25 | The AI Implementation Masterplan: Expert Strategies to Transform Your Business with AI. A conversation with AI implementation expert Josh Cavallier

0:00Hello, and welcome to Leveraging AI. This is Isar Metisrahost. In today's show, we're going to touch a very important point that most businesses are struggling with. which is how to get started with implementing AI in a business. What is the process? What are the things you need to look at? What are the best practices in order to implement AI in an efficient and safe way? Our guest today is Josh Cavalier, who's providing consulting on these topics as a service to multiple companies, and hence he's an expert on this topic. At the end of the episode, As always, I will share with you some exciting AI news from this past week.

0:37And now let's talk about how to implement AI in your business.

0:44In 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.

1:25Hello 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 we have a great conversation for you today. My guest today is Josh Cavalier. Josh Cavalier has founded JoshCavalier.ai, and he's an AI expert who helps other people through courses, through consulting, through training, how to implement AI technologies in order to improve their businesses, which is exactly the goal of this podcast, which means it's a perfect match. We hooked up on LinkedIn, had a great conversation on LinkedIn, and then a great conversation face-to-face, and hence why I invited him to be a guest of the show.

2:10Josh, welcome to Leveraging AI. Isar, it's great to be here. Josh, this is what you do for a living. You help business people understand how to approach this big, ugly, scary, and yet incredibly high potential monster in a systematic and practical way. Yes, exactly. Yeah, there's a lot happening today. And I think that for many business owners or leaders and corporations, they are trying to get signal out of the noise that's out there and looking for actionable things that they can be doing within their business or for their individual contributors to immediately have a plan in place. And that activity is happening right now.

3:00Yeah. And I think the, I'll go back to what you said, the level of noise is insane. So even the people who want to dive in, the amount of people that shares the best 10 ,000 prompts you need to know as a business person or the five best this or download my this or that is crazy. And I think the problem that most business people have, and especially on leadership levels, is how do we get started from a business perspective? Correct. Yes, there's all these bells and whistles and new tech and all these things, but how do we actually, what's my step one? How do I know what to do with this in my business?

3:41And I would really want to follow your system and guidance on how to do that. Honestly, before you do anything, I think there needs to be a common language so that everybody is on the same page. So AI literacy is incredibly important. And if you can build that foundation to where you're talking about what a large language model is and how How do you fine tune and what is prompt engineering and what does it mean when we have a firewall and trying to use open AI's API? So if those words that I just said don't mean anything, that's where you start. Because at that point, then yourself as a business leader, your middle management, your individual contributors can all have a conversation in regards to how AI shows up, especially for those large corporations that are looking to implement governance and security around AI.

4:38What does that look like? And then once that's in place, then how is it going to show up internal in our organization? And then how are we going to channel all the external capabilities and applications that are out there? So out of the gate, everybody's got to be talking the same language. I agree. And I'll extend that even further in our broader, what you just said. It's about education. And the first step is really education. You've got to educate yourself and you have to educate your team because if you miss on any of those, then any future process or progress that you try to make will be hindered by lack of the relevant knowledge.

5:14And with the pace and rate the AI things are moving, it's a never ending education process. Like you can say, oh, I've hired a consultant like Josh or like myself or anybody else. It doesn't matter. Somebody who has experience, not just in AI because they're passionate about it, but somebody that also has experience in business and knows how to put it in place and go and say, okay, we brought this person in. He gave us some education. We're good to go. Yes, you're good to go. But two months from now, you may not be good enough. And six months from now, definitely not. So you have to put in place a mechanism in which you and at least the leadership team continuously are educating yourself on what's happening in this arena.

5:55Yeah, exactly. And there's tons of resources that are out there. I know that McKinsey and Goldman Sachs and all these other business thought leaders have put out materials that are setting the foundation as far as the way you need to think about your business as a whole, about your different types of businesses, about your individual contributors, how that's going to show up. And that's a great starting point. But there's more than that. There's thinking about exactly how do we leverage AI for very specific purposes and how does that show up? What are the risks involved with actually implementing that specific solution?

6:32And how do we get started immediately? What is my competition doing? So there's a lot of competing things that are occurring within businesses currently. But I do believe out of the gate, it's that governance and security. How do we want AI to show up as a whole within our business? And then that's going to dictate where within the organization AI may be pushed forward, probably sales and or whatever your product is. And then down to the individual contributor level, is it we're not going to let them have access at all? Or sure, we're going to go ahead and build a custom tunnel into GPT-4 so we can check the prompts that are going back and forth.

7:15How is that going to look? So again, I think it's really a matter of setting that foundation with AI literacy. And then from a governance and security standpoint, where do you stand? Where do you stand? Obviously, law firms, medical, there's certain industries, finance, there's certain industries that are really tight when it comes to compliance. There are other industries that are fairly loose. If I had an ad agency or if I have a marketing firm, that's going to show up way different than if I was a law firm. Yeah, I agree 100%. I think there is, you touched on a lot of very important points.

7:49What I tell people is the very first step after education is building a committee of people who will be in charge of this. Within the committee, you want people from different aspects of the organization. You want people who are tech savvy and geeks who will enjoy doing this. So they will invest time and passion in doing this. and the first thing that they need to do is define guidelines, which is exactly what you're saying. The do's and don'ts that the organization as a whole is going to follow. And that mix of different people from finance, from legal, from marketing, from HR, from leadership, it has to be somebody from leadership in that group because decisions has to be made that impact the whole company.

8:32The first thing they have to do is decide on a set of guidelines. There are multiple great starting points on the internet out there today of, okay, here's a good starting point, go use it. And then you don't have to start from scratch, but you can also start from scratch. So I agree with you on that. Let's start talking about the business side of this. So now we have general guidelines put in place. We potentially have a committee. How do we start identifying what do we actually do with this? Okay. It's cool. It sounds amazing. Everybody's telling us it's going to grow efficiency by a hundred percent, but what are the actual steps within a business that a business needs to take in order to identify how to implement this?

9:11That's a great question. There, when you have an application, and if we just leave it with chat GPT, we'll just say we have that tool. It can do everything. That's what makes it difficult. When you have a tool that allows you to be more creative, or now everything is, that's a little bit over the top. What I mean is that it has impact in every area of your business. When I take a look at that possibility, for me, is what are the high impact positions? Typically, frontline sales. It could be an IT aspect in regards to programming. It could even be marketing or advertising. What is really going to allow us to see those immediate gains as far as productivity?

10:02Or if we play the long game with AI, what is the breadth and depth of those high impact positions so that we can begin starting that foundation and begin to build that out? Whether it's adjusting our current systems. Let's say we take frontline sales, right? So let's say that in the short term that we want to build a custom language model that's built around our products. And we could simply build a chat bot where our frontline salespeople can go in, enter some aspect of the customer information, enter a question about our product, and boom. It gives suggestions as far as solutions before they walk in the door and talk with the customer.

10:43That's one part. But let's go ahead and play that out. Let's say that now we want to combine that custom large language model with Microsoft Co-Pilot to where it's building a custom PowerPoint presentation based upon that investigative work. And now we're playing the long game. And now we're really taking that foundation, which could start with great prompting into the chat bot, getting those results, and then expanding it into the whole entire sales process, which could be you get feedback from the customer and that's put into a CRM system, but then you take the quarterly history from all those conversations, and then you may have a new sales strategy going into Q2 or Q3.

11:25And so you can see how this builds on top of each other with the maturation that's happening within AI as a whole. So it's really about starting. It's really about determining where's the high impact position, how can we start leveraging today? And then based upon the intelligence that we know, how can we continue to make those incremental gains as the power of AI continues to expand? Yeah, I'm going to, first of all, clarify some things for people who don't understand some of the language that we're using, going back to your recommendation. When we're talking about customizing a large language model, it's basically taking a model like ChatGPT or another and giving it access to your unique proprietary information within a closed box where that information doesn't get shared with the world.

12:10That's right. What that does, it allows you to do everything you do with ChatGPT or Bard or Claude, but based on the data that you have. And the data that you have, like Josh said, could be every sales conversation you ever had, every piece of information you have in your CRM, every background data you have in each and every one of your clients. Basically, any data, any proprietary data you have access to can help that model be more accurate, better predictive, and so on. And then you can literally ask it questions based on that data, and it will produce whatever you want it to produce. So the example, and I love that example, Josh, saying, I'm going to client X to give a presentation to type of person Y, CEO, CFO, head of procurement, lead developer, whatever the case may be.

12:58I want to focus on these topics, can you help me create the presentation? It will create the presentation for you. So Microsoft Copilot, which Josh mentioned, is a tool that Microsoft has exposed and started rolling out as beta, which means some Microsoft clients has access to it already. Google has a very similar thing to their G Suite that basically builds on top of all the office suites. So whether it's writing documents, spreadsheets, creating presentations, and so on, and can do stuff on your behalf very quickly, very accurately based on whatever information you give it access to. So that mix of that Josh mentioned of taking existing data, allowing a large language model to write on top of it and connecting it to our day-to-day tools is magical.

13:47But then I'm going to go back to make the question even more specific because what you just said is a mind-blowing to anyone, right? Including people like me and you who play with this daily. But it also means going back to what you said, this applies to everything that we do in the organization. Correct. So how do we pick the tasks, the topics, categories we start with, because you can't start everywhere because it's going to be a mess. yeah i so for me it's when you go back to those kpis that are seriously driving cash flow or any other high impact type measurement that's where you start so if it's sales conversions or if it's efficiencies if it's reduction in safety incidents at a warehouse or anything like that that's what you want to focus in on because that's what's going to go ahead and drive all of the upside of leveraging AI.

14:48That's where you're going to go ahead and see those efficiencies out of the gate and where that's the best place to test it, right? If you're going to go ahead and jump into the deep end of the pool and start using AI, why not focus in on the highest impact aspects of your business? That's where I'd start. So I will touch on two points and add, first of all, I agree with you 100 you want to start where it makes a difference two things i will be one i will be careful with and something that will help people focus a little more okay one is i will not do this initially as my first thing with customer facing stuff because until you figure this out the system like ai systems hallucinate they make stuff up even when they're using existing very clear information and it takes time to figure out how to use them in a very productive way that doesn't produce negative outcomes.

15:45Those negative outcomes could be, I just sent a proposal to a client without really reviewing it and I offered him rates that don't make any sense or products that we don't actually have because the AI made it up in an email that it auto-generated. And it happens, like it's actually happening to people. And I will start in something that is a supporting piece versus the actual execution piece until you figure this out. This will be my warning. The other thing that I will add, the beginning, you want to look for tasks that are repetitive and that are data intensive in one way or another, meaning they either need to predict future data or they have a lot of data analysis to do.

16:25Because in these kind of places where it's a repetitive task and it has data analysis involvement extrapolation in it, AI shines very quickly with relatively little amount of hallucinations and stuff being made up. So if you start with those, if you're looking like Josh said, you go, okay, what are my biggest boulders? What makes this company tick? What assisting functions within the business I can do tedious regular tasks that require a lot of time and do a lot of data? Start with those. You will be relatively safe. You will get amazing benefits to the bottom line. And you will use AI in the most effective way because that's really where it shines the most.

17:12I agree. If you take a look at the technique of fine tuning, and for those of you that are not familiar with fine tuning, it's essentially going in and custom training a model based upon some type of topic or guardrails that you put in. I think that's massive upside. I mean, if we take a look, because I was just talking about sales, let's talk about solution selling. There's certain techniques or questions that a salesperson would go ahead and ask a customer to be more of a consultant to the customer. If we take a model like GPT-3, because I know 3, 5, and 4, you can't fine-tune just yet. But if you take GPT-3 and you begin putting in example prompts and example responses and through code, you pretty much fine-tune it to build those guardrails.

17:57Now we're getting something powerful to where we begin to eliminate those hallucinations, not 100%. But I know through engineering and other techniques that there are people working on this to where, from a business standpoint, you'll know 99.5 % of the time that the content is going to be really tight and going to be usable. Now we're being productive versus, hey, it's getting me 80 % there. It could be lying about this information. You don't want to burn time on the back end, spending time looking over all the content. And is this correct? Did it make anything up? That's where we're currently at with these common models like GBT3, 5, and 4.

18:38So there is a maturation process that's happening with some of my clients. It is accelerating. Like they are off and running in that direction because they get it. They understand how their products need to show up for their customers. And they're currently fine tuning models. that's fantastic i want to ask you the follow-up question to this so now we roughly covered the business aspect of this right so i know the low-hanging fruits i know where i want to focus i know what i want to be what guardrails i need to put in place what i need to be aware of how do i pick the systems right because there's so many options out there how do i pick the right ai solution for my use cases it's a good question i for myself it's taking a look at your current tech stack.

19:26Are you sitting on Microsoft? Are you sitting on Google? I believe that's where it drives the conversation because the way that Google and Microsoft are going to show up, either with Azure or Google Business Solutions or whatever the case may be, that's what you're going to build off of. They are going to include additional tools and guardrails and eventually business cases and custom LLMs and all those things that you need to accelerate. Why you would go in and customize and build custom code off that, I have no idea. Maybe to experiment out of the gate, but really you got to lean in hard with those platforms.

20:05Now, if you don't have access to those platforms, and let's say that you're a small or mid-sized business and you have a few employees, it's a matter of just taking access and advantage of GPT-4 and understanding that model and what the possibilities are. Maybe building a custom prompt library that's versioned out that could help with writing or customer emails or an email sequence or whatever the case may be. Or it could be used as a partner in creative endeavors trying to solve problems. If I'm in a law firm or a medical setting to try to get some ideas. Again, having that prompt engineering skill set would just pay dividends even for small to medium in businesses that couldn't afford a giant tech stack into Microsoft or Google.

20:52I agree. I agree 100%. I'll add one thing to what you said as far as leaning into your existing tech stack. Even if you're a relative, not a tiny business, but a relatively small business, you'll have a CRM, you'll have some kind of a marketing automation platform. All of those, 100 % of them either already introduced or about to introduce an AI function within that thing. So if you're thinking, okay, I need an AI writing tool and I need an AI email automation tool. If you're using Salesforce or if you're using HubSpot, if you're using any of those other tools, they will add an AI layer on top of that.

21:27So very quickly, even if you apply tools today that you handpicked and selected five or six different tools to do to assist you in your existing operation, probably out of those five or six, four or five, you will not need because they will be integrated into the platform that you're already using, that you're familiar with, that you're paying licenses for, that is fully integrated with everything that you're already doing. My suggestion to people, the people I consult is, yes, absolutely pick tools right now. Play with them so you get the skills, so you understand how they work, so you get the benefits, so you build the processes and the systems and the education within the company on how to use them.

22:04But don't think that's going to be your final tool because very likely sometime within the next three to five months, your main platforms, your Google, your Microsoft, your Salesforce, your HubSpot, your whatever it is that you're using are going to have most or all of what you need built into the platforms themselves, and then go and reevaluate what are the gaps and holes based on your business analysis of, oh, we could get another benefit by doing this with AI that we're not doing right now that the platform is not giving us. But don't fall in love and start building crazy processes around the current immediate short-term tools because something fully integrated is coming down the pipes in the very near future.

22:47Yeah, I want to piggyback off that because I think there's another strategy at play. And if you take a look at some of these upcoming solutions or solutions that are in place currently, many of them are leveraging OpenAI's API and connecting you to the three, five, or four in the background. Now, that being said, if I have an application and there's certain outputs that my customers are looking for, odds are I'm going to go ahead and set in guardrails, put a chatbot function in, put in some kind of advantages that not only take advantage of that API, but then also creates outputs that speeds along productivity.

23:28Now, what if I look at those outputs and go, hmm, we could do better here. What that means is that you're going to have to strike a balance between the vendor and what kind of outputs they're creating versus truly understanding prompt engineering and going back into the GPT-4 model saying, hey, it got us there, but we really need a custom multi-prompt solution or I want to use code interpreter to take this data set from this Excel spreadsheet and leverage the output from that prompt and get some kind of custom output. it because if you lean into a tool hey that's great but you are at the whim of whatever those developers and whatever those implied business decisions are so I still think that prompt engineering and understand exactly how LLMs work is essential it's essential just like using Word or PowerPoint any other kind of business tool this is going to be foundational business 101 one knowledge.

24:28You need to understand how large language models work. I agree a hundred percent. And I think going back to what you said is the underlying technology is going to make very little difference unless you're a huge, crazy entity and enterprise with very custom things that have to be connected. Meaning whether you use Claude or Bard or or chat GPT, or where they use the tools that are already being provided. And Amazon just announced that they're investing$100 million in building more tools into AI capabilities to AWS. So now on the actual hosting platform, if you're a tech company, AWS and Azure and Google Cloud are all offering a large set of tools and AI capabilities built into.

25:17So if you're a tech company, then you already have a lot more new tools. So the underlying technology doesn't really matter. Your implementation of it, as you're saying, your understanding on how to make it most relevant and most effective in your business for your clients is what's going to make the most amount of difference. So I think too many people are like, oh, which tech we pick versus what's the use case? What's the business case? Going back to business 101, right? It's just another tool. It's a very capable, amazing, incredible tool but it's just another tool. You got to go back and do the analysis that you talked about in order to really figure out and do it as a continuous process.

25:56Continue, like you're saying, continue evaluating and tweaking and building it in order to make it work. I want to ask you another follow-up question that is, you talked a lot about the individual contributors, right? You used that terminology several times. How do you manage that? How do you bring the people in the organization into this process on both ends of the scale? Like, how do you prevent somebody doing something foolish because they don't understand? And on the other hand, how do you make everybody more efficient from an organizational perspective? I don't have to get back into too much in regards to governance and security.

26:36Let's just say that's already in place. Let's say that we have allowed our associates to go in and leverage AI and use chat GPT. Let's say that's a possibility. Let's even say that we build a custom portal so that we can check the prompts that are going back and forth and the response is coming back. At that point, it's going within each group. Let's just say HR. So within HR, you have leadership development, you have recruiting, you have core HR functionality as far as benefits, you have learning and development. And within each of those disciplines, there are workflows at play. And it's within those workflows that you can begin to find advantages as far as, you mentioned this earlier, reducing the mundane.

27:24What are those things that we have to grind on day in and day out that's a time suck that we can leverage AI and build immediate creativity or productivity? And I believe that's where it starts. It starts by going in and saying, hey, how do we break apart what we do and leverage our current access to AI to build in those productivity gains? Then once that's in place, it's a matter of maintaining consistency of prompts. So as a group, we're going to store all of our prompts. We're going to version them, make them accessible. So if somebody modifies a prompt that gets better results, let's version that out.

28:05You can't have individuals out there like the Wild West prompting and creating all kinds of content on their own. You better get a system in place to group think this. Or here's another great solution is take a day or two and have an AI hackathon. In other words, you are going to break apart all of your workflows and get after it. Start prompting. How can we go about this differently? I'm just talking about L &D. I'm going to write multiple choice questions and learning objectives. And I got to create an e-learning storyboard and a video script and all these different outputs. And for recruiting, it could be letters or how do I go ahead and respond to this possible recruit?