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

AI is Transforming Sales with Ash Smith

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Episode 328

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this episode, we delve into the rapidly evolving world of AI-powered sales with our special guest, Ash Smith. Ash, an innovative entrepreneur and founder of a successful AI company, provides insightful perspectives on the profound impact of AI on sales strategies.

Ash shares his journey of starting from scratch, leveraging AI to achieve remarkable growth in phone sales, and transforming it into a lucrative enterprise. He discusses the dichotomy between inbound and outbound sales approaches, highlighting how AI technology is redefining the landscape by automating top-of-funnel interactions and enhancing personal connections.

Notable Quotes:

  • "Lemme tell you a quick story. I started my first AI company two years ago with nothing. No money no. Round A, B, C, whatever investment... And we did that within nine months of starting, within six months of making our first sale." - [Ash Smith] 
  • "The things that AI is the best at, as you mentioned, are like large data analysis, organizing things like those kind of technical processes..." - [Jonathan Green] 
  • "You don't have to know how it works to use it." - [Ash Smith] 

Ash emphasizes the importance of trust-based selling and how AI can be a tool that complements rather than replaces human interaction. He advocates for an automation-first mindset to streamline operations while preserving the personal touch that defines successful sales.

Connect with Ash Smith:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ai-sales-guy/

Connect with Jonathan Green

AI is taking over sales calls with today's special guest, Ash Smith on 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.

So Ash, I'm really excited to have you, 'cause a lot of people have been bringing up this to me lately, and there's several different approaches to phone sales, which we're gonna dive into, which is the huge difference between inbound and outbound, right?

There's a whole difference between if you call someone because you wanna buy something and if you just get a call and you don't know who it is. Nobody likes that Surprise call. But it's effective or it wouldn't happen. Before we dive into that, I really just wanna get into one core thing, like what are people gonna learn over our next 20 minutes or so together?

Why should they be so excited about this episode? Let's get 'em just right off the gate. Tell 'em how you're gonna rock their worlds. 

Lemme tell you a quick story. I started my first AI company two years ago with nothing. No money no. Round A, B, C, whatever investment. It was just me. My co-founder and I knew that AI was gonna be the future, and I did that entire thing from zero monthly re recurring revenue to a hundred K monthly reoc recurring revenue from just phone sales from just cold calling.

And we did that within nine months of starting, within six months of making our first sale. So if you wanna really know how to do that and what went into that stick around. 

Some starts. Anyone I think that should have 'em excited, guys, if you wanna hit a hundred K in monthly revenue, and I know some of our listeners are way past that, but there's a lot happening in outbound.

That's a lot changing. I've always been an anti outbound person. I've always been heavily inbound. I've just recently dabbled. I. Unfortunately had massive success, which is which is what it always happens. My first two led to like results way bigger than I was expecting, like way bigger than I calculated were possible.

And I called my friend who told me to give it a try, and I was like, listen, I have a problem. This company's way bigger than I thought. It's 50 times bigger than I normally work with. I'm not sure. And he's you'll figure it out. So you get that surprise of the bigger one, which is the classic thing that happens when.

Someone's a coach and they tell you to expect success and then you don't, and then you're overwhelmed by it. 'cause that's why you hired them to work with them. But I wanna really dive into this whole idea of phone sales. 'cause there's a couple of interesting things happening in the field. I've seen a lot of companies developing real time.

Voice capabilities with ai. So now there's a lot of AI actually doing phone sales, and I wonder how long that bubble will last. As we were talking about before the call, there's always a new development in sales like, and I think it as a development between the short and the shield, right? There's a new weapon, then there's a better armor, then there's a new weapon.

That's a better armor. And how long until AI salespeople are on the phone. AI avatar that's representing a person having a fake conversation with just machine code. There's gonna be, there's a bubble until that happens. We have a window of opportunity now, but eventually people are gonna have AI answer the phone for them, don't you think?

So here's what I think. First we think about B2C and B two B2C sales and B2B sales. So B2C selling. I think within the next five years, you're gonna get rid of every single, probably 90% of your call centers are going to be replaced by AI agents and they have their call B2C people because what defense do those people have?

No, they're not gonna buy a software and nor person isn't gonna buy a software install onto their phone to, just to ensure that AI doesn't call you. 'cause it doesn't exist. They're not even thinking in that way because they're then, they're not buyers that are necessarily sophisticated. But then you've got B2B conversations with people.

I believe it's gonna be much easier to automate top of funnel conversations B2B than what it is to automate the rest of it. Because if you imagine a cold call conversation, the first half is pretty much always the same. It's something to grab their attention, followed by a piece of relevance.

Followed by why you think that's gonna be beneficial for them. And you ask a question whether that's a question of do you wanna hear more? Whether that is a question of what do you think? There's always a question at the end, but the rest of that conversation can go in any direction anyway. So sometimes it ought be objection handling or the time, more information or the times might be something completely different.

I've seen it all. I've done thousands of cold calls, I've listened to tens of thousands of cold calls from. The guys that are hired to do cold calling for me. So what I think is gonna happen is gonna be a, in combination in B2B cold call business development. I think that you're gonna have the top of funnel 99, if not a hundred percent AI agents repeating the same thing in the tone of voice, in the voice of the person who's gonna be carrying the conversation.

And then the rest of it will be that human being. Now the next question, and I really enjoyed when you mentioned this about the sword and the shield. I've got a sword right here because I'm always thinking in that same way as well. How can you make the most of the opportunity once it presents itself to you?

And I think what's gonna happen is that the kind of conversations that we are going to have via a cold call and online are gonna get more personal. They're instantly gonna get more personal. 'cause that's gonna be the only way that we're gonna be able to ensure that you're talking to a personal ai.

And AI doesn't swear. For example, I've tried for hours to try and make chat GPT swear using my kind of, of language that I use, sound like LinkedIn and it can't do it, it cannot do it or it can't do it in the way I want it to do it. So it might be the case that you tell someone to f off.

And then you see what the response is. And if the, our response is, oh, I'm terribly sorry. Have I offended you? Or a person goes, what? What the f you on about? Oh, sorry. I was just testing. I was just checking. And I think we're gonna see more of that. I think that's gonna be the human based shield that's gonna come up personally.

That's what I think. 

Very interesting. It reminds me of the three laws of robotics. Like the only way to see if someone's a person or a robot is to put a human in danger in front of them and to see if the robot saves them. I think you're onto something there, but also I can already think of three ways that you can program an AI or use an open source AI to get it to do those bad words.

You can't get the big ones to do it, but there's still five solutions where we can talk about after the call. I certainly know how to do that, but I think that's exactly it, is that we're seeing an evolution in communication and there are two ways to look at it. There's definitely a bubble, as in.

AI phone calls will work for a while. Like you can have a hundred percent phone calls right now, but eventually it will stop working. Like everything does, right? Telegrams don't really work anymore, and you can look at it of it's gonna end soon. Or you can look at it, it's raining gold. I'm gonna go outside with a bucket while it's raining and jump in on the opportunity.

And I think that the biggest thing I've found is that a lot of people are worried about making the wrong decision. They have this thought of, what if I. Mess up and burn my reputation or burn my relationships. This is a very common thing I hear from businesses that are led by a face, like the person's, the face of the brand, and they're like, I don't want to lose my voice.

I don't want it to stop sounding like me. That's one of their biggest concerns, which is legitimate because your voice or your uniqueness is your specialness. When people are thinking about that, how do you approach with what you're creating, the things you've worked on in the AI space?

To be clear, you mean how do founders go about not losing their voice? I. 

Yeah, they're so worried. What if it doesn't sound like me anymore? What if it's saying the kind of things that I wouldn't say That's what they're that's the big thing they're worried about. Like I, one time someone offered to edit my book after it become a best seller, and she sent me an example and I said, wow, this has perfect grammar.

It looks like I didn't write it anymore. You've taken away all the humanity, you've stripped it out so I know exactly what they're talking about, which is this fear that I will turn into a commodity. I think that's one of the best ways to say it, is that everyone, if you let everyone speak through chat, GBT, everyone will sound the same.

So I'm at a post about this on LinkedIn a little while ago. So I do most, I'm B2B, so I do most of my master on LinkedIn. And if you connect with somebody, little AI prompt will come up and it will say, oh, here's how you connect with somebody. And that has been trained based off of all of the different ways that a normal person would go and connect.

And they're all rubbish. They're all rubbish. So bad. They're terrible. It's appalling, right? So when a person asks me that kind of question, my immediate thought is okay. Try not to think of it in terms of I'm losing a part of myself. Try and think of it as the part of the process of creation, which is the mundane part of the process.

Whatever that part is for you, right? That can be automated in some way, or an AI tool. So let's say that you've got a thousand pieces of content, for example, and you're posting online on LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever. You can load that into a chat, GPT assistant and they might be able to produce ideas for more content for you.

Maybe you load it in with a different kind of scenario each time or whatever it's you wanna do. Once it has that kind of idea, you don't have to just post it. You can then change it, make a few alterations, but the majority of the hard part of the work has been done. I think people mistake automation for a complete replacement of everything that they're doing.

Where in actuality, I'm a big believer what Musk says here, which is that they're gonna become our tools, our companions, the way in which we do things is going to be shifted by the use of ai, artificial intelligence, and that we need to see them as helpers, not replacers. 'cause if we start seeing them as replacers, the quality of the things that we say and do is going to decrease naturally because it's just an amalgamation of everyone's thoughts and opinions.

Of course, it's gonna be watered down, of course it's gonna go to about neutral. Whereas the most interesting stuff is actually stuff that's on the periphery or the most extreme. Whether it's right or wrong, doesn't matter because it's the most interesting stuff and that's where you want to go for the most interesting stuff.

You brought up something really important, which is automation. 90% of the projects that clients bring to me, even really large companies, are actually just automations. It's usually taking one piece of data and moving it from one software to another. 90% of the projects, even when they think it's a really big and complicated project.

So often it's just an automation. It's just connecting two things together. And it's interesting how we still at this phase have so many tools that don't interconnect. We have so many softwares that are siloed and they don't realize that the value of connecting with someone else's platform. There are so many different CRMs and sales call trackers that don't integrate with each other and all sorts of things like that.

And it's mostly. These types of issues were how do I get data from a phone call plus an email onto the same file? That's 90% of what people actually need. And unfortunately, most of the public and most of the like media about AI is the worst use cases. Having it make a video that you would, there's no way a video I've ever seen that I would watch if someone didn't first say, this is an AI video.

I would just think it's a bad video if someone didn't first say, this is an AI video. But that's all everyone talks about. All everyone likes to talk about is, oh, you can have AI write your social media posts, and that's literally the worst use case. The things that AI is the best at, as you mentioned, are like large data analysis, organizing things like those kind of technical processes, which as humans, they're hard for us anyways.

I'm not good at spreadsheets. I'm terrible at 'em. I think that really important is to dive into the criticality of automation, which is mostly what we're actually looking to do is just connect things we already have. And then you need a bit of intelligence, which is where the AI comes in. So sometimes we buy a hammer, so we think everything is a nail.

So now that someone has an ai, they go solution. Everything is ai. I saw a project today someone was working on, and they were using an AI to take three files from a spreadsheet and separate them. Into three different links. I was like, that's not an AI task. You don't have to send a call to Chad GBT for that.

What are you doing? You can separate three files with a comma. So there's so many. We're jumping right to the hardest solution right now, and I think that it's a very cutting edge time. A lot of people are hesitant to make a decision because they don't feel like they have enough technical knowledge and it's impossible to know everything there is about ai.

So you brought up something very important to that I wanna dive into next, which is that. You don't have to know how it works to use it. Can you dive into that a little bit? 

Yeah. So I'm, I've got a lot of very strong beliefs on this exact topic around, around you do not need to understand how something works in order to use it effectively.

So when I was building my AI business last year, a couple years ago, what it is that I first looked at was right, AI is coming up, this is before chat. GPT properly launched in 2023, like in January 23. This was in 2022 in around October time, 2022. And I recognized that this is the future, but I knew nothing about AI and I still dunno anything really about how it works, how it's functions.

So I teamed up with CTOs and I and this one CTOI teamed up with. He had an AI tool, and he was selling it to plumbers and roofers and builders for $3,000 a month. It just it created a ways in which they could get more leads. Leveraging SEO I'm not gonna go into, that's what it did, and I recognized pretty much within a month or two of selling this thing.

The trick was missing. That you could be targeting these people who are small or you could be targeting much larger companies who are restricted on the advertisement they can do. So we went for cannabis, we went for CBD, we went for any kind of e-commerce store, which has restrictions placed on it, on the way in which you can advertise, because all they can do is SEO.

So all of a sudden we were able to capture much large SEO budgets and go from selling it for about three to $4,000 a month to between seven to $30,000 a month. And I, again, I knew nothing about the ai, but I knew everything about how to sell the piece of ai, how to structure it in a way which made sense to founders and then ensured that how it was used was gonna be effective for them in their particular kind of case study.

If you are thinking about, oh, I dunno how to use blah blah, I dunno what to do with X, Y, and Z, number one, you don't need to know. You don't need to really know how it all works and functions. Number two, if you have a use case that you need some high level like webhook based on make and everything else, using chat and whatever, cool.

Find an expert. They'll charge you X amount of money and they will do it for you. If you really need that level of use case for what it's that, that you are doing, and nine times outta 10 they found the solution that it is that they've got, just spend the money because the time that you are going to save to do that is gonna be monumental.

I've, I partnered with two AI people recently. One of 'em is directly in my team. And what we're working on at the moment is an AI based. Conversation assistant, which can top of funnel in DMing people on LinkedIn. And we've already got it to a place where we've got, 300, 400 different kind of responses based around what a person says.

And that's all top of funnel. We're not doing anything in terms of the bottom funnel. It's all an assistant based to an SDR. And the SDR doesn't need to know how it works. They just need to understand that when is their time to come into that conversation? So hopefully I've answered your question in an interesting way there.

Yeah. That's a really important thing that I want to dive into for those of like the entrepreneurs and developers we have listening, is that people don't care how it works. So I worked, I started working with larger and larger clients this year, larger and larger projects, and I realized that the larger the client is, the less they care.

They just wanna put something inside the microwave, push the button that has a picture of a chicken. And then a chicken that's cooked comes out like they just want it. You push the button, you get what you want, you don't care about the ingredients. 'cause yeah, let's be honest, I certainly have no idea how the internet works.

I know there's a wire going from me to you, but I'm not really sure beyond, if you put two cups on a string, what's happening beyond that? And I never think about that. But sometimes when we're selling, we start to think that we need to get super technical and. Absolutely, that's the wrong direction because Rebel really don't buy the mechanics.

They buy the solution and they buy the story. So can you solve my problem and. Is it easy? And then of course then there's the money question of is it something that fits my budget? Most of the time we get, this is something that I see a lot with product creators I work with. They go, okay, I'm gonna build a course, it's gonna have 800 videos.

I said, great. I'm gonna sell you a course with 800 videos. They go, no, I don't have that kind of time. And I was like what exactly We, as we get older, time becomes more valuable. So when I was younger, sure when I was in my twenties, I could do 18 hour days marathon through my time was worth less than money.

And as you get older, it switches so you actually will pay for a shorter solution. You're like, can I pay twice as much for it to take less time? Go to any theme park in the world to have the cut the line pass right. All you're doing is paying to save time. You're still waiting on a line. It's like a slightly shorter line, hopefully.

Same thing at the airport. You can have that security check pass thing. So it's very much, people want the shortest solution in the least amount of their time possible. So I think you've dialed into something really important there, which is that no one's ever, there's this fear we have, and I think it's a variation of imposter syndrome, which is what if they ask me a technical question, I don't know the answer to albeit, and what's the worst case result?

I guess you don't, you lose the sale and you're slightly embarrassed. I think that's the worst thing that can happen. And it's if you don't call the person, you also won't make the sale. So you, the worst case scenario is you go back to the status quo is no change, there's no negative, there's only a positive.

But we create this fear in our heads. And I think, but you know what? Yes. 

Do you know what Jonathan? I've been in situations before, same as you, where people have asked me technical questions and the way I respond, technical questions, I dunno. The answer to is very simple. I go, you know what?

That is a and is a, I don't have an answer to that question right now, but gimme a couple of days. I'll find it for you and I'll come back. And that's so much better than doing a load of BS and and saying something that, isn't right or not. And mo more often than not, most people are happy with that answer.

They're happy with going, oh yeah, this is complicated. It's technical. Fair enough. 

I actually think it's gotten easier with AI recently. 'cause you can go, listen, there's been a bunch of updates in the past week. I have to check what's the best solution right now because things have changed.

So it's actually even easier and it's completely reasonable because I. I guarantee that probably since we started this call, there's been some change. Someone's posted a new story, some tools changed, there's been some revolution, some new different like Sora Killer or Chachi Pete Killer or whatever. There's always something that's killing some other AI tool out there.

So I think that you're exactly onto something. We have this fear of the delay, like you have to have the answer instantly, but how many times have you. Ask for something and they told you, okay, great question. I'm gonna find out and get right back to you. Or I wanna make sure I give you the best answer possible, so I'm gonna double check it.

And we never get upset as long as you, I believe you just have to have that element of honesty like you mentioned, which is great question. Lemme make sure I get you the right answer. Gimme two or three days 'cause I wanna get you the best answer possible. And it's impossible to actually know the answer to every question before someone asks it.

So when I was younger in my teens and twenties, I would write down phone scripts for every time I would get a lady's phone number, I would write down what I'm gonna say first and every possible response, I'd write down this massive flow chart, entire, a four piece of paper every single time. First question, they would give me an answer that wasn't on the chart, and I would be like, what are you doing?

You've gone off the chart, you've gone off the grid. We don't have an, I don't, we don't have an answer for that. And. That's the point, is that no matter how much we prepare, people are gonna surprise us. I remember one time I called and her brother answered, and I go, no, you're not supposed to answer.

It's not on the chart. What are you doing? I don't know what to do. And one time I called and she goes, I'm in the car driving right now. And I go, I don't know. And of course, the call ended in disaster because I didn't know what to do anymore. And I was very awkward. Young guy didn't know what I was doing, but.

We can, the real skill is the ability to adapt when someone asks a question we're not ready for. And the cool thing is the answer to every question ready for is the same, which is, that's a great question. I'm gonna find out the answer. I'll come back to you in a couple of days because I wanna make sure I give you the best answer possible because no one's ever asked it in that way before.

And now it's you. 

Jonathan, you raised two very interesting points there, and I wanna address. The first point you raised was around people, business owners, people that you sell to, or people that you helped buy. They do not care. They'd not give rats ass about how it works at all. And if you go, and there's levels to this, right?

The first level is features and benefits selling. And you see this all the time. They say, what? Look at this feature. Look at this benefit of using air product. Why is that useful? I don't care. I just don't care. Next level up is solution. So you start talk, you start trying to tailor a little bit more towards what a person is going through, what you think they're going through, the relevance to them, that solution-based selling.

Then you have next level upon that. Then you realize that actually this entire conversation isn't in a vacuum. It's in a relationship, and this relationship can then lead you on to other kinds of deals that happen in the future. And of course, it's the relationship that's formed. And then finally, the very one at the very top, which is I try and do all the time, which is from a very good friend of mine called Charles Green, is trust-based selling and trust-based selling is actually putting the relationship first or what we call, it's being, being long term selfish. So that short term, you are putting that person in front of you, always thinking about them because in the long term view, you know they're gonna buy from you. So that's the first thing I wanted to mention around. Yeah, you're right. They don't care about how it works at all.

They only care about how it's gonna help them. And the more successful a person is, the less they care about how it works and how it functions. That's just how it's right. Second thing I wanted to say on what you're talking about was that when we were building when we were in this AI based company there wasn't any of these.

Bots or any of these tools that we can use now and what they're coming at every single day. Every single day. Accelerating. We didn't have any of them. It was all just doing the work right there. All of them, young guys, all of them under the age of 25, putting in the hours.

In putting in the hours. And now at the point, I'm 26 now so I'm still young where I'm looking at this, knowing everything that I know and I'm going. Hold on a minute. I don't actually have to put in X number of man hours when I can get this AI to do it, and I'm being forced to ask myself this question.

And this question is, what am I doing all of the work for? Because when you're actually in it and you're doing 18 hour days, you're not really thinking about what it's for. It's so obvious to you. You're doing for the money of the paycheck, which leads to the car or the house, or the wonderful wife, blah, blah, blah.

It all just goes on. But when you've got a tool which does 56% of that work for you and your left. I'm waiting for this thing to work and do its job. What am I gonna do? You then start thinking about how does AI fit into our lives in the future and what's it gonna do for us? It's what I find so interesting at Elon Musk's sort of AI robot that he brought out early last week that's gonna change so much in a, in person's life.

I can't even, I can't even comprehend it. 

I think that a lot of people. Are thinking of AI as this massive replacement for everything they do, but really what it does is it replaces the things that are non-revenue generating tasks, the repetitive tasks, the least important tasks, the magic of you.

Like I've been in this business for a long time in the what I do, online business building, coaching, teach, creating courses, all sorts of things, and it's. Everything I do is a commodity. The specialness is not my, I'm not the only person who teaches ai. I'm not the only AI podcast. What makes me different is my story, my personality, and it's so often the part of yourself that you like talking about the least.

That's the people's, the people comes, people's favorite part of you. And it's because we connect with like the underdog or people going through a struggle. The magic, like you're not suddenly becoming a commodity. We've all been commodities for a long time. We just don't realize it. The things that AI replaces are not your specialness.

They're the things that you spend time doing. So many people think the best use of AI is writing emails for you. It's not. It's better to have it sort out which emails you need to respond to personally and which ones don't matter. When I do that, instead of going through a hundred emails a day, I go through five, and that means I have the time to write the personal answers to the ones that matter.

To the ones that are family members or people friends or big business deals, I want to make sure I write a personal answer to those don't need an AI answer. And that's the shift in mindset that I really wanna encourage people who are listening to the show and thinking about the evolution of ai.

It's not replacing people. It really is just a smarter version of existing tools. It's a smarter word process processor. It's a smarter calculator. We had the same fears in the seventies when they used to say, if we let kids use calculators at school, they'll never understand math. Now it's like you have to use a calculator for tests.

It's switched. So same thing when they talked about having access to the internet and now everyone's allowed to use the internet when they're doing research for their papers. There's been such a shift and we just have to see this as just another shift and that we can either be a step behind or step ahead of everyone else.

And so I think this has me really excited showing that it's not the technical part that really matters. That's the least important part. What really matters, and I love that you dialed into this, is. Finding people that need the solution and then just explaining how this tool solves their problem. And you can, of course, as you get better at sales or start to build relationships, you move into relationship selling trust-based selling.

And I really like that you brought up the long-term sales thing. There's this idea that a lot of people have who are not salespeople, which is that it's all about the hard sell that you have to close on that phone call and. If you watch movies like Boiler Room or Wolf of Wall Street, yeah, it's all about hard selling people before they realize they've made a terrible decision.

But that's when you wanna have a single transaction relationship. And if you have a recurring product or you wanna have a business that grows, you have to have long-term relationships because you can't be constantly acquiring new customers to replace all the ones you're losing. 'cause then all you're doing is treading water.

So I think this is a really good lesson for people out there, which is that we're using AI to accelerate. To help us to do things, but the magic that's us is still part of the process. 

Yeah. You raised a really interesting point about the boiler room and the one time transaction.

There is extremely bad press around what selling is, and I don't even really call it selling, I call it selling for people who, there's so many connotation on what selling is these days. I just say I help a person to buy, help, a person to buy. Because selling by its very nature, the focus is on you as a sales person.

Whereas if you are helping someone to buy now, the focus is on the prospect or the client or the customer, and which is where your focus should be. It should always be on them. It should never be on you no matter what. It's, you're doing Something that I, one of my biggest pet peeves is when you are in a sales call.

I don't want sales calls a lot because I like look, looking at B2B Tech, I like helping people, I'm on him a lot and the owner thinks he's getting fancy and smart when he starts telling a story. And this story is all about how they have helped this customer with x, y, and Z problems. And it's 'cause of them that the customer's doing so well.

And every single time I go, oh god sake, because if you look at any really good movie. Really good movie. Whether there's a hero and they're doing a big quest. There is always the hero who is important and there's the helpers and what movie do you know where the helpers go? It's nothing to do with you, it's all to do with me.

It never happens yet. You see all the time in sound, in, in sales calls where the try to tell these stories should be reversed. Everything we do in sales should be reversed. Should always be about the customer. Always be about the prospect. Always be about the client. When you're telling a story, it should be about what you enable them to do, what they have done with your help and should be focused on them.

Them. Same for ai, same for artificial intelligence, right? If you are going to be using it, or, for example, what I do. Is that I help B2B AI tech companies get, get more sales, get more awareness, because a lot of CTOs struggling when it comes down to the sales component. And I keep saying to them, look what it is that you've got versus how it's going to be useful for the market are two very different things.

In fact I'll tell you a, a really interesting thing. I talk to early seed level invest, early, early investment round tech owners, which is. What you should do is that you should have an end point, like we should all have aim for that. But as you go through certain points in your tech development cycle, each point should solve a particular challenge for a particular group so that by the time you've gone through A, B, C, D, E and you reach the end, you've now got a base of a hundred, 200, 300 different customers, which are now using your end product.

Otherwise, what you're doing is that you are, you're developing, then you run outta money, gotta go from the seed round, developing more money nor more seed round. And that's what these AI companies are doing. What they're doing is that they're producing something which fulfills a task or fulfills a job as part one.

It gets traction. They use that traction as a way to get more investment or more funding. And they do exactly the same thing for 2, 3, 4. And a lot of these. SaaS, other tech companies haven't caught up to that kind of way of thinking yet. It's not in B2B yet, and it should be, and I'm encouraging so many tech people to follow that way of doing it because they're gonna be in a much, much stronger position afterwards.

I think that's very clever. There's. So many things happening in AI that, and there's so many tools coming out every day, even if you just try to keep up with product hunt. I checked one day, there were 97 products announced in one day that all had AI in the name I. That didn't even include the AI tools that didn't have it in the name, so it's impossible to keep up.

And I think the biggest challenge for a lot of these new companies that develop really cool things is getting noticed that attention is the big challenge because the noise, unfortunately, is all on the things that are interesting. And there's almost an inverse correlation between how interesting something an AI is and how unuse, how useful it is.

AI video is very popular. Everyone likes to post about, I know if I post an AI video, I'll get 50 or a hundred times more views than if I talk about a useful topic, unfortunately. And so there's always this pressure to put out what people want rather than what people need. That's the challenge.

And I. For companies that are doing the most useful things, like the things that I think are gonna move the needle the most is like data organization. That's the most important thing. 'cause every single one of us has been looking for something in the past week, whether it's a picture or a file or a video on our computer or a shared drive.

Every single that's like a universal experience of something was missing. What did I call it? I forgot what I named it. And you have to go look to a past conversation where you mentioned it. That's not exciting. But golly, is that a game changer? 'cause that will give you so much time and everyone loves to talk about turning long videos into short videos.

Okay. A little bit useful, but compared to something that can save you a MA already, you can get a va or there's already tools that do that. So it's like incre at the point of incremental revolutions. But the things that really matter is, yeah. What if you only saw the important emails? What if you never just imagine a world where you never got an email you didn't want ever again, like that's like a magical word, like a world with no spam emails, or imagine if you went on Google and typed in a search and you just saw what you were looking for and not 50 ads.

Like the world we want is basically the world of the late nineties. Like it's actually all we're trying to do is go back 25 years into the past before everything was filled with ads, when if you typed in a search, you would actually just get whatever the most relevant result was. We're just trying to go back to that.

It's interesting. So I love what you've shared today. This has been an amazing episode. Thank you so much for spending time with us. Ash. Where can people connect with you, find out more about what we're doing, see the cool projects you're working on. I know you have a whole bunch of different businesses cooking.

I definitely did a little deep dive on your LinkedIn before the call. Is that the best place to find you? 

That is the best place to find me. LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the best place. I don't have a website. I don't see the point. There's just so much going on. It just changes so rapidly. So yeah, LinkedIn is the best place to find me.

I post all the time there. I'm on their lots. If if you're a European, then I've got WhatsApp. My numbers should be on LinkedIn. If you're an American, then you can just LinkedIn me because I know you guys don't use WhatsApp. So yeah, no, LinkedIn is the best place and it's been a pleasure.

Jonathan, honestly, thank you so much for inviting me on. 

Great. Thank you so much. I'll put that in the show notes and if you guys are watching the video on YouTube, the link will be right below this video. Definitely make sure to see what he's posting on LinkedIn. It's very clever and it is worth connecting.

Thank you so much for being here today, Ash, for another amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

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