155 | AI for Efficiency: Real-World Automation Strategies to Boost Business Efficiency with Heidi Araya

0:00Hello, and welcome to Leveraging AI, a 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 I've got one of my favorite topics for you to start the year of 2025. Now, those of you who have been listening to this podcast for a while know two things about me and what I teach when it comes to AI. The first thing that I'm a process freak, I really think that running an efficient business has to do with having proper processes and knowing them and allowing people to run through them in the most efficient way.

0:32The other thing that you know is that I'm teaching in my courses, that one of the basic things you have to do in order to automate things with AI is to know the processes. Because if you don't know the processes, it's very hard to know what and how to automate. So with these two things in mind, I'm very excited about the show. And I'm very excited that this is the very first show of 2025, because this is exactly what we're going to dive into. Now, our guest today, Heidi Araya, has been in process management across multiple sizes of companies in the last 25 years. She's done process improvement in companies large and small across varying level of sophistications.

1:09And now she's helping businesses do this with the help of AI, which again is one of my favorite things to do because it actually does absolute magic for businesses. So if you're looking for magic in your business in 2025, and if you're looking for ways on how to understand what's happening in your company right now, and how can you apply AI to the relevant steps of the process and you can define what those relevant steps are, as you will learn shortly from Heidi, this is going to be the perfect episode for you to start the year with. So I'm very excited to have Heidi as our guest today. Heidi, welcome to Leveraging AI.

1:45In the next few 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.

2:26Thanks for inviting me. So excited to be here today. Same here. Like I said, I'm a total geek about this thing and I have multiple processes myself, but what you're doing is at a completely different level. So I think you came up with a specific example, right? Because this is not just a generic thing that we're going to talk about. It's going to be a real client with a real problem that we're actually going to review, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. I had someone approach me. He saw me at one of the chamber events and said, I was talking to somebody and they said, I can't help you. Your process is the problem.

2:52And he said, based on what you said, I think you might be able to help me because you have this background in process improvement and AI. How can I use AI and improve my process at the same time? So then we started having some conversations about what problems he wanted to solve in his business. So yeah, would you like me to dive right in? So before we dive into sharing screen and stuff like that, let's work in a minute, what's the process, the big process? What did you do with him step-by-step in order to really approach this problem? Because I think that's one of the biggest issues people have.

3:20They don't even know how to get started. And then we can dive into the steps and see exactly how to do them versus what to do. Great. Sounds great. So his problem was that he couldn't answer all the phone calls he was getting. He has a ton of inbound phone calls and he can't manage them all. He can't respond to them. He's like, I just let leads go because I just, I can't even answer all the phone calls. And then they leave some vague message and I have no idea what they want. And so he was just struggling to manage the phone calls among his other business. And he had multiple channels. So it wasn't just phone calls.

3:49They are text messages, emails. He's got a web contact form. He's got WhatsApp messages, Facebook, and of course the phone calls coming in. So he has got, he had multiple screens set up and of course he has to minimize and maximize. And when I, so I went to his office, so step number one would be understand the challenge that someone is facing or that you yourself are facing. AI is only here to solve some problem. And so I met with another guy the other day. I said, what is, he's like, how can I use this in my trolley car tour business? And I said, tell me what problem you've got. I don't have a problem.

4:16This is a retirement business. I'm okay. So let me take a tour and then I'll tell you. But anyway, in this case, you have to really understand what problem you're trying to solve or what challenge you're facing in your business. So you can begin to have that conversation. So start there. And then once you have anchored on what the problem is, now you can say, tell me about your current process. So that's what we did. I at first I went to his so I started with the zoom call, talked about a little bit, I went to his office, I took a big old board with stickies. And I sat with him for about an hour and a half and I went through and I asked him questions to what happens is okay this happens and then what happens next and then this happens okay what if this other thing in this so it's a it's an art rather than a science and so you have to talk through and think about and explore what happens if not or this so that's the kind of thing that we did so after about an hour and a half I had the board and I took it back to my house I actually then ported it into Mira which I'm going to show you the exact board that I put that I had afterwards and I still had some outstanding questions when you're thinking through and you're realizing, oh, we didn't cover that.

5:14We didn't cover that. That's all natural. We had a lot of conversations along the way. And then once you understand the process, you could then understand what are you going to do to solve the challenge that you came up with? Because now you have an understanding of the process. And so then the conversation moves to, all right, so what is the problem in this process that you're going to solve? So for him, he wanted to solve the problem of answering phone calls was his main one. We could put basically a huge portal together and have them all integrated in one. He said, let's just start with the phone calls.

5:42That's my biggest pain point. That's another suggestion that I have for folks. You can't solve every single problem all at once. It's going to be hard to transition your way of working all at once to some brand new way. You could do it and that would be good and it might save you some money. But sometimes the best thing to do is just start with one problem you're trying to solve, the biggest problem. And then you can add on and see and evolve as you go along. So that's exactly what we did. I created an AI receptionist. And then when people call the number, It goes to the AI receptionist. The AI receptionist asks questions about the job for this handyman.

6:13Tell me more details. What city are you in? What is your name? And then send me photos to either my email address or text me the photos so that by the time he's able to review the messages, he has already a good idea of what the estimate could look like. So it saves him a ton of time. We have been talking a lot on this podcast on the importance of AI education and literacy for people in businesses. It is literally the number one factor of success versus failure when implementing AI in the business. It's actually not the tech. It's the ability to train people and get them to the level of knowledge they need in order to use AI in specific use cases successfully, hence generating positive ROI.

6:54The biggest question is how do you train yourself if you're the business person or people in your team, in your company, in the most effective way? I have two pieces of very exciting news for you. Number one is that I have been teaching the AI Business Transformation course since April of last year. I have been teaching it two times a month, every month since the beginning of the year, and once a month all of last year. Hundreds of business people and businesses are transforming their way they're doing business because based on the information they've learned in this course. I mostly teach this course privately, meaning organizations and companies hire me to teach just their people.

7:31And about once a quarter, we do a publicly available course. Well, this once a quarter is happening again. So on February 3rd, we are opening another course to the public where anyone can join the courses, four sessions online, two hours each. So four weeks, two hours every single week with me live as an instructor with one hour a week in addition for you to come and ask questions in between based on the homework or things you learned or things you didn't understand. It's a very detailed, comprehensive course. that will take you from wherever you are in your journey right now to a level where you understand what this technology can do for your business across multiple aspects and departments, including a detailed blueprint of how to move forward and implement this from a company-wide perspective.

8:16So if you are looking to dramatically impact the way you are using AI or your company or your department is using AI, this is an amazing opportunity for you to accelerate your knowledge and start implementing AI in everything you're doing in your business. You can find the link in the show notes. So if you just open your phone right now, find the link to the course, click on it, and you can sign up right now. We're giving$100 off the course and it's valid through the end of the month. If you're listening, you are still in luck, go and sign up quickly. Also, we have a limited amount of seats. It's on a first come first serve basis.

8:49So grab your seat right now. The promo code is leveragingai100. And now back to the episode. Awesome. First of all, this is really exciting, right? Because there's the problem you're describing that he has is a good problem, right? Having too many leads is a good problem to have. But it doesn't matter what the problem is, right? You may have a problem not having enough leads. You can reverse this process and say, okay, I can do outbound calls with an agent like this to go after potential leads and so on. But I'm putting that aside for a second. And I want to touch on a few things you said on things that can even help people accelerate some of that process.

9:24So you said the number one thing is identifying the problem and working through the kind of like really clarifying the process. In a minute, we're going to share a screen and we're going to explain everything that's on the screen. For those of you just listening and driving, don't worry about this. But for those of you who want to watch this, we're also going to be on our YouTube channel and there's going to be a link in the podcast to the YouTube channel. So you can, in the show notes, find where to go and see it. But what I do with some of my clients to help them map processes, I just ask them to do the process and preferably several times and just explain, narrate what you're doing.

9:56So just explain to me in your own words on the screen, or if you're working in a warehouse or cutting trees or whatever it is that you're doing, just walk me through. Explain in your own words as you're doing the thing that you're doing. If you have several employees doing this, even better. Have them record themselves explaining as if they're narrating what they're doing to other people. And then you take these recordings, you upload them to an AI. Annie will do, I do this usually with Claude and I'll explain in a minute why. And I ask Claude to create a checklist from the process, a detailed checklist, multi-leveled, as many levels as it thinks as necessary.

10:29And then I ask it to ask questions that will help clarify the process better. And then I give it back to the people. Say, okay, here's the checklist. Here's the questions. What's missing from the checklist? What are the answers to the questions? I feed it back to the AI, same chat, so it has the memory of everything that happened before, and I get a pretty good checklist. Then what I do, I, in Claude, what Claude knows how to do, which as far as I know, none of the other tools knows how to do, is create flowcharts. And it creates really good flowcharts, even multi-layered swim lanes, like whatever flowchart you want.

10:59Now, it's never perfect, but after prompting back and forth six or seven times, you'll have a good, solid starting point that will take you 10 to 15 minutes with Claude and will take you about an hour and a half doing it on your own. So just save an hour and a half. And then what Claude does, it actually creates a code in the back to create that flowchart. So you can grab that code and paste it into third-party tools like Lucidchart, like Mermaid, both are tools to create flowcharts where you now have a very solid starting point and now you can add colors and notes and whatever other things you want to add to make it a better flowchart.

11:35So this is just a few ideas. By the way, my recommendation is to hire somebody like Heidi to help you through the process. But if you don't have access to a person like that, you don't have the money, you don't have the time, whatever the case may be, what I just said is a very good starting point for you to do things on your own. So I'm closing this very long parentheses and let's dive straight through the process and see your magic and how it works. Yeah, I will do that. Before that though, I also want to share that a lot of problems in processes are across people. So this is great because he has six people working for him, but mostly he's handling this process and it's an end-to-end process that he's handling.

12:09However, you often have processes that it's okay for you to have your own process and your process is fine, but the biggest problem is across departments and across people. So just be careful you're not honing in too much on a single narrow process when you should be looking at the end-to-end process. I'm sure that's, I'm sure that you've come across that too. Okay. So this is the actual Miro board that we work through. Again, I ported it from paper because I did exactly what you said. And I went to his office and I watched how he was working and took down the notes at the same time and chatted through it.

12:40And so I just want to highlight here that the sticky note colors are anything yellow is the handyman's manual action. The blue is from the customer side. And then I had some questions like orange, and then I had some other random questions here. So this looks very, very messy, but you shouldn't worry about how neat or messy it looks. You can always clean it up later. The most important thing about mapping a process is just getting it, getting started. Start with that first sticky. It's going to seem overwhelming. And here in this case, I, again, I just move these around later, but you know, I see his text messages coming in.

13:10He's got emails coming in. He's got website contact form, Facebook messenger. I think next door messenger too. He said WhatsApp messages and phone calls. He wanted the phone calls to be handled gracefully 24 seven. That was what we had started at the end, decided at the end. But in the beginning, we were just trying to get this process here. He said, I get a call or something. And I say, Hey, I need a job done. And the customer, he asked the customer to send the name, the city, the images, customer sends the info, he needs more details. Then he has to decide the subcontractors to send the job info, then he has to text them, then he's got to get estimates from them.

13:43He's going to negotiate the price, he's got to decide the price for the customer. So he covers his own expenses, send the quote to the customer, and then wait. Customer says, okay. Customer says, no, or maybe the customer never responds. He's then has to, customer says, okay. He selects the final sub. Then he has this additional process, which was decide which LLC it goes under. Cause there's that little complexity there. Once he selects the sub, say Jane, he does a rate, create a work order for himself. And then he schedules a job, negotiates time with the customer and texts the customer saying, Hey, we'll show up tomorrow about two o 'clock.

14:16Then he has to text the sub with the info. Now I'm going to pause here. This already is an extremely complex process. And he was saying, I'm always worried that I'm going to send someone to the wrong job, or I'm going to do something where like they show up, two people show up at the same place by accident, or I'm sending them to the wrong place, or I tell them about the wrong job. So this is becoming a real nightmare and he has to continually just check his work. So he's explaining this to me as we go through. If a customer says no, then maybe the price is too high and then he tries to negotiate.

14:46There's no response. He just follows up a few times. So you can see here, how many times do I follow up if they haven't replied? These are all conversations that come up as you're talking through, tell me about your process. Maybe you're watching them go through the process yourself. But imagine the customer says, yes, negotiate a price. It's successful. And then the sub arrives on site to start the job. This is just to show that it's not his action. It's just the sub arrives on the job. The sub finishes the job. Now, once a day, he has to remember to ask each customer how it is going. And I have used him.

15:14So I know he does do that. He was checking in. How's it going? You know, with my guys over there. Then he has to communicate with the sub because the sub's also telling him what's going on. So there's this loop there that he has to get back. Job's finished. He has his messages. I ask the customer if they're happy. Customer replies. He responds to the feedback. And then he asks the customer immediately how they want to pay. He always gets the feedback first before he asks how to pay. And then he sends the invoice, then the customer pays, and then he asks for a Google review, and then he checks it, and then he replies it, and then that's his basic process.

15:45So yeah, any thoughts? Yeah, and I want to pause you for just one second. This sounds crazy complicated, but if you go through any process you have in your company today and really map it to all the steps, you will end up with something very similar. We have very few two-step processes in our businesses. Once you start really breaking down what's the mechanism that happens beginning to end step-by-step, you will end up with 15 to 25 steps. And you will end up with all these what-if questions. What if the customer didn't answer? What if they didn't pay within 20 days? What if the thing that I ordered for the job didn't show up on that?

16:17There's all these what-ifs in everything that we do. And even if you're handling stuff that doesn't have anything in the physical world, like in handyman, so you do accounting, you would still have all these what-ifs, right? There's, again, invoices that are not aligned with what the PO says. There's whatever marketing don't even get started. There's so many what-ifs in marketing. So any aspect of the business has very detailed processes. So starting with this, actually mapping the process is critical because that will lead us to step two, right? Now we can start analyzing what we can automate.

16:45So what happens now? Yep. So step two is I went through the process and I figured what could be automated of this. There's certainly some steps that he wants to himself. And one of the ones he told me was like, okay, the WhatsApp is not that big of a deal. I want to keep that, but maybe we can automate other things. So I went through and I changed the color from yellow to this bluish purple color and thought we can automate a lot of this. Ask the customer to send names, city images, texting the subs, that could be automated. Of course he needs to decide the price and the estimates. It could be once he did though, the customer could be quoted automatically, have something go out.

17:26Once he has the price, follow up X number of times, that would be an easy scenario to do. It could even automate creating a work order, texting the customer, that would be easy. Texting the sub, that would be easy. It would never make a mistake. Remind the sub about the job. Let's say it starts three days from now, then they're going to work on it. Then of course, asking the customer how it's going one time per day, that seems like good automation. Ask the customer if they were happy. So these things I thought are good. And in conversation with him, he said, for example, Heidi, sometimes the invoice, the number is different because we're there and it might have cost more or less, or maybe they asked for some additional work.

18:00So I can't send that automated. I just want to do that myself for now. When the customer responds, if they were happy, like, I just want to reply to that feedback myself. So I certainly don't want to automate that. Asking the customer how they want to pay is still, I've got just this easy thing I sent. So he then shared with me the things that he still wanted to be the human touch in this. And I guess that's the other part here. Just because you can automate something doesn't mean that you want to or that you should. And so he was very into this personal touch. He said, this is my personal touch.

18:29So yeah, I can automate some of it. And yet I want to keep some of it for myself just for that personal touch. I want to touch on a few very important things that go back to the courses that I teach because they connect very nicely to some of the things you said. The first thing is the human aspect of business relationship, both inside our business, in our ecosystem, suppliers, subs, et cetera, as well as our clients and potential clients, is going to play a much bigger role in an AI future. And those of you who are not seeing the board, it's actually really interesting. So the board looks like a sticky note board, like a big white board with lots and lots of sticky notes.

19:04And we started with many yellow ones. And now in the new board, there's a lot more purple ones or about 50-50 purple ones to the yellow ones, which means we're going to automate about half the processes. That human factor is going to make the difference between you and the other company people are going to choose. And the reason for that, everybody eventually, in the beginning, it's a huge benefit. Like you will gain market share if you learn how to automate because you will need to spend less money to deliver the same amount of work and you'll be able to do more work, meaning you'll be able to be more competitive and you'll grow.

19:33But in two to five years, everybody will figure it out. This will be using Microsoft Office. And all these automation processes will work seamlessly for everyone. And so what's going to make the difference between you and the other guy? Human relationships. So I love that your customers understand this, and I love that you touched on this point, and I love it that you encourage and enable that to your clients while you're building automation. So that's one thing. The other thing that I want to touch, and it's actually not reflected here, but it's a very important concept when it comes to building automations with AI.

20:03And I call it, I have my five laws of success in the AI era. And one of them is actually called stop thinking process and start thinking outcome. What I mean by that is, yes, you have to start by figuring out the process. You have to because otherwise there's no way around it. But once you understand the process, there are many AI tools that we're allowed to skip three, five, 20 steps in the process because they can do all of it bundled into one solution. And then you may not need the process anymore. The problem we have as business people that we're trained to think through these thinking of boxes, right?

20:36Like with so many years, they told us to work the process, you got to improve this thing by 5 % and then this thing by 10%. And then your overall throughput grows by whatever your bottleneck is. that's the way it works. The reality is now you can sometimes skip multiple steps. Like the example I always like to give is customer service. The goal of customer service is not better intake form. It's not a better alignment system to which ticket goes to which kind of agent. It's not what automation system you have to make the phone calls faster or better IVR. It's not. The goal of customer service is happy customers, right?

21:06That's the goal. And so today there are AI agents that can do customer service actually better than most humans. And so you don't need 25 steps. You need the good AI system that does customer service. That's it. Now that's not simple. It takes a lot of money to put in place, blah, blah, blah. But if you can afford it, you can circumvent 25 steps in the process. So I'm saying that because yes, you can do step-by-step things, which usually is a lot quicker and it will still get you a big value. But the real value comes from looking at the bigger picture and trying to understand what can AI plus automation replace.

21:39And it doesn't have to be a single step. Good point. Yeah. It resonates with me also because I'm big with value stream mapping. And although we're not touching on this topic today, it's what you shared, right? It's the outcome that you want to have happen. It's not necessarily, the process is not the outcome. What is the purpose of the process? Interestingly, you talked, you touched on customer support. So certainly not this automation because he's getting leads, but the purpose of customer support, say you have a thousand incoming customer support calls would be to reduce that. Of course, you can even handle that with AI.