has announced that they're going to test out a new model that will allow better AI-powered features within their search. And based on internal documents that were leaked and quoted in this article, they're saying that ads will still show up in search results. And in this new project that they codenamed Maggie will just provide, as they say, better improved search results using AI capabilities. I don't know exactly what this means, but they're saying this will roll out shortly to a relatively small test group. And then they will obviously find the results and decide if they want to roll it out or not.

3:13But they've assigned 160 engineers to this project. Google is making big steps and a lot of investment into finding ways to save the hen that lays their gold eggs, which is search while still enjoying the benefits of AI and chatbots, etc. Will be interesting to see where this goes. I don't have a clue, obviously, but it's, again, another step in this interesting journey towards a new era where AI and AI chatbots play a bigger and bigger role in probably everything that we do, but definitely in how we interact with the internet and information as a whole. My next update from this past week is TED released a TED Talk with Greg Brockman, who is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, the company who created ChatGPT.

3:56It's a really great TED Talk, so go and watch it. It's 30 minutes worth every second. He dives into some of the ways and the technology that they're developing and how they're developing it. But the biggest take for me out of all of that is the idea that we've seen before through the concept of agents, AgentGPT and God Mode and Baby AGI and HuggingGPT, all these agent-based models that basically are moving into the next stage, if you want, of these large language models in which the large language model is just an interface to an endless and growing set of tools. So you can interact with ChatGPT or any other model, and it will know how to complete much more complex tasks by having access to multiple other tools and then coming back with results after it by itself identified what the process that needs to happen in order to get to the outcome, has picked the tools, and has came back with a result.

4:55Some of them are completely autonomous. Some of them, like the example that Greg Brockman is showing in TED, allows you to pause it in different steps of the way, give it feedback, and approve the next step or pause it before it does something you were not planning. But this definitely seems to be the direction that this world is going. It's like everything else in this world, really fascinating and amazing and really scary. Just think about a project, any project you can imagine and think about ChatGPT or a similar model being the project manager. You're just telling it what the project needs to be and it will figure out everything else on its own.

5:32But this is now not just coming from small developers applying these concepts, but from OpenAI themselves, which means you have really big groups out there that are making this thing move forward and hence it will move forward and we will see this thing becoming functional and operational in a way that we can use them probably within months. And the last piece of AI related news I want to talk about this week is a research paper by NVIDIA about text to video capabilities. It's incredible. It's really fascinating. I wrote a LinkedIn post about it so you can go and look it up if you want the links.

6:05It will also going to be in the show notes of this episode, but go and check it out. They're making some big strides into enabling video out of thin air in 4k resolution that looks more and more realistic and it's not there yet it's not perfect you know you have a fox with its tail on the ground and movements of animals it doesn't look completely realistic but at the end of the day the videos are mind-blowing and the fact that they were created with no camera crew no filming, no lighting, no editing. They're just prompts that generated these videos is out of this world. And it has profound implications on every content creation that we know.

6:47And it will happen, like I said, on the other stuff within a few months, we'll start seeing operational capabilities like that. We've already seen before and we've heard announcements before as well. But I think again, now that we have NVIDIA, maybe one of the three largest forces in the AI world today saying that this is where they're going. It's coming and it's probably coming faster than we are expecting. So expect to see big new things coming in the text to video world within the next few months. And now to the amazing episode with Adi Vaxman, who's going to share practical, tactical list of tools and the use cases and how you can use them in your business.

7:29in the next three years AI technology will change our world dramatically whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career this is the show for you I'm your host Isar Maitis a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast you'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

8:10Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI, improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, host, and I am truly excited today. Using AI tools in your business has amazing benefits, and companies who will not use AI tools will fall behind and may run out of business. But knowing which tools to use and which use cases to apply them to is a little scary, and there are literally new tools and sometimes hundreds of tools coming out every single week. Hence, what you need in order to get going is somebody who is an amazing practitioner who literally enjoys geeking out on testing these different tools and seeing how they work and which use cases to apply them to.

8:59And this is exactly our guest today. So our guest today, Adi Vaxman, is an amazing practitioner of AI tools. She's also the CEO and the founder of Shiba Consulting. And in the last 14 years, she has been helping companies reduce cost, increase productivity, and enable scale, which in the past few months has involved more and more AI tools implementation. And so in this episode, it's going to be, I promise you, after talking to Adi with her level of energy, it's going to be drinking from a fire hose. So get ready for a serious ride, get ready to take some notes, and we'll dive into multiple tools and the use cases.

9:38You can use them in your business today for either free or very little money to get much higher efficiencies of different aspects of the business. Adi, I'm really happy to have you here. I know we're going to have a fun conversation. Welcome to Leveraging AI. Thank you, Isar, for having me. This topic is really exciting. As you said, I have always been a geek and I'm going to expose the geeky side of me to the work. But yeah, really geeking out over these tools in the last six or seven months more than before. And cool, let's do it. Okay. Awesome. First question. So, you know, we all use some of these tools.

10:16Grammarly is an AI tool and Descript is an AI tool. There was AI tools before ChatGPT dropped on us on a, again, shiny day here in Florida in late November of last year, but that really changed everything. How did you guys start looking at these tools? Because I think most CEOs, that's the biggest problem. Okay. How do I even get started in picking the right aspects of the business or in choosing the right tools that can really benefit my business? So I think it's a really simple answer. The first piece of that answer is that me, my partner, and everybody on my team are all technology geeks, right?

10:59We love using technologies. We love testing different systems. We spend hours and hours on a weekly basis, and this is part of our entire team's goals, testing new tools, looking at monitoring what's going on and testing new tools. So this has always been the case. It's not new. How do we get involved with AI? I would say before November, we've been using some AI tools, like everybody's been using your Grammar Lees and some Jasper and some photographer and do a lot of image manipulations, some of like Topaz Labs tools that utilize AI. And I'm sure a lot of you have been using AI tools without even knowing with filters on your phones and stuff like that.

11:44If you have teenagers at home, which I do, especially female teenagers at home, there's a lot of AI tools that you're using without even knowing. It started like that. And then in November, in early November, rumors started bubbling about ChatGPT, about OpenAI. And I have friends at OpenAI. I've been following the company for a long time, obviously, since even before Elon Musk separated with it. So it wasn't huge news, but there were talk about this tool getting released to the public. So we've been following, we've been following the news. And the day that the tool got released to the public.

12:18We got on the waiting list immediately. And I think got it two or three days later. It was pretty quick. That's before everybody started jumping on that moving train. And I was simply flabbergasted. It was just unbelievable. I've used Jasper before for a long time, and it just wasn't there. It didn't really save me much time. I used it for very specific things. it wasn't as great, used grammarly, but again, for very specific things. And then comes ChatGPT. And I'm a writer, always been a writer. And I was just amazed. And I was shocked. And that week's team meeting, our team meeting was spent entirely.

13:08And instead of an hour, it was two hours, was spent entirely on ChatGPT demo and showing it to the team and trying to figure out how to interact with it and testing it out. The next thing that happened, I don't remember when it was, but shortly after was the Microsoft announcement about Bing. And we got on that beta as well pretty quickly and started trying to hack slash destroy slash joke around with Bing or Sydney or whatever you want to call it at the time and managed to get some pretty crazy things. And I'm a part of a community in general. Some of my clients are like that as well. And so we started all talking about, oh, did you see this?

13:54Started following the news, following Twitter, following Reddit forums and whatnot about people doing different things with this tool. Then Bing came out to the public. And first we all managed to break it really quickly. Then they limited it to, I think it was the first thing was six or five or six interactions. Then it went to eight, then it went to 15. So all throughout, I would say December through February, I feel like 90 % of what we've done, we put aside a lot of the testings of other systems that we usually test. We focused on just trying to figure out AI tools in general. So I want to pause you for a second to do a quick summary and generalization of what you said.

14:38The first thing you said is getting early. So it's still early for those who are like, oh my God, everybody's in. and I'm not, it's still very early in that game. So it's not too late to get in now. The second thing is let the geeks in your company play with it. So you said, okay, you are just like me. We're both geeks. We like these kinds of things. You spend hours through the night, probably like me, just, oh my God, there's a new toy. I got to check it out. But maybe you're not like that. But there's people in your organization who are. Give them the freedom. And more than that, you said it became a part of company procedure.

15:09like this is what we're going to talk about in the next meeting. So you allow people the time to go and investigate and play with tools and come back with their recommendations and ideas and then do some brainstorming. So now you're involved a few more people. I assume you have some KPIs around that as well on what tools you need to check this week versus next week and what the output needs to be for specific meetings. And then the last thing you said is be involved in some kind of a community, you can listen to podcasts like this one. You can join different communities online. There's multiple of them or just hang out with the right people.

15:45But this will give you a broader flow of information of what's going on and keeping updated. And this thing is moving faster than anything else before. So this is a summary so far. What about other tools? Let's just dive in. I think that's going to be okay. I see you want to say something. Then we'll dive right in? Before we dive right in, I want to say two things. One, in our world, this train is moving so fast and I feel like it's been a lifetime. In the outside world, that's not the case. I talk to people every single day that have absolutely no idea, no clue and never heard of it. And I am so shocked because it's been my life for a good almost six months now.

16:24Like it's been a long time and it's been the focus of almost everything that we do. So that's one thing. The second thing I want to say is that it wasn't necessarily an easy process even in my team. I have writers on my team. It wasn't an easy thing for them to accept. It wasn't an easy thing for them to adapt. And I, and there are a lot of scary ramifications as well to what's happening in the world with AI. But we are at a place now where even the people that were really deadly against it are using those tools on a daily basis and understanding two things. One, if we're not on that train, we're going to get left behind.

17:01And two, use it to your advantage. Find the good things in it because there are plenty of those. And the third last thing before we dive in, talk about the geeks on our team. Our CTO has been going to sleep at six in the morning and waking up at eight because he's been spending full nights testing tools like MidJourney, DALI, and whatever, different APIs that he's been implementing for clients. So talk about geeking out. Yes. Awesome. So let's really start going tools one by one in whatever order you want, either stuff that you've implemented for clients or stuff you're using internally. And really, let's start with the things that you find most productive, the stuff that you think that saves you the most amount of time, the use cases that you're like, oh my God, this was game changer into phase hours, whatever you want to start with.

17:53Okay, perfect. So I think the very obvious one is ChatGPT. That's the one that everybody's talking about, but chat GPT has its advantages and has its limitations. And a lot of other tools are built on top of it. So we definitely use chat GPT in my company and in our client companies that we've implemented workflows and use cases to use a combination of chat GPT, Bing, and Bard for the reason that chat GPT has GPT-4, which is the most advanced currently available language model out there, combined with Bing and Bart's ability to access the internet and be trained on data that is post September 2021, which is where ChadGPT stops.

18:37And so the combination of these tools allows us to do different things. We use some tools for research, some tools for comparing other tools. So for example, and I'll give you a great example of something that I'm using. I'll start with the first productivity tool that I'm using for myself and for my team and have recommended to clients. And you even told me that you tried it today. It's called Fathom AI. It's a free Zoom plugin that is an AI note taker and summarizer. So it does a lot of things. It transcribes Zoom conversations and it does different things. To me, the biggest advantage of it is the summary.

19:15So I used to take a lot of notes during conversations and now I don't do that anymore because I get an AI summary created for me with the right context of the conversation really well by Fathom. And I've tried different tools before. I've had Otter before. I've had other tools before that just didn't, just were not up to par to my expectations. And this one is, there are a few other tools that we're testing in the same kind of reality. And one is called, I think, TDLR, something like that. I'll check the name. D-L-D-R. Yeah. And the other is called BlueSnap. And there's one called Jamie. So they're a combination of tools that are doing these things.

19:51So that's a tool. It's free, which is surprising. I want to say something else about Fathom. I use these kinds of tools as well before. The two really incredible things about Fathom 3. One is that it's connected to the CRM. It's also connected to the video. So any point in time that it highlights, you can click the link and it shows you that segment within the actual conversation. if you want the full context of something. And in real time, while the conversation is running, you can make your own bookmarks on things you want to remember or things you want to highlight for yourself as they're happening in the call.

20:28And they will show up as bookmarks afterwards. Really incredible tool. So I strongly agree that this is an awesome recommendation. Like I said, it also connects with a CRM. So you have the notes in the right place in the CRM doing absolutely nothing. Yeah, it's amazing. Everybody looking at our CRM is able to click the action. item from the summary of the call, go straight to the video, see the right area that this thing is being discussed and move on with their lives, do what they need to do. Really productive. But my point was, is that when I was researching better things than Otter, which I've tried in the past and just wasn't great for me, I asked Bing to give me what's out there in the market, what's out there that does these things, and then give me a comparison, and then tell me the install base, and then tell me the pricing and create a table that shows me all the features and whether the feature that I was specifically interested in, which is the summary feature rather than the transcription, because who has the time to read 50 pages of transcription?

21:28And so Bing did most of this work for me. And at the end of the day, that kind of reduced the number of tools that I have to test to three or four, and we just started testing. So that's a really good use case when I I use a combination. For ChatGPT, I use two plugins that are very, they're Chrome extensions that are very useful. One is called ShareGPT. So ShareGPT is a Chrome extension that lets you share an entire conversation, creates a URL with the entire conversation of the prompts and the responses and everything. You don't have to copy and paste. Very useful, especially when you're having ChatGPT write code for you.

22:05So I am not a developer. I studied computer science 32 years ago. That was a very long time ago. And I'm not a developer. I know a little bit about structure of code, but that's pretty much it. And every time I had to create a script or a code, it would take me hours of research on Google and on GitHub and on Reddit or whatever, trying to figure out how to do what I need to do. And chat GPT helps me write the code that I need to write. And so whenever I need to share that code with someone to troubleshoot, to implement, to whatever, I just use ShareGPT and it's all there. No copying and pasting.

22:40With the format, with the syntax, great little tool, ShareGPT. Second one for ChatGPT. By the way, another cool thing about ShareGPT is that you can publicly share stuff and there's lots and lots and lots of publicly shared ones and you can learn how other people using ChatGPT, what kind of conversations they have, what prompts they use, how they progress through the conversation. So also as a learning tool, it's an amazing tool. So it's no big surprise, right, that ChatGPT is only as good as the prompts that you use with it. So really, prompting is really the art form around ChatGPT. And so there have been a lot of tools that popped up with pre-engineered prompts that are being sold or offered to the public.

23:19Some of them are really great at it, and I'll talk about one of them shortly. But the second Chrome extension that I wanted to share is called Summarize. It's also a chat GPT Chrome extension. You need to have a chat GPT account. So it's using your chat GPT account. And so whatever web page that you're on, you can click Summarize and it'll give you a summary of that web page. It works on documents as well if the document access has the right access. And so you can get really great AI summaries of articles, documents, that research paper that you shared not too long ago, and I had no time to read the whole thing.

23:59I use Summarize. And it did a really good job in telling me what I actually needed to read. So that's another cool tool. Awesome. Let's move on to some other tools. One tool that we use and have implemented for clients is called Numerous AI. Oh, I love that one. Let's talk about that. It's a Google Sheet spreadsheet AI automation tool that allows you to use ChatGPT prompts on a Google spreadsheet. And so I can tell you the type of things I do with it. First of all, people on my team that don't have incredible Excel or Google Sheet skills that need to create formulas or analyze a lot of data can use it very easily just by creating prompts.

24:46analyze the data in row B and put the combination of the data from row B, C, and E into row L, whatever. So that's one thing that we use it for. Another thing that we use it for is to create sort of mail merge type things. So we have a list of people that we want to send holiday greetings to depending on what holidays they celebrate. So we have a list in Excel, some celebrate Passover, talk about clients or talk about whoever. Some celebrate Easter, some celebrate whatever. And we have ChatGPT write very personalized messages to these people so that we can mail merge and send out the emails. Same for birthdays.

25:27This is brilliant. I never would have thought of that in this case, but I think it's really brilliant. I want to explain to people what it does. It does two things extremely well. One is it literally knows all the formulas of Excel or Sheets, and it has it for both. So you can either write it within Microsoft Excel or in Google Sheets. So it knows all the formulas. So instead of knowing all the formulas, you can basically tell it what you want the outcome to be. I want the minimal value of this. I want you to find the first name of all the people in those strings. Whatever the case may be, it knows what formula to apply.

25:58So you don't need to know any formulas. You just tell it what you want the outcome to be. And it knows how to do that. And it's nothing short of magical. But the other thing, it's the AI engine behind it is GPT. So if you wanted to write stuff, you can just say, hey, I want in this cell, you'd write whatever it is you want to write, like a regular prompt and you will get the outcome in that cell. So now you can use it, like you said, for multiple use cases as a reference for other stuff in other cells. Brilliant. So this is an example. We recently launched a referral program for our company and we had a list of people, past clients, current clients, other people that we network with, attorneys that we work with, different kind of contacts.

26:41And we wanted to send them all emails explaining what the referral program is, giving them some background and asking them to join. And so each of them comes from a very different angle, right? A client already knows what we do. An attorney that we work with usually knows what we do, but some of these other people don't necessarily know what we do. They just know that we use their tools. And so depending on, we create a category. It's a client, it's a networking, it's a vendor, it's a whatever. And according to that, we had numerous AI create messaging for these different people based on how much they know about our company.