How to Actually Implement AI in Your Business Without Wasting Six Months

0:00Jeff MacPherson:AI is not coming. It is already here and it is moving faster than most businesses can think. The question is not whether you adopt it. The question is whether you adopt it before the gap becomes impossible to close. Today's guest is Jeff MacPherson, CEO of Cloud37, one of the sharpest operators in the AI space. Jeff and his team had been inside the AI world for nearly four years. They have seen what works, what gets oversold, and what most businesses are completely missing. We get into why AI will expose the people who were never really experts, how the next generation of businesses gets built, and the one decision that separates the operators who win from the ones who get left behind.

0:46Jeff MacPherson:This is not a hype conversation. This is the reality check. Let's unlock it.

1:00Jeff MacPherson:i have heard that ai is going to take over i've heard that ai is going to take over in three months eight months i have heard that we won't even know who we are in the next five years today we have mr ai himself jeff welcome to the show i think this is one of the most important topics we can talk about right now. I mean, where this is going, the speed at which it has been going and how fast it keeps multiplying. I don't think most humans can even understand. Let's get into it. What comes up when you hear all of that?

1:41Kayvon Kay:A lot of noise. That's for sure. First of all, thanks for having me. It's always good to see your pretty face. No, I mean, there is a lot. There's a lot of overwhelm. Every business is dealing with it right now. What tools do I use? How do I use it? Is my team not adopting it right? It's the same cycle for every business that we talk to. The fortunate thing is as fast as it's moving, we're still very, very far ahead. So the businesses that really start to adopt this now and understand what some of the stuff that will likely go through, you still have a lot of time. But the only problem with that time, to your point, it's very compressed.

2:16Kayvon Kay:So a lot of time is going to move is going to compound into a very, very short period of time just because of that hockey stick effect.

2:23Jeff MacPherson:Absolutely. Now for the audience wondering, well, who is Jeff? Why don't you tell us a little bit about, you know, who is Jeff and why, why you, what you've seen, I mean, over the last, I think three to five years since you've really dived in.

2:35Kayvon Kay:Yeah. So, I mean, Jeff McPherson, Canadian based with Cave on there. I am the CEO of a company called Cloud 37. We've been in the AI space for almost four years now. Crazy to think how time goes. We started as an AI agency years ago, and we were building custom stuff for people. They were like, you would want something in sales, we'd do it for you. And then the next person would come in and we'd do it for them. And we found the same problems with everybody. And this was like early chat GBT days too, everybody was still trying to figure it out. But there was the same issues for every single person.

3:09Kayvon Kay:It's nobody had their information set up properly or what people call their knowledge base. It's all in like Google Drive or Notion or Airtable and it's just everywhere. And then all of the agents or workflows, we were basically copying and pasting them because how agents are built, it's the same process every single time. The only thing that changes is the expertise and the information that you give it. And that's where we went out and built the platform Cloud37, which is essentially powering people's businesses. And we're helping people scale their expertise into subscription models, which is really cool.

3:44Jeff MacPherson:Yeah, we're going to get into that because I think it's very fascinating what you're doing and how you're helping, you know, whether it's everyday people or speakers, coaches, consultants that have knowledge that typically are trying to build courses and how to create that knowledge base and kind of an all in one solution. But I think for where we're at right now, I really want to touch on the rate of why, like, I mean, what we're seeing in the market with AI. I mean, for me, with zero development skills in the last two weeks, right, I've showed you what I've built. I built two pieces, like basically SaaS platforms with websites, with email integration.

4:18Jeff MacPherson:I mean, things that would have taken me and my business, I would say six to eight months, if not even a year, and a lot of headaches, a lot of questions of why it can't be done. I mean, it's mind boggling. And I'm sitting there going, if I'm doing this with zero expertise, zero, what is the developer who has all the expertise and know what to actually prompt, ask, change? How faster does that guy's work happen and quicker?

4:46Kayvon Kay:Yeah. Well, I mean, for us, last year alone, we ended up getting rid of three engineers and we're growing. So it gave us the tools to be able to scale and scale properly. All of these tools, it gives us the ability to just be different. What we're noticing in the market is tools and these dashboards and these platforms are becoming commoditized to an extent. But it's like, how do you separate yourself from everybody else? The only moat that we believe people are going to have in the future is going to be community. And this is something we're heavily pushing on all of our clients that we work with.

5:17Kayvon Kay:It's great to have a tool and have all these AI workflows and stuff like that. But when everybody can do the same thing, what's next? What's next? And that's what we're always trying to keep up with that sort of stuff. So people don't have to think they can stay in that process. But for the development side, it's, I mean, we're running our whole software company with some of these big technologies, Cloud Code being one of them. Sure, there's a couple other things in behind the scenes. And then some of our developers, five years ago, they weren't even developers. So it's like it gives people the ability to learn and learn fast.

5:48Kayvon Kay:Yes, there's still levels to it, 100%. But at the end of the day, if you're willing to put in the time to learn and become that expert, the tools will do everything and it's power to amplify you to that output. So where do you see AI going?

6:02Jeff MacPherson:I mean, what do you see the future of AI? And how fast? In business? I would say business and life at this point. Yeah.

6:11Kayvon Kay:I mean, the optimistic side, I think it's going to like for us, I mean, we've known each other for a long time now. I think it's going to give us the ability to do the things that we're actually passionate about. Like I know that you're being into the sports and the biking and skiing and stuff like that. I think it's going to give us time to be part of our passions, part of our families. If you're in the right bracket, for sure. There's obviously the bad apples that are going to do the bad things. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the tool is, there's always those people. In terms of business, there's going to be an upper class and there's going to be a lower class.

6:43Kayvon Kay:What I'm most excited for is all of the people that we know on the market who made really good money for a short period of time, who weren't actually experts, who were some sort of affiliate or some sort of info guru or wherever. It's going to start exposing them for everything that they weren't because AI is just, it's unbiased. It will tell you exactly what's right and wrong and people who aren't experts or don't really know what they're talking about, it's going to expose them, which is going to give people who maybe didn't have those opportunities, the ability to be in that upper class because you still need the expertise there.

7:18Jeff MacPherson:Yeah, that's a big loaded answer there. But I want to I want to dissect that a little bit. Specifically, you're saying is going to expose the people that may not. I think what you're politely saying, they became really good marketers, but didn't know anything else but that so they knew how to sell but they didn't know actually how to maybe fulfill or what they were selling was snake oil but how's ai going to expose that if not just make it better and easier and faster for them to keep going down that road there's still going to be people who

7:47Kayvon Kay:win but when everybody can do it when all when everybody can do it what is going to separate people because you can only sell snake oil for so long like as the markets continue when because the problem with the people that were doing it before is if you didn't have that fancy car and you couldn't get pictures. Well, I mean, then you didn't have the ability to get in front of those people. But now with content, I can take a picture in front of a Lamborghini and get in front of those people. That content doesn't work anymore, but everybody is seeing that guy posting those pictures, selling a course, and we all know one of them.

8:14Kayvon Kay:But when everybody can get in front of the same audience doing the same thing and building the same products and stuff like that, the only thing that's going to separate you is truly understanding it and not selling snake oil. Nobody goes through courses anyways. We know this. It's having the community and having better true customer experience. There's still going to be a side of having that human interaction. And if you don't want to do those, I mean, you're just not going to be a part of it. It's pretty straightforward.

8:41Jeff MacPherson:Yeah, it sounds like there's no hiding anymore. Like if you're going to actually want to create influence and create community and or create an offer online, there's there's other factors that are in play now that must be looked at.

8:56Kayvon Kay:Lazy people will not win because at the end of the day, as easy as AI is, you need to. I mean, you understand it's like it's not it's easy, but it's not as easy as people think. And you put in work to build that site like it took you work.

9:08Jeff MacPherson:Yeah, yeah. I'm now probably over, I would say, 50 hours. But I mean, 50 hours, right, to build it all is just insane. And I keep laughing about a thousand dollars in credits. a lot better than the$50 ,000 proposal I got. Right. So, I mean, it's interesting because I just, someone said today, like, man, you're an AI expert. And I'm like, no, I'm not. I just use AI and I just use it as my brain and it's allowing me to be expert. I think that's the power of where AI is, but even the AI you and I are talking about is so small. We're talking about LMs here, let alone the robots that are going to be in people's homes that are going to be able to take care of your kids, clean the house, fix the, fix the sink.

9:51Jeff MacPherson:I mean, what's going to happen with all these professions and people that are worried about their jobs being taken over who are not adopting AI.

10:01Kayvon Kay:Yeah. And like that. So to the at home piece first is you having a robot doing your dishes and helping you cook and stuff like that. I mean, like unless it's a passion for you, do people really need to spend their time on it or could you spend time somewhere else with your family. There's that aspect of it. All the blue collar jobs is like, is it going to be, it's a while before that actually happens. Like these robots can't really empty a dishwasher without proper assistance as much as social media is showing you that way. So we've got a long ways before that happens, but where the blue collar is going to go and is a very easy example.

10:37If these robots are doing all the work, they're going to need

10:40Kayvon Kay:maintenance so instead of maintaining a car like an auto body shop there'll be robot auto body shops where people are going to have to do them and yes in time could robots do those possibly but it's like what's the next thing i do my best not to try and think what's that 10 15 year vision of what ai is because most of us don't even know what's going to happen the next six months

11:00Jeff MacPherson:well i mean the rate at what we're going it's pretty crazy like i mean i from what i was told I haven't looked at this, but I was talking to someone else. They said like in the last couple of days, and I'm not putting the date on here, but last couple of days, Claude Code came out and basically sunk like four Fortune top 100 companies. Stock down 20, 30 percent.

11:25Kayvon Kay:Yeah, it's insane what these what these platforms are doing. And this is why it's like we want to we are trying to show people is like don't build the tools in a in a respectful way. we're our own tools, like you have your knowledge, you have your expertise, the stuff that you've built over a long period of time. If you just know how to bottle that up and sell it to as many people as possible or be an extension of other people's business, that's when you're going to build the community to be able to do the next thing with those businesses. You're going to make really good money and let these big platforms do all the stuff that you just shouldn't do.

11:57Kayvon Kay:Like the amount of tools that are on the market that are just going to be obsolete in the next year and I see businesses signing up for these tools all the time, it's like, it's like, you're not going to have it. Like, it's just not going to be there.

12:09Jeff MacPherson:Yeah. Let's get some examples because I have an idea of what you're saying, but like, get some examples of what do you mean by these tools are going to be obsolete.

12:16Kayvon Kay:So there was there in the early days, there was newsletter tools. There was lots of them. People helping you write newsletters. I mean, you, you, you can write newsletters on your own now. Like you don't need to sign up for these a hundred dollar a month tools. There's AI sales callers. Now the things that AI sales callers in which you got to be careful with, because everybody goes through these or just callers in general. In the last two years, we've gone through five different callers. So it's like, because the voice is the, is the thing that people want, but the technologies in behind it are getting better.

12:46Kayvon Kay:So you have to set your business up that can be interchangeable to the actual multi, the multimodal, whether it's text, voice, callers, avatars. You want to be able to set your system up that you can change those just like downloading and removing an app on your phone. This is how people need to look at it. Because there's your operating system, which is your business processes. Then there's your LLM, which powers it just like the World Wide Web powers our websites. And then there's like your interaction points, which is how people receive value. Whether again, it's you receive it in text, voice uh avatar video all these things and those are the layers that that it comes down to

13:26Jeff MacPherson:it's interesting you're saying that because like the tools like things that i thought were oh you got to really know what you what you you really got to have the idea of how to use ai for these things to happen when you dive in and you kind of realize it's not that hard you know uh example i'll just use my LinkedIn posts. My LinkedIn posts are like, I had a team who was writing the LinkedIn posts and then they would, I mean, it's just, it was a nightmare. And I said, okay, you guys are not following directions. I know AI follows directions. Maybe an hour in, I now have a LinkedIn post that automatically gets posted on my LinkedIn.

14:03Jeff MacPherson:I don't care. You know, people like it's trained in my voice. It gets smarter as I get smarter because I keep training it up and it spits out a post in a graphic faster than any human possibly could before you can even say one two three here's a world-class post uh that gets sent out so just recently i said well if you can do that on linkedin why can't you do that for blogs newsletters blogs newsletters all of that

14:29Kayvon Kay:all these things yeah 100 it's like where where we try and go to it is because is there people who write better linkedin posts than us yeah i mean it's a linkedin post let's go with the newsletter because it's a little bit longer than those structures to these. Or like writing scripts for YouTube. Like this is, there's different levels to it. So if you could, and Alex Ramosi does this even with his own business, where you go and hire a consultant for a period of time, basically teach you the frameworks. Then you take those frameworks and you train your agents on them. Now you have expert frameworks that you can go and do this stuff yourself and you scale it infinitely.

15:02Jeff MacPherson:Absolutely. Absolutely. So my question is this, when does it become where like it's just content against content you know ai agent again ai agent i'll give an example of this is i'm sure you probably've been in uh legal battles you know ai agent against ai agent right i start off with the ai send it off to a business they come they put in their ai they're sent it off to me and next thing you know you you've lost you lost complete you've like sidetracked everything i see it i'm like okay can we stop with this ai let's just be real. Where do you see that becoming problems in the future where they become actually more significant problems?

15:43Kayvon Kay:It's hard to say. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better, for sure. People are going to take advantage of it wherever they can and try and siphon out as much money. But there's going to have to be some sort of guardrails put in place, like human guard rails in place, especially on the legality side. But it's hard to say, really. It's like when they're back and forth. Cause even like the LinkedIn, you can see them as like, they're commenting back and forth, comment, like they're having conversations with each other.

16:07Jeff MacPherson:Yeah.

16:08Kayvon Kay:When that happens with like lawyers back and forth, when that happens with, and how many years is that in? I don't really know. Is it ever going to come again? I don't really, I don't really know, but is it possible? 100%. Yeah.

16:22Jeff MacPherson:Yeah. I, it's, it's, it's interesting. So tell us a little bit more about like, you know, what your product, uh, How you're how you're servicing, you know, I think I believe it's coaches, consultants, experts, speakers. I mean, anybody that basically is a knowledge based business and or wanting to scale community.