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

Simplifying AI with Mark A. Preston

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Season 1 • Episode 331

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this episode, we delve into the complexities and misconceptions surrounding AI, featuring our special guest, Mark A. Preston, a renowned customer growth coach.

Mark shares insights into the common tendency to overcomplicate AI implementation within businesses. He emphasizes the importance of simplicity, advocating for streamlined solutions that enhance productivity without unnecessary complexity. The conversation explores how AI is often misidentified as the solution to every problem and highlights the significance of identifying the actual business challenges before integrating AI tools.

Notable Quotes:

"I'm a believer that the more moving parts, the more opportunities there are for something to break apart." - [Mark A. Preston] "AI is not a magic wand. It's a solution to a problem." - [Mark A. Preston] "Every business has inefficiencies, and for every business, they're different." - [Jonathan Green] Mark stresses the necessity of educating teams about AI's role in aiding their work rather than replacing them. He underlines the crucial aspect of understanding business mechanics and ensuring that AI solutions align with company capabilities.

Connect with Mark A. Preston:

Website: https://www.markapreston.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markprestonseo/

Connect with Jonathan Green

We need to stop overcomplicating AI with today's special guest, Mark A. Preston. 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 Mark, I'm so excited to have you here today because every single person I talk to, every project that comes my way, they. Always think I need the most complicated AI setup. It needs 15 different parts, or it needs all these moving parts, or I need my own rag setup. I need my own vector database. And we, there's something to be said for simplicity. I'm a believer that the more moving parts, the more opportunities there are for something to break apart. But I'd love to just start there, like what you're encountering with this is, and why you think there's this tendency, especially with AI and especially with technology right now, to just go super complicated right out the gate. I'm gonna say thanks for inviting me anyway, but I speak to a lot of CEOs and business owners, and I think that they just see AI as a magic wand, and they just say, oh we can basically replace everything. We can build this high profile thing, we can do this. But at the back of it, what are they trying to solve? Is AI right for that? And I think people they, they try and overcomplicate things unnecessarily and I think, a lot of money and time and energy is being wasted into AI from businesses that there's just no need for it. Most, every time someone comes to me with an AI problem, it's automation, not ai. They wanna move data from one place to another place. They wanna connect two tools and I. Because the definition of AI has become so ambiguous. It now seems to have morphed where it already was, including machine learning. And now it seems to have absorbed everything in the automation space, everything in the sorting space. And it seems like more and more things are now defined as ai. Someone I was working with last week was using AI to separate lines inside a Google sheet, and I was like, you can already do that. That's why the lines have a numbers next to 'em, but it's this. Suddenly it's become I have a hammer, so I have to hammer everything, every solution. Now AI is that hammer and very much I'm just seeing this more and more exactly what you're talking about, where people think that it's the solution to every problem, and it often is just makes things more complicated. Sometimes it's solution, but not all the time. Yeah, the need to strip it right back thinking well. What can AI help me to streamline? I think the word streamline, I use a lot when it comes to ai because it's not a replacement for things. It's how can you increase productivity? How can you increase certain manual tasks within the business that AI could do, leaving your resource. To actually help push your business forward instead of spending hours and hours doing these manual tasks that AI could actually do within the business. There's the larger a company grows, the more it has these different disparate tools that came in a different points. Like we, we set up our CRM in the eighties. We set up our payment processor in the nineties. We set up our website in the two thousands, and more and more, what I'm seeing is a lot of companies have all of these different tools that have never talked to each other and. There have been solutions for 10 years, like different options for doing this. esp, basically since Zapier became popular as kinda the first, if this, then that tool. But integrations and API have been around for quite a while. I. They haven't seemed to have not entered a lot of people's awareness that there are third party tools or ways of connecting to things. And that seems to be where I find the biggest inefficiencies that a lot of companies have is they go, we keep track of all of our customers on a spreadsheet. We keep track of all of our payment processing using this older tool. And there's, I feel the same way, like switching a major tool, like switching your CRM or switching your. Email client or any big change is always very stressful and something always goes wrong. Every time I move a website to a new host, something goes wrong and it's always something different, and there's this big fear of kind of switching platforms or something going wrong that I think is very legitimate. How do we help people navigate that when they're thinking the answer to every problem is this AI is the solution to everything. For me, I like to turn it on its head. I like to turn the conversation on its head and ask why is it you believe AI is the solution? I. Rather than me saying, look, you want that solution? This is the, rather than trying to go against what they're saying, I want to understand why they believed it is the solution, because 95% of the time it's because they read something online that doesn't represent what they're trying to achieve. And I think once the conversation starts opening up with these people and trying to understand why they believe it is, then I find that's a better approach and a better way to actually get to the root source of what they actually need, rather than trying to say, no, you are wrong, type of thing. Yeah, let's dive a little bit into that idea. So let's say we're, you're coming into someone, you're doing a console, you're talking to a company. How do you get them to switch and say, let's look at the problem first. What is the problem you're trying to solve rather than here's the tool and you're looking for a problem to solve with it. How can you switch when someone's looking at it backwards? I was gonna say that there's a reason, right? Somebody thinks that AI is the solution, right? And it's talking to 'em in a normal way to us, say those problems you have, what are they? What's the impact to your business from solving them? So if we use AI to solve those problems, what actual impact to your actual physical business and turnover is it going to make? And I think once I start understanding and relate into monetary terms. Going to talk about it, then it suddenly becomes a whole new aspect in the business. It's not just, oh I want AI because it means I can set five people. It, it's a, it's trying to how can we increase productivity and revenue by streamlining it with ai? So one of the kind of confusing marketing things a lot of AI companies will say is, oh, we can increase your team's efficiency by 10% and this will save you this much money, but only if you fire one outta 10 people. But you can't really fire 10% of a person. So it's an imaginary number that sounds really good, but won't actually do a benefit.'cause you still have to pay the person their salary. They're just gonna, take longer lunches. So it's. One of the things that people forget to look at is how long does it take to transition to get used to a new process or a new tool? Even I'm a tech person, it can still take me sometimes months to get really used to always using the new process and not accidentally going to the old one. And I think that sometimes we forget there's gonna be a transition period, which means productivity will actually go dip for a while people are switching over. And you also sometimes people. There's a bit of a resistance, right? Because they're like, so you, but I've always done it the other way. I don't wanna switch to the new way. So you also have that adds a little more time to that process. And then when you add that into the cost of switching to the new tool, sometimes there's not an ROI there just to increase the entire team's performance. Like one 10th of 1% to go through six months and spend a couple million dollars. Maybe it's not. Maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Yeah, anything in business, you have to think about it logically. You have to think about the costs versus the impact, and I use the word impact rather than return, because after all, you want to use AI to. In be impactful on something you're trying to do. And I think you can't just go out and blanketly say AI's going to, increase your turnover by 10%. You can't because you don't understand the problem. You can't make blanket statements to people without first understanding what the problem is because lots of problems are very different. And that 10% might not be 10% in their specific circumstance. And I feel as though that the honesty around AI sometimes gets confused to say it politely. Yeah. I feel that I. Every company's in a race to make bigger and bigger promises. And that is why people think AI can do everything.'cause a lot of AI companies are saying that this one AI company is saying you can replace your support staff and you can replace your tech staff and you can replace this staff. And that's why people are starting to believe those things.'cause they keep hearing that. And a lot of. When I talk to someone, I'm always like, let me just tell you what's possible and not possible. Before we jump into anything. You tell me what you think AI can do and I'll tell you if it can do it, and just starting from there, because that usually helps where sometimes I go, just tell me your wishlist. If AI could solve every problem, make a list of all of those problems and everyone. Once I dig into a problem, often it's different for every company. Like sometimes I remember this story that people could only remember 10 phone numbers, and this is a lot back when we used to have to remember phone numbers before cell phones. And then I met a lady who goes, I can remember 80, but that's 'cause her job was to call people all the time. She called the same 80 people every week. So her efficiency wouldn't be affected as much by having a speed dial as anyone else. So sometimes people are, have created their own efficiencies that actually AI can't move the needle as much. And that's why it's important to have that investigation element before we jump into a tool.'cause AI can do a lot of cool things, but it is, the beauty of it is that you can build a custom solution or find a custom process for every company. Every team, because. Every single person I talk to, even every AI consultant I talk to, when I say, what does an agent mean to you? It's always a different definition. Same thing happens whenever I meet people that are personal branding experts. I go, what does personal branding mean? I never hear the same definition twice. I've never, I always have to ask. I'm like, I don't know what you think it means. I always wanna know, and it's because of the lack of definition of terms, it just I think, waterfalls down because we haven't even decided what terms, even ai, when I was a kid, AI meant sentient robot. I. Now AI means smart word processor. It's such a drop in scariness, right? It's like no longer, it has a laser eye. It just can help with spelling errors a little bit better. So it's really changed definitions, and I think that's why some people are still using the old definition and they're thinking, A lot of people are still thinking ai, robot ai, this. When it's really just, it can just do a little bit better. I feel like the real definition of AI is that you can be a little more incorrect in your instructions and still get the response you wanted. Yeah. I think that there's, AI is not something new. It's not just landed upon us in the past year or two. It's been in the background for a long time. I think as it's progressed is you've got the, what I call a mathematical equations. Which people consider to be ai. Then you've got the self-learning machines that's based on what you feed it and based on the amount of information you feed it, it learns that well. If we tweet this is going to happen and that kind of thing. And I think there's, what the term AI so vast, and when we strip it down it, there's a lot of things, a lot of people I speak to, it thinks all AI is basically a content writing thing because of chat GPT. But it's not, I know people who are solving real issues within the businesses through ai. By putting together a system like yourself, do, and I think the terminology has been blown out of proportion. And like you said, lots of people think about AI in lots of different ways. There seems to be an inverse correlation between how interesting something is and how useful it is.'cause the most interesting thing is AI videos and they're far and away the least, least useful thing AI can do. And a lot of people come, a lot of people wanna do ai, social media, and it's the point of social media is that you can actually talk to people and actually form a connection. So as soon as you put AI in there, you literally remove. The only good thing about social media, the only good element of social media is that there's a human element that you can talk to people, and I'm always fascinated when I see someone realize that like a comment on their post was an AI comment. They get really upset, like they aren't just a little bit annoyed. It really bothers people because it feels like you've been tricked.'cause it's like getting a compliment. You ever had that thing where you think someone's waving to you and then you realize they're waving to someone else after you wave back and it's embarrassing. That's why I think that's what it feels like. It's the worst feeling where you go, oh my gosh, I can't believe that person's waving to me. How cool. And then you look behind you and you go, that's the feeling of getting an AI comment. And how much worse is it when you get a post or even One of the things that makes me crazy is you can make a video now that just says the person's name at the beginning, even though you didn't really say it. So you think it's personalized, but it's not. I. It's really good in the short. It's really good until they figure it out. It reminds me of like those eighties comedies where the guy somehow has two dates on the same night and he thinks he can go back and forth between the two locations because there's no transportation time. It always ends bad. It never works out. And whenever you. Do something that has a short-term gain especially, and then people realize you didn't send that message. It really turns into it really hurts their feelings, and it can actually turn you from neutral to a negative. It can really damage your reputation. So I feel like I. All these, the thing that sounds interesting about AI is the worst use case, it can actually really damage your business, really damage your relationships, really hurt people's feelings. And there's so many good things, like you said, that AI can do the most, the useful things is like imagine if you never lost anything ever again. Imagine if you never had to look for a file again. Imagine if you could just find every photograph you'd ever taken right away, or you were trying to think what was the name of that person I went to high school with that did this? That's the really useful stuff. But it's not as interesting. It's exciting as, look, here's an AI video of a car going backwards through a hamburger. Right? That's exciting. Unfortunately. So I do think you're exactly right that the business use case is really in the mechanics because I. Every business has inefficiencies, and for every business they're different. So a great starting point as you brought up, is to look at where are the inefficiencies? Where's the lost time? Where are people doing non-revenue generating tasks? Once someone starts to figure out, oh, these are the three people who are wasting this much time every week, what's the next step in the process? What do you tell people to do next when they go, okay, we've found. The problem we wanna solve, how do they figure out which AI tool, which process or how they should approach solving and reallocating that time? I think that before I answer that question I need to. Make the people that we are trying to make more efficient, understand themself that their job's not at risk. That by doing this it means you can do all this other cool stuff over here instead of the boring stuff. We are just gonna take that boring stuff off you. And I think that's a big thing that doesn't happen usually. And once you get that solved and. Piecing the puzzle together there. There is no right or wrong answer for me, it's just about okay, understanding things more. It's understanding the intricacies of the business. It's for me, it's understanding okay, if I streamline things and increase your revenue by say 10%. Is your business capable, actually capable of handling that on the other side, and all these other things. And I think myself, the actual nitty gritty, putting the AI together is only a small part of it. For me. It's literally all this other stuff and understanding the big business mechanics behind it, that's the important stuff. And once you understand all that, then AI might. Not be what they're looking for. And if it is okay, due to historical research and everything is, this is the solution. I'm really glad you brought up employee morale because there's this, with all the marketing out there about replace your employees if people think they're training their replacement. They're gonna slow roll or sabotage the process.'cause I would, if I thought I was training my replacement, I'm like, oh, I guess it can't work. Guess AI's not where we thought it was. It didn't work out. And like they've unplugged the robot or something. We've seen that so many times and it makes sense 'cause you're trying to protect your job. A lot of people, there's a really large amount of fear of, people think they'll be replaced by ai. And then to alleviate that fear. Sometimes we hear, oh, you're not gonna be replaced by ai. You're based by people that are good at ai. And it's that doesn't make me feel better. I don't know why you think that makes you feel better. I still lost my job. I have a family. So I think that's a really important thing, is to let people know that this is about accelerating them, switching them to tasks they like doing more, doing a morale task first. I love that. And I love looking at the holistic approach, which is, okay, can you handle. 10 times more leads. What if you had 10 times more customers? Tomorrow? A lot of times I see a product will get a big break. They'll appear on a television show or a magazine and it would just get too much attention and their website crashes or they run at a product or they try and scale so fast that they have a problem with quality control and so then they end up with a massive refund or recall issue and. Sometimes scaling isn't as good as we think. Scaling too fast can be just as damaging as not scaling at all because there are always different components. I always, I'm always fascinated by food industries.'cause a recipe at home for four people is not the same recipe you can use by for 400 people. You just don't a hundred x the ingredients. There's so many moving parts and. Trying to jump and scale, then you have to go now I have to keep it shelf stable for a certain amount of time. That means I have to change the recipe. But does it still taste good? Does it still taste the same in three months? We're shipping it out now so we won't find out for three months, and that's exactly what can happen when you jump and scale too fast. So I think that's a really good thing to think about is say, how much do you wanna grow? And is this something that's actually gonna be detrimental in the long term? Because you're just. 10 x your sales team, but you haven't 10 x your delivery team. So sometimes an unevenness can cause a problem. I think that's very clever. What are some of the other pitfalls that you see when people are thinking about implementing a tech change? Whether it's AI or automation or just switching software platforms or emerging platforms? It's, I think it's understanding how to use them. Effectively. I am a customer growth coach, and I find that, you go into businesses and there's an element of training. You can't just implement something brand new that nobody's ever used without. The training behind it. It's not the magic wand. It, I just want to get across, if nothing else. AI is not a magic wand. It's a solution to a problem. I. And you need to understand that solution, and you need to understand how to use it in your business to effectively push it forward. And I think that's the missing part I see many times is that the lack of training within a business, because effectively they bring in somebody like yourself who builds something and implements it in then. Lot of time, it's just dumped on them. There's no one in that business that actually has a technical expertise to understand it. You know who's going to maintain it? How do you know if it's doing the thing you want it to? If it's not, how do you tweak it? And I think all these missing elements that it's not just a let's build it once and forget about it, that, there's all these other aspects to it within a business. I think that's really good point. Remembering that you want your team to be able to use it and that I think the biggest problem with ai, especially with ChatGPT BT and like all the kind of similar tools is that there's no onboarding process. They're like, here's a blank page, figure it out. And that's the worst onboarding print you can possibly give someone. So it takes time to understand what's possible and also what's useful.'cause if you ask chat GPT or any of the ais, what are 10 of the things you can do? It will list 10 things that are not useful. I could give you a recipe for this and I can write you a song. I'm like, that's not gonna, how is that gonna help me at my job? So onboarding is so important, and I know that for a lot of softwares, onboarding makes or breaks. They're like SaaS companies like. If you don't have a good onboarding, people don't use the tool. They quit before the free trial is over. It's so critical, and I'm from the generation of I'm not reading the instructions. I'm not going through the onboarding like I will. I don't need that. And that's why my VCR always flashed 12 for my entire childhood. My dad was in the same way. We never figured it out. I always get lost. So there is this. Really critical component, which is the human component. Because if you don't tell people what it can and can't do, how to use it and give them time to get used to it. Even worse is what if you train one person in the office that knows how to use that tool and then that person leaves. I. So you don't wanna have the key man problem, as they say. So I really love that. This has been an amazing conversation. So thank you so much for so much of your time. I really appreciate it. Mark, where can people who want help with business growth or wanna see some of the amazing things that you're doing, connect with you online and see the projects that you're working on, and maybe they're a great fit for working with you? I'm gonna say just search my name, Mark A. Preston with a in the middle, and I. LinkedIn and X most of the time. Perfect. And my website is Preston. No, keep going. Do it again. Sorry. I'm gonna say you can find me by searching on Google, Mark A. Preston. My website's mark a preston.com or just search Mark A. Preston in either X or LinkedIn and you'll find me, if you're connecting with me on LinkedIn, please do send a personalized message saying you've heard me on this podcast. I don't think you're just an AI robot. Amazing. Thank you so much for being here for another amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thanks for listening to today's episode starting with ai. It can be Scary. ChatGPT Profits is not only a bestseller, but also the Missing Instruction Manual to make Mastering Chat, GBTA Breeze bypass the hard stuff and get straight to success with chat g profits. As always, I would love for you to support the show by paying full price on Amazon, but you can get it absolutely free for a limited time@artificialintelligencepod.com slash gift. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Monday with more tips and tactics on how to leverage AI to escape that rat race. Head over to artificial intelligence pod.com now to see past episodes. Leave, review and check out all of our socials.