The Role of AI in Modern Business Evolution 

Exactly. Yeah, that's going to be, that's like the hot favorite that I like to talk about is the impact of AI across everything that we are doing today as a business. So let's start with an example. Give us an example of work that you have done which really like through technology fostered a tremendous amount of growth. It could be a company, it could be a partner, it could be anything.

Yeah.

Yeah, so. Yeah, there's a few to be honest and one is a client that we're working with which is a kind of a B2B tour operator. run tours for, you know, they're a travel operator but they run it for business to business, okay? And so historically their business has been very much a kind of people-led business and we haven't changed that. But what we've done is implemented a set of technology tools that has allowed the people to become more efficient with their people-to-people experience. And so now... over the years, what's transformed from say a completely kind of phone and voice based business, which is not a very scalable business, very personable, yes, but not scalable to a more of a technology led business supplemented by people. So what we've done is implemented mobile apps, portals, and now actually AI calling assistants to help with their kind of customer service side of things. So the first thing was to enable their clients to facilitate and manage their own bookings through an online portal. Yes, it sounds simple, but this was quite a long time ago that this technology was implemented. But it's an example of how you're taking a traditional, not a bricks and mortar business, but a business that was very much human interaction, not scalable, and turn that into more of a software-based business, but with people supporting that and adding the human touch on top of it.

Yeah.

human interaction based. I I, you know, I...

Yeah, I mean I've experienced in the B2B event industry myself, you know, I used to be, so I know exactly, it's still like a lot of network effect and people.

Right, right, cool.

Yeah, yeah. And actually, I'll give you another one actually, which is along the same kind of lines, which is with a concierge company that we helped. And so what they do is offer kind of concierge services to sort of wealthy individuals. And so for instance, let's say you wanted to get tickets to the F1 or to the cricket if you're a cricket fan, which some of your listeners I'm sure are. But you know, it was kind of a big match and it's tough to get tickets. These guys source tickets for you and all of that kind of thing and film premieres, etc, etc. Again, historically, email, text, phone based business, not scalable at all. So we built them, you know, I know it sounds simple, but we built them a really simple mobile app for their users, for their customers to use. have your own

Yep.

account manager who you talk to directly through the app, but the requests that you make go through to a CRM portal, which can then be managed and then prioritized and ticked off. And once that's done, it's actioned and it's sent back through the app, push notifications, the client's happy, but there's a scalability to the business as well. So, you know, that's a bit of transformative tech. And I mean, the words of the business owner themselves has literally transformed my business. Yeah. So he's taken him from a, you know, a sort of a five person operation to a 50

and also mid-if technology.

in 20 person operation through technology.

Yeah, no, no, And I think that's a great way to scale as well. It's a great way to standardize the experience. And also, when you have digital touch points, you also have a lot of checks and balances built into the process. So like you just mentioned, somebody came in, they made a request, gets into the CRM. So you can time them. can like, know.

show. Right.

base, you can create automated tasks based on when something is due. And then when something gets done, the customer gets notified automatically. It's not really waiting for a human to actually sit there and type in.

Right.

No, and interestingly, that's kind of the next phase of any kind of SaaS or semi-software based business is starting to now automate some of these tasks to make it even more kind of efficient and, you know, the process driven.

Yeah, exactly. And then you mentioned AI when we just got started. So who does not want to talk about AI? So yeah.

Who doesn't? Right? Well, some people don't. They bury their heads in the sand and they're trying to ignore it as long as possible,

Well then, I truly believe companies that don't embrace AI, they will have huge challenges going forward. I think it doesn't matter if you're big or small. In fact, I think for smaller companies, it actually levels the playing field in some extent. mean, you being a smaller company with the use of AI technology, you can actually behave like a big.

Yes they

Mmm. Cutie.

correct you can.

And that's one area that, and like you said, I started my career back in 97. So it was just the beginning of the internet. E-commerce was very nascent. Having an e-commerce store was kind of an exciting thing. It's like a natural thing right now. a lot of companies, and SAS was just getting started as well.

Yes, was. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And a lot of companies that did not believe in e-commerce, that did not believe in the power of the internet, did not believe in the cloud, did not believe in SaaS, they got left in the dust.

Yeah, yeah, and then later on like an example of that would be somebody like Blockbuster. So, know, had an opportunity to kind of reinvent themselves and then didn't and you know, then died. Yes.

Yeah.

And they had like years to reinvent themselves. I mean, I was there when Netflix first started. was a great, all they did was, every time you, and the DVDs were getting, DVD players were getting popular at that time. So anytime you bought a DVD player, you got 10 free movies, rentals delivered. That was the only thing they did. They didn't do much of advertising, but they partnered with all the DVD manufacturers, the DVD player manufacturers. And it was a great,

Mm-hmm.

complimentary thing because you're buying a DVD player, if you know that you're get, and rentals used to be about $5 a movie. So that was like a $50 value right away with like a $200 DVD player that you were getting. And that's how they got their subscriber base. But Blockbuster for the longest time kept fighting it. And by the time they got into the digital,

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

They had already burned so much money. They were learning so much losses. Nobody was really willing to place a bet on that.

No, I agree. And I think for say a lot of SMEs, I think if you're not a digitally native company as well, it's still really important to kind of embrace it and take it on board. Even if you are at the moment kind of feeling like you're doing okay, if that makes sense, and you you've got good revenue and you've got a decent bottom line, it's still important because that is going to change. And if you don't do it, your competitors will and that's where you're to come unstuck.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I think, I mean, the other thing which happened is like COVID was a huge influencer and an accelerator or a catalyst for adoption to digital because a lot of businesses that had never thought of having a digital posture, they thought that they could kind of continue the way they are, even in like healthcare. A lot of doctors for the longest time had resisted adopting technology but when...

It was accelerator for sure, yeah.

COVID came, was like, there was no choice left. You you had to consult patients online. There was no other, yeah, there was no choice. And then they found, wow, this actually works and this is really good. Same thing with a lot of companies that are never restaurants for that reason. You know, a lot of restaurants that didn't really focus on delivery, they were like more dine-in experience and you we wanna, but when COVID came, they were like, you know, I have to really think about,

Yep, absolutely. Now they've stuck with it though. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And I know of really high-end restaurants that actually recreated that high-end experience at people's homes. They would have their kitchen and they would send stuff, but they would make sure that it was packaged really well. They really gave that inner restaurant dining experience to their customers at their places. So a lot of businesses really thought out of the box. And it catapulted them.

huh. Yep.

Sure. Yeah.

into a better place. And I think the same thing with AI is happening is companies have to realize that AI can be a game changer for

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah, it can. And actually, you talked about the experiences and recreating that kind high end experience and sort of say on the customer service side, AI is somewhere that you can really kind of help if you are a of a medium sized business and you have any kind of customer service or call centers or chatbots or whatever it is. This is somewhere that really you've got to start thinking about doing it. Like having customers waiting on the end of a phone line, listening to hold music is just

Yeah.

can't have that anymore, know, in the age of AI, you you really, you have to work on having decent chatbots or a kind of a voice-powered assistant, which is something we've built by the way, to kind of at least be that first line of customer interaction.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I was actually talking to an airline, a VP of customer service earlier today. And I just think the worst phone service experience that you get is with the airline industry, Because any time you have to, yeah, any time you want to.

You are.

Yeah, I Don't know my broadband operator is pretty terrible. I'm not gonna name and shame, but you know who you are

Anytime you want to change a flight, anytime you want to get a refund, anytime you want to have an inquiry about anything from baggage to anything. Either you're waiting on the phone for many minutes, and then eventually you get to somebody and they still can't help you. Even a small change request takes, like, let's say I want to change my flight. It's like, hey.

Alright.

Yeah.

you know, these are your options and I picked the options and they kind of cancel the original booking, make their new booking and it's like a 15 to 30 minutes and.

Yeah. But this is the problem with the larger companies is that implementing those changes actually is difficult for them because implementing any kind of digital transformation piece within a enterprise level organization is tough because you have to get buy-in from stakeholders. You have to get buy-in from your staff as well and then obviously roll it out sequentially and it's difficult and it's a one, two year program. And like you said, that's where the SMEs actually have a little bit of an advantage in that they can be a little bit faster mover with these changes.

Yeah.

be maybe a bit more agile, maybe a bit more creative with their transformation and actually kind of get a head start leverage it to your advantage. Yeah.

Yeah, and then with larger companies, With larger companies, data is always an issue as well. mean, their data is not organized. AI is going to be only as good as the data that you're feeding into it. So if your data is not that well organized and it's not in one centralized place, which I think for SMEs, it's a lot easier to do because the tech stack is not that complex.

Right.

No, it's not. No, exactly. It's not as multi-layered and yeah, they're just running a few systems.

Great. Any advice that you would like to share with companies that are small and medium size, that want to embrace AI? Typically, we always say crawl, walk, and run. So in your view, what would be the crawl, walk, and run if somebody wants to adapt to AI?

Yeah.

Yeah, so... First thing is to actually crawl and you've got to make that you've got to make that step. And I think what we find is some a lot of it is the people that we would talk to they're often still founder or owner run businesses. Right. And so those owner run businesses typically the bottleneck tends to be with that with that owner. You know they're a busy person. They don't necessarily have the time. So they think they push this down in their priority list. So I think the first thing is first is you've to start taking it seriously and you got to start that crawl aspect. So with the crawl, you said crawl, and run. The crawl, I would actually start by kind of doing what we call, and it's a service that we offer, is kind of an AI audit. So that is a look at the whole organization and the whole process and look at how we can get a few quick wins of any kind of AI implementation that can get you a quick win across your business.

Yeah, I mean, whatever your business processes are, looking at them and seeing where can AI have an impact, you know, from, yeah.

Exactly. Right. Right. So that's what we do is the first first phase and that would be probably the crawl and then the walk would maybe be implementation of a chatbot or kind of a script that reads incoming emails or something like that that can auto respond to if you if for instance you get tons of emails from customers or I don't know what it whatever it might be.

Yeah, mean, auto-respond, auto-schedule, auto-resolve, you know, issues basically. Yeah.

Right, all of these things. like a small bit of automation or something like that. And then a run would be like full implementation of automating kind of large tasks and processes throughout.

And typically, what do you think for a small business, and let's kind of quantify that. And maybe if you have an example, let's say it's like a 100 to 200 people company. And they have thousands of customers. And they get a decent volume of incoming support tickets. also have a sales team that is actively talking to their.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

customers and then obviously like they are like, you know, shipping either products or like, you know, providing a service. In that scenario, what do you think is a typical timeline for the three phases that we just talked about?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's good example actually. think the first phase can just be sort of a month to six week timeline to kind of do that overview of the business and look at the processes, the audits, yeah. And then the second one we're probably looking at a two to three month and then the same again for kind of the implementation. So all in probably looking at about a six month program of works I would say. Depending slightly on if there's any kind of resulting software that needs to be developed as a result.

the audit.

could be there could be like a front-end skin or a wrapper or something whatever it might be that would need to be developed to kind of increase that automation piece but the example you talked about there you know you've got quite a few touch points of where AI could you know you can automate the kind of the end-to-end process the kind of the CRM integrations the support tickets prioritization of support tickets by kind of you could have a machine learning algorithm that will kind of learn the importance of tasks or maybe auto respond to tasks or complete tasks without you actually having to get involved because it's kind of learn the behavior or learn the touch points. So yeah, that's quite a good example of the one you gave actually.

Yeah, and what are the best ways for somebody to explore AI on their own? What I see is a lot of people are hesitant to go talk to a consultant yet. They wanna introspect and figure out themselves before they're gonna take that step of involving an outsider in their business. What do you think?

Yeah.

Yep.

should be the approach there? Are there any tools that you recommend that they can play with, or is there a self audit that they can do that helps them answer the question whether AI can have an impact on their business?

Sure, I mean... You could just have a conversation with Chat2p about this and it'll give you a pretty good idea straight away. My suggestion would be go to Chat2p and enter a few prompts around, this is my business, this is my revenue, this is my current pain points, this is what I do, this is the customers that I interact with, this is what I think we should be doing, what do you think? I guarantee you're going to get a pretty good answer back to be honest and it'll at least give you an idea of where you can go. where you can go with it and what you can do. And yeah, that's where I would start to be honest.

Yeah No, that's brilliant, I think. That's brilliant. In fact, that way they also get a taste of AI firsthand. Because we dabble with AI every day. You and I, we know the power of AI. But a lot of people out there, they've heard a lot about AI, but they have not yet tried AI, basically.

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, give it a try. And like, obviously, it's not doing me out of a job. All it will do is kind of show you the power of what it can actually do also in the right hands, you know, so people say it's all about the prompt and it is about the prompt. But obviously, we kind of write models and agents and we develop specific agents to do exactly what you need it to do. But what I can do is very quickly give you an overview that you can come to someone like us and kind of say, look, we've identified this via AI and like how how can you

Yeah, I think I'm

but can you implement it?

Yeah, and I think it gives them a little bit of control as well. They're walking with some level of confidence that they know what they want to get done in their business and where they think that can be impacted.

That's Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, and I think it's the same like if you're kind of building a SaaS based startup, like not on the AI world, you should still kind of do your research a little bit around tools in software development platforms and how things are made and what good UX and UI is and do a little bit of learning yourself. So you're not entirely reliant on a software provider. you know, you're coming to the software provider for a bit of guidance, but at least being able to kind of talk the talk or have a rough understanding is going to be helpful.

Well, John, I think it was wonderful catching up with you. Hopefully our audiences learned a thing or two about how they can leverage technology to foster growth and better customer service. once again, thank you for being a wonderful guest.

Not quite.

Hope so.

Pleasure, I've really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on.

Thank you.