489: Creating Humanized Automations Using AI with Nat Choprasert of Future AI Lab

0:00Right now is literally the best time to start an e-commerce business and here's why. In 2018, we created something that was a first of its kind, a comprehensive online course to start and launch your e-commerce business from scratch, and we called it Start and Scale. Now, five years later, this course has helped 25 ,000 founders in 65 different countries kickstart their business ideas, including thousands who have achieved six and seven figure results. Founders like Laurieann Trin, who use Start and Scale to create a kids apparel brand that celebrates heritage. Or Samantha Brett, who used Start and Scale to build Naked Sundays into Australia's number one SPF skincare brand.

0:38Or April Scott, who used Start and Scale to gain the confidence to launch her luxury sleepwear brand. Although we've updated the program before, this year proved that right now is a defining moment for e-commerce, and it's because of AI. With AI, what used to be slow is now fast. What used to be complex is now simple. And what used to be expensive is now cheap. Every business is going to look so different in 10 years, and if it doesn't look different, it'll likely be out of business. So we went back into the studio because we knew to keep Start and Scale valuable for your business, we had to update it with the most relevant tools and strategies.

1:13So today, we're proud to introduce the brand new Start and Scale 3.0 course. And this course is for you if you don't have an idea yet. You're going to learn the fastest path to creating brand names, product ideas, logos, images, all through the power of AI. Or if you already have an online store, you'll learn how AI can help you automate repetitive tasks, analyze customer data, create all sorts of different content, and even handle customer service and so much more. So whether you're a start and scale veteran with a flourishing e-commerce business, or you're hoping to take the first step to 2024, this new course will help you completely transform your e-commerce journey with the power of AI.

1:54We're super proud of this incredible program. This is the third iteration. We've spent so much time, hundreds of thousands of dollars. So if you want to know more and want to sign up, which I highly recommend you do, if you want to start the store and you're confused or you're not sure where to start, go to founder.com forward slash build my store. That's founder, F-O-U-N-D-R.com forward slash build my store. I can't wait to see you inside. What you need is thirst. You need to be a thirsty human. is intent on learning. It's a really fascinating exploration of human potential. Now. The Founder Podcast.

2:35Even the greatest entrepreneurs had help. If you want to learn from the most successful founders on the planet, you are in the right place. Branson, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Ariana Huffington, Steve Case, Gary Vee, Sophia Amoroso, Barbara Corcoran, Damon John. Learn from the greatest minds in business today with interviews hosted by Nathan Chan. This is not your average entrepreneur podcast, the founder podcast.

3:06Thank you so much for joining us for this virtual summit conference, Nat. Really excited to speak with you. You mentioned offline that you've gone full circle. So you're actually a listener of the founder podcast, community member. So you would know this question, right? The first question that I ask everyone that comes on is how did you get your job aka how do you find yourself doing the work you're doing today? Yeah well thank you very much Nathan for having me on it's a privilege to be here. Yeah basically a couple years back I started an online tea brand and yeah it was like I was listening to Founder actually while packing my tea as a solopreneur doing everything myself.

3:50So I spent a lot of the time like, you know, talking to myself because I've already exhausted like all my friends and family about talking about business. I think literally I put someone to sleep talking about business and all the things that I learned. So yeah, I was quite lonely at the time when I was doing my own business and wasn't until like my husband said like, Hey, you should like market your business on TikTok. Um, and I was like, I ignored it for like a year. Cause I thought like TikTok was just for kids and like people doing dance routines and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, I, I came back to the idea of going on it, um, which I tried it for my tea business and it was okay.

4:34Um, I didn't blow up like all the other people did. So I sort of like just stopped that. But then I went back to the idea of, you know, talking about my business learnings and my journey and everything that I wish that I knew prior to starting a business, which I had to learn the hard way through like experience and lots of money lost and stuff like that. So I started talking about my business and like tech, tech reviews and stuff like that on a new channel so brandnat on TikTok and then I started gaining a lot of traction there like one of my videos where I stole a competitor's like database blew up to like I think 100 ,000 which was the most views that I had like ever since I started and yeah I just like really enjoyed talking about that aspect and marketing and all that on TikTok and connecting with people that like found the content really useful which sort of like gave me a lot of like happiness I suppose and yeah like since then I started gaining like more traction brand sponsorships came about as well, which I wasn't expecting so early on.

5:57And so people were like business owners were coming to me to ask for help. Like, how can I, how can you help me? Like they were asking me what I was selling, which I didn't have any products at the time anyway. But it was the first time that I sort of like had a lot of people coming to me asking me for more things, which was different when I was like doing my e-commerce business was I like pushing products onto them and I was like buy this buy that um and so by creating content like that on brand that I sort of understood how to like create content and so I applied this back onto my e-commerce store and I started gaining traction there as well and so um doing content more on brand that I sort of started to realize like this really came naturally to me and so I sort of like doubled down on it and I sold my tea business within the month and then I moved on to going all in on brand that and around that time that's when ChatGPT came around and like basically everyone knows about ChatGPT now but at the time when it first launched I did one video about that and it got a million views and that's when I was like well like I should probably create more content about that.

7:15And so my following grew from, I think, 30 ,000 to like now 400 ,000 across all my platforms. And yeah, like so many opportunities have come my way because I was just putting out organic value-driven content. And so now I teach business owners how to implement AI and automations in their business so that they can, you know, free up more time and do things more efficiently. So yeah, that's where I am now. Awesome. So yeah, basically you are an expert when it comes to using AI and automation and helping founders get leverage, right? Because that's really what it's all about. How can you get as much leverage as possible as a founder or entrepreneur to buy back your time, right?

8:07Because there's so many things that happen when you start a business, when you're trying to grow a business that it's so difficult to even get traction on that business. And, you know, you want to get ahead however you can. And there's like this resurgence, not just chat GPT, but there's so many other cool tools that you can use to get leverage. So I guess the first question that I have around AI is like, you know, what is humanized automation mean to you? Because that's your focus right yeah so when it comes to automations um like you said everyone has access to charge ubt bard or bing and everyone can create essentially like loads of uh facebook posts or social media posts and content basically but um generally like to make an impact uh with like you know AI and all that you don't want it to come across as automated or generic because that's the type of content that you'll get if you expect chattypt and all that to create like all the work for you basically so what I like to do is have humanized automation so that there is a human element in there and I guess people can't tell that it's AI generated even though So, you know, you may have used it.

9:31So the way I like to do it is I'll get AI to do 60 to 70 % of the work. And then in the final, you know, 30%, I might add the human element to it where I'll customize like one section or one sentence of it. And it doesn't come across as, you know, automated, even though it did majority of the work. So that way you get the benefits of being genuine, but also saving like, you know, a lot of time in the back end. And is this just around the concept of using chat GPT to create content or how else can this apply? Like this concept of humanized automation? Yeah. So one example of how we've used it is, say, we get a lot of like sponsorship inquiries.

10:18um so i used to spend a lot of time like creating custom quotes um and like we might be you know 30 emails deep when the brand might be like oh can you add like uh exclusivity to the contract as well and then i have to go back and like re-quote them go back and forth um whereas now um i've cut out that entire process of going back and forth and just saying, look, fill out the form here, and then AI or ChagibT will create a custom quote based on what they filled out. And they laid out the whole quote for them so they can see the whole breakdown. And then it automatically drafts an email for me so that I can like automatically send it off.

11:06But yeah, so if you wanted to make it even more customized. So what we did was they filled out information about what makes their product unique or like information about their product. I get ChatterBT to write something about that part so that it looks customized to their product. So that's what I mean about human automation. Yeah, got you. Hey, FounderFam, I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with OmniSend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders. We've been recommending OmniSend to founder students for a while now because it just works.

11:47Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling the seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results. Did you know on average, OmniSend customers make$68 for every$1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment. And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50 % off your first three months with the code founder50. Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show.

12:21So how often are you using ChatGPT to build your business now? Every single day. Like that is my go-to when it comes to AI tools. And also using it in the back end with automation tools like Zapier. So I don't have to think about it. Like I've set it up once and then, I mean, we might refine it over time to see like what's working, what's not. But generally it's ChatGBT and OpenAI, which is the same company, working in the back end. Got you. So you're using Zapier to talk to different tools or to solve different tasks in your tech stack and then you're using ChatGPT to automate it or like Zapier to automate it and then ChatGPT do a lot of the work and then it gets sent to you.

13:16So it's kind of like a co-pilot more than anything, not so much. You open it up, give it a task. You're actually, you're all about automating it. Yeah, exactly. and also you know adding that final human touch at the end just to make sure because right now you know it's not like it can do everything for you from start to finish you still need to have that human at the end or at the beginning just to help guide it so I like to think of it like previously we were walking to a destination but now we've got a car which is like the AI driving us there, but you still need someone to like be in the driver's seat, driving it to the right direction.

13:59Maybe later we can, you know, have driverless cars, but not right now entirely. So yeah. Yeah, no, that makes sense. So then the next question will be how do people identify the things that they can automate and use chat GPT or use AI? And there's many other tools, which I'm sure you use, right? Like for example, editing content, like what tools do you use to edit content? Yeah. So I love to use a D script, um, because it can like, especially when I was doing my little e-course, uh, I, when I made a mistake, uh, on video, I could just cut it out, like by deleting the text and it automatically deletes the whole section as opposed to me, like going deep in and just like dragging things around.

14:45And it's like really tedious. Whereas you can just like literally take off text and that's gone um and deleting like the ums and uhs which I do a lot of so working on that but Descript definitely helps with that and speeding up that whole process yeah we were playing around with Descript and basically setting up dubbing for me so oh yeah yeah that's awesome yeah yeah yes so Scott Scott sent me a video before which was quite funny like and it sounded like me like oh yeah yeah type to text type you might need you might need to use um hey jen in the future to replace your video completely yeah what's that um so basically it uh takes in your previous videos and then it replicates you on camera wow with your voice your natural hand gestures and stuff like that and yeah i've seen the the demo it looks really realistic so I'm gonna be trying that very shortly so the dream is like replace myself so you believe that like content creators will not even have to shoot over time possibly I think I could see this for like training courses and stuff like that that would be really useful especially because like you know you might be showing something on the screen and stuff like that and you would have like a little camera section for yourself but also like you know doing presentations and stuff like that for companies I think that would be very useful but yeah content creation I've tried a couple times on my TikTok and it's like really fun just to see if people like can spot it or not but it's getting really good actually at replicating like natural human gestures which it couldn't previously do because you could tell like the face was the only thing that was like moving but now Heijen has like come up with you know very natural human movements.

16:51Yeah got you so what tools because and I love that you've you know started and grown and sold an e-commerce business so i know um you you understand the challenges that an e-commerce founder would face at various levels um or even a founder in general but for e-commerce founders what do you see should be the go-to tools from all of the knowledge and experience that you have for when it comes to using ai to get ahead like how here if you would even start an e-commerce business tomorrow you know the process how would you use ai talk us through that um so if i started tomorrow another e-commerce store i would use two tools so the first one tragedy bt as i said it's my go-to mainly because um and right now i currently use it for the same purpose which is a business coach because in the past um i've paid lots of thousands of for business coaches.

17:53And I replicated the same thing on CharGBT where it gave me the same advice. And it's all about sort of having a conversation with CharGBT and giving it all the relevant information. And a lot of times when I speak to business owners, they don't know where to start. So a hack that I have is if you tell ChartGBT that you want to build a$100 ,000 business, e-commerce business, tell it who your target market would be and what your product is, all the information that you have about yourself. and then you would ask me 10 questions in order to create a business plan or a business strategy for me. And that way, Chargedy PT will understand your situation and it will come up with questions for you that you can answer and then Chargedy PT will use that as context to create the business plan or the marketing plan, everything that you need to get started and it will lay it out.

19:01What I love about ChatGPT is it will lay it out step-by-step for you in a very structured way. And just keep conversing with ChatGPT and ask because if you keep conversing with ChatGPT, it starts to get to know everything about you. So I have one thread in ChatGPT called Business Coach GPT and that's the main one that I always go to where I have a business problem, I'll go to it and say, here's my situation, here's the problem, my dilemma, what should I do? And it will give me a guided structure to how I should approach the problem, pros and cons to it. And then I'll be like, so I want to go down this route because it will give me two options or three options.

19:49And then I'll say, I want to go down this route. How should I approach it? And it'll keep giving me answers to the point that I understand exactly what I need to do. Um, so yeah, that's how I use CharGBT as a business coach, which is invaluable, especially when you're starting a new business. Um, especially because when you're starting a business, most of the times you're bootstrapped. So you don't have enough like money to, uh, go and pay thousands of dollars to a business coach, um, or possibly an e-course. This is a really good way to get started so that, you know, you can build that momentum up.

20:27The other tool that I love is Claude, Claude.ai, and that is a competitor of ChatGBT. But what Claude does really well is it has a lot of context and it's very good for creative writing. So if I'm coming up with like TikTok hooks, video scripts, I use Claude all the time because it comes up with amazing hooks. that I've used personally in my TikTok. And the most recent one I did for like a brand sponsorship and it got 400 ,000 views from it. And like the hook was made from Claude. So, you know, things like that. And Claude and all these other AI chatbots can generate lots of variations for you.

21:18So, you know, imagine using it for your ad creatives. I want to go down this hook, create 10 more different variations for me, and then it can create for you. Now, you've got the hook, expand out the whole video script for a one minute video, and then it will do that for you. Now, and saying that, you still need to sort of see, you know, how you can edit it towards like your tone of voice and stuff like that, which it can do, but ultimately you want to have your own personal unique voice in there as well because yeah otherwise it just looks a bit generic now with using these tools people often think that the AI can do it all for them but or they don't know how to use it but one of the things I like to tell them is you've already got the skills and the advantage at the moment.

22:18So say for example you're an expert marketer. You know that the content that Chagibiti or Claude comes out with, whether it's going to work or not because of your experience. And so all you need to do is ask the right questions, see the answers, and then direct it towards where you want it to go because you know what the end result should look like or have an idea at least. And so that's where you, you know, we still need humans at the end of the day when driving AI. Yeah, got you. So when it comes to clawed and hooks, why is it better than ChatGPT, you believe? ChatGPT still feels a bit robotic and like you can tell that it's written by AI.

23:04Well, I can anyway, because I use it all the time. And I know as a marketer, like I create content all the time that it's not going to work. Whereas with Claude, it feels very natural. Like the, the, the hooks that it gives you is very creative. And the stuff that I would actually say on, on video, whereas ChargerBT, it kind of feels very salesy, very promotional. Like I, I mean, And you could prompt it to be less salesy and all that, but Claude just sort of like eliminates that process of having to say be less salesy or be less promotional. Yeah, got you. And how long does it take to get it to a point you find like if you, let's just say you want to do a script for a video, you get to do a few different hook variations.

23:58Like how long will it take for you to like come up with a script for like a video, like a TikTok video? It might take me about like five to ten prompts to get it perfect. Generally the hook, if you get the beginning close to it, maybe five, three to five, where it comes up with something pretty good already. um but yeah it's it all comes down to you know how much relevant information you give it uh for it to be able to understand what you're trying to achieve um so what i like to say is with tragedy bt you often need to layer the prompts in so you you probably shouldn't like go tell it to complete a really massive task with a really massive prompt um it it works better when you like give it like little mini tasks to do first.

24:58And then once like, say, for example, create me like 10 TikTok hooks. So it like has one sentence hooks. And then after that, you choose like out of those 10 hooks, choose one and be like, I like number one, create like a whole video script based on that. And then keep, keep reiterating. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this episode and learning a ton. As you know, in this series, we interview some of the greatest founders of our generation to find out how they did it. However, if you're thinking of starting your own business and you want to hear from some incredible stories from everyday people like you or I who are actually in the trenches, only been building their business for maybe one year or two years, like they're building right now and they're really in the early stages, but they're getting success.

25:45You should come and check out our new podcast from zero to founder hosted by our community manager, Molly Flynn. These are in the trenches stories from our very own successful students that have gone through some of our programs. People just like you who are deep within the process of building their very own successful business. These are the founders of tomorrow. You can find the From Zero to Founder podcast on all platforms. And remember, it's founder without the E. All right, now let's jump in the show. As you said, you get a lot of people that come to you around like implementing humanized automation using AI tools.

26:27What are the common problems that business owners face when it comes to using AI? What are the common challenges that you're seeing? Yeah, well, when clients come to me, they often ask like there's so many tools out there, like literally thousands that have just come up this year alone. Which one should I use for my business? Because, you know, there's so many, it's very overwhelming. The next question is like, how do I actually implement it? And like, what needs to be implemented? They know the process that they have in their business, but they don't know what tools would be the best fit for what they're trying to achieve.

27:13So those are probably the two most common questions. The ones that have played around with AI and they have a deeper understanding, they generally know what tools should be used, but they don't know the nuanced nitty-gritty of how they can actually make it more efficient or more effective in their business. So say, for example, like Chachipiti and Zapier, they know those tools, but they don't know how to actually like implement it in their business. Like, yeah. So where should people start? Good question. So I think the best way is to actually play around with it themselves to sort of understand the capabilities of it.

28:05because a lot of the times they'll come to me and they'll say like, can you automate my entire business or can you automate my entire like department? Which I need to like burst their bubble and bring them down to earth a little bit. But I think if they played around with it and had a look at like how it actually works, that is like a really good way to understand in general how it works. And then they can sort of see, you know, where in their workflow could they implement these sorts of tools. And what I found in my personal business is say you've got like a 10-step process in the workflow. So if you really analyze the whole workflow, you may find that you could eliminate like eight of those steps and just implement like two or three of the steps to get the same result.

29:00And that's nothing to do with AI, but it's more to look at your entire process. So say, for example, like, do we really need to go through like 10 interactions before we send them the quote? Or can we just get the client or the lead to actually play around with it on the website first before they get to a point where they can speak to our customer service and do business that way. So, yeah. Yeah, got you. And I guess with the industry changing so rapidly, how do you stay ahead? Yeah, I consume a lot of information, but one of the tools that really helps me is Feedly, which is a tool that aggregates all the news sites together.

29:53And then I also have a staff member that reads all the information from Feedly and then only collects the important stuff and presents it to me. um so that's how I keep ahead uh of the curve and yeah also just trying out lots of different stuff that come out um so I know you know what's actually valuable and what's not so yeah and um I'm curious when it comes to I guess your e-commerce business that you were running your business. It was called, sorry, Life of Char. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Life of Char. So when you were running Life of Char, obviously AI was just starting to kick off. Once, you know, let's just say you talked about using it as a business coach or a co-pilot to help guide you.

30:53Once it's up and running, what other ways would you use AI right now, knowing what you know, to continue to grow it besides getting advice? Yeah, so a couple, there's so many different ways that you could use AI right now. One of the really easy ways would be, say, photography photo shoots. So I used to pay for my products to be in really nice photo shoots, but now you could just simply take a photo of your product on your phone and then get a tool like Pebbly to actually put it into a really nice setting. So it looks like you've done a photo shoot, but like literally it was done on your mobile phone.

31:38Yeah. And literally yesterday we were playing around with Bing and they've gone up another notch. So we took a photo of a perfume bottle, messy background, everything like that. Like it was just on our desk and stuff. And Bing actually took the photo of that product, presented it with similar settings, like with contrasting colors and stuff, but it refined it and it literally looked like a professional photo shoot that was done with the product. So, yeah, like the tech is like getting, I mean, the AI is getting really good now so that, you know, you don't need to have really expensive like setups and stuff like that.

32:24But yeah, the other way that I would use AI would be, say, B2B, like when you're dealing with wholesale clients and stuff like that. I used to do it a lot with my tea business when talking to wholesale business. So when a Facebook lead would come through asking more information about wholesale prices and stuff like that, I would get Chargibit, well, you could get Chargibit to generate that email draw for you and customize, you know, give them some compliments about their business and stuff like that, and then send that off with the quote. And then after that, get a tool like ActiveCampaign or an automation email software to automatically, you know, contact them in a five-day sequence or something like that until they're either ready to buy or they're not ready yet.

33:28But at least, you know, like where they're at. And that's what I actually implemented before AI. But that really helped because I used to do like cold calling like eight hours of the day to try and get new clients but this really cut down everything so I didn't have to be on on the phone following up the following up was like a massive um time consuming process and then you find out like they're not interested whereas this way I only get notified if they're interested and then I can work with them um in detail so yeah yeah that's cool um yeah I love the one around photo shoots as well wholesaling and then also obviously Shopify have launched yes um what's it called again Sidekick yeah Sidekick that's right yeah Shopify launched Sidekick and uh you know you can do little changes and tweaks to your site and all sorts of things and optimize the conversion rate and all sorts of things I love that um the one part that I really love about that is you're able to see you know the data driven content in there because a lot of the times before I had a lot of data but I didn't know what to do with it I didn't know what it meant whereas with the sidekick you can see like uh you know the results from your conversions what's working what's not and it can tell you like you know this is what you should do and so it directs you towards the right direction and the other tool sorry the other thing that I wanted to also mention with helping e-commerce business is say they're running Facebook ads I a lot of the times when I had Facebook ads running I would get a lot of data and I had no idea what that meant at the beginning and it was hard for me to know what ads I should turn off or on and so if you export this data now you could go into ChatGPT data analysis and just dump your Excel spreadsheet with all the Facebook data.

35:36And you can ask it, like, what does this mean? What are the valuable insights I can take from these Facebook ad results? And what ads should I turn on or off? Or which ads are doing really well and why? And reiterate more ads that are working really well for you and create lots of different variations based on that. And so like having really data-driven insights is very valuable, especially with AI, being able to interpret it in a simplified version. Yeah, that's a common thread. Like from people that we've been interviewing for the summit, that's definitely a common thread. People are using ChatGPT to analyze data.