21 | Revolutionize the User Journey, Leveraging AI Video Personalization with Don Bosco, founder of BHuman.ai

0:00Hello, and welcome to Leveraging AI. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and I've got a fascinating episode for you today. We are going to talk to Don Bosco on how to use AI to personalize videos of yourself. So not like an avatar or a deepfake video, actually you, how you can use AI to personalize the messages in those videos to specific individuals in various steps of the user journey. At the end of the episode, like every episode, I will share some exciting news that happen in the AI world this week. And now to the fascinating episode about AI video personalization with Don Bosco. In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically.

0:47Whether 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.

1:22Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage J.I. Improve Efficiency, Grow Your Business, and Advance Your Career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and I'm really excited today. And the reason I'm excited is because face-to-face human communication has been a core building block of relationship building, which in return has been the core building block of businesses for generations. The problem with face-to-face communication is that it's very expensive and it's not very efficient and it's not scalable. You're wasting a lot of time on travel and money.

1:58And so the next best thing that we have in our era is video communication. You can now communicate with people through video, which saves you the travel and some of the overhead. But you got to choose when you use videos, whether you want to make it really personalized, meaning are you sending this to a specific person in a specific use case with a specific name in a specific scenario, or you make it scalable, meaning I can record a general video to a specific persona, and then I can send it to a lot of people, but I cannot do both, at least not until recently. So our guest today, Don Bosco, has founded a company called Be Human, like the letter B and then human.

2:41He actually founded it three and a half years ago, so way before the current craze of AI. And what the platform enables you to do, and when I found it a few days ago, it literally blew my mind. It allows you to record a video and then after you recorded an actual video of you, personalize specific keywords and have the AI change what you're actually saying to make it relevant to a person. The name of his company, where is he from, his name, changed the background of the video to stuff that's relevant to that person. And it really blew my mind and the opportunities there on multiple aspects of the business started running in my head.

3:21So I reached out and Don was nice enough to say yes and be a guest on the podcast. So Don, I'm really excited to have you on the show today. We're going to talk about how to use AI and how to use AI in video personalized in order to boost and enhance multiple steps of a company's user journey, which I think everybody that's listening is going to find fascinating. So thank you for joining us. Welcome to Leveraging AI. Yeah. Thank you so much, Isar, for having me. I love the way that you introduced Be Human, which starts from the human connection, because actually that's the entire reason why I founded the company.

3:58It was to solve my own pain point. I was running a lead generation agency. And if anyone has done lead generation, you know that it is brutal, right? And it's just the toughest training down you can go through. And so started to work with video and realized that if I can make a video, say someone's name and talk about their company in a way that's relevant, they're going to think that video was just recorded for them and therefore bringing back that human connection. And that's been our North Star since day one continues to be. I love the way you're thinking about it. Beautiful. By the way, I've done this manually several times in the past, meaning I've recorded myself in a long message.

4:32I stayed in the same lighting, same background, same microphone, and then just went and recorded people's names to say, hi, this, hi, that, and edit it into the beginning of the video. So there's a way to do this manually. It's just really time consuming. And if you want to do this for other stuff that is not right in the beginning, it's very clunky. So really, let's take it from the top. Let's go user journey step by step and look at different stages of the user journey and how can technology like this or other AI based technologies can be used in order to boost the results of that particular stage in the user journey.

5:08Yeah. The first thing I want to preface this with is that it's really all about psychology. That's the number one. I think that when there's a new technology, especially something that has a lot of hype and craze around it, like AI does right now, there's this tendency to think of it as, okay, this is the hammer that's going to hit all nails, right? This tool will solve everything. And so you just mindlessly just start hitting places. But really, you should look at AI and particularly be human, which is all about human communication as a tool for psychology. Basically, how can I have psychological interactions at scale?

5:41Okay, if you look at it that way, what kind of psychological interactions am I trying to have? And you can get really creative with this. So there's an exercise I like to always recommend to folks who are new to be human and new to really applying AI in a practical way that is producing results and not just some sort of flashy thing. It involves sitting down. And it's one of those things where it's like you're reading a book and it recommends an exercise and you're like, yeah, okay, I get it. I don't need to do the exercise, but really, I promise you take 15 minutes on a coffee break and do this.

6:12I guarantee you will have some breakthroughs. Guarantee. If you don't let me know, but basically, so sit down for 30 minutes and look at, think about your sit on a blank piece of paper and a pen and think about your customer journey from start to finish. Meaning what is the experience that your customers go through from first, not knowing you exist to maybe hearing about you or seeing your ad, whatever your acquisition funnel may be, to then landing on your page and getting educated and so on and so forth, all the way down to becoming an advocate that is now referring new clients and business.

6:44And think about each point along that funnel. And as you do that, you're going to be like, okay, you may start with five points and you really think about it. There's going to be 25, maybe 30 points there. And it goes really as in-depth as you'd like. And then think about where the friction points are, meaning where between maybe step seven and step eight, maybe 30 % of people are dropping off. And why is that? And then think about how AI can supercharge and reduce friction between those steps. So be human, all about personalized videos at scale. So I'll give you, we work in over 17 industries in basically every major language across almost every continent.

7:25So we've seen a huge variety of use cases. Everyone from the average mid-level marketer at SMB in the US to a politician in Chile to government in, let's say, somewhere in Asia, right? Like hospital groups, we've seen so many use cases. So it's given us a lot of inspiration in terms of how it can be applied. So that's the broad exercise I'd recommend. And as you do that, you'll start to see, okay, for example, I'm driving people from a Google search onto a site where they fill out a form. and fill out the form to get more information than to hear back two days later. You'll notice that maybe 60 % of people are not responding to that reply that you give them two days later.

8:04And how can you supercharge that? One example, just to give you an idea and some inspiration is whenever that form is filled out, you can use one of our integrations with Zapier or Pavley or API to trigger a video of you saying, hey, first name, whatever that first name would be. Hey, Jake. Hey, Paul. So I just fill out the form requesting a quote. I know you're in Toronto and we actually have an office there. Why don't you come in for a chat? So you can programmatically have these human, very psychologically positive experiences that are going to make the recipient feel really special, feel impressed that they just fell as formed 10 minutes ago.

8:40Now they're getting a video from you saying their name, inviting them in. We have a car dealership, a group of car dealerships doing this in the US. And we have this persona of Lisa. Lisa is always the one responding to Lisa as they come in. And she's, hey, John, I actually have this car sitting in my lot. Why don't you come in and let's have a chat. We can test drive it. And everyone comes in saying, hey, I just got a video from Lisa. Lisa asked me to come in. Lisa doesn't exist. Lisa's always on lunch break. But it just shows how people really love it and really respond to it. I love that. I want to touch on a few things that you mentioned that are connecting several different things that I find really important in this whole analysis process, because that's like the first stage you're talking about.

9:18First thing is understanding your customers is probably the most important part of any business. So the exercise you suggested is good for anyone, regardless of anything. Let's sit back, go to 30 ,000 foot level, really think about where there's friction and who exactly is your customer? What are they trying to do? When in that journey, there's things you want to do that doesn't really align with what they want to do. And then how do you make it better? Nobody likes filling out forms. So is there a way to remove that level of friction? Maybe a video in that page with their name and say, hey, in the form page, oh, this is really for me.

9:54So there's so many ways to look at that. That's one thing. The other thing is in general where to use AI, right? So this is just another AI tool. You said there's like a gazillion of them right now and another gazillion every week or so. So what are the use cases you want to use AI? And you want to use AI where there is either data analysis that needs to be done at scale that humans just are not very good at. We are, but it just takes us a very long time. When there's data prediction required, when there's personalization required, and when it happens on a high frequency. And if you have a bunch of these together, meaning it's a repetitive process that happens all the time that requires data analysis and so on, you hit gold.

10:43Meaning if you find these cases where you have the data and the data could come from a form, could come from your CRM, could come from people entering the data somehow, but you have the data on a specific person and then you have to provide personalized messaging to them to increase whatever results you're trying to increase. Now you have ways to do that by sending personalized. It doesn't have to be video, by the way. It could be text messages, could be emails, could be whatever, but you can take the data that you have and apply it in a way that will reduce the friction, build a closer relation, and increase the results of anything that you're basically trying to do.

11:20So two very important points. Let's really take some examples on different steps of user journeys. And like you said, multiple industries will be awesome because people are listening up from different industries and try to really analyze how this kind of technology can be applied in order to get better results. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And just to echo what you mentioned there, one trick that has always worked well for me, in fact, this is what led me to coming up with the idea for BeHuman some three plus years ago, is thinking, what is the, imagining that I had all the resources in the world, right?

11:54Imagining there was just one customer I wanted to win. Like, what would I do to win that customer, right? And my life depended on it. I had to win the customer, right? Think about the experience they would receive and then take that as, okay, this is what will happen. Now then walk back to how can you practically make that happen at scale? That's a nice little trick for me. That's always works. I recommend that. In terms of the use cases, I mean, yeah, very, very broad ranging. I'll just run through some examples just to let me know if anything. Yeah. And really let's try to go by order. So let's start with, it's like, nobody knows that I exist.

12:27Because I think that's the hardest part, right? Because then it's not personal because because I don't know who the person is. So what use cases in the awareness stage, you've seen people do in order to create awareness using this kind of tool. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So in terms of, especially looking at B2B, right? It's, so you're in cold outreach, right? We actually have a tool we just released called Leader, which is a app within Beeman platform. And what that does is it enables you to go into LinkedIn, search for any audience you want. Let's say marketing managers in New York who are in retail, right?

12:59Okay. Search, come back to BeHuman, put that search URL, the link that you just searched for, put that into BeHuman. And then you can select, you can create a video or select a video we already have on our template store. So for example, hey name, this is Don from software.com, whatever it may be. I saw that you're a manager and you're working in retail and we have an office in New York and I have some, the tool I want to show you. I'm wondering if I could maybe come in, you can have a cup of coffee and I can show you this tool, how it's going to make your life amazing. Then all you have to do is hit start.

13:30And essentially what will happen is immediately AI videos will start being created for who appeared on that audience list and generated. So we're changing what you're saying in those videos and then sent out to all those people each and every day in an ongoing fashion. So you just set it up once and you just watch the leads roll in. For any B2B use case, I'd recommend that for cold outreach. And the reason why we built that in the beginning, and we've been building this to a leader for over a year now. And it actually just was released yesterday. So we're very excited for it. Congratulations. And it sounds awesome, by the way.

14:03It's like a really cool automation process that otherwise people probably would have done manually with your tool anyway. Exactly. That's the exact point. Any outbound campaign is three things. It's data, it's content, and distribution. So think of a three-legged stool. If any of those legs are broken, everything falls apart. I designed this because I've run so many outreach campaigns in the past, myself, for clients, and I know how painful it can be. And so this is basically designed the least painful possible way to do it at scale. That's reliable. It doesn't give you a headache every day. And so on the data, you're getting it from LinkedIn.

14:39So you don't have to scrape, you don't have to find verified email addresses, all that stuff. It's all on LinkedIn. So that's all content, of course, personalized video. This is in our experience, and you can ask anyone in marketing who's played with video, personalized video just performs better than text. any given day, all the time. So that's content. And then distribution. This is where things really get tripped up because even if you make the best videos possible, you have the best data possible. If your emails go to spam, right? You might as well just gone to the beach that day and not even tried.

15:10The nice thing about LinkedIn is about according to, I mean, there's really no way to know this, but according to research rates, benchmarks out there, about 70 % of LinkedIn messages get opened and viewed, right? Which is a fantastic open rate. You look at email and you're happy with a 30 % open rate is great, right? And then the beautiful thing about it is unlike email, you don't have to think about, oh, you don't have to watch the delivery rates and maybe stop the campaign and start it, right? LinkedIn just runs. So we designed it to be the easiest possible plug and play solution for cold outreach, which is a really big segment of our user base, because a lot of our users are B2B and they're wanting to start that initial funnel.

15:47And then in terms of the B2C side, we've seen a couple of issues and things here. So usually it starts from social media. So someone will start a giveaway sort of campaign where you have to tag friends to win a giveaway. Let's say it's like a local business, a restaurant, something like that. What they'll do is they'll collect phone numbers. And this is really key. So I said that LinkedIn open rate is 70%. That's phenomenal. Phone number open rate is anywhere between 95 % to 98%. Like text messages. Text messages. Exactly. Messes. And we've seen this work really well where a business will essentially find any reason possible to collect phone numbers of people in the area, right?

16:23And have their permission, of course, to send them a message. Then what they'll do is they'll have, like in the case of a restaurant, there's actually a really nice video I saw of a user doing this as a chef and he was in the kitchen and he generated a video saying, hey, name, this is blah, blah, blah from blah, blah, blah restaurant. I want to let you know that we're having an event on Tuesday. We're launching this new menu. I don't remember exactly what the special was, but there's some sort of really enticing special. And he said, I saw you entered the giveaway and I just chose out a name and I want you to come down and have a free plate on us.

16:53And that's just habitual and getting them to come into the restaurant, love the food, and then they're a loyal customer. And because that was sent out SMS, because it was local, because it was a name they've heard before, a restaurant around town, it worked phenomenally well. So that's very top of the funnel, B2B, B2C, nobody knows you, how do you start? Those are two plays that I've seen work really well. Amazing. By the way, I'm going to jump. I know I said I want to go step by step, but just in my head, this clicks on the else because it connected to what I said before about having data about things and how do you collect it.

17:25Just think about any kind of business, whether B2B or B2C, and you had connections with specific either clients or potential clients and stuff about them, but they disappeared. Like one of those, they became a cold lead and you don't know what to do with them. This is an incredible tool to dig through that data and then send those personalized messages. Again, if you have their phone, even better, but think about that restaurant and somebody that was a regular or that chose there several times and you know what they order because you can see in your checkout, okay, this guy always orders the pasta bolognais and he's been here five times in the last six months, but I haven't seen him for three months.

18:01You can say, hey, hey, Shal or Gina or whoever, we haven't seen you in a few months. That bolognais is really waiting for you. I have one with your name on it, just come in. And you can do that with these kinds of tools today, just by digging through data in your CRM, building an automation that will pull this data up and will automatically create these things. And it's absolutely mind blowing. It's something going back to what you said in the beginning, Don, it's something you would really like to do and you won't do it just because it's so time consuming, it's going to work. And now there's a way to do that.

18:33So now that I totally destroyed my own rule of let's go step by step. Let's go back to step by step. And now you have awareness. What's the next step that people use this for? On that note, before we go back to the being in order, we've had a lot of gyms use us or that's the exact thing. When someone hasn't been in the gym for, let's say, one or two weeks, they'll get a message from a face they know at the front desk or gym. What are you doing? It's been two weeks. Get your butt in here. We're waiting for you. Where are you? And that works very well. But okay. Coming back to where we were. So in terms of once they're in the funnel, top of the funnel.

19:06What's the next step? Yeah. Okay, sure. So you have some interest, right? Someone is curious. Now it's all about usually, of course, it depends on your business and your funnel, but usually now it's about education, right? Showing them, enticing them. So there are a lot of ways to do this. I'll pull up a real estate example I've seen that's been interesting. There's a group of apartments that are owned by a single individual and he rents him do is when someone is interested, and by the way, this is all through WhatsApp. So his flow was starting on Instagram. So it's kind of like a B2C use case, you could say, right?

19:42These are students. So Instagram, getting followers in different ways. And then when someone is interested, it's like, great, let's chat on WhatsApp. I can send you a tour of the apartment. And then what he does is let's just say there are 10 different apartments, right? He's renting out for like short-term periods, a couple of months. So this is happening often. What he does is he'll have someone do a personalized walkthrough tour of the apartment. So selfie style video, holding up the phone, very natural, very casual looking. Hey name, this is Don with Baba Lutz. I heard that you're interested in a place here in city, whatever that city would be.

20:17Why don't I give you a quick tour? So then they basically just turn the phone around and just start giving a tour of the apartment. And also helps them. The actor is really friendly and energetic. And it's someone they would want to hang out with because they're students, right? And so they're in a new city for Erasmus. And that's worked phenomenally well because there's that instant human connection going. What's this? Okay. It's an Instagram page. I'm looking for a place to, okay, now I feel like I have a friend in this new city I just moved to. Yeah. I've seen that work really well. And then thinking about other industries we have.

20:48I want to pause you for one second because I think there's an underlying thing here that connects just to solid marketing. And like you said, solid psychology that has to be a part of this when you're planning these kinds of things, which is you got to pick the right persona to attract the right audience to do the thing you want them to do. So the two examples that you gave a really cool guy or gal that is a college student that's showing you around an apartment in the city you just moved into is awesome to attracting other people to come into that apartment complex, having a really cool chick trying to attract people to come and buy a car, which usually is going to be a male person buying a car, I assume.

21:27And so having that chick say, hey, I have this car on the lot, come check it out, will get more people to come in than an old fat dude with a non-shaped beard. It's just human psychology. So again, if you understand your target audience and you understand what's going to build that connection and you use an actor or somebody from the company, and like you said, in many cases, it can be as easy. Sometimes the best videos, especially these kinds of videos that are personal, the less professional they are, they better. You want to make them look casual. Literally, when I saw your tool, the first thing I thought about, this is crazy.

22:03I can walk my dog in the street, grab my phone, film a thing that looks completely authentic. It doesn't look professionally produced, which means there's a less chance people think that there's some kind of a trick behind this, that I made this at scale because it's just me walking my dog, say, hey, I'm just walking my dog. I thought about you, blah, blah, blah. You got to figure out what's going to build that connection with the target audience. Pick that particular person, that particular scenario, that particular topic you want to raise, and that's going to build. So the tool is just a tool.

22:36Core good marketing and psychology thinking behind it has to happen regardless. But sorry, I stopped you. You had another use case you wanted to share. Spot on, spot on. And I've had one of our best campaigns ever for us internally. literally on that street right there, walking with a cup of coffee, going down the street saying, hey man, just head of the office and a friend sent me your LinkedIn, thought I'd reach out with a little impromptu video message, go on with the pitch. And all of the examples I gave during this entire podcast could have been done the same sort of step in the customer journey.

23:08They could have been done with low energy, just bad, just not bringing your best to the table and you would still have AI at work, but the results wouldn't be good. So you're absolutely right. Like psychology, that's what I'm like, I said at the start, like psychology is really the product here, the foundation, the thing AI is just enabling that to be possible. We've even had people request like larger enterprises, for example, an insurance company say, Hey, for anyone who is, let's say between the ages of 25 and 35, don't, they don't have kids and they're in this sort of persona group. We want to use this actor for anyone who's over 65, we want to use that after and totally doable.