Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

AI-Proof Your Business with Brian Childress

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Episode 325

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this episode, we explore how businesses can safeguard their future with AI, featuring our special guest, Brian Childress, a fractional CTO with deep expertise in technology integration.

Brian provides valuable insights into the growing concerns of businesses wondering how AI will impact their industries and whether they are at risk of being replaced by AI-driven solutions. He discusses how to “AI-proof” your business and offers practical strategies for integrating AI in ways that enhance rather than replace human roles.

Notable Quotes:

  • “AI is everywhere, but the biggest concern for many businesses is whether they’ll still have a business in five to ten years.” - [Brian Childress]
  • “Start with the business value. Look for inefficiencies and tasks that can be streamlined with AI, but don’t rush to replace people.” - [Brian Childress]
  • “If we focus on solving employee boredom by removing mundane tasks, we can raise both morale and productivity.” - [Jonathan Green]
  • “Let’s look at your business processes first, then find the right tools—don’t just adopt AI because everyone says you should.” - [Brian Childress]

Brian emphasizes the importance of first identifying inefficiencies within the business and selecting AI tools that address those specific issues. He warns against the hype of adopting AI for the sake of it, recommending a thoughtful, problem-solving approach. Brian also highlights the value of collaboration between AI consultants and CTOs, suggesting they work together to implement AI solutions that truly benefit the organization.


Connect with Brian Childress:

Connect with Jonathan Green

Jonathan Green 2024: [00:00:00] AI proof your business with today's special amazing guest, Brian Childress on today's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. 

Today's episode is brought to you by the bestseller Chat, GPT Profits. This book is the Missing Instruction Manual to get you up and running with chat g bt in a matter of minutes as a special gift. You can get it absolutely free@artificialintelligencepod.com slash gift, or at the link right below this episode.

Make sure to grab your copy before it goes back up to full price.

Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you wanna make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now. Then you can come to the right place. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. You will learn how to use artificial intelligence to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep.

Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by bestselling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.

Now Brian, I'm really excited to have you here. It's awesome to have an amazing fractional CTO.

I have so many questions about fractional, so many questions about CTO, and of course we're in diving into AI proof in your business, but I wanna get people excited. What are they gonna learn over the next 20 or 30 minutes as we chat together? From your unique experience? Why should they be so excited about today's episode?

Tell 'em what you're gonna bring. 

Brian Childress: AI is just absolutely everywhere, and one of the biggest concerns that I have in working with a lot of my different clients is they're worried that their business could be completely wiped out by ai, and they're really concerned about not just how do I integrate it into my business, but how do I make sure I still have a business in five or 10 years?

So that really has changed the trajectory of how we think about our strategy. 

Jonathan Green 2024: That's amazing. 'cause so many people, and this is something that I deal with a lot as an AI consultant, people think that I want AI in everything. And I'm the exact opposite. I don't have anything in my house that listens to me.

I don't have any of those devices when I'm not working. And there's a lot of things I don't want AI inside of. Like they started putting AI inside my project manager. I was like, I don't want an AI coming up with tasks for me. That's not. What I want. So I think this is a really interesting direction because there's so much AI positivity, and a lot of people say things like, oh, if your company's not using ai, then you're a bunch of dumb dumbs and you're making a huge mistake.

But not every problem. The solution's not always ai, like it's good, it's a tool, but I think that there's so much hype and there's so much. Power in the news cycle. And I think that we're having very similar to when they said internet will solve every problem in the late 1990s. You're gonna order your dog food on the internet, you're gonna order toilet paper on the internet.

And maybe some people do now, but there's this hype bubble that then burst and we start to come back to reality. And hopefully over the next two or three years we will. So I really wanna dive into this core idea, which is. Why do people, let's get to this. Why do people think that AI is gonna replace their businesses?

And is this every business or just in certain specific sectors? 'cause I'm very used to people who think they're gonna lose their jobs to ai, but thinking about an entire business, this is very new and very interesting to me. 

Brian Childress: I think there are certain sectors, especially in say, creative arenas that are really concerned.

And we've seen a lot, take for example, any of the movie or television industry, they've been seriously impacted by AI because of the ability to use it for creative endeavors. So I think those arenas certainly are going to be impacted. Any businesses that work with. Service organizations are going to be impacted by ai.

I do a lot with B2B SaaS software, and I look into a lot of the platforms that help, service industries say plumbing, electrical HVAC. In those areas, the software that those companies are using are absolutely impacting and in many ways it's being impacted for good. A lot of the things that small organizations just weren't able to do an ai platform or agent is now able to help them answer calls and respond to customer feedback and ratings and reviews just much more effectively.

So their business is improving. So I think it's. One of those things, we'll see it throughout and we may not even recognize where AI is having an impact in our business and in our lives. 

Jonathan Green 2024: A lot of people think that the best use case for AI is creating content, writing your blog posts, writing your articles, writing your social media content, responding to your emails, and I'm a big believer that those are the worst use cases because every one of those is the chance for someone to get to know you and.

There's this feeling people have when they say, oh, I really love that article. And you go, I didn't write that. AI write, wrote that. Then they feel like you've tricked them, and that's the fastest way to make someone hate you, is to trick them. That's our natural response is, oh, I liked you, but you tricked me now.

I hate you. You don't go back to neutral. And I'm a big believer that the really big value, as you already mentioned, is. Organizing your schedule, taking care of repetitive tasks, things that are not as important, the customer facing thing. And a lot of people are really excited. For example, there's so many people excited by an AI that can do phone calls, and I just think of all the different ways that can be massively misused, whether it's.

Pretending you're someone else and calling their bank all the way up to someone thinking they're talking to a person. 'cause every time I talk to a company and my clients, I say, okay, they want a customer service chat bot. That's what gets people really excited. I go, oh, that's amazing. Will this chat bot have the ability to issue refunds or to send someone a replacement partner?

No, of course not. I would never. I was like, so you trust it with the customer's money but not your own? So when you get on the phone with a, like when I get on the phone with a, when I'm talking to a chat bot and a computer, I know it can never solve my problem. 'cause I know it doesn't have the power to issue refund.

So it doesn't have that power human would. So that always means, if I have a real problem, I have to get through this. Just like when you're answer, hitting the buttons on a phone tree to try to get to a person. So adding another AI layer. It really worries me that people think those are the big use cases, whereas I completely understand like, yeah, keeping track of reviews, keeping track of data coming in, organizing data analytics, helping you figure out who to respond to noticing when you have a customer complaint appear on a website you haven't been paying attention to, so you can fix that quickly.

That's really cool, and I think that's a very interesting use case, but so often we're caught up. In the luster, like everyone loves to talk about AI video, and I always say how often, how many videos did you make last year? None. Why do you care about AI video? You're not, why would you make any this year if you didn't do it last year?

And I think that the core business for most businesses isn't gonna change as much as people think. Certainly not as much as the hype is, because most of the hype is about things that are not useful, but exciting. And most of the things that are really valuable. Are really boring and they're just slightly better improvements of things that already exist.

We already have tools that help you organize your email. Now they're just a little better. We have tools that can help you organize files and project managers, and now all those things exist. But I think that you brought up, which was really cool, and one of my favorite things is that we've seen a downward pressure on pricing because a lot of companies, once they grab market share, they just spike those prices, right?

Everyone thinks they need to have Salesforce. Everyone thinks they need to have these really expensive tools, and they could be really tough. For a smaller company that only handle only has five employees, so they need a way to grow. And now I've seen my overhead's gone down about 90% in the past two years because chat GBT OpenAI set the standard of this $20 month price point.

All these other tools I was using that were two or $300 a month ago, oh, we're gonna lose all of our customers and we don't drop our price. And I see that as a really good thing for the consumer. 'cause it just shows you how high margin these SaaS companies actually are. And that has me really excited.

'cause now smaller companies have access to tools that allow them to compete with larger companies without a massive budget. 

Brian Childress: Yeah, I think that's absolutely huge. We're now we're seeing an equal playing field in a lot of arenas across many different industries. I. And it's never been easier to create a business.

It's never been easier to scale a business. And a lot of these tools, like you say, maybe a few hundred dollars worth of different subscriptions. I am up and running and I have a six figure business pretty easily. And I think that's amazing certainly for the consumer to have more optionality out there.

Jonathan Green 2024: There's this idea that the biggest companies have the biggest advantagement. The advantage of a smaller company is the decision making cycle. When you look at how long a government contract takes, or a hospital has a three year buying cycle, or a university, if a university makes a decision about AI right now, and then there's said, oh, we're gonna input this in 2027.

It's that's gonna be. That's, it's not gonna be good anymore. It's like too long of a cycle. So smaller companies have this really big advantage of agility, but they used to not be able to compete as far as really big tools and enterprise contracts. And now they have agility and the ability to compete.

I think that's what's gonna really interesting. I think we're gonna see a lot more fracturing of markets where smaller tools are able to capture market share, and we're gonna see a lot more entrepreneurship. So those things have me really excited now. You brought up something really interesting to me as well, which is the creative space.

There's this idea that, and we're seeing it a little bit like movies. They're trying to, and the hard part is that they never tell you when a movie script was written by ai. You just have to guess. You just have to watch, wish and go. I'm pretty sure this was chat, GBT, because this is not very good.

It feels like chat, GBT, you keep seeing those words you see all the time. Do you think that. That's going to last. I feel like we've seen a major dip in quality every time they try and make an AI movie. The quality is so low and whenever I see like an artist generate an AI image compared to anything I can create, you can tell right away there's a difference.

You can just see their skill. When I see people making an AI, movies that have movie experience, there's so much better 'cause they understand storyboarding and structure. Do you think that AIS will eventually catch up to that and actually be able to write super high quality movies or create movies in real time?

That's stuff people talk about. I'm not sure [00:10:00] why That's so interesting, but is that, do you think the Director of Entertainment will go, and I wonder if that will lead to a shift of people going to live performances for that exact reason. Like concerts in the late nineties when music. Napster went everywhere.

What happened? Concerts became much, much more popular. Music musicians make their money from touring now rather than from selling albums. Do you see a possible shift to live performance or other ways the market will shift where creative people can still thrive, that maybe there's just a slight shift in modality?

I. 

Brian Childress: I really think that there will be, and if we look at the human condition we're drawn to connecting with others, and a live performance is a perfect example of that. I am much more likely to spend an increased amount of money to go to a play or a concert than I would have been maybe even a few years ago, because I feel like all I'm doing is engaging with some sort of digital product all day long.

I need that other human connection, that creativity, that thing that makes us human. And so I really do think we'll see I don't know, maybe even a seismic shift in the ways that we're doing that. And for any of us that might be in creative businesses or endeavors, I. We'll likely just start to see more people wanting to really show their authenticity in their creativity.

And maybe they're using a chat GPT to superpower a lot of that work. But at the end of the day, we're gonna see a big push towards, I want to really show and give my voice to this thing, 

Jonathan Green 2024: because I see a lot in movie marketing. Every single movie now says, no, CGI, no, CGI. And. No visual effects.

And it's it's never true, right? Like I watched the new Top Gun, they said, oh, there's no cgi. And it was like 95% CGI. Oh wow. Like they were like, we flew real planes. But the planes in the movie are not the planes they flew. So every single plane is a replacement. Like every single plane in the movie is not the plane they flew.

And that's fine. The movie is still great. I don't know why there's this anti. I think it's 'cause we don't like bad visual effects. Just like we don't like bad AI experiences. There's plenty of times that AI is useful or helpful and can be do cool things, but it's the bad that cause us to go. I don't like it.

And. What I see possibly happening is a shift, like you mentioned, towards authenticity. Like we wanna see things in person, which again, could lead to, it actually could mean that a market that right now is centralized in Hollywood suddenly becomes dispersed. And people, now there's more writers with work and more plays everywhere.

So actually more actors are making money. Even if each individual, the people at top make less, but everyone across the board actually sees an increase. 'cause the face to face is like the only way you know you're talking to a real person. 'cause eventually. When you talk on a computer, you don't know it's a Zoom call, it's a bot, or it's an ai, all of that stuff.

So suddenly the only way you know is like by talking to a person or holding their hand to know that it's a real person. So suddenly, I actually hope that it leads to a shift in a decrease in social media and increase in person to person communication. So I do see some positives now for businesses that are trying to figure out.

How to make the right move. There's these two forces that are fighting against each other right now. The first is you have to do ai, you have to keep up. And the second force is what if I choose the wrong tool and I. I feel like my industry, the AI consultant, the AI analyst are like the people the most guilty because we go, listen, you need to be using Chacha B four.

And we go, Hey, listen, it's all about Cloud 3.5. If you're using CHA four, you're a dummy right now. And then it's no, you need to use CHA two B five. Oh wait, it's not CHA two five, it's gonna be called Strawberry. And it's I hope not. That's a dumb name. Like we're gonna do the thing like Android did where it was Kitco and Oreo, and then it's cat like we're jumping names around and.

For someone who wants to take that first step with their company. There's the two things I need to make a decision, but I don't wanna make the wrong decision. And most people don't even know what AI means. Like we don't have universal definitions because AI used to mean sentient. Computer IB is not sentient right now.

It doesn't mean that now they go, oh, a GI means sentient, or, strong AI means sentient. And because we have shifting definitions for a lay person who's I just wanna use a tool that works. Where do you think people should start? What's the first step you should take as a company, as an approach?

Brian Childress: For me, I always like to start with what is the business value? What is the problem that I'm trying to solve? And so when I'm talking with companies about bringing in some sort of AI so that they can keep pace with the industry, we start by looking at what are the things that we do. Every day. So each business is gonna have some unique things that it does.

Let's take a look at these specific tasks and then find an area that, hey, maybe we can streamline this particular process with some sort of AI tool. And I. Because these subscriptions to a lot of these different tools are so inexpensive, let's try a few of them. And for me, the way I approach it is I'll sit down or with the person who does that job every day and says, really look at the tasks that they're doing and encourage them and work with them to bring in some of these tools and let's try this out.

And it is a delicate dance, I think, because in those conversations is where it. It starts to feel like, oh, they're going to be replacing my job with this $20 tool. So now my, salary is now a significant overhead. And so a big part of what I do too is try and alleviate a lot of that fear.

It's, we're not trying to replace you, we're trying to supercharge you, and we're trying to remove a lot of the mundaneness of the work that you do every day. 

Jonathan Green 2024: I think that. That's a really critical differentiation because a lot of the AI marketing is like replace your employees, replace everyone, and whenever you see an unfettered AI result, it's bad, right?

You let AI make a video that no one checks, or anytime someone posts a social media post or puts an email and doesn't check it, eventually someone goes, this is terrible, right? You get caught and it causes problems, and I love that acceleration. I think that's so important to think. Instead of thinking I'm gonna replace my team, what if I could just make my team 50% more efficient?

What if we could raise our profits 50%? Suddenly their salaries are not a problem anymore. I'm not feeling that downward pressure because they can just do more. I really think of AI as LA raising the floor. So if everyone is on a scale of zero to 10, when you have ai, now everyone's on a scale of two to 12, people that are really skilled, artists are really great at their jobs, are still gonna be better than beginners.

Everyone has been able to deliver something a little better. So I think that this fear, right? We have these two big fears. I'm gonna lose my company, I'm gonna lose, or I'm gonna lose my job here. Nobody wants to train the replacement, right? No one wants to develop the system for the tool that's gonna replace them.

And I think that it's a legitimate fear because of how much people like to promote AI as though it's as good as an employee or replace everyone and it's autonomous. And none of those things are true. I test the most cutting edge AI stuff all the time. Every time someone says something's autonomous, as soon as you take your eyes off it, it does something silly.

Every time I see one of those videos with a robot, if the robot does anything like useful, I'm like, that's a man in a suit. That's a guy that's a guy in a mask. And I saw a robot recently and the people are like, I'm gonna order that. I was like, that's why Do you want a guy in your house wearing a mask that is not a robot?

It's too much of a jump in technology. I've never seen a robot that can pick up an egg, right? You show me a robot that can pick up your groceries, put them all in the refrigerator without destroying them. Now I'm afraid of robots, but we can't even do that. So the physical world is still definitely the realm of humans.

But we have this two pushes of everyone wants to create hype to sell their product. But then on the other side, all the other people are like I don't wanna bring this product into the company 'cause it could risk, it could replace me, it could destroy my business. So there's these two kind of competing forces now for.

What I really like that you brought up, and I think this is important, is that it's companies need to be problem solution first. Rather than buy a tool and figure out where to implement it, like there's nothing worse than when your boss gets a visit from the good idea fairy and says, Hey, we bought this new software.

Figure out how to use it, figure out how to justify what it costs. That's every tech person's nightmare, right? Like I get these questions all the time about certain AI tools that someone's Hey, we, what do you think of this tool? I'm like, it's terrible, or it's not really ai, or it's just a fake front end on top of chat GBT for a 10 times markup.

And it's really rough. It's bad enough telling that to someone before they buy it, but after they've bought it and they're telling you to implement it. Now you are, have a hammer and you're in search of a nail. So I really like this core idea that you have, which is, let's look at where we have lost time inefficiencies, and if we focus on solving like employee boredom, right?

How many people are on board at work? Almost everyone. If we can eliminate all the tasks that are boring and say, what if we just get rid of the boring stuff? You just get to do the fun stuff. We can also raise morale and we can actually cause a shift in the other direction. We're so busy thinking about the benefits for us at the top we're thinking, oh, we can cut overhead, we can eliminate a few employees, and we can raise our revenue.

What about just making everyone also like coming to work again? Like I see a lot of people talking about going back to work, working in the office or working from home and. What if people liked? What if you just made the office an enjoyable experience? What if people actually liked it there?

'cause there are positives to that. So I really think this is a very cool direction and I. This is why I wanted to bring you on because I know you have this really strong perspective and you've worked with so many clients. You've helped so many of these businesses. From the chief technical officer perspective, there's one other thing I see happening, which is this current war between CTO and Chief AI Officer, or AI Officer Eric consultant.

There's this idea that I hear this a lot and it's oh, chief CTOs are like stodgy. They see every, the solution, they see every problem is something you solve with Python and that AI officers are like creative and visionaries and they see [00:20:00] everything. They solve everything with wisdom and it's don't see it that way.

I see it as. Really, it's about a collaboration, right? So the chief technical officer really has a technical approach and they see how everything's working, but they also know, they know all the company's problems. They know all the things, moving parts. They know the tools they're using. Really the value I see from AI consultants or people that are in the AI space is going, Hey, here's everything.

Cutting edge. Here's what tools, here's what tools can do. Here's what tools can't actually do. Let me just tell you what, here's all the problems that can actually be solved and then the CTO can go these are the problems we have. Let's test those tools. Now you actually can be collaborative and I think that's the right direction for the future.

'cause it's like I spend three to four hours every day just reading all the AI news, testing new tools, and a lot of what I do is separating the promise from the reality. It's like so many tools make these really big promises, or they don't even have ai, they just have a heuristic algorithm that fakes ai.

I've run into that on quite a few big tools or, and when you're making a big decision, when the companies have things on their sales page or they make these promises that aren't really true, I. And you can't test it until after you invest. That's really not a place you wanna be in. So I can understand the hesitation to jump into AI because we have an over-hyped market.

Everyone wants to say things like, it's autonomous, it can do everything. It's a 24 7 employee, it's push a button, it makes you money. It's so magical. So I don't really, I think that the next generation, hope this happens over the next year is we get rid of this idea that cTOs are boring and AI people are interesting 'cause I don't think that's really true.

I think it's two ways of solving the same problem that should be collaborative rather than competitive. 'cause I don't think AI experts are going to replace CTOs. I just don't think that's the future. And I don't know why there's this competitiveness in the space. What's your experience been of that, of kind of that mindset thing of how AI people talk.

Brian Childress: Yeah, that hasn't been really my experience either. Now I have definitely worked very closely with a number of different AI consultants, experts in the space that really have the experience and the accolades to back up what they're saying, and that's been a really powerful experience. They bring a lot of really valuable information and insights and the most.

Insightful ways that we collaborate and work together is always starting with, alright, what is the business problem that we're trying to solve? 'cause it's so easy for us to just bolt on some sort of ai. We check the box. Our board is now happy 'cause we have AI integrated into the product.

The developers are annoyed because now we have to support this thing that doesn't actually do anything. But we have to make sure this integration stays working all the time. So it. For me as a CTO, I always want to go back to how can we solve this business problem? And if there is an area that I don't have enough information on, let me bring in that expert, let me bounce ideas off of that person and collaborate and work together, like you say.

Yeah, 

Jonathan Green 2024: I like that mindset. I think that the, we've seen a lot of boards go to the CEO E and say, we want ai, and then the C the CEO goes, okay, what do you mean? And they go, we don't know. We just know we want it. Which is the scariest type of command. And this is something that a lot of freelancers experience all the time, like designers.

They go, I want a logo. What do you want it to look like? I don't know, but I'll know when I like it. What colors do you like? I don't know what colors I like, and it's like very hard without direction to know the right thing to do. And I've definitely seen this idea of we just want AI so that we can say we have AI and.

There's this temptation and there's something I always see this thing whenever I see a product, there's always an inverse correlation between the commissions they offer to affiliates or joint venture partners and how good the product is. So whenever a product reaches out to me, they go, Hey, we offer 50 or 75% commissions.

I go, oh, it's gotta be trash. I. That's my first thought. I said if you can give away the majority of the money, there's something going on here. Like one of my favorite products to recommend. I recommend this tool I use all the time called Art Flow. That's great for making AI images that look like your face for people that wanna do thumbnails.

And I do a lot of color books. My kids are that way. I make a nickel every time someone buys you through my affiliate link. That's how you know it's a good product. Like I don't make any money from it. But whenever a product comes in with this huge offer. And it's very tempting, right? And that's one of the things I see a lot of people are recommending tools that I go, oh man, I couldn't never, I could never, because I know how it works.

I know there's a functionality problem. And in any market you have this where there's commission-based things and things happening in the backend. There's sometimes these two pressures, right? This is the best tool, but this makes the most money. So we have this space where there's really a lack of.

Language. We don't have a consistent meaning of what is ai. What is a GPT? What is an agent? What is an assistant? I talk to five AI people and they all gimme different answers. No one has a clear definition. That's, I think, the biggest problem. It's the same reason creatives hate ai art. I. Because it's, we don't have a name for it.

We can say painting, drawing, sculpting, but we don't have a word for someone who's making stuff with AI art, and they feel like it's not as authentic and it's not real, and it is a skill, but it's definitely different. Like drawing from scratch is completely different skill, just like sculpting is. I think if we just took a moment and stopped to hype and said, let's just name everything, make a clear set of definitions so everyone's reading from the same music so everyone knows what these things mean.

So much of the confusion and the stress would just eliminate. I dunno why we don't do that. 

Brian Childress: Yeah, I don't know either. I don't know. Maybe it's so that we can sell more tools that aren't actually valuable, but have really high profit margins and keep the consumer confused. 

Jonathan Green 2024: Yeah. There are so many, I encounter so many tools that are just basically a form, a prompt that's hidden inside the form and it sends it to Jet GBT and they have a subscription and, I can, and I was actually writing about this today. I can reverse engineer any of those. 'cause I can put in 10 inputs, let look at 10 outputs, and then figure out what's in the middle, right? Like it's an easy mathematical formula and, but it's really common and I think it's unfortunately gonna create a backlash in the market when people start to realize, oh, this person is paying 6 cents a month in API costs, but charge me $60.

And it's a short term win. Maybe, but for a long term, like relationship killer, like you'll lose your reputation. So what do you think, and this has been really interesting, I really appreciate your perspective as someone who really knows what they're talking about, what do you think is the first step a business should take when they're deciding if they should even use ai?

Because so many people think oh, restaurants need ai. And I'm like, why? It's not gonna cook the food. It's not I always think that's the, people always think restaurants are the best use for new tech. And I don't know why this is, they're like, oh, restaurants should do SMS 10 years ago is restaurants should do SMS marketing.

Those restaurants should do Facebook marketing and all these different things. And the biggest bump for any restaurant is if Guy Fieri shows up and does that TV show that leads to a bump that can last for 10 or 20 years. That's not social media, that's not SMS. It's like just a guy who knows what he is talking about, eating the food and giving, like explaining what's going on and getting you excited.

So often we think every business needs this and it's I don't know why people think restaurants, but for a business that self-assessing, they go, Hey, we've got 10 employees, we've got 50 employees. They're in that range. What should they do first as their very first step to approaching AI before they spend any money?

Brian Childress: I wanna do a gap analysis and find out where are, where do we have inefficiencies? Where are our current employees just completely overburdened, overwhelmed, or really inefficient and not producing the way or the level that we think that they could or should be, and really understanding. Go back to first principles and what does it take to run a successful business?

Let's look at those areas. Are we hitting all of those at a hundred percent? And if we're not, maybe those are an area that we can integrate in. Some sort of AI based tool, and it may not even be AI based. We just might have an opportunity for better automation and efficiency. Usually that's what we find to be the case.

We just wanna make sure that we aren't being completely left in the dust on the AI craze. So really just what are the things, what are the gaps that we have in the business? And let's start addressing those. And for a lot of companies, I find that's a hard pill to swallow. It's not a let me spend $20 or $200 a month on this tool, and all of a sudden we're just amazingly efficient.

Everything is fixed. Usually there's underlying problems that we actually have to address. And, buying a a vitamin. Isn't going to solve the pain that we have. 

Jonathan Green 2024: You brought up overwhelm because there's this approach to AI that is now you could do 10 more things. It's like now you can make AI videos and now you can do social media posts, and now you can do things.

All the, so the promise of AI is that like you have more freedom and you can get more done less time, but now we're just piling on tasks. And I see this a lot from solopreneurs and smaller entrepreneurs going now I could do all these additional things. And I always say. Focus on what you're already doing because you have the ability to error.

Correct? If you've never made a viral post and the AI makes a post, you don't know if it's gonna be viral or not because you've never done that. If you are not making videos already, you can't say this is a good or bad video because you don't have anything to compare against. So as soon as you move outside of your area experience or air of excellence.

You're gonna start to see lower, and lower quality, which is why, like you talked about, it's not about replacing people 'cause we still need 'em in there as the quality control. As the manager, I see it as every employee can start to move a little bit into management. Now the AI does the task, but you check the work, you fix the work, and it gives you a rough draft.

And it allows you to [00:30:00] do your tasks a little better and lower those overwhelm levels. I really love that approach. I think that's really brilliant and it's gonna let all the employees go, okay, this person, because usually when employees here consultant, they think downsizing. But if you go, my job is to lower everyone's overwhelm levels.

And I do love that you brought up automation, because so often we think the solution is AI and it's oh, what if we just add in a very simple automation process, a simple thing that moves with this happens, then this happens. They go, I thought that's ai. And it's it doesn't have to be that complicated.

So I really love that direction. I'm so tempted to do a double episode and go down automation. It's one of my favorite topics, but I, your time is so valuable. I really appreciate you being here. This has been an amazing episode. I really appreciate your perspective. Where can people find out more about you, connect with you online and maybe see if you are the perfect factual CTO to help them with their business growth?

Brian Childress: LinkedIn is the best place to find me Brian Dash, Childress. I encourage everyone to reach out, send me a dm. I'm happy to connect over there. 

Jonathan Green 2024: Perfect. This is an amazing episode. I'll put that in the show notes and right below the ep, right below the video on YouTube. Thank you so much for being here.

Everyone. Thank you for listening to an amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

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