10 AI Business Ideas in 43 Minutes

0:00All right, I'm setting my timer. I'm going to give myself 31 minutes to give you 10 specific AI business ideas.

0:13I'm doing this because I see a lot of stuff on YouTube that's like, hey, AI is the next big thing. And then they're like, you're like, okay, what? How? For me? What should I do with it? And there's no answers. Or AI is going to kill us all. like really shit how I was like we don't know um so I just don't like the the just general enthusiasm without the specifics and so this is all about the specifics and I think I'm well qualified to do this because I've my whole life I've been an entrepreneur and I've been an idea guy I ran an idea lab where I was basically funded to just come up with business ideas and then build them for six years um I then have a podcast now this podcast is all about business ideas I've also invested in the last year, maybe$2 million into AI companies.

1:00So I've about a dozen companies that I said yes to, plus probably another 100 or so that we passed on. So I've seen a bunch in this AI space. I know what the best entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are doing. That's where I live. And so I wanted to share with you my list from number 10 to number one, number one being the best, the biggest opportunity that I see in the space, that if I wasn't just chilling out rich and happy and being a dad, I would go and jump in and do these right away. Instead, I'm going to invest from the side. I hope somebody takes an idea from this list and just goes and does it.

1:30But before I tell you the ideas, a quick little history lesson, a quick little trip down memory lane, a little I told you so. Three years ago on this exact podcast, I did an episode called, is GPT the next big thing? I think it was like episode 94. We're on like 500 now. And this was back in July of 2020. So it's like COVID had just hit. People are freaking out. but me and Sam got on the podcast and we said is GPT-3 the next big thing we had gotten access to this tool that there was no chat GPT at the time you had to like get a favor from somebody to even be able to try it and we used it to write rap lyrics which of course being idiots that we are we thought oh that's the best thing we can do with artificial intelligence and so we well we thought it was amazing we were like wow this is really good and we the episode is GPT the next big thing.

2:20We were basically saying, yeah, it will be. Now that's 2020. Fast forward today, open AI is worth$90 billion. They're doing a billion dollars a year. ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in history to hit a hundred million users. Um, you know, so I'm not saying that we called it, I'm not saying that we're business geniuses. We kind of did and we kind of are. So, you know, if, if you had listened to me, then you probably could have made a bunch money, listen to me now, because I got for today, I'm going to share with you 10 specific AI business ideas ranging from simple doable things for somebody who's non-technical all the way to like moonshot really big ideas that I think are game changing.

3:03And so I'm going to read you the list from number 10 to number one. They include things from about, you know, robotics and therapy and celebrities and education to porn to, I got everything. And the last one, the very last one, I think is the biggest idea, um, that exists today. So the biggest, I think it is the biggest opportunity that exists today for any entrepreneur, you know, like, um, when you think about, uh, Mark Zuckerberg stumbling into sort of like the social networking craze or, um, you know, when Steve jobs created the iPhone that changed everything, there are these sort of change everything moments.

3:40And like, you know, I was a kid when the internet came out, I'm 35 years old now. So I was, you know, I remember being on the internet as like a 12 or 13 year old, um, using like, you know, whatever, very basic, uh, dial up connections and BBS forums and stuff like that. But it was clear to me that the internet was a thing. It's just, I was a kid. So I didn't think about how I could bend. Like, I just wanted to use it. I didn't think about, I wasn't an entrepreneur. I was a teenager, right? I couldn't even spell entrepreneur. Still can't. Um, but then when I graduated from college. I graduated in 2010.

4:09The iPhone had come out the year before I think the app store had come out, but I wasn't, I didn't have the light bulb on. I didn't really understand that there are a few times I think what's that Warren Buffett quote. He's like, um, something like, um, there are moments, there are moments every once in a while where the skies get cloudy and it begins to rain opportunity. And when it does let us not run out with spoons, but with bathtubs to catch the opportunity. So I didn't really realize when mobile was the big opportunity. It was right in front of my nose, right? Like we were working on things and we had a mobile developer, one guy, and we would try to make a mobile version of our website.

4:51But we didn't realize, yo, mobile's changing everything. And all of a sudden, this thing's got a GPS. That means that Uber is possible. Google Maps is possible. This has a camera. So that means that Snapchat and Instagram are now possible. You know, I'm carrying this with me everywhere. So all of a sudden WhatsApp is possible. You know, this thing has an accelerometer inside. That means that MyFitnessPal is possible, right? So the technology unlocks the opportunity. So now to my specific list of 10 ideas that I think anybody could do. And by the way, here's my disclaimer. These specific ideas don't matter.

5:27I know I'm hyping them up a little bit, but it's not the ideas that matter. Naval has this great quote where he says, you know, you don't read books for the information. You read books because books spark ideas in your head, right? Reading a great book is like, you know, lighting a match or starting a bonfire in your brain. And so that's my goal. I want to start a little bonfire in your brain. I want these ideas to help you get to the real ideas. I don't think that these are necessarily going to be the ones, but I hope that they really stimulate you to think. Okay, so let's jump in. Number 10, eliminate the wait.

6:02Okay, so we think of the internet as this fast place, a place where you can just click and you instantly get what you want. But that's true. Like the internet, if you just compare normal business, I used to have to drive, go to my car, drive to a store, park, get out, walk in if I wanted to buy something. And now the internet, I don't have to do any of that shit. I just website, click, boom, it'll be here in two days, right? That's kind of amazing. So the internet has killed waiting in a bunch of different ways. and that's generated billions and billions and billions of dollars of value. But all waiting is not gone.

6:32There's still some waiting left. I want to tell you about it. So like, for example, this is one of my companies is called Shepard, right? I'm a minority owner of Shepard. I bought a minority stake earlier this year. They do a very simple thing. So they find you employees overseas that will cost you 80 % less than if you're hiring in the US. They're like recruiters that will find the best talent in the Philippines or LATAM that just solves whatever problem you have. Okay, great. So now when somebody comes to this website and this business works, right, it makes millions of dollars a year, but it also loses, I believe, millions of dollars a year because of one very simple problem, which is that when you click start hiring here, it's going to tell you to book a call.

7:10It says, great, tell us some information. And then when you do, once you fill this in, you know, you fill in a small form. As soon as you do that, then it's going to tell you to book a call. And that book of calls might be two days from now, three days from now, four days from now. By then you're cooled off, right? Like, you know, you've lost anybody, any salesperson knows that like you need to strike while the iron top, you're going to have the highest conversion rate in that moment. So let me show you what an AI company is doing that I think is very smart. This is called some company called same day.

7:39I'm not involved in this at all. I just think it's a very cool idea. So they're like, hey, what if we just had a phone agent, an AI phone agent that could just reply to anybody who calls you right away? So listen to this. How can I help you today? Yeah, I got a call from my wife a minute ago. She said there's a bunch of ants coming through our kitchen window. How soon can you guys come out? That's the worst. Luckily, I can probably have someone out as soon as tomorrow to take care of those ants. Can I get your address to confirm? Yeah, it's... Uh, but can you transfer you to a person? Yeah, I can transfer you to a person.

8:16But you'll be on hold for about nine minutes. Now, I can answer any questions and get you scheduled in under two. How does that sound, Eric? That sounds good, but what's it going to cost? Oh, of course. I just need to know. You get the idea. I think it's funny they made him have a accent. But instead of I'm interested and then three-day gap, now we get on a Zoom call and you're trying to remember the context and then we fumble and bumble. How about right when I say I'm interested, an AI sales agent is going to call me or create a voice call right here on the browser and ask the questions that it needs to do to qualify me as a potential customer, as well as answer the questions that you have and even give you a sales pitch, right?

9:00You might look at that and be like, oh, you know, it's a little slow the way it talks or it's not as good as a human. And I would tell you two things. Number one, that the conversion rate in the moment versus the drop off of people not bouncing because they don't want to book a call or not showing up to the call, like the show up rate might be 65 % to a call. You know, you get these huge drop-offs for every step of every additional step in the funnel. So you want to just remove steps in any funnel. So I believe that AI sales agent will be higher converting than doing it the sort of slower human way.

9:35And the second thing is, this is V1. Imagine, you know, like you remember the V1 of anything, the brick cell phones or the V, even V1 of the iPhone compared to what we have now on iPhone 15, Like, just wait two years. This is going to be incredible. And it's already good enough to make up for the fact that, you know, you know how many businesses don't even have a phone number or don't answer the phone when you call them? Like every pest control service or lawn care service or self-storage facility or whatever, you name it. You can go and become the AI phone sales guy for every business on the internet.

10:10I think that's one opportunity that's there for the taking is forget this whole idea of you know, call me, I'll call you back or book a call in a few days and we'll talk. It's no, no, it's going to be, we'll talk right now with my highly trained sales agent who always sticks to the script is always polite, never gets frustrated, never gets sick, never takes a day off. Um, that's what's going to happen here. That that's how, that's where this is going. Okay. Idea number nine therapy for everybody. So therapy used to be pretty taboo and every year it's becoming less and less so. Every year, more and more people are going to therapy and there are multiple billion-dollar therapy startups that just connect you with a therapist.

10:51However, that's still only a fraction of the opportunity. How do you make this 100 times more accessible, right? Like I think most people could probably benefit from having somebody to talk to, having somebody who's there for them, supportive, ask good questions, gives good advice. That seems like something that's going to help every couple, every individual person, every executive, et cetera. And the biggest barrier to this is now is cost and sort of like the friction or privacy that's involved. It's almost like, remember how HIMSS came out and they were like, you know what? Erectile dysfunction is a big deal.

11:25It's a big problem, but people don't want to go to the doctor, admit this to another person, and then have to go to a pharmacy and say, hey, can I get my pills, please? Instead, what if it was, you could just telemedicine, you could just get diagnosed online, get the prescription really quickly from the comfort of your own home without going anywhere. And then we'll deliver it to your doorstep in very discreet packaging. And there you go. And Hems and Road did this and built billion-dollar companies just on that one way of increasing access. Well, I think for therapy, you got to do two. I think you got to decrease the cost and increase the privacy.

11:55So solution, put an AI therapist in everyone's pocket. You train it on 100 million hours of therapy, you know, transcripts and conversations that exist or could exist. And, um, and you provide the service to everybody, even people who can't afford a hundred dollar an hour therapist or$200 an hour hour therapist. Um, you know, you drop the cost of that by a hundred X. So how do I get this for$10 a month or$5 a month? That's the, that's the big opportunity. And how do I, in doing so you would a hundred X the number of people that get this benefit, right? It's a win-win. And, uh, you know, I don't know the exact specifics, like, you know, you may need, it's going to take some time to train this to be good.

12:35Um, there may be some things like, you know, the difference between creating drugs or a supplement, like you have to get, you have to do like either clinical trials and get FDA approval, or you just create a vitamin and you can like sell that online tomorrow. Um, you know, it might have to be framed less medically and more like a life coach. I'm not sure, but the idea of providing therapy for everybody is a big idea. Number eight robots that automate warehousing. So I, for my e-commerce business was running a warehouse for, I don't know, a year, year and a half. We had a, I don't know, 10 ,000 or 15 ,000 square foot facility here in California.

13:10And we had 10, 20 people there. Absolute pain in the ass for everybody. Nobody liked it. They didn't like working there. We didn't like having people there. We didn't like running the thing. It was slow. It was expensive. It was bad in like pretty much every single way. And then you look at Amazon and Amazon has invested billions of dollars. I've read anything from$10 billion all the way up to a hundred as an estimate of how much they've invested in R &D around their warehouse automation. Back in the mid-2000s, they bought a company for almost a billion dollars, Kiva, I think Kiva Systems. And those are those little sleds.

13:39You can see these insane videos online. The sled basically like goes into the warehouse, finds the set of boxes that somebody ordered something from, picks it up, drives back. And these are all like, there's hundreds of these going at once and they're all like part of one big brain. So they know how to never bump into each other. and so then they drive all the way up to a human who's sitting in a chair who just pulls the item out of the box, puts it in the package and that's what the Amazon product is and this is a perfect example of my export framework. So my export business framework is basically, it's a way to generate business ideas, which is you look at any big company and you see what did they spend millions of dollars building a homebrew solution for, something that works for them and made their life better and then can you export that idea as a product that any company could use without having to spend the money on the R &D.

14:27Tons of examples of this. Simple one, LaunchDarkly. Billion-dollar company now, they were working at Facebook. Facebook had a feature that they had built internally, a product they had built internally, spent a bunch of engineering resources building, which was a way to launch new features under feature flags, meaning you launch a feature, it's in the app, but you can turn it on for 5 % of the population. If it's bug-free, then you can turn it on for 25 % of the population. or if it starts to have a bug, you can turn it off quickly, remotely from your server. So the idea of feature flags, they productized it, took it out there and said, hey, the thing that Facebook uses for their app, you should use in your app.

15:04And of course it works. So I think somebody is going to do that here with Amazon's warehouse technology. I'll just give you a crazy stat. Just this stat is the business plan for this business, right? I talk about this idea of one chart businesses, one stat businesses. It's a single stat that basically encapsulates the entire opportunity, which is that today, hey, 2 % of all warehouses use robotics, right? So 2 % of all fulfillment warehouses are using robots today. That number's going very close to 100%. And so just the shift from what's going to take it from 2 % to 100%, you could just sit down and brainstorm.

15:37What is that going to take? Is it new robotics technology? Is it better sales and development process? Is it consulting practice? What are the different ways you could take that number from 2 % to 100 %? I think that's just one big opportunity. All right, number seven. uh, similar to what I just said, consulting McKinsey for AI. So technologies come, but they don't, it's not evenly distributed. It doesn't just get everywhere all at once, right? There's still like, I don't know, 4 million people would dial up internet using AOL. We get online right now in the, in the United States. And so, um, it takes time for these technologies to sort of propagate through the, through the community, through the population.

16:14And so AI, AI does all this amazing stuff. It can help businesses become more efficient, more smart, more intelligent, serve their customers better, but it's not just going to like appear overnight in every company at all. No way. And so I think somebody can build a killer combo of conferences, content, and consulting, the three C's package those together and build something. So here's what I would do. If I'm working at McKinsey, right? I'm one of these, you know, fancy pants, smart people who works at, gets a job at McKinsey. And you have two choices. You're either going to grind the McKinsey ladder for like the next, I don't know, five to 10 years with the end goal of maybe becoming a partner someday and making a million bucks a year.

16:56Or door number two, quit your job tomorrow and launch a AI specific consulting practice that is going to identify one type of customer. Maybe it's a mid-market industrial companies or it's lawyer law firms or dental practices or whatever, and identify AI market fit. So identify one AI tool or process that would help one type of customer and start there, start consulting there. You can build a multimillion dollar service business from there and stack more and more. And basically in the same 10 years, instead of just grinding it out at McKinsey, just spend five years doing this on AI, building the AI consulting company and sell it back to McKinsey for a hundred or a thousand X the payout.

17:39I believe that there's going to be billion-dollar consulting companies that are specifically just about AI, that the big consulting companies, Deloitte, PwC, McKinsey, et cetera, they're going to need to buy. They're going to acquire practices that do this. And so I think if you have the chops to do it, conferences, content, and consulting, I think a combo of those three would work. And specifically around conferences, what I don't mean is what I think everybody wants to do is create the AI conference. That's cool. Somebody's going to do that, but that's also very crowded. Instead, I think the easier opportunity is to create the AI for X conference.

18:19So AI for healthcare conference. Hey, healthcare, you have a healthcare company? We have a conference that's specifically about marrying the best AI companies and startups and experts to healthcare companies like you and seeing how you guys are going to be using AI in the next three years in order to build a better company. And I think you could do that with every niche, every industry. Every industry could have this. So you could do this in healthcare, you could do this in whatever, you could do this in farming, you could do this in any industry, any vertical industry, you could create conferences around that.

18:54So I think that's separately just a good idea. All right, next one. Cameo. Okay, so Cameo was this app that got really popular because it lets you buy shout outs and greetings from celebrities. Great. But if we just step back for a second, like influencers and celebrities make money off their name, their face, their voice, all that. And today, if they want to do that, they have to cut these deals with companies. They have to agree, hey, you're going to have to fly out to Tucson and we're going to film this commercial and you're going to be here on set all day. You have to read these lines and it's a pain in the ass.

19:31And that's why you have to charge a bunch of money for it. Well, now that AI is here, we have something called deepfake technology, which basically means you can make a fake video of anyone's face. You've probably seen the deepfake Tom Cruise, or you've seen the deepfake music video that was made where the guy's face was shifting from one celebrity to the next. Indiana Jones, I think, used deepfake tech to have the young Indiana versus the old Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones. defakes are getting really, really good. And so this is an opportunity. Now, here's where everyone gets it wrong. People think, entrepreneurs think, I talked to a lot of startups that do this, they're pitching me for investment, and they're like, we're going to make this defake tech, it's going to be great.

20:17It's not a tech problem really right now. It's actually a rights problem. So what somebody needs to do, the move here is not to go all in on product, but to go all in on biz dev, which is a total narrative violation. Nobody says, hey, go all in on biz dev, but that's you need to do for this business. What you got to do is create some sort of digital likeness license. You need to go to athletes and celebrities, everybody CAA represents and WME. You got to go to them and you got to get partner with them and basically say, hey, I'd like to sign up to be your rights provider, rights holder and provider and license, licensing technology for you so that anytime a brand comes and wants to use your name and face and voice, they can do so.

20:58And you can get paid for it. They can have the official training data for you. They can have your signature and your rights that saying you're allowed to use my face and my voice to do this. And then after you have the rights, once you, and this is beautiful, by the way, because we all know in businesses, the value of a business is in the defensibility. And the defensibility here is not the technology, it's the rights ownership. So if you can go lock up the rights, there's a land grab right now. If you can go lock up the rights to the right names, names and faces and voices, and you own that, right?

21:30You either license it from them, and then you sub-license it out, or you create the product that they use to manage their rights and licenses. You have a moat, because people only want celebrities to do this. And so whoever gets them first wins. And after that, you can either buy technology, partner with technology, do whatever you want to actually deliver this deepfake stuff. And so, you know, in the future, when LeBron James does a McDonald's commercial, he's not going to have to go fly to Georgia and film that commercial. They're just going to put an API request, pay the money, get the license to his face, his voice, his whatever.

22:07Then they're going to be able to script it and he's going to be able to sign off for approval. That's it. Like, that's how the whole process is going to go. He's going to make more money with less time. That's where that's going. So idea number five is the opposite of that, the anti-cameo. So I was on TikTok yesterday and I saw this video of Mr. Beast giving away iPhones. Now, your boy's not a dummy. So I know he's not actually doing that. This was a deep fake. But a lot of people didn't know that they were clicking on it. And in fact, Mr. Beast tweeted this out. I was like, hey, a lot of people are seeing this and this is effed up.

22:37How can I get rid of this? Like, how do I stop this? This is terrible. You're using my face in ways that I definitely don't want. Similarly, I saw, you know, Taylor Swift is all the rage right now because she's dating Travis Kelsey, somebody used Midjourney or one of the AI image tools to make photos of Taylor Swift like smoking weed or whatever. They put her in a bunch of compromising situations that you wouldn't want to be in. She doesn't want to be in. That's bad for her brand. But now it's easy for anybody to just deepfake that. And so you need an anti-cameo. So protection. So the takedown and protection and detection and monitoring service for all these celebrities to say, hey, we are scouring the web to make sure your face is not showing up in deep fake porn or in ads that you're not actually endorsing and things like that.

23:29That's going to become a no-brainer business. It's a consequence of how good this technology is. And by the way, for all my crypto haters out there, this is a great blockchain use case. There's a company doing this that basically what they do is they say, yeah, we're going to basically let you create, everyone who is a celebrity or whatever, anybody, any company, you have a private key. And so anytime there's media out there, you can sign the media with your private keys that only you have controlled to say, yes, this is real. I actually said this. I actually vouched for this. I actually created this.

24:03I actually endorsed this. And what's going to happen is that in the future, media that doesn't have that digital signature is going to be seen as untrustworthy. And so what they did with the blockchain was very smart, was they let anybody create their keys, their digital signature, so that they can sign off on these and have it encoded that, yes, I indeed did say this, do say this, I endorsed this, I allowed for this. So that's going to be a big deal. All right, number four, AI tutors. So education is obviously a big space. How amazing would it be if everybody had their own AI tutor. So everybody had a patient, infinitely intelligent tutor who was going to let them just take a picture of the problem that you're trying to solve.