4 Ways to Use AI in Your Business | Ep 968

0:00Last year, my companies did over$250 million in aggregate revenue. I've been in business for over a decade and a half. In this video, I'll show you how we use AI to make our business better, cheaper, faster, and less risky for our customers. I'll also walk you through some real examples of every department. Number one, how do we actually make the business better? So if we think about each of the functions of the business, you're going to be turning raw attention into some sort of profit, right? Like if we look at businesses, though, it's a manufacturing belt. And the first, I think, misconception that people have around implementing AI to their business is they think they must become an AI.

0:30business, which is not true at all. And so the easiest analogy I can give is the internet, right? So almost every business is on the internet. You don't have to be an internet business. You just use the internet as one of the many tools that you use to deliver whatever it is that you sell. And so I think the first mistake that I'm seeing businesses make is assuming that either they have to become tech companies. Now there's a component of being tech forward. But like, are you tech forward for having a webpage? Not anymore, but you used to be. And the people who got there first got disproportionate returns.

1:00The second kind of big thing that is being a mistake is assuming that like one of the tech nerds is going to do it for you. Now, one of the big advantages, I think that I've had that's led to some disproportionate outcomes for me has been what I'll consider cloud to dirt knowledge. So like vertical integration of knowledge. So being able to do the high level strategy, being able to handle the people stuff, communication, marketing, all the way down to the granularity of like, how do we connect this API to this other API? And the reason I think that cloud to dirt understanding of all systems within the business is valuable is because you're the only one who's going to understand what is possible.

1:35So even if you have some tech nerd, right, who's next to you, you would then ask them, well, what is possible? And they're going to answer within their limited context of business. And so if you know your business better than them, which you should if you're the owner, then you can see how different pieces, if applied together, would be really valuable. they won't see that inherent value. And so they're going to default to things that they've seen before that people have done, which largely will be what I would consider commoditized automations. Right. And so where you get the true alpha or the true kind of big improvements in the business are going to come from your business acumen getting overlaid on top of technical acumen.

2:10Now, you probably don't consider yourself to be a tech person. I certainly don't. In fact, I would say that I don't even like saying it, but I largely dislike technology, but I see it as a necessary evil being, you know, emphasis on the necessary part, which is that you've got to get good at the shit. So I'm gonna give you a couple of things that you can do. And then I'll give you some examples of stuff we've done, but things that you can do today right now is there's a zillion videos on YouTube on how to automate a specific thing or task within a business. They exist. You can find them on your own time.

2:39What I would encourage you to do is take the link, take the transcript and then say, Hey, I want help building this thing. And then plug that into whatever AI you want, and then follow the directions. And when you get stuck, take a screenshot of the page and say, what do I do now? And put it in the chat and do that over and over and over again. So from a marketing perspective, we have an AI SDR right now who's matching our human team. Okay. Now, one of the big mess ups though, is that people will install, business owners will install a half built function of AI into their business, compare it to something that's been optimized over the last six years or 10 years or 20 years and say, see, it doesn't work as well.

3:25John Henry wins again, right? For those who don't know that, well, you know, you were born probably after 2000. Anyways, so the idea here is you have to do an apples to apples comparison, which is how long did you work on training and putting all the SOPs together? Okay, great. Well, then you have to apply that same methodology to the AI. So let me give you a different example of this. So the reason that I think that like people who have like sales called sales AI agencies will struggle is that you have to know more than just tech and just how to sell in order to implement sales into different businesses.

3:59And as somebody who's been very good at acquiring customers via checkout page, via webinar, via in-person sales, via phone sales, most of the ways that you know how to acquire customers, we've gotten pretty good at over the years. And it's just probably maybe an obsession of mine. But the thing is, is that if I were to go into a company and they say, Hey, Alex, can we use your AI setter to apply to my whatever XYZ business, I would say, well, it's going to, it's not going to be like a simple drag and drop. It would be like saying, Hey, can I take one of your sales guys and put them in my business?

4:26The first shot, you think they're going to be good? Of course not. They're going to suck. They're going to be terrible. And you're going to be like, how is, how is that good? Now it's even worse if you don't even have a very good sales process as is. And then saying, Oh, now that I have an AI sales person or AI setter, I'm going to run an ad and then have the AI setter, you know, call every single person who opts in. Well, would you have a human call every single person that opts in? You can then make the argument, well, it'd be cheaper. It's like, yeah, but would it be effective? Most times there's a certain amount, there's a sales motion, there's a sales process.

4:55Like AI will make the things that you're doing right now easier and faster. It doesn't mean that you still don't have to do them. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10 stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1 % of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate.

5:24And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, just enter info and it'll spit it right back to you all free. So humans aren't going to change. Our ability to be persuaded, the things that we find interesting and important, those aren't going to change. The psychology of humans is largely going to remain unchanged. And so whatever you do in order to persuade people will still have to happen.

5:53It's not that all of a sudden all the rules of persuasion are broken. And to the same degree, if your business now starts using AI, I wouldn't advertise that you're using AI. No one cares. They just care that they get their stuff faster, that they get it cheaper, that they make it better, and that it's risk-free. And so let's just hit those ones really quickly. So from a risk-free perspective, how can AI reduce the risk in a business? Now, on a global level, right, I think PayPal reduced its fraud team by a gigantic amount. And more importantly, they've reduced their fraud losses by$700 million in a single year just by having AI start recognizing patterns faster.

6:27Now, to the same degree, on a human savings level, JP Morgan had Coin, which was their kind of like their AI engine for, I think, like credit agreements, something like that. But it basically saved like 350 ,000 lawyer hours, right? Which they were able to just basically do 12 ,000 credit agreements in seconds rather than having these lawyers review them over and over again. That is another use case. Now, some of these seem like these big global companies, but you're like, how the hell am I going to do this in my smaller business? We'll Klarna replace 700 customer service agents with AI and save 40 million bucks in a year.

6:57For us, when we did our book launch, this is before people were talking about agents as much. We spun up five agents that handled, I think it was like somewhere in the neighborhood of like 120 ,000 support tickets. And it was mostly just like, hey, can you tell me where I get the free stuff? Right. But we were able to resolve 90 % of all tickets without any human intervention. attention you have to find a time and maybe that's weekends maybe that's evenings maybe that's early mornings maybe it's middle of the day whatever that thing is for you that time period is for you where you have to fully dedicate yourself and actually go soup to nuts click to close beginning to end on just automating one portion of your day that is my only ask now people have an incredibly hard time um with this for two reasons one because everyone's afraid of ai which by the way if you're watching this and you have workflows who do you think would be best served to automate the workflow someone else or you.

7:51You should automate your workflow because then that will give you time to figure out what else you can do that's more valuable. Now, every single time you think about your workflow, whenever you want to put what I'll just call magic or mysticism in, it's where you say, well, I just kind of know, or I have a gut feeling, or I have intuition, or instinct, or whatever you want to call it. I just want you to think pattern recognition because that takes all of this magic away from it because you are an organism that has been exposed to different stimuli. And then you had reinforcement cycles that occurred where you realized that this, like when we say, Oh, I think that looks cool.

8:24It's because we've seen things that look similar to that. We generalize this pattern and then describe it as cool. All right. That's how it works. And so if you can just erase your romanticism around whatever niche specialized knowledge you believe to have, and believe me, I'm somebody who thinks for a living, I would be the most threatened by AI, right? You still have to approach it with an observable lens, which is what are the actual behaviors that I do in order to get this outcome? And so even something as simple as like, okay, I have to think of a cool idea for this YouTube video, right? We have different ways.

8:59I'm sure you have some ways where you're like, okay, well, I think about what I did that week. Okay. So could a, could a bot look at your calendar? Okay. Step one, Step two, can you record all of the calls that you take and have those transcribed? Okay, that's now more interesting because now I have a bot that not only sees the calendar, they also know what all the conversations were. Okay, can I then ask that bot to say, hey, any interesting situation or decision that came up over the last week, I want you to put the top five most interesting ones into a document for me and then run it. And then great.

9:32Now you've got the five most interesting moments. What does it also create? True stories and narratives. which is do epic shit, talk about the epic shit you did, right? So you don't have to make stuff up. The big difficulty that people will have in the world of AI content creation is proof. That's the issue. That's the problem. And so like, there will be endless amount. Now, on the consumer side, they won't be as sensitive. On the B2B side, it still matters. Like, imagine tomorrow, there's a B2B AI avatar, right? For sure. Why do I think that that won't work that well. Because the same reason doesn't work for other people who don't have any proof.

10:12The first thing that's like, again, human psychology is not going to change. People are still going to wonder, why should I listen to you? Why should I listen to this AI bot? Well, if that AI bot has no proof about why it is good or what it's achieved or what real world outcome it's had, it's just words. It's just GPT words, right? And so what would then happen is it has to be backed by somebody who has done some extraordinary thing. Maybe you sell an e-commerce store. Maybe you did, maybe you're an amazing trader. Maybe you're really good at real estate investing, whatever your thing is, right?

10:41You have to have the proof. And so in a consumer world, it is easier because, and this is, I mean, again, psychology doesn't change. If you have a beautiful AI avatar talking about skincare, people are going to see the beautiful AI avatar. And then the way the avatar looks gives proof to the thing. Now we can be clear that obviously it's just purely pixels and generated, but I think that the human psychology part, I don't think that's going to matter. Right. But on the, on the B2B side, I still think it will. And so I use all these examples to say, and hopefully drive point, drive home a single point, which is that the internet is here.

11:17It's just, you know, 25, 30 years later and it's AI. And your business doesn't have to become an AI business, but you do need to use AI in your business. You don't need to advertise that you use AI. Just like I don't advertise that I use to the internet, right? I just use it just like you do. And so we use the tools to get the outcomes. We don't advertise the tools we use. I don't talk about my CRM. I don't talk about, you know, what call service we have or, or, you know, what specific training I'm doing for a specific rep. Probably not. I don't talk about that because no one cares. They just care about the outcome and whether I'm good at it is whether they buy again.

11:55And that will come down to your skill. And so my big encouragement is, is that you are not too busy to do this. You have other things that are less important and you need to start prioritizing this. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10 stage roadmap from zero to a hundred million plus that less than 1 % of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it?

12:24And then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this. And it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description. But you just go acquisition.com forward slash roadmap. Just enter info and it'll spit it right back to you all free. So the AI equivalent of the web page in the internet era is a different type of response because the internet was all about connection. And so the website became a calling card. It was a means for people to contact. So it was really, it was in some ways single faceted.

13:01From an AI perspective, anything a human touches, an AI can interact with at a basic level. And so if we think about the departments, right, there's going to be AI that's going to be involved in marketing. But let me give you some examples of many different ones that small businesses use. You can have an AI that helps you create the ideas behind your marketing. You can have an AI that helps you script and package the ideas, meaning the headlines, the thumbnails, even the topics themselves, right? It's a little bit kind of like the ideas. You can have AI run the tests for different thumbnails automatically that it generates and then creates a skill based on what it sees over time of what's winning.

13:43That's on the organic side. Now, again, you can also include trend research there. What are the trending formats? What are the trending hooks? What are the trending visual hooks, not just verbal hooks? And then take all of that information and then cross-reference it with past content or subject matter that you would show your AI that you associate with, which means aka brand, right? And so you say, okay, these are trending formats, hooks, intros, visuals, and this is what I do. Come up with the Venn diagram, the cross-pollination of those things, and give me 10 of those. And of those 10, you'll pick the one you find interesting.

14:16You click that button and now it starts generating the idea, the headline, the scripts, whatever. That is on the content side. On the ad side, this is where it gets very interesting too, is that you can create self-licking ice cream cones. Which means that I can make content and I can have the content immediately get overlaid with a CTA, which immediately gets put directly into an ad campaign that launches every single day with yesterday's content. You can create endless amount of statics, static images off of different data sets. So for example, if you run a community-owned school, you could have, hey, I have one tab where people list their wins.

14:50Great. Any new win that gets added to that immediately gets transferred over and then runs through six visual templates that we know are high converting. And then we will run those as ads towards Vantage, which is our million-dollar-plus community that we have there. Right? All of that automated. Pretty slick. Right? And so all of these things like, and that's, again, all of those examples are just marketing, right? Sales, you can apply all the way across the bat too, which is like, how can I enrich the leads? How can I respond to them quickly in terms of, can I send an automated voice note? Can I send an image or text that's obviously personalized their business, which we can dynamically pull?

15:26Yes, of course you can. Can you do that via DM on Instagram? Yes, you can. Right? All of that's, that's just on the nurture side, right? On the scheduling, can we do more dynamic scheduling because we have one AI who hands off to another AI? Yeah. Is availability less of an issue? Sure. Does that mean speed to contact goes through the roof? Yes. Now, the thing is, is that we got 18 months. We have about 18 months where there's just a huge amount of wealth that can be created by people who have nothing. It's a very big opportunity. And so no matter where you're at right now, if you had an army of these agents working on autonomous tasks for you, you could get a lot more done than you currently are.

16:01And I think you should do that. But I mean, it works across the board. My legal team, you know, like I can have one general counsel that instead of having 100 paralegals run all the different stuff that we have for deals and lawsuits and whatever else that we have going on, she can just run it all through different agents that have different tasks, right? First response, second response, cease and desist, all that stuff that we have to do every day.